HELP! WANTED: Tales of On-the-Job Terror

by Edited by Peter Giglio

  The shadow suddenly swallowed the light under the door at the end of the hall. Someone was just on the other side. And about to come through.

  Sydney ran to the next available door, a fire exit from one of the empty suites. Without a handle to grab and pull, she wedged her fingers into the door’s half-inch seam and tried to pry it open in order to escape. Clawing at the metal, her fingertips turned white. Her nails started to bend.

  Then she lost her grip. Her taut muscles snapped her arms back to her body. Whimpering, Sydney glanced toward her office.

  Its door started to slowly open, spilling light into the hall.

  As Sydney clawed at the seam again, a shadow fell over her. A bald man, silhouetted by the bright office lights, stood at the end of the hallway. The only discernible feature of his shadowy face was his piercing blue eyes that seemed to glow in their sockets.

  Dr. Bowden.

  Sydney screamed and wedged her fingers deeper into the door seam, pulling so hard her nails started to split and peel back.

  The door suddenly released, swinging open with such velocity, it knocked Sydney into the wall behind her. She bounced off and crashed to the hard linoleum floor. With her adrenaline racing into overdrive, she scrambled to her feet and glanced at the man standing in the distance at the end of the hallway.

  The lights went off, encasing her in a pitch black void. A heartbeat later, she felt a cold breath in her ear.

  “The Doctor is in,” the man whispered.

  Sydney screeched as icy hands clamped over her shoulders, pushing her forward into the abandoned suite. She blindly swung the letter opener through the air, hoping to stab her attacker, but only impaled it into the plaster wall. As she was pushed, her feet drug across the polished floor then left the ground completely. She landed on hard tile then was yanked across it by her hair.

  Pulled through the pitch-black corridors, she zigzagged back and forth across the linoleum, kicking and screaming.

  When she finally skidded to a stop, her attacker released her hair then clamped his frigid grasp around her throat. Lifted into the air, Sydney gasped and attempted to claw at the hands throttling her but only swung at empty space. She reached behind her and felt nothing. Where was he, God damn it!? How was he holding her?

  Before her windpipe could be crushed, she was thrown through the darkness, landing face down on some sort of bed; its cool, slick surface made of either leather or vinyl. The cold hands flipped her onto her back and choked her again.

  Fighting for breath, Sydney’s scream transformed into gargling gasps. As the hands squeezed tighter, the blackness around her somehow grew darker.

  ***

  When she awoke, she was lying on her back, naked below the waist. Her legs were spread and held up in the air by the stirrups attached to the end of the exam table. Although the domed examination light blasted her face, she was still able to make things out beyond its intense beam. Things like the old medical equipment. And the familiar style and layout of the cabinets.

  She was next door in the west wing. In one of the rooms containing the doctor’s abandoned items.

  Wincing, she fought to break free from the leather straps restraining her wrists, ankles, and chest.

  “Struggling accelerates the heartbeat,” the voice from the murky corner told her. “Which will only make you bleed more.”

  Sydney turned in its direction and watched the man with the port wine-stained scalp materialize from the shadows.

  Stepping closer, he lifted the exam light and repositioned it.

  Sydney failed to notice that the beam was now aimed at her crotch. In fact, she was too terrified to notice anything except for the piercing blue eyes that stared down and, seemingly, through her.

  “You-you-you….you’re…” she babbled.

  “Dead?” he said then shrugged. “In due time…” Dr. Bowden placed his frigid hand on her warm belly, “…that will all change.”

  Sydney recoiled at his touch. “Please! Please let me go!”

  Bowden smiled, ignoring her pleas. “I’ve been watching you. Patiently waiting.”

  Sydney shook her head as tears streaked her face.

  “And now that the lunar cycle is right…” he said, walking to the end of the exam table, “and you carry child…” he positioned himself in-between her spread-eagled legs, “the time is absolutely perfect.”

  “Please don’t! Please don’t hurt my baby!”

  “Not my plan at all…Mommy,” he said, smiling. His face looked more canine than human. He disrobed until completely naked.

  “Oh God! Please don’t do this!”

  Bowden simply shot her a wink then stooped lower, moving closer to her pubic area.

  At first mumbling, Bowden gradually spoke louder, then more defined, chanting something in another language.

  Sydney winced and felt his index finger violate her. “Please! No! No! No!!”

  Bowden seemed to be glowing, illuminating from within.

  Then his middle finger penetrated. Sydney wailed in agony as he kept adding more fingers. Then his thumb. She passed out once his entire hand was inside her, snaking its way toward her womb.

  ***

  Sydney woke with a start, bolting up and out of her desk chair, sending it crashing on its side. Heart racing. Gasping for breath. Drenched in sweat. She shuffled in reverse, slamming her back against her office wall for some sense of security.

  Her hands wrapped around her stomach. She was fully clothed. The lights were on—dim in her suite and bright in the hall. The letter opener sat on her desk. The sun was rising outside her window, its warm rays penetrating the mini-blinds.

  She leaned against the wall and fought to catch her breath.

  Her hands moved between her legs. There was no pain. She caressed her belly. All was fine. She just fell asleep. That was all.

  Dissolves.

  Her head slowly rose.

  “Yeah, dissolves,” she said, chuckling. She could get around the jump cuts in the commercial by using a series of dissolves between the edits. Its cutting wouldn’t be nearly as jarring.

  Why hadn’t she thought of that earlier? As horrible as that nightmare was, maybe she needed the sleep in order to clear her mind and find the answer.

  The clock on the wall read six a.m. Her deadline was three hours away. She could still pull it off if she got moving. Sydney picked up her chair at the editing bay and plopped into it.

  She exhaled a slight sigh of relief. Everything was going to be just fine.

  ***

  But less than eight months later, Sydney realized things were far from fine when she caught the first glimpse of her baby boy in the delivery room. Although he was strong and healthy, it was the mere sight of the port-wine stain on his peach-fuzzed head that made her stomach drop. It sunk even further when the boy’s lids fought to open and what stared back were the most piercing blue eyes.

  “Not my plan at all…Mommy.”

  Knowing that most newborns had light blue eyes before turning slightly darker over time, Sydney could only pray that the child’s eye color would eventually transform to brown or green…anything besides that cold blue that stared up and, seemingly, through her.

  Originally a part-time independent filmmaker and screenwriter, Matt Kurtz decided to narrow his creative energy to focus more on short stories and future novels. He writes twisted tales for fun when not working at a small advertising company somewhere within the large state of Texas. His fiction can be found in anthologies from Pill Hill Press, Blood Bound Books, Comet Press and Necrotic Tissue Magazine.

  The Little Church of Safe Crossing

  Joe McKinney

  For Rudyard Kipling

  It was Christmas Eve, and Eddie and Bobby and I were driving on a rock-strewn dirt road that ran along a ridge line in the Bullis Gap Range, looking for a group of illegals one of our helicopters had spotted walking through the badlands. There was a little town called Sandersville about twenty-five miles to the north of us, an
d Eddie figured they were probably headed that way. There were lots of places to hide if they could get there.

  We hadn’t really expected to get any activity, and to tell the truth, we weren’t really all that worried about a few extra Mexicans getting through the border. Working for the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol is a lot like standing in the middle of a river and being told you have to drink every drop that comes your way. You do what you can, you blow off the rest.

  Our sector covers some of the roughest country along the whole Texas-Mexico border, and during the winter the cold and the shear size of the desert makes it practically impossible to pass through it on foot. Most who try end up food for the buzzards. So what we were really worried about was having to go into the desert and look for their dead bodies on Christmas Day. Working ghoul duty when you should be rolling in the covers with your best girl just sucks. There’s no other way to put it.

  And since we weren’t really expecting to get any activity, we let Bobby talk us into cracking open the case of homemade Coahuila tequila we’d seized off a goat truck a few weeks earlier. Eddie and I weren’t regular drinkers—not anything like Bobby, who routinely knocked back a six pack after the end of every shift—but it was Christmas Eve, and our girlfriends were both with their families, so we figured a little tequila wouldn’t bother anybody.

  But of course by the time the helicopter reported the illegals, it was well after dark and we were all thoroughly shitfaced. So I tossed a cooler of beer into the back of our Chevy Tahoe and Eddie took the wheel and Bobby the shotgun seat and we took off across the range to find the Mexicans before the desert killed them.

  We had been tearing across the desert for more than twenty minutes when Eddie suddenly slammed on the brakes.

  “What the...?” Bobby yelled. His beer had slopped into his lap and all over the dashboard.

  Eddie ignored him and motioned for me to look out his side of the truck. “Jason, look down there along that line. You see them? Go around back and grab the night scope.”

  “Why me?” I said.

  “Because you’re the junior man.”

  “Eddie, come on. It’s like ten degrees out there.”

  “Yeah?”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “Fine,” I said, and climbed out.

  The winter winds coming down from the Chisos Mountains are like a cold from another world. It reaches through your clothes and clutches at your heart, and it can steal the breath from your lungs. When I stepped from the Tahoe my boots crunched through the white powder of ice that had formed in the dirt. Bolts of icy pain shot up my shins with every step. I looked out across the desert and saw a fine white frosting had covered everything. I heard the limbs of nearby hackberry trees cracking under the weight of accumulated ice. And there was the constant wailing of the wind coming down from the mountains, haunting in its beauty and loneliness.

  I got the night scope from the back and went up to the driver’s side window and stood there next to Eddie, shivering as I tried to blow some warmth onto my hands. He rolled down his window and we both looked out across the range. I didn’t see anything, though. Just rocks and dirt.

  Most people think the whole Texas-Mexico border is hot and dusty and flat and desolate. Well, it isn’t flat. At least it isn’t around the part of the border we patrolled. The Bullis Gap has got so many ridge lines and pocket canyons it looks like an unmade bed sheet on the topographical maps; and when you get down in it and start wandering around you can smell the acacia trees and feel the wind ripping at your ears and the whole thing is so savagely beautiful you just know it hasn’t changed a hitch since the days when it was the northern frontier of the Aztec empire.

  And, during the deepest part of winter, it can get cold enough to kill a man in no time flat. Standing there next to Eddie, I was shivering so hard that when I did finally catch sight of the Mexicans, it was all I could do to steady the reticule long enough to count them.

  “Nine, looks like.”

  “Eleven,” Eddie corrected me. “The other two are over there to the right, behind that clump of acacia.”

  I lowered the scope and tried to spot the group with my naked eye. “You can see that? How can you see that?”

  “I say fuck ‘em,” Bobby offered. He had managed to get a lot drunker than either of us. “Turn us around, Eddie. I didn’t see nothing if you didn’t.”

  “Shut up, Bobby,” Eddie said. He turned to me and said, “Get in, Jason. That ridge cuts back northwest for another two hundred yards. We can come across the line and catch ‘em when it opens back up.”

  I looked again, this time with the night scope, to see if I could spot the other two, then gave up.

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re the boss.”

  Eddie tore off down the dirt road, then cut down an embankment at full speed. Bobby was hollering like a loon for him to go faster and I was holding on to the roll cage for dear life and praying that Eddie really did know where he was taking us.

  When we stopped I looked around and saw that the ridge line had opened up just like Eddie promised it would. We parked out of the way and killed the engine and waited.

  We waited in the dark, cold and sullen, our buzzes fading to headaches, listening to the wind as it whistled through the truck. We waited ‘til at last even Eddie’s patience gave out and he admitted they must have slipped out of the ridge at some spot even he didn’t know about.

  “There’s no way we can get our vehicle in there,” he said, more to himself than to either of us. “We’re gonna have to go in on foot.”

  “You sure you don’t want to call the helicopter out again?” I asked.

  “Why bother? We saw ‘em go in. All we got to do is go in and get ‘em.”

  “Yeah, but it’s really cold out there.”

  “Don’t be such a pussy. Get the flashlights.”

  ***

  I got three flashlights out of the toolbox and we started off into the pocket. It was hard to tell how far we walked, but when we came up on the ridge line where the Mexicans had gone in, even I could tell we had gone too far.

  “Double back,” Eddie said. “We missed something.”

  On our way back we found where they slipped off. There was a section of the ridge wall that folded in on itself and was all covered over with wild tosora grass and cat’s paw cactus. If we hadn’t been looking for it we never would have seen it.

  It was pretty clever the way whoever hid it did it. The helicopter probably flew over it every day and never saw the opening, but from right up close we could see the hidden pocket for what it really was. One section of the ridge wall had been dug out and reformed so that it bowled up at a shallow, but natural enough looking angle. Below that was what appeared to be some sort of structure.

  It might have been more obvious in the daytime, but with only our flashlights to guide us it was hard to tell where the front wall started and the ridge walls stopped. The fit was seamless. Everything about it was a perfect blend with the surroundings. The only thing that really made it stand out at all was the dark, angular cut of the door and the rough-hewn mesquite wood cross embedded in the wall next to it.

  But the longer I studied it, the more uncomfortable it made me. For such a small, primitive looking structure, it felt powerful and dignified, like it was some kind of dividing line—though what it was dividing me from I couldn’t have said at the time. What I remember more than anything else about standing in front of that door was the feeling that we were absolutely unwelcome there. I’ve never felt anything else like it. The feeling was so strong, so undeniably clear in its meaning, that it was all I could do to hold my ground and not run away. As I stared at that door, a very distinct sense came over me that someone or something had looked into my heart and recognized me as one of the unclean.

  “Somebody’s god lives in there,” I said.

  Eddie turned around and looked at me like I had just said something every fourth grader knew by heart. “It’s a church,” he said.

  �
��How do you know that?”

  “Those pictures on the cross.”

  “What pictures?” I turned my light on the cross and saw there really were pictures on it—small, roughly carved pictures of birds and men dressed like animals and some wavy lines that sort of looked like a stream. I had to squint to see them, they were so small.

  “It’s picture writing. That part right there means ‘sanctuary,’ and that part there means ‘safe crossing.’”

  “And you didn’t know this was here?”

  He shook his head.

  “So how do you know so much about it?”

  “I grew up in Coahuila, remember? These are my people.”

  Bobby made an impatient coughing. Eddie and I turned back to look at him. He took a swig of his beer and pointed at the door. “You guys mind if we go inside,” he said. “I’m fucking freezing out here.”

  “Get rid of that,” Eddie told him. “Jesus. What the hell’s wrong with you? And give me that shotgun. Jason, let’s go.”

  Eddie held the door to the church open with the shotgun and we all went inside. We stepped into a narrow corridor with a low ceiling so that we had to stoop over and walk doubled over for about twenty feet before the passage opened up on a round room. The room was lit by a big pit fire in the middle and there were several smaller fires in lamps hanging from the ceiling.

  The place was a lot bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside. All eleven illegals were there, sitting on their haunches along the wall. They were praying softly when we walked in, but one by one they stopped and grew silent.

  Eddie told them who we were. He said something to them in the pidgin blend of Spanish and Indian dialects of the Coahuila farmers. It took them by surprise, I could tell. Two of them along the far wall were partially obscured in shadow, but I could see the whites of their eyes as they stared at Eddie.

  On the other side of the fire I saw a large wooden statue of a man. The man’s skin was painted sky blue and he was wearing the traditional eagle feather cloak and headdress of an Aztec god. There was a rough cut stone altar at his feet and the farmers must have been praying to it because there was a pile of gold and silver coins and desert flowers on it, placed there with obvious care, like an offering.