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

in the student cafe, which was on the other side of the building. So she and Sadie passed into the darkness beyond the check-in counter.
    “Ohhhh,” someone groaned. Someone else—a girl from the sound of it—giggled in response.
    “Git your ass over here!” a man yelled, and the sound of flesh being slapped echoed down the hallway. Then there was a clang, as if a heavy weight had been dropped on a concrete floor.
    A wail sounded, so desolate and despairing it gave Sadie a chill.
    Someone else shouted “No! Please!”
    Sadie considered the odds of successfully freeing people and told herself “no.”
    “They torture people in the weight room,” Callie whispered.
    “Yes they do,” Sadie whispered grimly, though Callie didn’t get her joke.
    Sadie put a hand on Callie’s shoulder while Callie put her free hand on the wall. Slowly they traversed the black passage, both of them sliding their feet along as they went, not worrying much about the sounds they were making since the storm outside the building was raging and the people in the weight room were making so much noise.
    As they moved forward, Callie whispered directions and told Sadie where various hallways went. The first one on the right led to the weight room and game room. The second one on the right went straight into a gymnasium, which exited into another hallway and led to the front entrance of the cafe. On the far side there were showers and restrooms.
    The gymnasium was where most people stayed during the day, because of the skylights the college had installed in the roof.
    At night, Sadie said, people slipped off to offices or supply closets or even dorm rooms in other buildings.
    A short hallway to the left led to the building’s loading dock and the cafe’s employee entrance, Callie said.
    Sadie nodded in the dark and set off down the hallway in front of Callie. She had her pistol out and her other arm stretched forward, her palm open.
    Almost immediately the smell hit her nose. It was a combination of spoiled milk and rotting hamburger meat that got worse the farther along the hall she went. She made a face in the dark but kept moving forward.
    She wanted badly to put her respirator on, but it was so dusty she wouldn’t have been able to see through its faceplate.
    The hallway ended with a pair of doors that gave no resistance when Sadie pushed through them. As the doors swung inward the full force of the smell hit the girls.
    Sadie gagged and retched and fought down her nausea while Callie shoved her mouth into the crook of her elbow and went into a coughing fit.
    “I’ve never been back here,” Callie said as the two doors swung closed behind them. Then she bent over and fought to control her coughing. Sadie nodded in the dark and pushed the button on the top of the flashlight. Instantly she wished she hadn’t. The loading area was a nightmare. The remains of dead bodies lay against the two steel loading bay doors. Both doors were dull gray with two windows at head height. Dim light came in through the windows, but were as little help in illuminating the bay as the tiny square window set into the exit door to the right of the loading doors.
    Sadie shined the light over the bodies and nearly threw up. The skulls had been stripped of all meat. The only skin remaining was on the crown of the skulls’ heads, and hair still clung to it. The meat had been peeled off the arms and legs of the corpses as well, and their chests had been spread open and emptied.
    Surrounding the corpses were hundreds of human bones picked clean of flesh. They’d been tossed into the loading bay carelessly and left to decay for who knew how long—despite the fact the bay doors could have been opened and the area cleared.
    Rats and cockroaches scattered away from the bones in the beam of the flashlight, although the long columns of ants weaving in and out of the bones showed no interest in Sadie’s light.
    Callie sobbed and Sadie moved the flashlight, sweeping it