As I went flying into the air, I was thrown with enough force that I flipped over, and somehow managed to make my foot connect with the stairs, sending a jolt of pain up my leg, which threw me back up into the air. I braced myself as I anticipated a rough landing on a hard floor, fully expecting to break a few bones or even be fatally injured, but was surprised to land on something soft and squishy.

Damn, what a relief...

Dizzy from my tumble, I slowly regained my senses. I heard shouting and inhuman screaming coming from upstairs. Shit! Aaron, Jared, Sarah! I had to get up... I had to...

My hand touched something wet and gooey.

I recoiled away, falling onto something else with the same texture.

Come to think of it... what exactly had I landed on?

As my head stopped throbbing, my eyesight cleared: I was sitting on top of a human body that was covered in bruises, and bloated with boils and pus. All around me, there was about a dozen corpses in a similar state, some worse for wear than others. My eyes widened as I trembled, staring at my blood soaked hand then looking to where I had touched a moment ago: a pile of guts that were spilling out of one of the corpses with a huge gash in its stomach.

So... this is what happened to the people that sent the radio message?

God, no... was every last one of them dead?

No way... there was no way!

My heart sank as the fire of hope that had been inside of me turned into a tiny insignificant glimmer. I tried to scream but I could only choke when I noticed that something else was in the room with me.

I was facing towards the right wall, and whatever else was down here with me was shifting around behind me. I couldn't turn around. My eyes dropped to the ground, spotting a gun laying about three feet in front of me... I think it was some sort of machine gun. There were tons of other guns laying around the room too. What had managed to kill all these people, when they were armed to the teeth like this?

I heard something that sounded like the intonations of speech, but there wasn't any words to it. It was basically just white noise. That must have been the mumbling noise we heard from upstairs. And logically, it must be coming from whatever was behind me... from whatever had killed all those people.

I heard a gunshot upstairs, and the thing behind me sounded like it hesitated for a second before inching closer to me, the corpses squishing beneath it as it moved.

I took a deep breath.

I could move again, but my mind still wouldn't let me turn around. My gaze rested on the machine gun. I heard something squish behind me, not even four feet away.

Another gunshot, followed by a scream echoed from upstairs and on that cue I dove for the machine gun and turned around to face the monstrosity that had killed everyone. I prayed that the gun would fire.

When I locked eyes with the thing, my body froze up again for an instant.

For a split second, I thought it was a survivor of the massacre, that is, until I noticed that its emaciated body was crawling along with four long spider-like legs. It looked just like a woman lying down on her back, looking at me with panic... but... that was only its torso. The bony legs snapped upwards, lifting the thing's body and face so that it was level with mine, its skin seeming to stretch and pull taut across its bones in a way that made my skin crawl. In place of feet, the legs all ended on a sharp looking spike that dug into the corpses it stood on.

It looked down at me, and its panicked eyes suddenly were drenched in pure black as if they had been filled with ink, its sideways mouth turned into a toothy grin as it let out a mocking sob, and its barbed tongue rolled out of its mouth, dripping saliva onto my forehead. Like the tall grass in a rotting swamp, its long dark hair brushed against my face.