Red's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

By dawn the gate was still shaking. Red had stitched the man's leg shut and gagged him with a strip of cloth. He slept now, breathing hard. She stood at the upstairs window and counted the dead pressed against the cars below. Thirty at least. Their hands had worn a dark smear into the wood where they clawed, and the dirt at the base of the gate was packed flat with footprints and old blood. The wall was strong, but nothing held forever against that many fists. She had to move them, and she had to do it before the bar split. She went down to the shed and pulled out the toy car. It was a stupid thing, an orange and blue plastic body on fat tires, a small speaker duct-taped to the roof. She had built it for this exact problem and never used it. She loaded fresh batteries. She tested the speaker with her thumb on the volume wheel, low, then off. The recording was a man screaming. She had made it herself, alone in this house, on a night she did not want to remember. Red climbed to the back wall with the car under one arm and the controller in her teeth. She lowered the car down on a rope into the brush behind the property. Then she drove. The little wheels caught on roots and dragged through wet leaves. She steered it toward the old hunting stand at the edge of the woods, a tall dead tree with a ladder nailed up the trunk and a platform built into the branches. Moss hung off it like wet rope. She had picked the spot months ago because it stood far from any road. She was a hundred feet from the tree when the branches above the platform moved. Not wind. Something small and gray dropped onto the railing and crouched there. Then another. Then six more, then twenty. Their eyes caught the gray light and glowed red. Their mouths hung open and dripped. Squirrels. Dead ones. The tree was full of them, nesting in the platform she had meant to use as her lookout. They poured down the trunk in a gray wave when the speaker clicked on. Red thumbed the volume to full. The scream tore out of the little speaker and rolled through the trees. At the gate, the horde turned as one body. They began to walk, then to run, toward the sound. The squirrels ran too, faster than the dead, a chittering flood across the leaves. The car kept driving. The scream kept playing. Everything in the woods followed it away from her wall. She lowered the controller and watched the last of them vanish into the trees. The gate stood quiet for the first time in a day. She had bought the wall, and she had lost the lookout tree, and something small and hungry now lived between her and the only high ground she had.