Free The Walls of Lemuria by Sam Sisavath

he thought the lobby smelled bad when he first got a whiff of it from outside, it was worse once he settled into the room. The air was suffocating and he started sweating, the combination gag-inducing. The entire building had been baking in the heat since sunrise this morning. That, combined with the bloodied evidence from last night, had badly tainted the air with a thick odor that was tangible against his skin.
    Keo started alternating between breathing through his nostrils and mouth.
    “You still good back there?” he asked.
    “Yeah,” Jake said, with all the conviction of a condemned man being led to the gas chamber.
    Keeping the shotgun in front of him, Keo moved across the lobby and toward the hallways on the other side. There were three, clearly marked as Hallways A, B, and C, spaced out from left to right, with a nurses’ station behind a sliding glass window in the center.
    As he and Jake moved toward Hallway C, Keo saw them out of the corner of his eyes. At first there were just the occasional flickering movements, but as he neared, they came fully alive.
    Silhouetted figures, dozens (hundreds?) of them jammed into the hallways, were impossible to miss even if he couldn’t actually see them. He could feel and smell them just fine, though. If he thought confronting one of them at a time last night was daunting, so many of them squeezed into one place—one narrow, oh so narrow passageway—was paralyzing.
    I should have kept driving yesterday…

CHAPTER 8
    Jake started breathing hard as soon as they entered the lobby, but he really picked it up when they noticed movements from the hallways in front of them. He was practically hyperventilating by the time they saw the amassed horde inside Hallway C.
    Keo took out the flashlight and ran the beam across the mouth of the hallway. Creatures, black eyes like seas of tar, glared back at him. They looked rabid and annoyed by the sudden brightness but remained where they were, just beyond the reach of the sunlight that splashed across the lobby floor.
    He raised the flashlight over his head in order to see past the massive blob of hunched over forms. He couldn’t. They were everywhere. Simply everywhere. There wasn’t a single window in the entire hallway, and without the lights along the ceiling, the whole length of the passageway was blacked out. The figures inside grew more agitated the longer Keo shined the flashlight at them.
    Impossible. It’s impossible.
    “Daebak,” Keo said under his breath.
    “What?” Jake said behind him.
    “Hmm?”
    “You said day-bat?”
    “It’s nothing,” Keo said. “Just something my mom used to say to me.”
    “Oh.”
    “Remember what I told you, Jake. Keep your shotgun pointed at the floor and only shoot away from me.”
    “Okay…”
    He turned off the flashlight and put it away, then unclipped the radio. He didn’t press the transmit lever right away because he didn’t know what to tell her.
    “Sorry, babe, but you’re on your own. See ya!”
    Not quite.
    He keyed the radio. “Gillian.”
    He hadn’t bothered to keep his voice down. There was no point because they knew he was here. They could see him, and it looked as if some of them were sniffing him, getting as close to the mouth of the hallway as possible without entering the stream of sunlight.
    “Keo,” Gillian said through the radio.
    She sounded relieved. Maybe she had expected him to turn and run as soon as he saw what awaited him inside the lobby. She wasn’t far from the truth. Keo desperately wanted the medical supplies in the rooms along the hallways, but he didn’t intend to die here in this place, at this moment.
    But he didn’t say any of that. Instead, Keo said, “You were expecting someone else?”
    “You’re still here. I’m surprised, that’s all.”
    “How many rooms are in Hallway C?”
    She didn’t answer right away. “One of the nurses said ten,” she said finally. “We’re in the last room at the back, after a slight right