My steps slowed and then stopped. The absence of light was disorienting, causing my heart to start jumping. This was as bad as the blindfold. Maybe worse. My stomach turned cold as I stared at the different shades of nothingness.
“Careful,” Zayne warned, moving ahead. “The branches are really low in here. I need to move them out of the way.”
“Thanks. I...” Drawing in a deep breath, I told myself to get over it and just ask for what I needed. “Can I put my hand on your back? Is that—”
Before I could even finish, Zayne’s hand wrapped around mine, and a second later my palm was flat against his back. With a ragged exhale, I curled my fingers around his shirt and whispered, “Thank you.”
“No problem.” There was a pause. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
My still-in-training Guide Gargoyle led me around trees and low-hanging branches that would’ve surely knocked me out. I counted my steps and noted when Zayne slowed to announce a large rock or fallen tree limb. It took fifty-two footsteps before the thickness of the darkness shifted and shapes began to form in the silvery moonlight.
We stepped onto a lawn that hadn’t been tended in years, the grass reaching my knees. Bushes and weeds choked a driveway that was cut off by the chain-link fence. I took a step and realized sticker bushes had latched on to my leggings.
Ugh.
Letting go of Zayne’s shirt, I reached down and brushed off the little buggers and then straightened, getting my first look at the building.
It was... Um, it might have been lovely in its heyday.
Now the monstrous building looked like something straight out of a horror film. Several stories tall, it had two wings and a whole lot of boarded-up windows. I couldn’t even tell what color it was supposed to be. Gray? Beige? Dusty?
“Well...” I drew the word out. “That definitely looks haunted.”
“Then you’ll come in handy, won’t you?”
I shot him a look behind his back as he made his way through the jungle of a yard to the side of the building. Stopping at a boarded and chained door, he looked back at me. “You still feel the demon, right?”
“Yeppers peppers.”
“Yeppers peppers,” he repeated, shaking his head as he moved to the nearest window. He grabbed one of the boards and yanked. Wood cracked and gave way. He propped the board against the side of the building.
I stepped in and gripped the next board and then pulled. The old wood broke free, and I started to toss it.
Zayne stopped me. “The boards have nails still attached. If we come back out the way we came, I don’t want you stepping on one.”
“Oh.” Chagrined, I gently placed the board against the wall. “Good point.”
“I’m useful like that.” Zayne pulled down the last board, and it joined its friends against the wall. Stretching up, he leaned through the window. “All clear.”
I was happy to hear him speak, because I kept picturing something straight out of an ’80s horror movie. The kind Peanut loved to watch that involved a lot of bizarre decapitations.
Zayne pulled himself up and disappeared through the window. A nanosecond later, his hand shot out. He wiggled his fingers. “Come on.”
I rolled my eyes. “Back up.”
There was a sigh, and then his hand disappeared. I planted my palms on the dusty windowpane, then jumped through the window and landed nimbly on floorboards that groaned under my weight. I straightened, finding Zayne standing a few feet in front of me.
“Show off,” he muttered.
I smirked as I looked around. A good part of the ceiling was missing, as apparently was either the roof or an interior wall, because a decent amount of moonlight filtered in. There was a maze of broken, toppled chairs, and graffiti marked the walls.
We left the room in silence, entering a hallway where less of the moonlight could penetrate. “Damn,” Zayne muttered. “Looks like a lot of this floor is rotted out.”
Without asking this time, I gripped the back of his shirt. “Lead the way, wherever that may be.”
We passed several rooms with doors broken off their hinges but found no sign of the demon except for the blood that Zayne could see.
We entered another wider hall with windows, which allowed more light through. I let go of his shirt and peered around to get a better grasp of my surroundings. There were several more open rooms, and the musty smell was starting—
A vision in white burst from a wall—well, actually not a vision. It was a person in a...white uniform. White pants. White top. Even a strange little white hat. A nurse. It was a nurse.
Who ran through another wall without looking in our direction, as if she were in a hurry.
I stopped walking. “Uh, you didn’t see that?”
Zayne looked over his shoulder at me. “No.”
“Oh.” I stared at the empty hall. “What did you say this place used to be?”
“An old manufacturing building,” he answered. “Why? Wait. Do I even want to know?”
I slowly shook my head. “Probably not, but I think we should go in that direction,” I said, pointing to the left.
We made our way to where I’d seen the ghost nurse disappear and came to a set of rusted yellow double doors. Zayne carefully opened the doors as quietly as possible. Every muscle in my body tensed as I prepared to see the demon.
But that’s not what we found.
It was a ledge, about twelve feet by twelve feet. Only a railing separated us from wide, open emptiness below.
“I’m so confused,” I said, looking back and then up, just to confirm that we were still on the first floor. “We didn’t go up any stairs, right?”
“No.” Zayne kept his voice low as he crept to the railing and looked down. “It’s an old pool. Emptied out, but it must’ve been in the basement or a lower level than where we entered. Probably used for rehab.”
I joined him, placing my hands on the metal bar, surprised to find that it was sturdy. This definitely wasn’t a normal basement, because the whole west wall was full of unbroken windows, allowing light to spread across the bleached cement pool.
Was this where the ghost nurse had come from? There weren’t any rooms between where I’d seen her and here, but that didn’t mean much. She could’ve come from anywhere, but—
Footsteps echoed through the open space. Zayne suddenly grabbed my hand and pulled me onto my knees. My head spun toward him, but he placed a finger over his lips and then jerked his chin toward the pool.
I followed his gaze, not seeing much at first, and then someone shuffled toward the steps leading into the shallow end of the pool. It must be the demon, but...
Something seemed wrong with the way it shuffled, taking a few steps and then twitching uncontrollably, the head jerking left once and then twice.
Pulling my hand free of Zayne’s, I grasped the bars of the railing and leaned forward as far as I could. My eyes were bad, but I could still see enough to know something looked really, really off about this demon.
Then it stepped into a ray of moonlight, and while its features were nothing but a fuzzy blur, I could tell it was missing a nose.
And when it jerked its head again, something flapped out from its cheek. Loose skin, I realized. Loose, partially unattached skin. What we were looking at was definitely not a Fiend or an Upper Level demon. It was something...
Something that used to be human.
11
My palms sweated as I watched the creature stop in the center of the pool. “Is that...is that what I think it is?”
Zayne leaned in, his arm pressing against mine, and when he spoke, his voice was nearly a whisper. “If you think that’s what happens when a Poser bites a human, you’d be correct.”
“Jesus.” My grip tightened. Now I knew why that poor ghost nurse was hauling butt. That thing down there even freaked out ghosts.
Posers were demons that looked and acted human with the exception of their insatiable appetite, crazy strength and nasty habit of biting people. Their infectious saliva transferred via one nip of their teeth, and three days later, the poor sucker who was snacked on turned into a potential extra for The Walking Dead, complete with a tendency to eat everything, including other people, and with a healthy dose of rabid rage. We called them zombies. Not very creative, but the word zombie and its meaning had existed long before pop culture got ahold of it.
“Never seen one before, have you?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I haven’t even seen a Poser. At least, I don’t think I have.”
“They’re rare.” Zayne’s breath stirred the tendrils of hair around my ear. “And as you can see, their bite is bad news, but they don’t chomp on humans often.”
My gaze flickered over his face. “Because they can only bite seven times before they die?”
He nodded as he turned back to the pool below. “What is this zombie doing here, in an abandoned building?”
“Urban sightseeing?” I suggested.
His chuckle was low. “When a human first gets bitten, they’ll go to familiar places. Home. Places of employment. But the guy down there is way past his expiration date of it being a fresh bite. At this point, he should be chasing after anything that’s alive.”
Which was why it was important to put down Posers when they were found. All they had to do to cause chaos was bite one human. Just like in the movies, the infected human then spread the demonic virus to another human through a bite, saliva...any bodily fluid. It had happened in the past, probably more often than I knew. As the demonic infection spread, zombies lost their ability for cognitive function beyond walking and eating.