The thing that had been Mr. Henderson stumbled through the shattered frame of the window. It was clumsy, its leg catching on the broken sill, sending it sprawling onto the living room carpet amidst a shower of broken glass. It paid no mind to the deep gash its arm had sustained in the entry, the blood welling up dark and thick from the wound. It scrambled to its feet with a twitching, uncoordinated motion, its head snapping towards the sounds coming from the hallway—the sounds of Lily's frightened crying.
It was a target-lock, pure and absolute. The creature was ignoring the two adult men standing in the room and focusing entirely on the sound of the children.
That was a mistake.
Quinn did not hesitate. He did not think. He moved, closing the distance in three long strides, the heavy iron poker held high. He swung it like an axe, aiming for the head, a killing blow meant to end the threat immediately. But the creature was fast, faster than a man of Henderson's age and build should have been. It ducked its head at the last possible second, and the hooked end of the poker caught it high on the shoulder with a sickening, fleshy crunch of breaking bone.
The impact drove it to its knees, but it did not cry out in pain. It only let out a low, frustrated hiss, like an animal, and clawed at the poker embedded in its shoulder, trying to dislodge it. Quinn yanked the weapon back with a grunt. The creature lunged forward, not at Quinn, but past him, scrambling on all fours with unnatural speed towards the hallway. It was single-minded in its pursuit of the children.
Quinn stumbled back, repositioning himself between the monster and the path to his family. He blocked the hallway. The creature rose to its full height again, its face a mask of mindless fury. It launched itself at him, arms outstretched, fingers curled into rigid claws.
There was no room for a full swing. Quinn reacted with a different instinct. He thrust the poker forward like a spear, bracing his feet. The pointed end met the creature's chest with a dull, solid thud, sinking into the soft tissue just below the collarbone. The impact stopped the creature's momentum, pinning it. The thing gaped, its bloody mouth opening and closing, making a horrible, wet, clicking sound. It did not seem to register the fatal wound. It just kept trying to push forward, its feet scrabbling for purchase on the glass-strewn carpet, its inhuman strength pressing against the iron rod.
Quinn's arms strained against the force. The muscles in his shoulders and back screamed with the effort of holding the creature at bay. He could smell the coppery scent of its blood and something else, something sour and wrong, the smell of sickness. He looked into its milky, vacant eyes and saw nothing. No soul. No person. Just a machine of hunger and violence.
"Mark!" Quinn grunted, his feet slipping slightly on a piece of glass. "Help me!"
The shout finally broke Mark's paralysis. He looked from the gruesome tableau in the center of his living room to the hallway where his wife and children were hiding. A surge of pure, protective adrenaline hit him with the force of an electric shock. He grabbed the first thing he saw—a heavy floor lamp with a weighted brass base. He ripped its cord from the wall outlet and swung it with all his might, a desperate, two-handed swing. The heavy base connected with the side of Henderson's head with a sickening, wet crack.
The creature went limp instantly. Its full weight slumped forward onto the poker, driving Quinn back a step. For a moment, it hung there, impaled and lifeless. Then, slowly, it slid off the iron rod and collapsed onto the floor in a heap.
Silence descended inside the house.
The only sounds were Quinn's ragged breaths and the frantic, distant screams from outside. He stood over the body, the poker held tight in his hands, dripping dark blood onto the beige carpet. Mark stared at the corpse on his floor, at the ruin of his living room window, at the blood spattered on his walls. The lamp fell from his hands and clattered onto the hardwood floor of the entryway.
"Oh, God," Mark whispered. He covered his mouth with his hand. "Oh, my God, Quinn."
"There's no time for that," Quinn said, his voice flat and hard. He was not looking at the body. He was looking at the broken window, at the open invitation it offered to the horrors outside. "Help me get it out."
Mark just stared at him, his mind unable to process the request. "Get it…?"
"Out!" Quinn commanded, his voice sharp. "We can't leave it in here. It will draw more of them. Grab the legs."
The sheer authority in Quinn's voice cut through the fog of Mark's shock. He nodded numbly and moved to the creature's feet, his movements stiff and robotic. Quinn took the shoulders. The body was unnervingly warm. Together, they dragged the dead weight of their former neighbor across the room, leaving a dark smear of blood on the light-colored carpet. They shoved it unceremoniously back out through the broken window, letting it fall onto the flowerbed below among Sarah's rose bushes.
"Now, the window," Quinn said, already scanning the room for something large and heavy. "We need to block it. That bookshelf. The big one."
They moved to the heavy oak bookshelf that stood against the far wall, filled with Sarah's collection of novels and framed family photo albums. Without a word, they began pulling the books off, dropping them in haphazard piles on the floor. Together, grunting with the effort, they tilted the heavy piece of furniture away from the wall and began to wrestle it across the room. They positioned it to cover the gaping hole. It scraped and gouged the hardwood floor, but neither of them cared. Finally, it was in place, a solid wall of dark wood where the window had been. It was not perfect, but it was cover.
"Okay," Quinn panted, leaning against the makeshift barricade, his chest heaving. "Now the rest. Every door, every window on this floor. Use whatever is heavy. Desks, tables, dressers. Don't leave anything open to the outside."
He looked toward the hallway. Sarah was standing there, a silent spectator. Her face was a pale oval in the gloom. She had seen the end of the fight. She had seen what they had done with the body.
"The kids?" Quinn asked.
"In the closet," she said, her voice hollow. "The one under the stairs. I gave them Tom's tablet, the battery is almost dead, but… I told them it was a game. A hiding game. To be as quiet as possible."
"Good," Quinn said with a nod. "You stay with them. Keep them quiet. No matter what you hear. If they hear you panicking, they'll panic."
She nodded, her eyes wide with a terror that was warring with her maternal resolve. She turned and disappeared back down the hall, a ghost in her own home.
For the next hour, the house was filled with the sounds of their frantic work. The scraping of heavy furniture across wood floors. The grunts of exertion from Quinn and Mark. From outside, a symphony of chaos provided a terrifying backdrop. A car alarm started blaring down the street, its electronic whoop insistent and piercing, then stopped abruptly with the sound of smashing glass. A burst of what sounded like gunshots, three sharp pops in quick succession, echoed from a few blocks away. A woman's scream, shrill and close, was cut off mid-cry. The neighborhood was tearing itself apart, one house at a time.
Quinn and Mark worked without speaking, a grim understanding passing between them. They shoved the heavy dining room table against the sliding glass door in the kitchen, its legs screeching in protest. They dragged a dresser from the guest room to block the back door leading to the yard. They were turning their beautiful, open-plan home into a fortress. A tomb.
When they were finished, every potential entry point on the ground floor was blocked by a heavy piece of furniture. The house was a dark, sealed box. Quinn's gaze fell upon the aluminum bat he had discarded earlier. He picked it up. Mark, seeing what he was doing, went to the kitchen and returned with the two largest knives from the butcher block. He handed one, the chef's knife, to Quinn and kept the broader butcher's knife for himself.
Quinn looked at their arsenal. A baseball bat, a fireplace poker, and two kitchen knives. They were hopelessly, laughably under-equipped for the end of the world.
The house was finally quiet again. The physical work was done. There was nothing left to do but wait. Quinn, Mark, and Sarah stood together in the semi-darkness of the barricaded living room. Sarah had come back out after settling the children. Her face was stained with tears, but her eyes were dry now, filled with a hard, brittle strength.
They listened.
The sounds from outside were no longer distinct. The individual screams and crashes had merged into a constant, low-level thrum of violence and destruction. It was the sound of a society in its final, agonizing death throes.
They were trapped. The three of them stood there, side-by-side, listening to the world end, realizing with a shared, silent terror that the thin walls of their home were the only thing separating them from the chaos. And they had no idea how long the walls would hold.