The Gristle & Bone Series (Book 1): The Flayed & The Dying

by Roach, Aaron

  As he covered the distance, Burome's peripherals picked up something he could never unsee. The screaming writhing people on the ground began tearing at themselves. They tore at their hair, their eyes, and their bellies. They left deep lacerations across their own faces, arms and legs, spraying bloody amber across the white marble of the museum floor. They shred themselves and dug in some more.

  And then, at mid-run, Burome felt himself burst into flames, his body consumed by heat. His skin cracked like setting magma and the fluid in his eyes boiled.

  Stop, drop, roll!

  Burome threw himself to the ground, cracking his teeth on the marble floor and tasting blood, but these were mere ripples in the ocean of hurt in which he now swam. Before the pain could become blinding, he opened his eyes and viewed the world in chaos. The museum was filled with people either standing, scared and confused; or on the ground, like him, shrieking in agony.

  But...

  His mind lurched like a missed step.

  There was no smoke, no flames, no fire; only the loud, violent gasping of a thousand people trying not to drown in an invisible, burning sea.

  Burome fought hard. He pushed back at the rising tide of suffering that grew inside him. He fought to his knees, and his elbows, and his hands and moved forward.

  Soph.

  He crawled across invisible coals which cracked open the meat of his palms and left red streaks in their wake. When he reached the stairs, he threw himself down them, their sharp corners prodding like demons with pitchforks.

  When he hit bottom, he saw tilted running feet and Sophia's new red-and-white backpack, the one she had worn just for today's field trip.

  Soph.

  Overriding fear for his daughter's safety was the only thing holding back the sea of violence that threatened to consume him.

  Then he saw her, Sophia, crouched down over the spasming body of her friend.

  Sophia’s hands were grasping and unsure, patting hesitantly at Becca’s body, searching for the source of her pain. In panic and indecision, she brought her hands back to cover her ears.

  Becca only shrieked and clawed at herself.

  “What do I do, what do I do?” Sophia sputtered, half sobbing. “Becca, please stop! Ms. Cowan!”

  But Ms. Cowan couldn’t help. She was on the ground too, gnawing on her fingers and crying out helplessly with each bloody bite.

  Sophia turned away from the sight and vomited. She wouldn't look again. Not at Ms. Cowan and not at Becca. Instead, she would close her eyes, cover her ears, and all would be okay.

  “One...Two...Three...”– she counted.

  Burome pressed his hands against the floor and hacked. There was burning tar in his throat, he could taste it. But only bloody phlegm and shards of broken teeth came out.

  “Soph..!” he croaked, but she had her hands over her ears and couldn’t hear him.

  The sight of her, so close and so afraid, broke him and the dam that he had been holding up against the boiling sea, burst.

  It flooded into him, an ocean of fire in his skull. He collapsed and tore at his face to get to it, to banish the pain, but his fingers only came back bloody, with bits of hair and scalp still attached.

  No good.

  He tried to go through his eyes. He clawed and dug at the soft tissue there until the world went dark and he felt the wet surface of exposed bone that surrounded the cavities of his eye sockets. The source of his pain was a quarter inch away, just behind the bone, but his stupid fucking skull was in the way!

  Something beastly was growing inside him.

  Burome pulled himself back up to his hands and knees and slammed his forehead into the floor. With each hammercrack the pain disappeared momentarily, only for it to come roaring back as he reared, cocking his head for another blow.

  Again and again, he brought his face to the floor and tried to break into himself, to spill out the fire that consumed him.

  “...Four...Five...Six...” Sophia continued her mantra. Close, too close, she could hear a dull, slamming thud, muffled through the hands that protected her ears. The sound hammered at the denial in which she was trying to enshroud herself.

  The fire in Burome's skull drifted down his esophagus like a boat pyre at a Viking funeral. When it settled in his belly, he dug and tore away at the flesh there too. He snarled at the hands, his hands that betrayed their own body. He willed them to stop, but they continued their macabre labor, until his snarl turned into a growl of hunger as the hands pulled out his own slithering intestines.

  The agony didn't dissipate with the removing of his guts; it simply migrated into the marrow of his ribs.

  A sudden need to get them out overtook him.

  Out!

  Reaching in and up through the cavity he'd created in his belly, Burome grabbed the first hard wet handle of bone he could feel and pulled it outward, snapping it. He did this again, again and again until his ribs, jagged and gray, reached out through the broken canvas of his skin like the upturned legs of a dead spider.

  Then, as he lay there gasping and dying, the pain faded away.

  There was almost nothing left of him.

  Burome Shea sank deep, deep into the hell sea where the last of who he was both burned and drowned. He had no eyes, but through the simmering sea above him he could sense Sophia there, so close, planted on the museum floor. The surface of the dark water was a window into life, and Sophia was alive. She was surrounded by dying people doing terrible things to themselves, but she was there, and she was alive.

  And there he was, on the other side of the watery window, fading.

  The last of Burome gathered himself for a final push, to fight for one more moment of existence. He kicked hard and willed himself to the surface.

  “...Seven...Eight...Nine...”

  The screaming wasn't so loud anymore. Sophia couldn't hear Becca or Ms. Cowan, and the hammering that had been so close had stopped. Her mantra was working. At ten, she would open her eyes and Becca and Ms. Cowan would be okay, and her daddy would be there to take her home.

  The body that once belonged to Burome Shea jolted to its feet, like an executed man electrocuted long enough to be brought back to life. The exposed yellow skull that had once been Burome’s head pulled air in deep before it bellowed a roar of defiance at what he was fast becoming.

  “Sophia… Run!”

  “...Ten.”

  Sophia knew that voice.

  Sophia opened her eyes and saw, standing only a few feet away, a monster in the tattered shreds of what was once a dark uniform. It stared down at her like a gargoyle high on a cathedral wall. The heart-shaped cartilage of where its nose used to be coughed a mist of red air and its empty eye sockets stared through to the skeleton inside of her. It opened its broken-toothed maw and gargled in what might have been her father's voice.

  “Go...” the creature said.

  Sophia stood very slowly and as soon as she was upright, she did as she was told and ran.

  -8-

  Kathleen Adder paced at the pavilion edge like an animal waiting to be freed from a cage. She looked down at the edge, at the clear separation between wet and dry, staring at it as if it were the starting line of a race to freedom. By now, the rain was beginning to slow, but she could still sense the corruption – whatever it was – hanging in the moist air, as if waiting for her. Beyond the rainclouds, a few rays of sunshine cracked through the sky, the beams of light moving far too slowly for her liking.

  Somewhere in the distance she heard screaming and sirens. Sirens were normal, the screaming was not.

  It was time to go.

  Wait for it to stop, said something inside of her, something ingrained deep down in her very genetic code.

  The screaming in the distance grew until it was no longer in the distance, and the entirety of the esplanade suddenly sounded like a jungle filled with howler monkeys. The screeching bounced off the skyscrapers at the edge of the park, back through the trees and reverberated up through the hig
h-roofed ceiling of her little pavilion shelter.

  Kat’s eyes refocused as she looked through the drizzling rain to the little boy in his yellow jacket and rubber boots. He was lying on the ground face up while his mother knelt at his side performing CPR. Her grief-filled cries terrified Kat to her soul.

  Kat wanted to go to her, to help them, but -

  Something was amiss. The mother's mouth was bleeding and the way she was performing the chest compressions with her hands didn't look right. Her compressions weren't desperate, they were furious; and her hands weren't hands, they were spikes.

  Kat gasped in horror as the mother withdrew two jagged points from the little boy's torso.

  At the sound of Kat’s gasp, the mother turned, swinging her face in Kat's direction.

  And Kat finally understood the screaming.

  The woman looked like the skeleton that used to hang up in her old high school classroom, if the skeleton had decided halfway through decomposition that it didn't want to be a skeleton. It was eyeless, nose-less, with only a few wisps of long hair remaining on her scalp, like cobwebs in the wind. From her neck to the top of her breasts, flesh hung in strips like some grisly meat gown. Farther down, the red sinew of her biceps was exposed from shoulders to elbows; and past the elbows, only the bare bones of her radius and ulna remained –broken, jagged and sharp. She had made prongs out of her own arms and had stabbed her little boy to death with them.

  A grunt emanated from the mother-thing, and she stood up, still facing Kat's direction. Her cranium tilted, listening.

  Kat's breath caught in her throat. Quiet.

  The mother-thing crouched onto all fours and began a slow crablike shuffle across the grass towards the pavilion, her forelimbs leaving small punctures in the earth with each step. As it moved, Kat did too, slowly, towards the picnic table on which her backpack rested. With each quiet step, the tilt of the mother-thing's head seemed to track her as if aware, yet unsure, of Kat's presence. Still, it continued its deliberate crawl in her direction.

  When Kat reached the table, she lifted her backpack by the strap, never taking her eyes off the mother-thing. If she had, she might have seen the music player and headphones that she had left sitting on top of it. As the bag came up, the music player slid away, hitting and bouncing off the aluminum table with a loud clang.

  The sound that came out of the mother-thing's mouth in response was old. It emanated from eons ago, over tens of thousands of years, from back when humans still lived in small tribes and large apex predators roamed the earth hunting them. Now the sound was here, baying for her blood.

  Run.

  Before Kat could turn, the mother-thing was already closing the distance with frightening speed, that ancient earth noise still spilling out of her. Kat ran, hopping over the other tables of the gazebo in her rush to get out and away.

  Thankfully, miraculously, the rain had stopped, and no more warning bells were going off in her head. Kat leapt off the last remaining table, the top of her head grazing the ceiling of the pavilion, and hit the grass hard and fast, stumbling into a forward roll. As her momentum carried her back up to her feet, she heard a crash a mere few feet behind her. She dared a glance over her shoulder and what she witnessed would have been comical if it hadn't been so terrifying.

  In its rush to get to her, the mother-thing had run across Kat's skateboard at full speed, slipping on it and crashing into one of the tables. Nearby, the board was upturned, its wheels still spinning, and the mother-thing was already pulling itself up. It was chirping now, like a blind, hungry bird waiting to be fed, its head tilting back and forth.

  The voice inside her told Kat to be still. She stood there in the open expanse of the park, watching the thing hunt for her, prowling and sniffing at the gazebo floor, tapping the pointed ends of its arm spikes against the aluminum tables. Kat held her breath, standing and trembling as silent as possible while the thing came closer and closer.

  A shriek, a very human cry for help, emanated from beyond the edge of a nearby treeline. The sound was immediately joined by hungry howls all through the park, including from the mother-thing. It took off towards the sound like a gorilla at a gallop, the spiked points of its arms throwing up earth behind it.

  Kat turned and ran desperately silent towards another treeline, away from the call for help.

  -9-

  When the screaming started and the lunatics in the museum began their bloody self-mutilation; Don ran, leaving the kids of his tour behind to fend for themselves.

  They don’t pay me enough for that shit.

  Don headed towards the museum’s exit, sidestepping past screaming bodies and ignoring those unafflicted individuals who were desperately pleading for help. He didn't know what was going on, and frankly, he didn't care. All he wanted was out.

  But Don’s path to freedom was barred at the museum’s main hall by an open expanse of bodies littering the ground, flaying themselves and spreading bloody crimson everywhere. Unwilling to cross through them out of fear of some disease or infection, Don took refuge in a nearby custodial closet. There he sat in the dark, trying to figure out what to do, when the radio at his hip squawked loudly, scaring the shit out of him.

  “Hello? Burome? Is anyone there? I need help down here!” It was Jenn, his bitch supervisor.

  “I'm here Jenn, I'm coming down to you now,” Delilah's voice responded. She sounded scared but determined. Don recalled her saying once that she had been a paramedic before switching careers. This type of thing was right up her alley.

  Good. Let them handle it.

  By now, the noise and screaming outside was beginning to die down to an eerie silence and Don heard running footsteps nearby. He cracked open the door to peek out into the hall.

  Don was greeted by the sight of a little girl with a teal sweatband and red-and-white backpack heading towards the exit. He thought he recognized her from his tour but wasn’t sure. The girl ran, almost on her tiptoes, around the museum visitors who were beginning to still into death and hopped like a fawn over the ones that had barred his exit.

  And then she was gone, out the door.

  Fuck that. If she can do it, so can I.

  Quietly, Don opened the door to follow after her, when he saw something that made him freeze in fear.

  Not more than twenty feet away stood a monster, a massive bleeding mess of bone and gore that seemed to expand and shrink with each labored breath. Like him, it had been watching the little girl make her exit, salivating and twitching its exposed bony fingers the entire time. As the girl disappeared, the monster shuddered and let out an inhuman whine that sounded both frustrated and relieved. Once she was gone, the monster turned its hulking mass and sniffed at the ground.

  When Don had started his job a few months prior, the museum had been hosting a temporary exhibit on Vikings. One of his first tasks was to memorize placards detailing the items of the exhibit so that he would know what to say when giving tours. The sight of this monster made him recall one such painting from the exhibit, the one that had been titled “Blood Eagle.” The painting had depicted a Viking method of execution in which the victim was splayed out face down upon a rock, and had his ribs snapped at the spine and flayed out like wings.

  This monster was the blood eagle come to life, except its rib-wings were at its front, curved outward like a reaching talon.

  The blood eagle tilted its bare skull, listening. At the same moment, down the hall, Don recognized the forms of two women – Jenn and Delilah – on their knees over the prone form of a man. Circled around them, a small group of unafflicted survivors stood watching or trying to help. The two women were using an emergency defibrillator to try and resuscitate the man. Why they had chosen that particular individual to try and save, when the whole museum floor was littered with bodies, Don would never know, but they were so distracted by their attempts to bring him back from death that they hadn't noticed the monster that had turned its attention to them.

  The blood-eagle was
silent as it lowered itself into a sprinter's crouch, and quieter still as it broke into a run. It covered the distance like a jaguar in the night, in leaps and on all fours. Just before it reached the group, it brought itself upright again without slowing down. It slammed into them, knocking them over and scattering them like bowling pins.

  Jenn, however; hadn't been knocked down. She received the full brunt of the monster's momentum. It scooped her up and ran her through, sandwiching her between the wall and itself with its ribs. Before she could register what was happening, the blood-eagle bit into her neck and tore away her throat. She died there, hung up on the wall like a painting.

  The others who had been knocked to the ground kicked and backpedaled away, screaming in fear and trying to put distance between themselves and the thing feasting on Jenn’s neck.

  It was loud enough to wake the dead.

  The hundreds of bodies that littered the museum floor shuddered. Then almost as one, they suddenly snapped upwards, contorted and broken, and very much alert. Their jerky, spastic awakening reminded Don of a mass exorcism gone wrong.

  At the sight of the living dead, the survivors scrambled for the exit.

  The newly arisen blood-eagles reacted to the noise and movement. They descended on their outnumbered prey, stabbing with broken limbs and eating voraciously.

  Through it all Don caught sight of Delilah, who had been smart enough to separate herself from the others. While the monsters feasted, she ran in his direction, toward his hideout in the custodial closet, and he could only watch helplessly as she came closer, willing her to find a different place to hide.

  Delilah leapt over a crouched and feasting blood eagle too preoccupied with its meal to chase her down. She reached the door of the custodial closet and yanked it open, catching a silent scream in her throat at the sight of Don cowering there. She threw herself inside, joining him.

  “The hell are you doing?” whispered Don angrily.

  Delilah was taken aback by the hostility in the man’s tone. She had never been anything but nice to Don and he had always seemed so quiet and reserved. Jenn had had issues with him, but their own interactions had always been mutually respectful.