by David Beers
Just the man on the ground.
The lights went out. Whatever else you’re thinking, you know they went out at the same time that crazy man went lax. And they came on when he started talking again.
Brett let his hands drop and opened his eyes.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know yet,” Ease said.
Brett laughed, unable to do anything else. He actually was forced to bend over, putting his hands on his knees as the laughter rolled from his mouth. “Of course you don’t. Of course you don’t have any idea where to go. Why would you?”
The laughter slowed and then died, leaving an odd and eery silence between the two of them. Still bent over, Brett stared at the floor.
“Alright,” he said, shaking his head.
He went to the crazy man and helped him stand, though he didn’t remove the cuffs. The two went to the car below.
Lichen placed Abel in the backseat. He’d been in a car like this before, a long, long time ago. It’d been a little bit earlier in the morning, though not by much. The sun had just been coming up when the police arrived at his one-story house in South Carolina, his father and sister dead, his mother too insane to understand what was happening. The only difference between that car and this one was the outside. The car in South Carolina had the word police scrawled across it in large, capital letters. This one was black.
The insides of both cars were similar, though. The car in South Carolina had used a metal barrier to separate him from the police in the front. This car used plastic.
Fifteen years later, and you’re in the exact same place, Abel thought as the door closed.
Lichen walked around to the driver’s side. He got in and looked in his rearview mirror. “Don’t move from that spot. I don’t care what else happens. You stay right there.”
Abel nodded. He no longer cared what the FBI Agent had to say.
The dead man wearing the suit sat in the passenger’s seat, sitting right in front of Abel. He was staring forward, not bothering to look at either of the other passengers.
“Where do I go?” Lichen said, still watching in the rearview.
“Tell him to get on the highway heading west,” the dead man said.
Abel swallowed. His eyes were on Lichen’s but he knew how insane what he said next would sound, and also that the crazier Lichen thought he was, the higher Emi’s chance of dying.
That was Abel’s life. The more truth he told, the more he was doubted.
“I’m going to have to say some things, and you’re not going to understand them. You’re probably not going to like them, because they’re going to sound crazy. You have to let me do it, though, okay?”
Lichen simply stared at him; Abel didn’t know if that was permission or not, so he simply looked toward the passenger seat.
“Do you know which highway?”
“Do I look like I am from here, young man?” the dead man asked.
“Oh, this is going to be real pleasant,” Abel said, unable to hold his sarcasm back. His eyes flashed to the rearview. “We have to head west. That’s all I know right now.”
“Who ….” Lichen paused, as if trying to make sure his words were correct. “Who do you think you’re talking to? There’s no one up here.”
The suited man didn’t move, giving no clue if he even knew he was being referenced.
“You sure you want to know?”
“I’m not starting the car until I do.”
“There’s a dead person sitting next to you,” Abel said. “He won’t hurt you though. You’re fine.”
The agent stared at him for a second, pursed his lips together and nodded, as if to say, this is my life.
He started the car and pulled out from the deck.
Chapter Eighteen
Eric Nickson’s dick had gotten him into trouble before. It was, without a doubt, not to be trusted on any occasion, but especially when alcohol was involved. Eric’s dick was simply a selfish creature that cared not about his greater wellbeing, but only its immediate pleasure.
Eric knew this.
He knew it far, far too well.
And yet, even knowing such a thing, Eric had left his house that night. “Going out with the guys,” he’d told his wife. And that was the truth. He was going out with the guys. The only problem was, the ‘guys’ were a bunch of damned savages that only chased pussy and didn’t care in the slightest what it took to get said pussy. Save, you know, drugging or forcing themselves on women. They didn’t do that—even Eric’s dick wouldn’t have let him participate in that bullshit.
Yet, most other methods of getting pussy? Fair game.
So going out with the guys, despite what his wife might think, meant his dick was about to get him in a lot of trouble.
Had Eric known what kind of trouble it would get him in this evening, he would have stayed in, without any doubt. He would have told his dick that things weren’t looking well tonight, and everyone needed to simply take a breather. There would be other nights.
He wouldn’t have even needed to mention that it wasn’t the smartest idea to cheat on his wife with another woman from this shit town. No, his dick would have understood immediately, if Eric had been able to tell it what was to come.
Eric didn’t know, though, and so he kissed his wife goodbye for the last time. She wasn’t exactly happy with him leaving, but she wasn’t going to start a fight about it. She gave him his kiss, maybe having suspicions of infidelity, but none of death.
Eric had gone to Brad’s, and they quickly commenced drinking. They had a couple of hours before it would be time to head to the bar—Fred’s, the only damn watering hole in this town. It got busy on Saturday nights and with any luck they could pull some tail. If so, Eric knew that he’d have to call his wife at some point, explaining that he was going to stay at Brad’s and he’d be home the next morning.
He’d done it all before.
It wasn’t new.
Eric wasn’t a bad guy … it’s just when his dick got involved, it could really, really get him in trouble.
And tonight, it apparently had.
As he woke up lying on a concrete floor in some giant, decrepit warehouse, Eric remembered nothing of the past few hours. He didn’t remember meeting the heavyset woman that he decided he was going home with. He didn’t remember telling Brad that he was leaving, and that if his wife called, Brad wasn’t to answer. He didn’t remember stumbling into the parking lot and then making out with the heavyset woman either.
He didn’t remember the dark figure suddenly standing in front of the two of them, nor that dark figure reaching forward and grabbing his head. Eric certainly didn’t remember his head banging against the heavyset woman’s.
All Eric Nickson knew was that his skull felt like a nuclear bomb had been detonated inside it, and that he was being dragged across something very hard, and very rough.
“Hey,” he said, though it sounded more like hehhhh. “What’s going on?”
Whuhhhth’s goinnn ohh?
He looked in front of him and saw someone dragging him by his ankle, and that’s when real panic set in. Someone was dragging him.
“HEY!” he tried to shout, his voice strengthening some, though the effort caused new explosions to rip through his head.
The person dragging him turned around … and had Eric thought he was feeling panic moments ago? Had he thought he was in the grips of fear?
Eric had known nothing of the subjects, and he realized that as he looked on the face in front of him. It was stained and still dripping, and even in his stupor, Eric had no problem understanding what was on the man. Blood. Dark red blood that looked almost black in the gloom around him. The blood had dripped down to the man’s shirt, soaking the whole of it. Eric’s eyes finally found the man’s, and he froze. His mind as well his hands trying weakly to stop from being pulled. It all simply froze.
Because the man’s eyes were black. Not the dark red of the blood across his face, but black lik
e night, like a seal’s flesh fifty feet beneath the ocean, like the Devil’s very soul.
The man blinked and when his eyes opened again, black liquid flowed over them.
Eric started screaming. Loud, wrenching things that filled the entire warehouse. His voice sang high, all the way to the top of the building.
“NO NO NO NO NO!” he shrieked with hardly a pause between words. He turned over on his stomach, trying to pull himself away with his hands.
The creature jerked his leg forward, and Eric felt something in his hip dislodge as he was flipped onto his back again. Scorching fire ignited in his pelvis, sending his screams higher and louder.
“Shhhh,” the man said, his voice inhuman.
Eric’s palms scraped along the concrete, shredding his skin as he did everything he could to stop the forward movement. His left foot kicked repeatedly, trying to hurt the person dragging him.
The man stopped at that, turning briefly to look at his left arm. Eric saw the man’s hand then, a massive bloated thing, the color almost as black as the man’s eyes. Eric’s screams ceased, but only for a moment.
He watched—seeing it almost in slow motion—as the man twisted Eric’s right leg.
Something snapped in his knee, an audible pop, and then his entire leg was ablaze. Eric’s screams began afresh.
The man started pulling again, and through squinted eyes, Eric’s horror grew.
Hanging—hanging—from a hook, was the woman he’d left the bar with. He didn’t know her name anymore, something lost forever from Eric’s mind.
A curved metal spear stuck out from just beneath her breasts.
Impaled! his mind frantically thought. Impaled! Impaled!
A word he’d never used before, but one his mind repeated continually as his shrieks echoed off the walls.
The man stopped once beneath her body and Eric saw the blood dripping down, spattering on the concrete below. Slow drips, like a slaughtered beast.
“NO NO! PLEASE NO!” he shouted.
The man wasn’t moving, Eric’s struggles useless against his grip. Eric felt no pain in those few moments, his mind brutally focused in its single desire to escape. His body wouldn’t help, though. It simply couldn’t create enough strength or power to free him from the iron grip on his calf.
The bloodied man stared up at the hanging body—at the woman Eric had kissed hours before. He reached up and grabbed her calf the same as he held onto Eric’s … and then he pulled down.
“NO! NO!” Eric shouted uselessly, the verbal equivalent to his kick at the man’s arms. He had to shout though; his brain knew nothing else to do, because what it saw shouldn’t be possible. It shouldn’t exist. It was an abomination to everything Eric understood.
The man pulled, and without a grunt or even strain on his face, the metal hook ripped upward through the woman’s body. Ripping through meat, organs, and bone, the woman moved closer to the ground. The sounds of bones snapping echoed out like firecrackers as the metal broke through her ribs.
Pop, pop, pop, pop.
The body paused for a second, the hook catching on the chest plate. The man’s hand stopped its downward momentum. He took a stronger grip and then yanked. The chest plate both cracked and bulged upward, an odd shape shoving through the woman’s breasts. Her body continued its downward drag, bones snapping as the chest plate ripped through her flesh.
The hook was making its way up the left side of her body, through where her heart should be and toward her collarbone.
Anther five seconds or so, and then the collarbone broke, the hook fully freeing itself. Her body collapsed to the floor, the man still holding onto her leg. Eric’s screams died away as he stared at the woman he’d been trying to lay hours before. Coagulating blood slowly spread out from the ragged tear that stretched from her belly button to the side of her neck. Eric couldn’t make out any of her organs, intestines mixing with a bloody soup of ripped body parts.
The man looked back to Eric and his face was still. He held both people in his hands, and Eric’s mind finally snapped back awake, losing focus on the dead woman in front of him.
“NO! NO! NO! NO!”
He turned, pain in his leg dulled behind the fury of his mind’s need to escape. He scraped his hands across the concrete, a fingernail ripping off and blood spurting out on the white ground.
The man yanked forward and Eric felt his leg pop out of his hip joint, his skin stretching nearly to the point of breaking as he flew toward the bloody-faced man.
He screamed but it did no good. The man reached down and grabbed him by the hair then hoisted him on the dead body. Eric landed with a splat, blood flying from the torn torso and coating his skin and clothes. He tried to push himself up, his left hand slipping off her bloody, wrecked chest. His face landed in the shredded hole, blood covering him.
He lifted up and, and the viscous liquid now covering his face dripped off of him to the body below.
“AHHHHHH!” Eric screamed, forgetting everything now. Forgetting his need to escape, the dead person beneath him, nearly who he was at all. The lukewarm liquid dripping from his face replaced all thoughts.
Until the two hands came down from behind him. One gripped the ass of his jeans, and the other his hair.
They twisted Eric Nickson, turning him from lying on top of the dead woman like a lover, until his head was next to hers, but his feet facing the opposite direction of her feet. Still screaming, he stared through the red liquid dripping off his face into the gaping hole of the woman’s shoulder and chest. Shattered, jutting bone looked back at him, that and endless organs. The two hands held him there for only a second, and then they shoved him into it.
Jagged bone scraped across his face and warm, squishy meat smashed into eyes and mouth. Darkness surrounded him. He tried to scream but wet flesh met his tongue, muting it. He pressed his hands against the ground, trying to force himself up, but something hard slammed down on his left elbow and then his right; his forearms simply snapped in two. Trying to still scream, he inhaled blood, and just when Eric Nickson thought the terror could get no worse, he felt something wrap around the top of his head. He tried to push up, arms and legs broken, he used his neck to jerk back against whatever enveloped him inside this hellish flesh.
He felt something hard hit his back, and then Eric felt no more. He no longer struggled to get up, no longer felt his snapped arms nor his destroyed leg. Eric knew only darkness and the flesh he felt in his mouth. He couldn’t even move his tongue to push it out. He simply breathed in the blood, suffocating inside the human tomb created for him.
Emi looked down from her perch, her body still beneath her. She watched along with the dead people at this creature’s horror show. It still didn’t seem to notice them, moving through the warehouse as if they didn’t exist.
Emi’s terror had been absolute from the moment the woman was thrust onto the hook, blood pouring from her mouth as she died in near silence. That fear froze her mind the way an arctic winter will bury a fossil deep beneath layers and layers of ice. No hope of being found; no hope of escape.
She watched as the creature grabbed the man, him waking up as he was being dragged across the floor. She heard the screams, feeling no hope that they might alert someone to all of this. There was no hope here, only insanity.
The creature ripped the woman from the hook; Emi’s mind wasn’t even able to ask the question of why it didn’t use one of the more surgical instruments around her—why it used such a brutal method to rip the body open.
She watched as the creature shoved the man inside the open chest cavity, understanding nothing. The man tried to push himself up, but the creature simply stepped down on his arms, cracking both in two. The screams were muffled but Emi hardly noticed.
The creature bent over the man and grabbed a handful of the woman’s torn flesh and then stretched it across the back of the man’s head. For a second, it looked like she was pregnant as the broken man tried to push up underneath the skin, stretching
its bloody grotesqueness toward the ceiling.
The creature dropped a foot on the man’s back, breaking it, and he went limp—his head still inside the body.
Not dead, though. Only paralyzed.
The creature studied its creation for a second, the skin pulled tight over the head. It finally let go and looked up at Emi—or at least in her direction.
Her mind felt no thaw from the fear, only that deep, deep freeze.
The creature turned and walked deeper into the warehouse. She heard things opening, objects tumbling. Emi didn’t understand how much time passed. Time was a foreign concept, something alien and unfamiliar. Unable to move, she simply stared down at the two bodies, both their legs sprawled in opposite directions, one laying inside the other. She looked carefully and saw the man’s body slowly rising up and down, his lungs still working … but nothing else.
The creature’s footfalls grew louder as he returned from the other side of the building. It was carrying something in its hand, and as it grew closer, she saw that it looked like a nail gun.
It walked to the two bodies, one dead, one broken but most likely dying, and knelt down. Emi could see the man’s head still lying in the mush. The creature grabbed the skin hanging loosely over the broken bone and pulled, stretching it again across the man’s head. He stretched it until it reached the other side of the woman’s torn flesh.
Pop.
He fired the nail gun. It shot straight through the skin and bone, securing the flesh.
The creature moved the nail gun down a few inches and … Pop. He did it again and again. Pop, pop, pop all the way down.
Before, when the entity had worked with Demsworth, there had been many utensils available to it. KNIVES. HAMMERS. NAILS. Even SCALPELS. All kinds of different tools that Demsworth could come up with. The entity now realized, vaguely, that Demsworth’s presence had been useful in the fact that it allowed for greater long term planning. Demsworth had allowed the entity to create really beautiful Altars.
