The Dystopiaville Omnibus: A Dystopian Sci-Fi Horror Collection

by Mark Gillespie

  Whatever.

  It was several minutes before he got back to his feet. Jack moved sluggishly, like someone packing the weight of the world on their shoulders.

  With a sigh, he glanced back towards Alexandra Falls.

  “What now?” he said.

  His first thought was to go back home. But Jack quickly dismissed the idea. That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. He couldn’t stand the thought of being in the house while his waxwork parents were stuck together like that in a sex position. And besides what was he going to do there? Sit around and wait for the doorbell to ring again?

  He turned back to the invisible wall.

  He couldn’t leave town, that much was obvious. So that left the rest of Alexandra Falls for him to explore – whoopee fucking doo! Was this his world from now on? Was he destined to live alone in the one place he was so desperate to leave?

  Jack felt a few specks of rain land on his head. He looked up to the sky and there were no clouds.

  “Of course,” he said, forcing out a twisted laugh. He didn’t bother trying to work it out – rain from a cloudless sky. Why not? Rain that was in so much of a hurry to get there that it couldn’t even wait for the clouds to form. Nothing made sense in Alexandra Falls – that was the one constant thing that Jack could rely on. He was trapped in Weirdtown. He was living in an asylum and it was best coming to terms with that fact rather than trying to decipher all the little messages scrawled on the walls of the cell.

  The rain fell harder. It was picking up fast and Jack was forced towards the car.

  He climbed in and started the engine. Then he turned the Civic around and drove back towards Alexandra Falls.

  “I’m home,” he said, his eyes glaring at the surroundings with contempt. “Home sweet home.”

  He thought of Hudson’s restaurant and laughed.

  “Well at least the cakes are good around here,” he said. “Right? Look on the bright side and all that – isn’t that what they say? Yeah, good cakes. Guess I’ll be eating them alone for the rest of my life.”

  Jack closed his eyes and felt the car gradually pick up speed. A thought came to him. Why not crash and be done with it? Keep your eyes closed. Keep your foot down. Suicide. Sure, a high-speed crash hadn’t worked back at the invisible wall but what if he tried again? Harder and faster, would it wipe him out next time? With any luck it would. Or what if he jumped off a roof? Poison? There had to be some way out of this damn town.

  He opened his eyes.

  “Oh shit!”

  Jack hit the brakes and the car screeched to a halt.

  The shooter was standing in the middle of the road.

  “You,” Jack said, staring through the windshield. He wasn’t frightened now – he was angry.

  The shooter wasn’t moving – it had frozen in mid-stride, caught out as it relentlessly pursued Jack out of town. Its left foot hung forward off the ground and it reminded Jack of a soccer player trying to kick a ball in midair. The shooter’s body leaned forward slightly, almost at the tipping point. Any further and it would fall flat on its masked face.

  Jack rolled the car forward, fully prepared to hit the gas if the robot killer did so much as twitch.

  But the shooter didn’t move.

  Jack stopped the car and got out. He stayed close to the Civic, glaring at the gunman with all the contempt he could muster. Rainwater ran down every inch of Jack’s skin but he wasn’t concerned about it. He’d rather get soaked than shot. Still, he couldn’t shake the thought that it was a trick – that the shooter was deliberately luring him in.

  There was one way to find out.

  Jack walked towards the shooter. What did he have left to lose anyway? Maybe this was his way out – to die at the hands of the killer robot.

  He gasped for breath in the heavy rain. As he closed the distance between them, Jack waved his hands in front of the masked figure.

  “Do it,” he said. “I’m right here.”

  The shooter didn’t move. It stood in silence, water dripping down its body onto the soaking street.

  “I’m right here,” Jack said again. “You can shoot me whenever you want.”

  He reached an arm out and touched the shooter’s hand – the one with the finger on the trigger of the AR-15. Jack winced. It was that same stiff, rubbery sensation that he’d felt in all the other waxworks.

  The shooter was one of them now.

  “So long asshole,” Jack said.

  Without giving it a second thought, he reached over and pulled the wet mask off the shooter’s face.

  “Oh shit.”

  Jack staggered backwards, a hand clamped over his mouth. The mask slipped out of his fingers and fell onto the flooded street. For a moment, Jack forgot all about the furious rain. He forgot about everything.

  He knew the face behind the shooter’s mask.

  “Vince Kutter,” Jack said. “Is that really you?”

  The blond waxwork with the ivory skin didn’t answer. It was a ghostly mannequin with narrow blue eyes that stared into empty space.

  Jack had first noticed Kutter years ago, long before they began attending school together. Kutter was a strange looking kid, almost albino but not quite, who was always lurking around town with the other local creeps getting up to no good. Even as little boys, Jack and Vince Kutter had taken an instant dislike to one another. They were sworn enemies – two opposite personalities. Jack was gregarious and polite to a fault, the handsome jock hero that everyone loved. Kutter loathed most people – especially authority figures. He was frail and sickly, and he possessed a surly, old-beyond-his-years demeanor that came from living with abusive parents who didn’t give a shit about their kid and who if the rumors were true, regularly used him as a punching bag.

  Jack stood in the rain, staring into Kutter’s icy blue eyes. They were glassy orbs gazing into the void. An endless stream of water ran down his face and it looked like the waxwork was crying.

  “Kutter,” Jack said. “Can you hear me?”

  He waved his hands in Kutter’s face, looking for some kind of reaction. He clicked his fingers, trying to make the boy blink.

  “Can you hear me Kutter?”

  Jack had to shout to hear himself over the rain.

  “Kutter? Damn it, you can’t have been frozen for long. Are you still in there? Show me something for God’s sake. What are you doing running around town with a gun?”

  Jack moved closer. He was a few inches from the other boy’s face when he jolted backwards all of a sudden. It felt like he’d been struck by lightning.

  “What the hell?”

  He backed away, not taking his eyes off the waxwork. Jack’s hands were shaking. There was something terribly wrong about this but he couldn’t articulate it. It was a feeling trapped in the back of his mind, a deep rumbling of discomfort triggered by something he’d seen in Kutter’s eyes.

  By now, Jack’s feet were under several inches of water. He groaned and was about to go back to the car when he heard a noise like thunder. Something was moving. It felt like Main Street was trembling, like a major earthquake was about to strike the broken town.

  There was a loud crashing noise.

  Jack clamped his hands over his ears. His eyes bulged as a high-pitched shattering noise, like a mountain of glass exploding, threw him off balance.

  He stumbled and fell backwards.

  “For God’s sake!” he yelled. “Somebody help me.”

  Chapter 15

  Jack sat on the wet road, too stunned to move.

  He looked down Main Street, his mouth hanging open in shock.

  An avalanche of water had burst through every window of every building that Jack could see. It crashed through the glass of all the upper and lower floor windows, and down it came, an army of miniature Niagara Falls gushing onto the already flooded street. All those quirky and charming buildings – they all spewed water and it was water that seemingly came from nowhere.

  The endless barrage of rain still
fell from the sky. The gutters around Main Street swelled and overflowed.

  Jack got back to his feet and stumbled forward in a daze. He wiped the rain off his face, blinking furiously and gasping for breath.

  He’d never seen anything like it. It was a biblical scale flood that had landed in small town America.

  He could feel the water level rising faster, churning its way up towards his knees. He turned around to look at the Civic and groaned. There was no going back to the car now. If the flood kept up like this, it wouldn’t be long before it was swept away.

  Jack hurried down the street, splashing through the tepid water. Dozens of waxworks floated back and forth like mannequins tossed into the river. Their blank eyes gazed up towards the sky. Most of them were smiling, still trapped in a moment from the past.

  He had to do something but it was too hard to think. The noise of the water, both from the sky and pouring out of the buildings, was like an endless drum in Jack’s head. It felt like it would never stop.

  “What the FUCK do you want from me?” he cried out. He spun around as if expecting to see someone else on the street with him. “What am I supposed to do here? Drown? Is that what you want me to do?”

  Jack stumbled forward. He lost his balance, tripped and fell face first into the water. He surfaced again quickly, his lungs clawing for breath. Jack pushed himself back to his feet and continued to wade down the street, looking for somewhere to go.

  He saw the Alexandra Falls Tavern.

  The tavern had a turret attached to one side of the roof, shaped like a giant wizard’s hat. Even amongst the striking architecture of Alexandra Falls, the building stood out. The tourists loved it. Jack loved it too and he’d love it even more if it offered him shelter from the storm.

  Jack ran over to the door. It was locked. Fortunately there were two doors at the front of the tavern – the main entrance and also a second one that was mostly used for deliveries. Jack tried the staff door and his body shuddered with relief as it fell open.

  He hurried into the main bar, flooded with about two feet of water. Jack looked around, shaking his head in disbelief. How was this happening? There was no source for the water – the tavern was literally filling up as if by magic. Despite everything that had already happened, Jack’s eyes searched for something logical. There was nothing inside the building to suggest where the flood was coming from. The water started at the windows, as if it was being fed through an invisible pump hidden underneath the town.

  Jack turned away. He was wasting time looking for answers. There had to be somewhere he could go, somewhere dry.

  He rushed out of the main bar, then hurried upstairs to the second floor balcony. There was a seating area outside, which on a normal day offered a pleasant view of Main Street and beyond that, the lush green scenery surrounding the outskirts of town. There were no windows on the second floor, just the sliding doors at the balcony entrance. Fortunately for Jack, there was no water pouring out of this level and it allowed him a moment’s respite from the flood.

  He tucked himself under a yellow awning. As he caught his breath, water crashed down from the third floor windows above his head.

  Jack was soaked and exhausted to the core. The water on Main Street was up to about four feet and rising faster all the time. A parade of waxworks floated back and forth like driftwood. As Jack gazed down at them, he imagined this was similar to standing on the deck of a rescue boat, looking into the ocean in the aftermath of a shipwreck.

  He glanced up at the awning, listening to the waterfall coming from the third floor. It crashed onto the yellow fabric with a rhythmic thud, spilling over the edge and plummeting down onto the street.

  Would it ever end?

  Jack inhaled deeply. There was no musky scent of fresh rain in the air. The metallic odor he’d picked up on earlier was gone too. In fact, the town smelled of nothing – it was was empty and colorless.

  He turned back to the sliding doors and stepped into the bar area. With a sigh, Jack glanced towards the ceiling that was dripping water.

  There was only one place left to go.

  He hurried down the second floor hallway, checking the doors until he found one with ‘No Access’ printed on the front. The door was locked. Jack grunted angrily and kicked the door as hard as he could. There was a loud thud but it didn’t budge. Eventually, after a few more attempts, the door burst open to reveal a short set of stairs leading towards the roof.

  Jack didn’t hang around. He climbed the stairs as quickly as he could, walking towards a pivot window at the top. He peered through the glass and then pulled the handle down. The window tilted open a few inches and a jet of cold water sprayed in Jack’s face. He wiped it away and then extended the window further, creating enough room for his body to squeeze through the gap.

  Jack pushed himself forwards, slithering his bulk through the gap like a giant snake and emerging onto the roof. As he set his feet down on the slippery concrete tiles, he kept one hand on the window ledge for support.

  “You can do this,” he said. “Just don’t fall.”

  Slowly, he let go of the ledge and straightened up. Jack held his arms out at the sides like a tightrope walker. With great care, he sidestepped towards the turret on the opposite end of the roof. Jack didn’t look down but although his eyes couldn’t see the street filling up below, his ears couldn’t escape the deep churning noise that sounded like a giant bathtub overflowing.

  It took him about a minute to cross the roof. Once he’d covered the distance, Jack leaned his body up against the base of the turret.

  He relaxed, just a little.

  Jack looked across the street. There was a bookshop over there – it was a nice little place with a coffee shop inside, run by a sweet old lady whose name he’d never taken the time to find out. Sometimes Jack liked to spend hours browsing the bookshelves on his way home from school.

  The building that housed the bookshop was about two thirds underwater.

  He closed his eyes. This was as far as he could go and it wasn’t going to be enough. As Jack stood there, dripping wet and clinging to the turret, he felt the town shudder under the weight of the flood.

  His head flopped forward, like a baby that had fallen asleep in the car.

  “Just do it,” he mumbled. “Finish it.”

  He’d been so close to getting out. All he had to do was wrap up high school and then hit the road – that was the plan. College. Growing up. Traveling the world. Destiny. But the town was like a jealous lover that wouldn’t let go. So let it take him – he’d keep his eyes closed until the end. He wouldn’t watch the water inching closer towards him. There were no last words either – nothing elegant sprang to mind.

  Jack closed his eyes and waited for the end.

  “C’mon,” he said.

  He heard something over the sound of the rain. A buzzing noise. It was a faint electrical hum sizzling in the background, completely at odds with the wet noises of the flood.

  Jack opened his eyes, but he already knew what was there. Wiping the water off his face, he saw the Snowman to his right. It was floating just a few feet away – a large bubble of TV light with a human shape inside. The long octopus arms reached for Jack.

  “For God’s sake!” Jack yelled. “Leave me alone. Please!”

  “Jack,” the Snowman said. The voice cut effortlessly through the sound of the heavy rain. It was almost as if the water had muted itself to allow the Snowman to be heard.

  Jack shook his head and closed his eyes again. “You’re not here,” he said. “I don’t have to talk to you.”

  There was a long silence.

  But when Jack opened his eyes the Snowman was still there.

  “Jack.”

  The Snowman opened his arms wide, inviting Jack towards the web of black and white light.

  “Who are you?” Jack said.

  “I’m the exit door,” the Snowman said. “I’m your way out of Alexandra Falls. And that’s what you want isn’t it
Jack? You want to get out and see the rest of the world in all its glory. Well you can. You don’t have to die here today, not if you don’t want to. If you step willingly into the light then everything – all of this, the confusion, the pain, the loneliness – it’ll go away in a second. Faster than a second. Faster than the blink of an eye. Not only that, everything will be explained – the truth about what happened here today. What do you say? Are you ready to trust me yet Jack?”

  “Explain now,” Jack said. “I think I’ve earned it, don’t you?”

  There was a pause. The buzzing noise that surrounded the Snowman got louder.

  “We only have your best interests at heart Jack.”

  “We?” Jack said, wiping water off his face. “Who’s we?”

  There was a loud crashing noise from below. Jack looked over the edge of the roof and saw that the floodwater had reached the second floor balcony. Now it was spilling angrily across the seating area, pushing back tables and chairs in the spot where Jack had stood just minutes earlier.

  “We don’t have much time Jack,” the Snowman said.

  Jack couldn’t argue with that.

  “How about we make a deal?” he said, turning to the Snowman. “Tell me the truth now and I’ll walk into the light, I swear.”

  Jack took his hands off the turret. With his arms out at the sides, he walked along the slippery roof and approached the Snowman. His heart was racing. He was only one wrong step away from falling off the edge and plummeting into the rising water.

  He stopped in front of the Snowman, shielding his eyes from the light. The human shape pressed its hands against the TV snow, as if it wanted to get closer to Jack.

  “There’s one thing I know for sure,” Jack said. “Even though I’m standing in front of you like this, you can’t touch me. Right? You need me to come to you willingly.”

  “That’s right,” the Snowman said. “I need you to trust me Jack.”