Free Dawn of the Yeti by Winchester Malone Page B

twisting the handle, but it won’t budge.
    They are standing
now but a few feet away. I try the door again. No good.
    I fire the
shotgun into their midst. Pump, shoot. Pump, shoot. Pump—dry click. Not a
one of them has fallen, two have huge crimson blemishes, but they continue to
come. I throw the gun. One of the wounded Jo-Bran catches it, snaps it like a
brittle bone, me.
    “Open, you
fuck,” I scream, tugging at the handle, trying to get inside. I’ve gone through
too much to die a few short inches from safety. “Open!”
    It does.
    It slides apart, a
hand shoots out, snatches me by the collar and drags me inside before I know
what happened. The door slams shut, locks, and the Jo-Bran pound against the
heavy metal. Then I see the glow.
    Meredith squats,
hunkered down to my level, blinking at me with those glowing eyes. The light
flickering into a message, an SOS.
    “Thank you,” I
say.
    She doesn’t reply.
    And I’m not
surprised—at least not until she moves.
    She slides up
beside me and pushes me forward, allowing her a better look at my wounds. She
lifts up the back of my remaining clothes and I hear her suck in a breath.
    “That bad, huh?” I
say, laughing slightly. I’m so fucked that it’s funny.
    I hear nothing,
just feel her hand brushing across my back, tickling like feathers.
    The pounding continues.
Occasionally, Meredith’s eyes look up, over my shoulder or around the room,
making things glow. It’s this same as it was just a few days ago, the gasoline
smell thick in the air. It feels like such a long time ago. Every day feels
like a lifetime, and I’m tired of the constant rebirth.
    “Things
would be so much easier if we just let them in,” I say, talking to myself.
    “It would.”
Her voice is faint, almost lost amongst the thudding walls.
    “Then what
are we doing?” my voice drops down to her level, not much more than a whisper.
    “Living.”
    “This isn’t
living,” I laugh. “This is surviving. Where’s the joy? The smiles and the real,
true laughter. Not this maniacal bullshit.”
    She fingers a
particularly tender spot, and I wince.
    She doesn’t
apologize.
    “I smashed
in a guy’s head with a can of pears.”
    “We do what
we have to.”
    Genevieve
and Krista wrap my mind in memories of them both. I see their faces so clearly,
but not the smiling faces I long for. The dead faces. The one’s with the bullet
holes in their skulls. The cold faces. Frozen. “I shot my family because I
thought the same thing once.”
    Meredith’s
fingers pause, but only for the briefest of seconds.
    “Right in
the head.” I make my hand into a gun, my thumb the hammer, and click it twice.
“To save them from this horror.”
    “You did.”
    I snort. “I
murdered them.”
    “That too.”
    “But was it
right?”
    She doesn’t
answer, the question dangling over me, waiting to pounce like the Jo-Bran
outside.
    “Was I?”
    “We do what we
have to do.”
    And she leaves it
at that, tending to my wounds as I drift to sleep, too weak and tired to fight
anymore.

Chapter Sixteen  

 
    There is so much
white that I can’t see anything. It blinds, burns, purifies. Screams echo all
around me, filling my ears until the sound overflows into my mouth and I can
taste the charred echoes of pain.
    Then everything
goes quiet.
    Still.
    Perfect.

Chapter Seventeen
    Sunlight filters
through the small porthole on the door, hitting me right in the face. I stir,
shielding my eyes from the light. Meredith sits nearby on one of the desks and
stares at me. Her eyes have returned to normal, the piercing aqua, but they no
longer glow. The stare doesn’t disturb me as much as before.
    “Are they gone?” I
hope.
    She nods to the
door.
    It’s silent. No
pounding. Nothing but sunshine coming through.
    I stand, trying to
keep my back as straight as possible, to keep it from shifting, splitting my
wounds and allowing them to bleed. Every movement feels like I’m inside an iron
maiden. The slightest twitch