Crisis Event: Black Feast by Greg Shows, Zachary Womack Page B

around for somewhere to hide.
    She saw the half-open door behind the blood-filled tub and rushed to it. The door couldn’t open any further, so Sadie bent and pulled at the tub with one hand. It slid forward, but the blood sloshed up and over the side, covering her hand.
    Sadie thought she could fit through the gap if she turned sideways, but when she stepped over the tub and tried to squeeze through, her pack stopped her. All the while the big man’s footsteps grew louder—as did his horrible whistling.
    “Come on,” she said, stepping back over the tub and setting down the Ball jar and slipping the pack off one shoulder and then the other.
    “I left that girl tied up in a sack,” a croaky voice sang from just outside the lab, and Sadie nearly screamed. She swung her pack in front of her and pushed it through the gap between the door and the door frame, but this threw her off balance. Her injured back and hip screamed at her, and she nearly dropped the pack. She stumbled forward, her foot splashing down in the tub.
    Cold, thick blood rose up to her ankle, seeping almost instantly into her sock through gaps in her leather boots.
    “Ullllllll,” she moaned.
    “She gonna die when I get back…”
    Sadie set the pack behind the door and stepped through the gap. She bent and reached back for her shotgun and pulled it into the darkness with her just as the big man came around the corner and into the room.
    She went rigid, waiting to see if the man would spot the jar she’d left sitting on the floor a few inches away from the door.
    He didn’t.
    “Got the cannibal blues,” the big man sang. “Got the cannibal blues.”
    Sadie remained as still as she could, crouched halfway between squatting and standing, and listened to the hissing of the burning propane and the crazy giant on the other side of the door.
    “Well, Lord I got ‘em,” he sang with a yodel. “I got the can-nee-annuh-bull buh-looooz.”
    Soon Sadie’s eyes adjusted and she saw she was in a supply room. A completely raided and destroyed supply room that stank worse than the boiling pot of vinegar water next door.
    The cabinets were all open or had had their doors wrenched off and carried away. There was trash all over the floor—broken glass slides and plastic lab tongs, smashed microscopes, and a pile of blackened, mold-covered frogs and fetal pigs she guessed had been freed of their formaldehyde prisons for some unknown reason
    Sadie wanted to shove her respirator over her face so she could filter out the stench, but she didn’t dare move. The giant on the other side of the door talked to himself as he went to work at his canning job, slamming down the meat cleaver with a heavy “thunk!” and then pulling apart the meat and gristle of the girl’s leg.
    “How you doing in there!” the guy suddenly yelled, and Sadie felt her head get light. She wondered if she shouldn’t just step out and blast the guy. But she wasn’t sure he didn’t have friends around.
    She didn’t want to get into a gun battle. She’d never been in one. She didn’t see how she’d have an advantage if the guys she went up against had. So she remained where she was, barely breathing, looking around the supply room for the best possible escape, and waiting for an opportunity to reach inside the room and snatch the potassium nitrate she’d risked her life for.
    After a few minutes, Sadie had developed a mental picture of what she thought was happening in the room. The giant freak kept up a steady pace of chopping up the dead girl’s body, then clanging the tongs into the boiling water to pull out a fresh ball jar to fill. After packing the goopy, freshly deboned meat into several jars, he would screw the lids on.
    Sadie guessed that if she was quick and silent, she could succeed. If she failed and he saw her hand, that would be too bad for him.
    After taking several nerve-steadying breaths, Sadie reached forward through the gap between the door and the door frame,