Chapter 8: The Funnel Breaks
The first shot from below was so loud it felt like the stairwell itself had been punched.The concrete vibrated under Jason’s boots. He braced against the wall, rifle aimed down the jagged, turning staircase at the shattered basement door.
It wasn’t just open.It was gone, folded inward like rotten cardboard. Beyond it, the darkness of the lower corridor seemed to writhe.“Contact!” Jason yelled, his voice raw. The word was still leaving his lips when the first one lurched into the rectangle of faint light from the dying bulb above. It was a man, or had been, missing an arm at the shoulder, the stump a messy, gray knot. It stumbled over the twisted door frame, its one good arm pinwheeling for balance.Beside him, Joan fired. The crack was deafening in the enclosed space.The thing’s head snapped back. It collapsed, tripping the next one coming through.For a few blessed seconds, there was a tangle of limbs in the doorway. Jayden, positioned on the step below Jason, took careful aim and dropped a second Walker as it tried to rise.“That’s two!” Lee called from three steps up, his voice tight. He wasn’t firing; his job was watch, reload, call movements. Sandy was beside him, a field kit open at her feet, her hands steady but her face pale.
Then the third emerged, shuffling fast.Amie, from the landing above, fired.The round took it in the throat. It gagged, a wet, choking sound, but kept coming, clawing its way up the first step.Jason fired again.This time it went down.
The acrid smell of gunpowder mixed with the damp concrete and the rising, sickly-sweet odor of decay. Jason’s ears rang.
“Reloading!” Jayden shouted, ducking back behind the turn in the wall to slap a fresh magazine home.Joan followed suit, her movements crisp, automatic.
A fourth shape filled the doorway. This one was different—massive, shoulders hunched, its flesh swollen and taut like a overripe fruit.It didn’t lurch. It shoved through, filling the frame entirely, its bulk sealing the opening. The flickering light glistened on its damp, distended skin.It got stuck.Not just slowed.Wedged. Its swollen torso jammed against the metal doorframe with a soft, sickening squelch. It thrashed, a low, bubbly moan coming from deep within it. Its arms, comparatively thin, scrabbled at the concrete.The advance halted.The sudden stillness was almost worse than the chaos. The only sounds were the thing’s wet struggles, the ragged breathing of the group, and the distant, isolated crack of a rifle shot from the roof above.
“What the hell is that?” Sandy whispered, staring at the bloated figure.“Later,” Jason snapped, his mind racing. Roy’s advice echoed: funnel them.This was better than a funnel; it was a cork. But it wouldn’t hold forever. The thing’s thrashing was already crumbling the damaged concrete around the frame.Dust sifted down.
“We can’t kill that from here,” Joan said, her voice low and practical.“It’s all… mass. Rounds will just sink in.”
“Jason?” Lee’s head was tilted, listening past the bloated Walker’s noises. “I hear more.Behind it.They’re stacking up down there.”
The pressure was building. They had seconds, maybe a minute, before the jam broke or the ones behind pushed through.
Jason made a decision.“Retreat!Second floor landing, now! Go, go, go!”
He didn’t have to say it twice. The group moved with the drilled precision of people who’d practiced for this and hated every second of it. Jayden went first, taking the stairs two at a time, rifle held close. Sandy scooped up her kit and followed, Lee right behind her, one hand on her back.
Amie and Ally, from above, covered the retreat, their barrels trained on the stuck monstrosity. It had managed to free one arm and was pulling desperately at its own chest, trying to yank itself through.
“Joan, move!” Jason commanded, still holding his position.“Not leaving you last,” she said, her jaw set.
“Now, Joan!”
She went. The moment she was around the turn, Jason started backing up the stairs, his sights never leaving the doorway. The bloated Walker let out a gurgling shriek and lunged forward violently.There was a crunch of breaking stone and a tearing sound. It popped free, stumbling into the stairwell, a wave of foul-smelling air preceding it. Behind it, more shadows shifted in the dark.Jason turned and ran.
He hit the second-floor landing just as the group was reforming. The heavy fire door here was reinforced with a steel crossbar—one of his and Joan’s projects.It was a choke point.Better than the open stairwell.
“Lee, Amie, Ally—get that bar off! We’re not sealing it,” Jason ordered, gasping for breath.“We leave it open. We draw them to it.”
Lee’s eyes widened behind his glasses, but he understood immediately. He and Amie shoved the heavy crossbar up and out of its brackets. Ally pulled the door open, creating a narrow, defensible entryway into a short hall that led to the old labs.
“New plan,” Jason said, his voice finding a calmer center.He pointed at Joan and Jayden. “You two, prone here, just inside the doorway. You’ll have the clearest shot down the stairs.” He looked at Amie and Ally.“You’re on the doorframe itself, left and right. Aim for anything that passes the threshold. Lee, you and Sandy are behind them, reloading, watching the flanks. Anything gets past us, it’s yours.”
“What about you?” Sandy asked, her eyes scanning his face.
“I’m bait.” He saw the protest forming on her lips.“It’s geometry. They see me at the end of the hall, they come straight.They don’t fan out. We kill them in the queue.”
He didn’t wait for approval. He jogged down the short hallway, about twenty feet, and turned, kneeling behind a fallen locker they’d dragged there months ago for this exact shitty scenario. The hallway was a tunnel. The open door at the far end was a bright rectangle, backlit by the shitty fluorescent.He’d be a silhouette.
From his pocket, he pulled the small, fabric-wrapped bundle Roy had given him ages ago.A signal mirror. He angled it, catching the light from the ceiling fixture, and flashed it once, twice, towards the open stairwell door.
A cacophony of snarls answered. Heavy, dragging footsteps boomed on the stairs, coming fast.“They’re coming!” Joan called out, her voice steady.
Jason tucked the mirror away, raised his rifle, and rested his cheek against the stock. He had a perfect, terrible view of the doorway. He could see Joan’s and Jayden’s prone forms, the sides of Amie’s and Ally’s boots. He took a deep breath, let it half out.The bloated one filled the doorway first, its huge frame blocking the light. It hesitated for a split second, confused by the new space.Two shots rang out, almost as one. Joan and Jayden.Dark holes appeared in the thing’s forehead.It swayed. Another shot from the side—Amie or Ally—punched into its temple. It crumpled, falling forward with a sound like a wet sack of gravel hitting the floor, effectively blocking the doorway again.
But only for a moment.
The next one scrambled right over the massive corpse, a gaunt, fast thing with stringy hair.It cleared the body and leaped.It didn’t get far. A storm of gunfire met it from the two prone shooters and the two at the doorframe. It was thrown back against the wall, sliding down in a heap.A third came fast on its heels. More gunfire. It stumbled, caught itself on the doorframe, and lurched into the hallway.Right at him.Jason’s world narrowed to the sights of his rifle. The thing was ten feet away, then eight.Its mouth was a black hole, its eyes milky with rot. He could see the stitches on its torn jacket.He fired.
The round took it high in the chest.It staggered but didn’t stop. He cycled the bolt, the metallic snick loud in his ears.He fired again. This time, the back of its head erupted in a spray of dark matter against the faded biology posters on the wall.It collapsed five feet from his cover.
Silence again, punctuated only by the frantic cycling of bolts and the clatter of spent cartridges hitting the linoleum.The doorway was blocked again by two bodies.
“Reloading!” Jayden yelled.“Covering!” Ally called, stepping forward slightly to keep sight down the stairs.
Jason’s heart hammered against his ribs. He could smell the cordite, the rot, his own sweat.He glanced at the mirror on the floor beside him. For a second, he thought of Roy up on the roof, a tiny figure in a giant world, utterly vulnerable. The fear for him was a cold, sharp thing under his breastbone.
Then Lee’s voice, strained but clear, cut through from the doorway. “I don’t hear more on the stairs.”
They all listened, straining.Only the buzz of the faulty light and Sandy’s shaky breath.
“Maybe that’s it?” Amie whispered, hope a fragile thread in his voice.
Jason wasn’t buying it.The device had screamed.It had called from deep in the woods. You don’t get just four.He stood up, his knees protesting.“Don’t get cozy. Joan, Jayden, with me. We need to clear the stairwell, see what’s down there.Everyone else, hold this door. Anything moves, you shut it down.”
He picked his way around the body at his feet, its vacant face turned towards the ceiling. Joan and Jayden fell in beside him, their expressions grim. They stepped over the corpse in the doorway, into the stark light of the landing.The stairwell below was a mess of shadows and fallen bodies. The bloated Walker lay at the bottom of the flight, a mountainous obstacle.No movement.
Jason led the way down, each step deliberate.The air grew thicker, colder. He reached the landing just above the basement entry.He could see the ruined door, the dark hallway beyond.Empty.
For now.He looked back up at the second-floor doorway, at Sandy’s worried face peering out. They had stopped the breach.They had held.
But as he stared into the impenetrable black of the basement corridor, he knew.The call had been answered. And silence after a scream was never a good sign.
And silence after a scream was never a good sign.
On the rooftop, the distant crackle of gunfire from within the building had stopped.Rosa listened, her body coiled tight against the parapet. Only the wind hissed through the cracked solar panels behind them.
Amie and Ally had already vanished through the roof access door, their footsteps echoing down the stairwell.They were joining the fight below. Rosa ejected the spent magazine from her rifle with a sharp, metallic clatter. She pulled a fresh one from her bag, the brass cartridges cold against her fingers, and slammed it home with a decisive thud.
“Your pocket’s a bad angle,” Roy’s voice came, muffled but clear from his fabric enclosure. “I can’t see the lower courtyard from here.”
“What’s your play, engineer?” Rosa asked, her eyes never leaving the field of view through her scope. The bloated Walker was still down, but movement flickered deeper in the tree line.
“I need a tower.Your braid’s a climbable rope. Get me to the crown.”
Rosa didn’t hesitate.She unclipped the pocket flap. Roy emerged, squinting in the harsh light. He climbed the thick, dark braid draped over her shoulder, his small form deftly using the woven patterns as handholds. It felt like a slight, persistent tugging on her scalp.He reached the summit of her head and lay flat, spreading his limbs for stability. From here, the world was a staggering panorama. He could see everything: the entire north approach, the side alleys, the blown basement door now looking like a missing tooth. “Okay,” he said, his voice directly above her.“I’m your eyes. Adjust two clicks down and one right. The scope’s parallax is off for the close edge of the woods.”
Rosa made the tiny adjustments on her scope. “Done.”
A figure, sluggish and torn, shambled out from behind a thick oak.“Walker.Male.Faded red hoodie. Ten o’clock from the basement door, range seventy yards,” Roy narrated, his voice a calm, technical monotone.Rosa’s finger found the trigger. The crosshairs settled on a point just below the thing’s ear.She exhaled half a breath.The rifle cracked.
Through the scope, she saw the hoodie snap sideways. The figure dropped, lifeless before it hit the ground.“Clean,” Roy confirmed.“Another.Female.Behind the green dumpster. Moving slow. Right at the edge of your range.”
Rosa compensated, aiming high to account for the bullet drop Roy’s height and vantage point allowed him to calculate instinctively.She fired again. The figure crumpled behind the dumpster.“Hit,” Roy said. “You’re drifting left post-recoil.Compensate.”
They worked with a terrifying, silent precision. He was her spotter, her ballistic computer, her high-altitude surveillance.She was his stabilized platform, his lethal mechanism. Each shot was a collaboration, a wordless dialogue of minute adjustments and confirmed kills. The emotional noise—the fear for Jason, the revulsion at the things below—was compressed into pure function.
Below, in the concrete gloom of the second-floor hallway, Jason stood over the last fallen Walker. The immediate threat was neutralized.The silence stretched, taut and unnatural. Sandy approached the bloated one, her medical curiosity overriding horror. She didn’t touch it, just leaned close, her glasses slipping down her nose.“Lee,” she said quietly.“Look at the skin. This isn’t just bloat.It’s…consistent. Symmetrical.”
Lee crouched beside her, avoiding the dark pool spreading across the linoleum. “The swelling’s not from decomposition gases.It’s cellular. Hyper-trophic.”
“Like an allergic reaction on a massive scale?” Sandy whispered.“Like it’s full of something,” Lee corrected, his voice grim. He poked at the corpse’s distended abdomen with the barrel of his unused rifle. The flesh gave way too easily, sinking in and not rebounding.“It’s not taut anymore. It’s…flatulent, but solid.”
Jayden kicked the smaller Walker at his feet. “This one’s just bones and rot.That one’s different. It was different when it came in.It led.”
Jason stared at the dark maw of the basement corridor. The device had called.These had answered. But the big one…the big one had pushed to the front.A new hierarchy? His thoughts snapped to Roy, a tiny silhouette against the vast, dangerous sky.“We secure this mess,” he ordered, tearing his gaze away. “Barricade that door again. I need to get to the roof.”
On the roof, Roy watched a single, sluggish crow land on the red hoodie of the Walker he’d just called out. It pecked once, then flapped away, startled by nothing.“Clear for now,” he said to Rosa. “No movement in the visual perimeter.”
Rosa relaxed her cheek from the rifle stock, the tension in her shoulders unknotting slightly. The adrenaline began to recede, leaving behind a hollow, shaking fatigue.Her leg throbbed in a hot, insistent rhythm. “Good work up there, spotter,” she murmured.Roy stretched, his back aching from the prolonged, rigid position. From his perch, he had a perfect view of the rooftop garden, their stubborn tomato vine, the cracked domes. He also saw something else.“Rosa,” he said, his voice changing. “The east solar panel array. The one we patched with the blue tarp.”
“What about it?”
“The tarp’s torn.It’s flapping. And there’s a…a drag mark in the gravel leading to it.”
She turned and her eye went back to the scope.Roy was right. The vivid blue plastic she’d secured just that morning was now a ragged flag, whipping in the wind. A distinct, heavy groove was scored through the rooftop gravel, starting at the raised parapet and vanishing behind the solar panel array. “Shit, not good. Hold on.”
She climbed to her feet, a sharp gasp escaping as her wounded leg took her full weight. She safetied the rifle with a practiced click and slung it over her shoulder before grabbing her cane and heading downstairs. The metal door clanged shut behind them, swallowing the daylight.The rooftop access stairs were a brutal transition. The open sky was gone, replaced by cinderblock walls stained with old water marks. The only light bled from a single bulb two floors down, painting the steps in jagged slices of yellow and deep shadow.Their footsteps echoed too loudly.
Roy clung to her braid, the world now a bouncing, vertical tunnel. “It came over the wall,” he said, his voice close to her ear. “The drag mark is too deep for a person.Something was pulled.”
“Or someone,” Rosa replied, her voice tight. Each step sent a jolt up her leg, but she moved fast, leveraging the cane and the railing. The sounds of the earlier fight were absent now, leaving an oppressive silence.It felt like a held breath.
They hit the fifth-floor landing. The hallway there was dark, the classrooms abandoned monoliths behind locked doors.She paused, listening.Nothing from below.Nothing from above.“Jay? Jason?” she called out, her voice cutting through the stale air.A beat of silence. Then, Jason’s voice, strained but clear, floated up from the depths.“Roof clear? We’re on two.Situation’s contained. For now.”
“On our way down,” she shouted back, already moving.“Stay alert.We have a possible breach on the roof. Something’s up here.”
“A breach?What kind?” The worry in his voice was palpable.“Unknown. Roy saw a drag mark. We’re checking.” She took the stairs slower now, her eyes scanning the shadows above and below.The device had called, and things had come. But had something else been listening, too?Something that didn’t use the front door?
Roy’s grip on her hair tightened.“The panel array creates a blind spot,” he murmured.“A perfect corner. If something’s there, we won’t see it until we’re on top of it.”
“Then we don’t go to it,” Rosa said, reaching the fourth-floor landing. She stopped, peering over the railing into the dizzying well of the stairwell. “We let it come to us. We have the high ground.”
From far below, the clatter of the barricade being reset echoed upwards—a comforting, human sound of rebuilding. It was undercut by the absolute silence from the floors above them. The rooftop door, now two flights up, seemed very far away.A new sound fractured the quiet. Not a snarl, not a gunshot.A soft, wet crunching, like someone stepping on soaked gravel. It came from directly above them, on the rooftop stairs.
The wet crunching stopped.
In the sudden void of sound, Rosa’s breathing was a harsh rasp in her own ears. Roy went perfectly still on her head, a tiny statue. Below, the distant sounds of barricade-building had ceased. Jason’s voice, sharp with new tension, floated up. “Rosa? Report.”
She didn’t dare speak above a whisper. “We have company. On the roof stairs.” She slowly, silently, unslung her rifle. The cane leaned against the wall with a faint tap that sounded like a gunshot in the silence.
“Don’t move,” Jason’s voice came back, a low, strained thread. “We’re coming to you.”
“Negative,” she breathed out. “Hold the choke point. We don’t know if this is a diversion.” Another sound came from above—a slow, dragging slide, like something heavy being pulled over concrete. It was closer. A single flight of stairs now separated them from whatever had torn the tarp.
Roy’s whisper was a faint vibration against her scalp. “It’s not moving with purpose. It’s… searching. Listen.”
The dragging stopped. A new sound replaced it: a low, wet sniffing. It was grotesquely loud, a huffing inhalation that echoed in the stairwell. It sniffed once, twice. Then a guttural, clicking keen.
“It smells us,” Rosa murmured. Her fingers tightened on the rifle stock. The angle was terrible. The stairs above turned at a landing; she’d have maybe a second to aim if it came around the corner.
From below, a new set of footsteps, careful and quick, began ascending. Not the whole group. One person. Jason. She could tell by the rhythm. He must have handed off command to Joan. He was disobeying her order, and she felt a surge of furious gratitude.
The sniffing above turned into a frantic, scrabbling sound. Nails on concrete. It had caught the scent trail, and it was moving. Not down the stairs. Across the small fifth-floor landing. A door there led to the humanities wing, long since sealed and barricaded. A heavy thump shook the door in its frame. Then another. It wasn’t trying the stairwell door. It was trying to break into the sealed wing.
“It’s not coming down,” Roy observed, his voice still a controlled whisper. “It’s fixated on the fifth floor. The door won’t hold if it’s as strong as the one that hit the basement.”
Jason appeared on the landing below, rifle raised, scanning upward. His eyes found Rosa, then flicked to the ceiling where the pounding continued. Thump. Thump. Each impact rattled dust from the seams. “What’s on five?” he whispered, taking the steps two at a time to join her.
“Just classrooms. The old literature department. Nothing of value,” Rosa said. “We sealed it because the north-facing windows were too exposed.”
Thump-CRACK.
The sound of splintering wood was unmistakable. The thing was through the outer layer of the barricade. In a moment, it would be inside the dark, empty hallway. Their hallway.
“If it gets in there, it’s in the walls,” Jason said, his face grim. “It could go anywhere. Come out anywhere.” He made a decision, his jaw setting. “We can’t let it get a foothold. We corner it now, in the stairwell, where we know the terrain.”
Rosa nodded, the motion slight. She handed Jason her rifle. He took it, understanding immediately. She drew the hatchet from her belt. Its worn wooden handle fit her grip perfectly. A close-quarters tool for a close-quarters hell.
“Roy, to my shirt,” she whispered. He scrambled down from her hair, diving into her front pocket just as he had on the roof. The familiar weight settled against her chest. Jason moved past her, taking the point position. He gave her a look—a flash of fear, of fierce protection—then turned his focus upward.
They began to climb.
Each step was a deliberate act of will. Jason led, his rifle’s barrel tracing a slow arc ahead of them, aimed at the turning point of the landing above. Rosa followed, her left hand on the railing, her right gripping the hatchet, her cane abandoned. Her leg screamed with every upward pull, but the pain was a distant thing, buried under layers of adrenaline.
The pounding had stopped. The only sound was their own controlled breathing and the soft scuff of their boots on gritty concrete. They reached the fourth-floor landing. The door to their living quarters was just feet away, a promise of safety they couldn’t accept. They moved past it.
The short flight to the fifth-floor landing stretched before them. The door to the humanities wing was visibly damaged. The lower panel was smashed inward, leaving a jagged, dark hole. Splinters of wood littered the floor. A trail of wet, glistening sludge led from the stairwell door, across the landing, and through the breach.
It was inside.
Jason paused at the base of the final flight, pressing his back against the wall. He pointed to his own eyes, then to the dark hole in the door. I’ll look. Rosa nodded, shifting her weight onto her good leg, hatchet raised.
He edged up, one silent step at a time, and risked a glance through the broken panel.
The hallway beyond was a tunnel of deep shadow, pierced by slants of light from boarded windows. Something moved in that gloom. A large, hunched silhouette, broader than a man, was shuffling slowly away from them, its head swinging low from side to side. It was sniffing again, that wet, huffing sound. Jason pulled back, his face pale in the dim light. He held up a hand: Wait.
The thing in the hallway stopped. Its sniffing ceased. A low, vibrating growl emanated from it, a sound that seemed to fill the stale air. It had heard them. Or smelled them. The silhouette began to turn, a slow, ponderous rotation in the half-light.
Jason didn’t wait for it to finish. He stepped into the doorway, raised Rosa’s rifle to his shoulder, and fired into the dark.