The Hanging Wives of New England
Ellis Brightwell
Copyright © 2021 by Ellis Brightwell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by Damonza.com
Winter Blood Moon Harvest Publishing
eISBN: 978-1-7369827-1-6
Contents
1. Morning
2. Police Station
3. Lily
4. Boat
5. Fire Station
6. Bridge
7. Hills
8. Fishermen
9. The Abyss
10. Aftermath
1
Morning
It was when I woke one October morning to a trail of bloody streak marks that I lost the will to live. I had been halfway through the day’s first coffee when the ink strokes of my letters in the daily newspaper’s crossword puzzle started writhing like rain-drowned worms. I trudged upstairs to take a nap while the children played video games in the living room on a rare school holiday brought about by icy roads. I had every intention of rousing with a clear head once the caffeine kicked in—until a guttural rasping outside my bedroom door brought my dreamless sleep to an abrupt end. Out on the hardwood floor, I stepped over a thick swath of blood and held the railing overlooking the dining room as I walked astride jerking, halting, bloody brush strokes that brought me to the top of the staircase. Patchy, carmine spots darkened every third step, as if someone had dragged a dead animal downstairs from the children’s bedrooms. At the bottom, a snaking stream wound its way around the dining table’s overturned chairs and disappeared into the short hall that led to the front door.
There, in the foyer, on the thrift store rug my daughter had picked out for its rainbow pattern—her favorite color, no matter how many times anyone told her “rainbow” was not a color—she lay face up in a pool of her own blood. Her stomach had been rent open, her innards hung out, and her eyes were as glazed as the lenses of her pink-rimmed glasses. My son stood hunched over her body with a fat, green snake in his bloody hands, chewing and smacking his lips. He pulled on the rope-like viscera with enough strength in his scrawny arms to lift his sister’s back and shoulders off the floor. Whatever insanity had gripped the fabric of reality in that moment was beyond my comprehension.
The doorbell rang. My son stood upright with his sister’s innards clenched in his pale fingers. The front door rattled against its frame. A man’s muffled voice forced itself through the paneled wood and asked, with anxious perturbation, whether Mrs. Hayes was at home.
“This is Shannon,” I called to him.
“Deputy Andrews with the Queensport Police,” he said. “I need to talk to you about your husband.”
“Is he all right?”
“This conversation would be much easier if we didn’t have to do it through a door.”
I agreed, as did my son Jason, but his agreement came from somewhere deep within his throat and vomited itself onto the rainbow rug, where it lay in a steaming pool of black ichor. Something outside slumped against the door.
“Oh, shit,” said the deputy through the paneling. “How long have you known about this?”
“Known about what?” I said.
“Step away from the door, Mrs. Hayes.”
A violent thrust against the doorknob’s metal housing shook the foyer’s walls. Jason dragged his legs forward to meet the noise.
“My son is standing right here,” I said. “Please don’t hurt him!”
“I think that ship has already sailed, ma’am. Get away from the door. I’m not going to warn you again!”
The door flew open and struck Jason’s skull with a sickening crunch. A spray of black saliva darkened the cream-colored walls with viscous ink blots. I stepped forward with outstretched arms in a vain attempt to soften the blow my son had already taken.
“Get away from him!” screamed the deputy.
He took his revolver from the holster on his hip and pointed it right between my eyes. I fell to my knees, pressed my forehead against the floor, and held my hands over my hair as if by doing so I could shield myself from certain death. A loud, searing blast like a car’s tire bursting froze my trembling limbs in place. Two loud thuds against the hardwood floor brought my eyes to a mess of bloodied arms and legs. Deputy Andrews holstered his revolver as he stepped around lifeless bodies whose faces bore a painful resemblance to my babies.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?” he said. “Why do you keep squinting?”
His rough hands twisted the skin of my upper arms through my turtleneck sleeves as he hauled me up to my feet. I buttoned up my pink sweater to give my shaking fingers something to occupy them. The last thing I wanted was this gun-wielding monster thinking he could comfort me by taking my hands.
“I need to put my contacts in,” I said.
“Do people still wear contacts?”
“When they want to see things, they do. How could you do that to a child?”
“That thing was not a child. It wasn’t even human.”
“How can you say that?”
“We don’t have time for this. We’re leaving. Now.”
“But I can’t just…”
He fingered the handle of his gun.
“I… I can’t leave without my contacts,” I said. “Everything will be shapeless blobs fifteen minutes from now.”
“If we make it that long,” he said. “Even then, you’ll be easy prey if they spot you before you see them. Where are your contacts?”
“Upstairs in the bathroom. What do you mean by they?”
“I’ll explain it to you later if it doesn’t explain itself. Stay on my ass like a diaper.”
He stomped through the dining room in thick-soled, black shoes that left bloody footprints in a neat half-circle around the table.
“Goddamn,” he muttered at the foot of the stairs. “Mrs. Hayes, get over here right now so I don’t have to grab you by the collar of that nice turtleneck.”
My white socks skipped over the blood marks on the hardwood floor. I hugged the staircase railing—not his waist—as I followed him up to the second floor landing. Between the flashlight on his belt loop and his leather-sheathed handcuffs, a radio with a thick antenna whined and squealed as it vomited patchy static. The deputy reached back and twisted a knob. It went silent.
“Communications are a mess,” he said. “Phones are dead. Radio signals aren’t getting through. Which way to the bathroom?”
“Left,” I said.
“That’s where our blood trail leads.” He unclasped his hip holster and drew his revolver. “You stay here while I clear the rooms.”
He made his way down the hall, pointing his gun into each room before poking his head inside and shutting the door. The bathroom light brightened his face in the mirror as he fished in the medicine cabinet for my contacts. An impatient grunt sent me scurrying along the railing to join him.
“That one,” I said. “The white case.”
I reached for it. He grabbed my wrist and shut off the light.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Mom?”
My daughter, Caroline, must have finished her video game and come up here wondering what was going on. I raced out into the hallway to meet her. Beside the banister stood a pale, bloodied, hollow-cheeked doll wearing her blonde hair in a ponytail. She clutched the blood-soaked rainbow rug from the foyer against her sternum with shaking fists. I knelt down and hugged her. That my baby’s b
reath smelled of motor oil and rotten eggs was nothing new to me. The kids didn’t brush their teeth nearly often enough.
“Mrs. Hayes,” said the deputy in a gravelly voice. “Step away from that thing.”
I hugged Caroline tighter.
“She’s my daughter,” I said, “not a thing. Leave us alone.”
“Shannon, she’ll bite your neck and turn you into one of them.”
“You already took my son. I won’t let you take both my children from me.”
“I’m not taking anything from you. They’re already gone.”
He grabbed my turtleneck’s collar. I held on to Caroline with all my might. He wedged himself between us and shoved me to the ground with the bloody bottom of his boot. No sooner had he turned to my daughter than he sank to his knees, screaming as though the pits of hell were in his belly. The deputy showed me with bloodied fingers where Caroline’s teeth had taken a chunk of flesh from his neck. He rounded on her with his revolver and shot her in the head. Not once, but twice. Twice, he shot my baby and ripped my heart from my breast.
Caroline struck the floor. The deputy slumped against the railing and slid down it. He held his gun’s handle out to me.
“I’m going to turn,” he said. “Shoot me in the head so I don’t become one of them. Take the keys from my front right pocket. Drive my cruiser to the station and tell them what happened. Not your car. The snipers there will shoot you dead if you show up in anything other than a black and white.”
“Can’t we call them?” I said.
“If we had a phone worth a damn or a radio that worked this far out,” he said. “You understand what you need to do, Shannon?”
He slid his gun across the hardwood floor to my bent knees in their khaki pants wet with tears. I had no use for it. I slid it back to him where he sat with his legs stuck straight out in front of him like a schoolboy playing hooky by fishing on a riverbank.
“I understand,” he said. “You must hate me for what I did. But thanks for not throwing my gun away.”
I threw up in his lap.
With the deputy’s keys in hand, I lifted my legs over the railing, slid down the lacquered wooden bars, and dropped down onto the dining room floor. My ankles stung like nettles, but I forced myself to run bow-legged into the foyer. I did my best to ignore the blood-stained, headless mannequin lying on the floor as I tied my shoelaces. The gunshot from the second floor sent me flying out of the house without a care for whether I might slip and crack open my head on the icy driveway. I threw myself into the still-warm driver’s seat of a car that looked more like an airplane cockpit, with all its plastic devices and knobs and its laptop on a swivel tray over a passenger’s seat that passengers would never use.
I fumbled through keys until I found one that fit the ignition. The motor hummed to life. Outside, the house’s half-open front door closed itself and, with a sound like a jet engine backfiring, collapsed forward onto the front steps. The deputy was there, running with unearthly speed right toward me. I set the car in reverse and hit the gas, only to go flying backwards through the street and up over the curb of the mailbox opposite ours. I shifted into drive right as the deputy slammed his bloody hands against the hood of the cruiser. His eyes were glass; his face was ashen gray; the gaps between his teeth flooded with black ichor that spilled from his mouth down onto the car and burned a hole through the metal. I stomped down on the gas pedal, willing the spinning wheels to find traction on this unseasonable black ice. With a violent lurch, the car shot forward, sending talcum powder and inflated nylon rushing up into my face. The windshield spider-webbed and showered the dashboard with shattered, crystalline fragments. The deputy fell brain-first into the passenger’s seat and stayed there, unmoving, while my air bag deflated.
I drove downtown all the way from the city limits at ten miles an hour so we wouldn’t slide off the icy road into a ditch. I couldn’t think of a good way to explain to the deputies at the station why their fellow officer was sitting upside down in the passenger’s seat of his own vehicle with his feet sticking out of the windshield. When I rolled up to the police station’s towering coils of barbed wire and sandbags stacked around mounted machine guns, it became clear to me that explanations were the least of anyone’s worries.
2
Police Station
A young, wiry policewoman in a dark blue uniform pointed an oversized rifle at the space where the police cruiser’s windshield would have been if Deputy Andrews hadn’t removed it with his head. She jumped aside as the car’s front bumper struck a concrete barrier and sent my passenger’s upturned legs sliding across the dashboard. His bloodied shoes came to rest against the windshield’s frame just as a gun barrel announced itself against the driver’s side window. I set the car in park and held down the power window button with two jittery fingers.
“What the fuck did you do to him?” said the policewoman. Her rasping voice had the timbre of a cello.
“He shot my… he shot two children in my house,” I said.
“You’re lying.”
Icy fear flooded my veins as I stared at the steering wheel. I didn’t want to provoke her wrath with an unwanted glance.
“One of them sank her—sank its teeth into his neck,” I said. “He told me he was going to turn. I don’t know what that means.”
“Yeah, I see that nasty bite mark. Turning means you’re infected and you start losing your mind. You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, either.”
She shoved the end of her rifle against my temple. I closed my eyes to clear my blurring vision.
“So, which one of those is Andy?” she said. “Alive or dead?”
“He shot himself so I didn’t have to,” I said. “He didn’t stay dead.”
“Suicide doesn’t sound like Andy. But you don’t look like a killer to me, which makes me wonder why he’s in the car like that. Why are you in his car, for that matter?”
“He told me to drive here in his cruiser so you wouldn’t shoot me when I came here to tell you what happened to him. As I was backing out of my driveway, he blew my front door down and ran out of the house after me. He looked like he wasn’t alive anymore.”
“You gotta get their brains good or they keep coming at you. We learned that the hard way. You got any bites?”
“No.”
“Leave the car here. We’ll do a search outside where I can see you. Did you hear me? Show me your eyes.”
The blurry black shape in the center of my foggy vision must have been her rifle. I leaned away from it. She lifted my chin with the barrel of her gun.
“If you’re not going to cooperate, I can leave you out here the same way you left Andy,” she said. “Open the door and step out.”
Her rifle pressed against my throat as I reached for the door’s handle. I stepped out into slush mixed with salt, dirt, and blood. The policewoman stood three steps away from me with her gun barrel aimed between my eyes.
“Take off your clothes,” she said.
“What? Why? It’s freezing out here. Can’t we at least go inside?”
“After you show me you have no bites. We took a chance last night. Let a guy hiding teeth marks on his groin sleep inside the station. He woke up in the middle of the night and bit one of our deputies. They’re both dead now. So unless you want to join them, you start undressing.”
Behind her, the station’s metal-barred window shuddered. A middle-aged woman in a dark brown uniform with a golden star on her left shirt pocket motioned to us. The policewoman saluted her and slung her rifle strap over her shoulder.
“Sheriff wants you in there,” she said. “Follow me. Don’t mind the guns. We all have ’em.”
As we walked, I focused my watering eyes on the policewoman’s straight, black hair swept back into a tight bun and held in place with a white scrunchie. On the periphery, fires burned in barrel drums. The armed men and women who stood around them for warmth wore all manner of clothing: checkered flannel shirts, hunting jackets, snowmobil
ing outfits. Were their children dead, too?
The policewoman walked me past a shaky, metal, roof-bound stairway into a gray-bricked building. Wood-paneled walls, green Berber carpet, and pencil-holed ceiling tiles were the domain of a sturdy woman with graying hair in a mud-brown uniform. She stood behind a desk that bore an ancient computer and upright, plastic filing stands thick with documents.
“Sheriff Graham,” she said as she stepped around the desk. “No handshakes. Stand still.”
The sheriff stretched the collar of my turtleneck, slid my sweater sleeves up to my elbows, and lifted my khaki pants to my shins.
“Nothing in the usual places. What’s your name?”
“Shannon Hayes.”
“Well, Ms. Hayes, normally I’d say you made one hell of a scene, but as of yesterday morning, that sort of thing is par for the course. I don’t think I’ve slept more than three hours in the past forty-eight. What about you, Williams?”
“I haven’t slept at all, ma’am.”
“She’s our best marksman. The fact that you actually met her means she didn’t think you were a threat, appearances notwithstanding. Go get some rest, Linda. I’m sure those walking corpses will wake you up when it’s time to put them down.”
“Thank you, Sheriff.”
“Helen. We make it through this, you can go back to calling me Sheriff Graham. I’m not in charge of a damn thing at the moment.”
“Sorry about the rough treatment, Ms. Hayes,” said Deputy Williams. “Things have been way off since yesterday. Hard to keep your head on straight when everything out there is trying to kill you. Good night.”
She walked over to the payphone near the entrance door, leaned her rifle against the wall, and lay down on the carpet with a stack of phone books as her pillow.
“She has a husband and two kids,” said Sheriff Graham. “Unlike most people, they were rightfully suspicious and got the hell out of the city before this unearthly fog rolled in. Everyone else thinks the icy roads are the reason school got canceled. All the kiddos ran around telling each other how ‘wicked cool’ that fog was until it started eating people like the Bermuda Triangle. And now my youngest deputy has his head in a cruiser seat instead of up his ass. You ever watch a television show called Mork and Mindy?”
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