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Someone knocked.
Sam set his controller down and stretched his hand. He’d been winding down for the night anyway. Joel was getting tired. “Go brush your teeth and get ready for bed, alright? It’s late.”
“Okay, okay…” He stretched and shuffled off. Sam made his way to the door. Whoever it was knocked again, a little more frantically.
He peered through the door's eye hole. A powerfully built individual stood there, with piercing grey-blue eyes. He hesitated, but spoke. He always answered and he wasn’t about to stop now, even if this person had a very intimidating frame. He couldn’t be one to judge. Not now. “Hello?”
Her voice was husky and lacking intonation. “Open up. I… need help.”
A familiar story. She wouldn’t have been the first. Yesterday someone with a bad infection came by and he passed them some medication. He was running a little low, but he had things to spare. He opened the door.
She was drenched in so much blood the front of her navy blue coveralls had turned black with it. A cleaver hung loosely in one of her hands, speckled with blood but not nearly as much as what coated her middle. It even smeared the hockey mask she wore.
He flinched. “What happened?” he asked, opening the door wider. She swayed slightly on her feet. In the dark of the hall, he couldn’t tell where on earth she could’ve been bleeding from.
She shambled half a step closer on unsteady legs. Her vacant eyes locked onto his. “I’m… hurt. No, no… I’m… yeah. I’m fine. I just need help.”
Oh.
“I have something to show you.”
The seam of her coveralls split like a mouth. Teeth pointed outward like a Venus flytrap.
Sam slammed the door shut in her face and locked it. Not a second later, the knob rattled hard. Something thudded against it.
“Morton?” he called, backing up. He reached for the baseball bat he kept at the entryway for emergencies.
“Yeeees?” The weird bug guy in question leaned into view.
A cleaver slammed clear through the wood inches from the side of Sam’s head. He shrieked.
The cleaver wrenched back. Sam skittered away from the door, bat abandoned. Morton was by his side immediately, a combat knife brought into his hand. Sam snatched his backpack from its spot against the wall and pulled out his pistol.
“It’s good,” the monster insisted through the splintering wood. A little bit of excitement crept into her tone. “I’m sorry for scaring you. I need help.”
“She, ehh… does not need help, I gather?” Morton mumbled to him.
“She does not!” He hissed under his breath. He winced when the cleaver cut into his door again. It rattled. “Hey—hey! I’m opening the door! Stop doing that!”
A pause. “...do you promise?”
“I promise,” he said as firmly as he could muster. Morton shot him a look. Sam shook his head just the slightest bit. After a moment, the cleaver was wrenched out. “You, um. You scared me.”
“Oh…” Her voice softened. “I’m sorry. I just… something’s wrong with me.”
“Happens to all of us,” Morton murmured. Sam elbowed him. But to his surprise, the voice relaxed further.
“Yes. Yes, I…” A little laugh. “I saw something beautiful. And I’m… I was looking for help.”
Sam advanced to the door. Maybe he could still salvage the situation. She talked, she could be reasoned with. He didn’t want to do this if it could be avoided. “Um, what do you need specifically? You know? So I can get it for you.”
“You’re stalling.”
Something scratched at the door.
“Open the door. You promised. I will break this down if you don’t let me in.” Well, he tried.
Sam, with Morton closer behind, opened the door and shot the woman directly in the chest.
Her middle was half-open and waiting. It snapped at the air when she stumbled back, taken off-guard. She hit the opposite door, heaving. The cleaver slipped from her shaking hands. “Help me,” she rasped, clutching at her heart where the bullet hit true. Nothing cursed died easily anymore.
She lunged at them. Morton, quick with his hands, buried his knife to the hilt in the soft flesh under her jaw. Blood so deep it glistened black ran down his hands. The monster choked on it and clawed at him, lunging first for the hand holding the knife, then for his eyes. Morton shrieked and pushed her away. Jaws clamped shut around an arm.
Sam joined the fray in a panic. The monster dragged Morton down with her, in a mess of kicking and biting. She’d devolved to vicious snarling that only intensified with every shot. Gunfire rang in his ears. Dimly, he wondered what the Visit was doing to his long-term hearing.
Her hand found the handle of her cleaver and drove the blade haphazardly into Morton’s chest. Chitin cracked. Her jaw loosened. He kicked himself off her, gasping, trailing hemolymph. Sam glimpsed his wounded arm and the thick gouges taken out of his exoskeleton by her teeth.
Sam emptied the round into her and struggled to reload. She was stumbling to her feet already, leaning against the wall for support and smearing blood down the wallpaper.
“Fuck,” she rasped wetly. Blood bubbled up underneath her mask. She clutched at her front, as if trying to stitch herself together. Clarity knit into her voice, desperate, confused, pissed-off, and afraid, growing with every word. “I’m sorry. Get—get away from me.” She pressed herself to the wall, hunched, wild-eyed like a cornered animal. She clutched her weapon close, blade pointed out, and for a second she was just another frightened survivor. “I’m dangerous. I…”
And then it was gone.
The defensive posture dropped with a death-sigh. Her eyes glazed, and it reminded him of when he found Joel, how his eye fogged and unfocused before the teeth grew into it. The look of the mind throwing in the towel, buckling under something far stronger than human will. “I’m hurt. I’m starving. Come here.”
It was enough time to reload but she was already moving, already raising her weapon. He tried not to look at all her teeth but it kept drawing his eye. He pulled Morton up on unsteady legs.
She stilled. Another spike of clarity, or something akin to it, when she looked past them.
“Sam?” Joel. He stood in the doorway, and in all the days he’d known Joel he now recognized exhaustion in the way he held himself.
Sam averted his attention from the monster to herd him back indoors. “Get inside.” He gripped the kid hard by the shoulder. He didn’t need to get his hands dirty when he had to be asleep. He was in his pajamas, at that; he didn’t have anything that’d protect him from the thing in the hall. “We’re fine, it’s fine—”
She was standing. Moving. She lurched on her feet, gasping for breath. She bled horribly, spilling through fingers clutching her chest. She stared at Joel, huddled behind Sam, and her unsteady gaze shifted to him and then Morton. Her mouth shifted over itself uneasily, never fully shutting, strands of drool leaking out between rows of teeth.
The thing tensed and bolted down the hall like a startled cat, back to the stairs. She threw the door open so hard it slammed into the wall with a deafening crash and left a dent. She vanished into the stairwell.
Sam didn’t move for a moment, as if she’d come charging back, but she didn’t. He heard a faint scuffle of Morton roping Joel back inside, which snapped him out of it. “Inside. Something might’ve heard us.”
“Who was that?” Joel asked tiredly, as Sam steered him to the couch to sleep.
He hesitated. “Don’t worry about it,” he settled on. Joel didn’t seem pleased with that answer, but it was late, and he didn’t have the energy to wring an answer out of him.
Sam cast a look back at the door, and watched Morton inspect the gouge the cleaver took out of it. He watched the bug raise a gentle claw to pluck a wood chip from the door and tuck it away into his bags. Maybe in the morning they could tape over the gouge or find caulk to seal it.
That woman could’ve taken down the door. Hell, it was late and their guards were lowered; she could’ve taken Morton’s whole arm or killed one of them. He had no doubt about it. But she had enough of herself in her to bolt.
She kept asking for help.
As Sam helped Morton tend to his wound, he wondered if he could’ve tried harder. If he’d kept talking, if he’d staved off her violence a little longer, she’d have her moment of clarity.
She fit in snugly to all the other Visit-maddened monsters in the back of his mind, right alongside Joel’s family and Vincent and countless others he cut down. Nameless, faceless mysteries and what-ifs.
He tried not to dwell on it.