Echoes in the Dark

Week three brought the rain again, and with it, the voices.

Elena was asleep in her bedroom on the second floor. She was dreaming of the crash—the screech of tires, the silence that followed.

"Elena?"

She woke with a gasp. The room was dark.

"Elena, honey?"

It was David.

Her breath hitched. It was coming from the floor vent. His voice. Not a recording, not a memory. His deep, gravelly baritone, the one that used to vibrate in his chest when he hugged her.

"David?" she whispered to the darkness.

"I'm hungry, El," the voice called up from the basement. "We're so hungry down here."

Elena threw off the covers. She didn't think about logic. She didn't think about the fact that David was buried six feet under in the Oakhaven cemetery. She only knew that he was calling her.

She stumbled down the stairs, her bare feet slapping against the cold wood. She reached the kitchen, threw open the basement door, and flicked on the light.

"David?"

The scene at the bottom of the stairs stopped her dead.

They weren't pups anymore. They were the size of full-grown wolves now, their bodies lean and ropy with muscle. They were clustered in the center of the room.

The Alpha stood on its hind legs. It was nearly five feet tall when it stood like that. Its front paws hung limply, the fingers too long, too articulated.

It looked up at her at the top of the stairs. It grinned, revealing gums that were black and rotting.

"Hungry, El," the Alpha said, using David’s voice perfectly. It even had his inflection, the slight dip on the vowel.

Elena gripped the doorframe, the world spinning. "Stop it," she whimpered. "Stop it, that’s not... that’s not him."

"Mama?"

Elena choked. That was Toby. Her baby.

A smaller pup, the runt, skulked forward from the shadows. It didn't look like a child. It looked like a gargoyle made of raw dough. But the voice coming out of its throat was the sweet, high pitched babble of her two-year-old son.

"Mama, up?" the runt said. "Mama, milk?"

Elena sank to the floor at the top of the stairs, burying her face in her hands. She screamed. She screamed until her throat was raw, trying to drown out the sounds of her dead family begging for meat.

But she didn't leave. She didn't run.

Because when the screaming stopped, the Alpha walked up the stairs. It moved with a jerky, unnatural gait. It knelt beside her. It licked the tears from her face with that long, grey tongue.

"Love... Mama," it croaked, shifting from David’s voice to a distorted parody of her own.

"I love you too," she whispered, broken. "I'm sorry. I'll get more meat. I promise."