“Are you okay?” I called out. “What broke?”
“Just a glass,” she answered.
That’s when I realized that Camille had turned her head. She was staring at me. Just staring at the hairs on my neck, with the dogged, unwavering attention of a mounted deer head.
It was creepy. Goosebumps broke out on my arm, and I realized again that how cool and clammy her neck felt against my skin. Cold as riverbed stone.
I pulled back my arm and stood up.
“I’m going to see how your mom’s doing,” I announced, and left her frozen grin behind.
“How are you?” I asked Anna later on, as she settled into bed beside me.
She shook her head. “I can’t say it,” she said. “It’s too horrible.”
“I know,” I said. “I wish I’d never…I’m sorry.”
Still later, I came awake suddenly in the pitch black of night as Anna snored heavily beside me. Something felt wrong. I knew it before I opened my eyes. The air tasted feral. And icy.
I slit my lids open just a hair, and took in as much of the dark room as I could. I caught the faintest whiff of something both sweet and sour.
Something sparked near my face and I sat up like a shot.
Camille stood by the bed.
A knife protruded from the pillow where my head had rested just a second before.
A breath hitched in my chest. She had almost put the blade right through my eye as I slept. She hated me. Camille seemed capable in her new pseudo-life of almost nothing. But one thing she had proven.
She wanted me to be as dead as she.
I slid my legs to the floor and took her by the shoulders, leading her away from the bed and back to her room. She did not resist. Except for the dull movement of her feet, she didn’t show any sign of life, whatsoever.
When I tucked her back into her own bed, and pulled the covers back up to rest on her frail shoulders, a tear bled from my face to fall glistening on her chin. She made no move to wipe it off, only stared straight ahead, at the ceiling. I rubbed it away with my forefinger, and felt my skin crawl. I now had a horrible revulsion at the touch of my daughter’s skin.
When I left the room, her eyes remained open. Unblinking. Unfeeling. Dead.
I locked the bedroom door behind me, pulled the knife from its sheath in my pillow and slid it beneath the bed. Sleep didn’t come for a long time. In my head, I replayed scenes from the past year, when Cammy had been full of beaming sunshine and infectious laughter. When she had laughed at my funny faces and begged me to bounce her on my knee like a bronco pony. When she had kissed me and said “I love you, Daddy.”
When she had been alive.
Then I remembered her calm in death, as all around her quiet body people moaned and cried. She’d laid there in a coffin built just for children. Anna’s mother had moaned tediously about the horror of the thing, proclaiming to any that would hear that they should never need to build wooden boxes for kids. But, as I finally pointed out to her, they do, and Cammy had hers, and her face had looked small yet peaceful on the cloud-white silken pillow.
Now she had neither the joys of life nor the peace of death.
I was the reason. As the grey light of dawn slipped in through the bedroom window, my mind finally slipped into a troubled hour of sleep, soothed only by images of black blood and newly filled graves.
I knew what I had to do.
My eyes felt slathered in sand when Anna finally managed to jostle them open with a punch to my shoulder.
Get up,” she insisted, “you’re going to be late for work. And why did you lock the door last night?”
I didn’t answer her question, but stumbled as fast as possible from shower to closet to car. When I passed Camille, already sitting motionless at the kitchen table, I couldn’t meet her eyes. I didn’t want to see what was, or wasn’t, in them.
The day passed in slow motion. Every time I looked at the clock it seemed that only another five minutes had passed. I could barely hold my head up, but still, I welcomed the crawl of time. Anything to avoid what I had to do when I got home. All through the day I replayed the images of Cammy’s gravesite on the night I brought her home. Of how I propped the industrial flash on the side of the loose dirt, and of how each shovelful rose with the ache in my back to join the growing pile beside the flash. Of how, after what seemed like hours, I finally reached the wooden gleam of the top of her deathbed, and of how my fingers fumbled at the clasps to free my baby.
It all had to end.
It had ended, and I’d refused to believe it, thinking that somehow Madame Trevail and her voodoo could cheat the reaper. In some way, I supposed, it had. But the reward was worse than the loss it answered.
When I finally pulled into the garage that night, I hit the button to close the door behind my car, but didn’t immediately enter the house. Instead, as the chain ground through its heavy cycle to bring the garage door to the ground, I opened the trunk, lifted the false bottom that hid the spare tire, and pulled out the heavy tire iron that fit the expandable jack. Then I replaced the bottom, and lined the surface of the black carpet floor with black trash bags from my workbench.
I pulled a long spade from its rest on a round hook in the garage wall, laid it on the plastic, and shut the trunk.
Then I hefted the tire iron in my hand and slapped it lightly against my free palm. The sting from just that slight touch said it would easily do the job.
But could I?
Taking a deep breath, I assured myself that I could, and turned the doorknob to enter the house.
The foyer was dark as I stepped inside. I slipped off my shoes in the small mud room between the garage and the living area and opened the door into the great room. The room where I had almost been skewered not so long ago by my dead daughter. The TV and lights were off here too, which was unlike Anna, who normally lit the house up before dusk, but I could see light beaming from the kitchen.
“Anna?” I called.
The only answer was a faint thump.
Something was wrong here. The air screamed with the electricity of evil, and my stomach clenched. Why hadn’t she answered? Where was Camille? Part of me had hoped to find her planted here, unmoving, in front of the television while her mother fixed dinner.
But there was no warm smell of spice or stew in the air. The house felt empty.
I crept across the front room carpet until I reached the entryway to the kitchen. The hanging fixture on the far end of the room over the kitchen table was on, and I could see something resting on the tiles of the floor, something that peeked into my view from just beyond the edge of the cabinets. Something pale and fleshy.
Something that looked like a bare toe.
I stepped into the kitchen and flipped the florescent light on. As it flickered to life over the counter and I moved closer and closer to the table, the shadows lifted and the light…oh god, the light. It burned the image into my brain forever. I wish to god I could forget it.
Camille sat beside my wife on the floor. My daughter’s face was blank, but her hand still held the weapon. Cold steel tempered in the heat of life. Silver wetted and warmed with her mother’s blood.
Anna wasn’t dead yet. She reached out to me from the floor as I gasped in shock at the tableau. Blood streaked the pale skin of my wife’s fingers; her entreating arm was streaked and spotted with gore. I could see Anna’s lips moving, trying desperately to say something to me as her eyelids fluttered, struggling to stay conscious.
She never got out a word.
Her hand dropped back to the awful, bloody wound on her stomach. The beautiful skin of her belly, that soft flesh I’d kissed and caressed for so many years, looked as if it had been punctured and ground through by a dull can opener. Bloody shreds of skin peeled back and wept life as her fingers grasped and struggled to hold the slippery wound closed. I could see something undulating beneath the skin, beneath the blood.
Something creamy. Something soft and pink.
I g
agged as the realization hit. Anna was holding her very guts in.
She wheezed and coughed, then, with her whole body shuddering, a stream of crimson spat from between her lips. A heavier flow sluiced from the ragged slice in her neck, running like thick juice to ripple on the tile. Her eyes held open firmly and locked on mine for just a second, and my heart froze. Then she seemed to shiver, and her pupils rolled back in her head until I could see only white.
A keening, pitiful cry came from her throat before gagging off to a painful, gargling choke. Her beautiful raven hair stirred a broth of blood as her whole body shook. Before I could break my paralysis and kneel to hold her, she was still.
“Anna,” I cried, and fell at her feet and crawled through the warm stickiness of her blood. Ignoring the silent presence of our daughter, I pressed my ear to her chest. There was no sound, no breath.
Her face was still, her features quiet. I looked into her eyes, hoping for some spark of life, but already, their luster was gone. With a fingertip stained red in her blood, I closed her eyelids. At last, I realized my own danger, and looked up.
“Why?” I whispered, sitting back on my haunches to stare at Camille. My daughter sat at her mother’s head. Her empty eyes didn’t stray from my own.
I hadn’t expected an answer and I didn’t get one. I sat there for some time, waiting for the tears to come. But they didn’t. I couldn’t quite fathom that Anna was really dead. This shredded, bloody mess on my kitchen floor couldn’t be her. And the deadly child couldn’t be ours.
I stood up, and started towards the phone to call 911 for the police, or an ambulance, whoever you have to call when these things happen.
My hand was on the receiver when I stopped.
What could I tell them?
That my dead, eight-year-old daughter had brutally murdered my wife with a knife while I was at work? I pulled my hand back and looked at Camille, who scratched at the back of her neck.
How could I explain her? Who would believe me?
“Get away from her,” I yelled at Camille, who had bent over to touch her mother. “Isn’t it enough you killed her? Are you going to drink her blood now, too?”
I walked back around the counter from the phone to shoo her away and stopped.
Camille’s hands were around Anna’s neck.
And in those hands, was the charm I’d bought from Madame Trevail. Camille had not been itching her neck, but removing the magical talisman. She fastened it deftly around my Anna’s throat, and the small sachet of voodoo herbs and magic lay in the wound there, soaking up the blood from her ruined neck like a sponge.
“What are you doing?” I cried and started towards her.
Camille picked up the knife and pointed it at my heart. I backed away to safety behind the counter.
What was she trying to do? First she slaughtered her mother, and then she dressed her with the charm that would bring her back to life? Would it work? Would Camille guard the body until it did? And if it did, then what? Would Anna reborn be as deadly as her daughter?
There were no answers from Camille, whose dead eyes followed me without a blink. We were at a standoff.
It occurred to me, finally, that when I had entered the house, I had done so armed. The tire iron lay on the floor now, abandoned, soaking in the blood next to my wife’s thigh. Slowly, I stepped back around the counter and knelt down at her feet, edging forward, hoping to get close enough to snatch the weapon before Camille realized my intent. She remained at my wife’s head, knife in hand, and watched my progress, but didn’t stir.
My heart leapt with victory; my hand was nearly on the weapon, but I moved too slowly.
Anna’s body shuddered. Her eyes flickered open.
Then my dead wife sat up, blood still oozing sluggishly from the gash in her neck. The salmon loop of her inner organs threatened to spill from the grinning lips of her open belly, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Anna?” I whispered, backing away from her and Camille until my back hit the wall of our kitchen.
My wife’s eyes met mine, and I knew that I was lost. There was a darkness resident there, the same vacant emptiness I’d seen in our daughter’s. Anna’s hand reached out to grasp the tire iron, and I shuddered.
“Honey?” I begged, as Anna stood up from her deathbed of blood.
She raised the iron rod over her head.
Behind her, my daughter followed, bloody knife in hand.
Anna brought the tire iron down as I dove away, embedding its curved end in a chalky puff of drywall.
She pulled it from the hole and kept coming, her purpose clear.
I fled the room, stopping at the garage door for a split second to look back, to see the ruin of everything in my life that had mattered. To see the tortured, gory body of my wife still staggering toward me, intent on braining me with a tire iron I’d meant for my dead daughter. To see the horrible picture now forever etched in my brain––the image of my daughter, holding a knife still dripping with the blood of my wife.
There was no question of her expression.
Camille smiled.
Not With A Bang But A Whimper
MONICA J. O’ROURKE
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
(From The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot)
Harley sipped his beer—bottle only, no tap; no telling what might be floating in the tap line these days. He threw back his head like he was about to bust a gut laughing but came back up with a poker face. His Stetson was tilted to one side, but that was unintentional. It just flopped that way.
“They’s all rotters, though,” the bartender said as she wiped a shot glass with a bar rag. “No use feelin’ sorry for ’em, Harley.”
He shrugged, and looked somewhat disgusted. “It’s that sort of thinking’s what keeps me sane. But it still ain’t easy when they’re so young. You can’t help feelin’ sorry for ’em, rotters or not.” He took a sip from his bottle. “You never had kids. Did you?” He thought about his own son, now dead. And he thought that maybe the boy’s death had turned out to be a good thing, considering. Not that he really meant it, not really, not at all, but he was grateful that his boy didn’t have to go through this. He chastised himself for allowing that wretched thought to pass through his brain.
Harley nodded, shrugged, added another gesture or two because he really had no clue what else to say for the moment. But then he added “They’re kids … that’s the worst of it. They can’t understand what’s happening. Can’t be held responsible. So that really is the worst of it, when you see a kid and you… you gotta put it down.” He finished his beer with a generous swallow. “Like a goddamned rabid dog.”
It was the bartender’s turn to shrug. “No, I got no kids.” She changed the subject back. “They ain’t human no more, Harley.”
He paid his tab and left a generous tip and walked out into the sunlight. Sometimes if was easy to forget he’d been drinking so early, and daylight could be a surprise. Like going to a movie matinee—some things were just better suited for night.
The list jutted from his hip pocket and he pulled it out for the hundredth time that day. Mostly descriptions and possible locations. Names were included but weren’t useful in his hunt—they no longer responded to their names. He hunted, for those parents who wanted their kids back, no matter what condition they might be in. No matter what condition Harley would inflict on them. This is what he’d been reduced to, he’d think bitterly. Goddamn truant officer with a pistol.
He didn’t bother with a motorcycle—which most people assumed he drove—hell, Harley was his birth name, not his vehicle of choice. He climbed into his Ford pickup and headed toward the sticks. Tim Gorman had last been spotted in the Highland Woods area.
He shouldered his backpack, locked the truck and headed into the overgrown forest known as The Highlands. Long pants and heavy work boots
protected him from the elements, particularly rattlers. He’d hiked about half a mile in, marking his trail by spray-painting small red Xs on treetrunks, when he picked up the boy’s trail.
He assumed it was the boy. He spotted evidence he’d been here—tatters of a Megadeth T-shirt found draped over shrubs, caught in brambles and prickers. One thing the rotters shared was an uncanny sixth sense, an understanding they were in danger, so he’d surely be hiding. Even with their limited brain function they knew to hide. Until that maddening hunger drew them back out into the open.
“Come on, kiddo,” he said quietly, treading carefully over branches and mulch, drying patches of mud squelching beneath his boots.
He stopped only long enough to wipe his sweaty forehead with a bandana. Harley’s search for the Gorman kid had taken the better part of the morning. Finally he spotted the boy—and Harley thought of the term loosely, because Timmy was almost a man, big and cumbersome in life, now just ogreish in death. Timmy was chewing on something. Something thick, dark; something long and fat like a branch but decidedly hairier and with features not commonly shared with branches.
Timmy was feasting on a human arm, ripping out chunks of flesh with his rotted teeth, pus dribbling from his facial lesions and soaking his meal. Not that he seemed to mind.
“Awww, Christ,” Harley groaned, wiping the spittle out of the corner of his mouth. Bile clawed up his esophagus and into the back of his throat and he swallowed twice, three times to keep his lunch down.
There was no hope for this one. Too far gone, too many days had passed and Timmy was a full-blown rotter now. Carefully Harley aimed, shooting off the top of Timmy’s skull. Enough of his face was still intact so that the family would at least have the comfort of receiving the body in recognizable condition. Unfortunately, head trauma was the only really effective way of dispatching a rotter, and as long as Harley removed a good part of the gray matter, he knew his job was complete.
Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (Volume 1, 2 & 3) Page 53
