And yet the gurgling wheeze of the creatures surrounded them.
In the crowded penumbra, Andy struck a match. Yellow fleur-de-lis wallpaper ululated at the still-healthy flame. She cocked the rifle and gave a quiet military signal to head upstairs. Tim understood it perfectly and took the lead, while Andy helped Kerri help Nate upstairs.
The dog stopped on the sixth step, tail stiffening to DEFCON 1. Two of the dozen wheezer-voices around them raised in tone and manifested, jumping onto the landing ahead, both on all sixes.
ANDY: Sheep smuggler rugsweep!
(Kerri swiftly grabs the carpet and yanks, causing the wheezers to slip off the landing and tumble down to Andy’s feet, right in time for her to take the gun and blow the first one’s head off, dodge three claws, step on the second wheezer’s chest, and shove the cannon inside its gaping mouth and fire.)
PETER: Why didn’t she just say “carpet”?! Like the fucking thing’s gonna understand!
ANDY: Go! Get to high ground!
They rushed upstairs, crossed a hallway, flashlights sweeping the rooms frantically, trying to catch sight of the invisible wheezers that stood cheering around them, crawling all over the house, outside, beneath, above, a stereophonic choir crescendoing to homicidal ecstasy.
Andy gritted her teeth and swept the gore off her face to confront the inevitable conclusion: there was only one room to go.
She hurricaned up the third-floor staircase and hit the attic door. It wouldn’t open.
“No way!”
The wheezer audio track around her grew into what sounded like sadistic laughter.
“NO WAY! (Banging the door.) Open up, motherfucker! We’re here! Open up!”
“Andy! In here!”
She spun on her feet and ran back toward a second floor room, shutting the door behind her. Nate was there, and Tim, and Kerri, her flashlight pointing at the peculiar furniture.
Oxygen tanks. Tens of them in assorted sizes, the smallest ones as big as fire extinguishers, a couple of canisters looking like they’d barely fit through the doorway.
“What…?” Andy stuttered. “These are the same kind we found under Sentinel Hill. He was smuggling oxygen here? Why?!”
“There.” Kerri pointed for a close-up shot. One of the largest tanks was connected to a duct pipe that slithered into a vent in a corner. “He’s oxygenating the attic. He holes up there while the whole lake is leaking gas!”
A high-pitched, overreaching shriek rose from the chorus; Andy and Kerri turned to face it. Their lightbeams hit a bare wall.
On the other end of the room, Nate slid down the flowery wallpaper, his anxious panting barely audible over the pandemonium.
PETER: (Whispering.) We’re as good as dead here, Nate.
NATE: (Really loud.) You are fucking dead!
“What?!” Kerri shouted. “Nate, what are you saying?”
Tim growled at the door, claws ready to pry off the floorboards.
“They’re right outside,” Andy announced, aiming her gun.
“They’re pouring in through the east wing,” Kerri said.
“Nate.” Peter was breathing hard too, like he actually had something to lose. “Listen to me. We’re not gonna make it.”
Nate could feel both icy sweat and lava blood dripping down his spine. The wheezer-voices were accordingly dropping in volume, from warcry to drumroll.
“Look at this, man. This is her plan? Just walk into ground zero and fight? It’s insane.”
Andy pushed Kerri aside and let Tim take the middle of the room with her, both facing the entryway with gritted teeth and quivery trigger fingers, all eyes on the door handle.
It never moved. Wheezers couldn’t handle handles.
So they blasted the door open.
Andy fired a welcome shot through the frontrunner of the horde, switched to the pickax, and jumped forward, her and Tim both roaring like face-painted warriors. The doorway was immediately taken over by a new creature digging its claws on the doorframe, and then another, and another, and another, and another.
Andy and Tim stopped halfway to the door, astonished, watching the five wheezers struggling to fit through at the same time. A ridiculous number of arms bashing at one another, mouths snapping in the air.
“Take note,” Andy told Tim. “People wonder why bad guys charge at Jackie Chan in a single row. This is why.”
In response to that, wheezers blasted two new doorways, one on each sidewall.
Drooling, hissing, claw-waving creatures poured inside like a tidal wave of sulfuric acid.
In amazement, Andy saw Tim jump at the first one and be flung across the room while she herself shotgunned one creature and pickaxed an eye socket into another one’s face at the same time, all while watching Kerri move to defend Nate and fight off the second wave with a stick.
“Kerri! It’s a gun! (Pickax through something’s ribcage.) Fire the gun!”
Kerri bashed the front wheezer, gaining room to aim the pump-action rifle and fire.
All action stopped for a fraction of a second, if only to admire how the blast went through no less than three screeching devils, silencing them instantly and making them fall to their knees and sideways like tux-clad dancers domino-diving in a swimming pool.
Nate staggered to his feet, cocked his rifle, and stepped forward into the three feet of ground Kerri had conquered against the quickly regrouping creatures, when something crashed through the dormer window on his right. Thorn-shaped teeth snapped an inch away from his cheek. He fired as he fell to the ground, and the gun blast knocked the wheezer out the window and off the roof.
Andy silently approved while she fired her shotgun at Lambda, felt Mu clutching her jacket and slipped out of it, nailed Nu onto the wall with her pickax, surprised Omicron with a butterfly kick while it complained that Xi go first, shot Xi’s head off, ducked to dodge Mu again, grabbed one of its medial limbs in midair, and shoved it into the pickax point coming out of Nu, impaled four lines above.
KERRI: Nate! Ammo!
Andy’s gun clicked empty. She threw it at somebody’s eyeless head, grabbed an empty oxygen canister, dug in her heels, and spun. She swung the bottle around, knocked Pi and Rho off their feet, and kept spinning, off-balance and losing control, knowing she would fall eventually, but hopefully not before she’d broken at least one more neck, and indeed she heard a scream cut short by the sound of the canister striking one o’clock on Sigma’s skull before crying out, “Duck!” and letting go of the bottle, which by sheer luck hit Tau right as Kerri was blasting a hole through its abdomen.
KERRI: Nate! Ammo, now!
Andy didn’t wait to regain balance before she dove for the shotgun, a shell in her hand, and as she landed over the weapon, the nth shrieking monster leaped on her. She rolled aside to avoid being pierced by three claws at once, pried the pickax out of the wall, nailed the last wheezer’s hand on the floor, and then finally chambered the shell and blew its head into goo.