Odium IV: The Dead Saga

by Claire C. Riley

  “Me too,” she replies, her tone haunted. “It needed to be out of this misery.”

  I stare at her in shock. I meant that I could imagine nothing more horrifying than this mutated deader chasing after me while it tried to munch on my brains, but O’Donnell is feeling some sort of sympathy. I play along with it.

  “Oh yeah, exactly,” I reply, still trying to shake the image of this thing coming at me and how much I would have pissed my pants. I look across at Ricky, and for a brief second I kind of wish this thing were alive to scare the shit out of him.

  A noise from behind another curtain makes us all stop what we’re doing and look over, the familiar shuffle and growl of the undead drawing our attention even further. I hold my hatchet tightly, turning my back on the shelves and the deformed deader, and we watch the shadows move from beneath the flap as the footsteps come closer.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The flap of material posing as a doorway moves as the deader pushes against it, and it’s a long, drawn-out moment as we wait and watch until the flap falls free and every one of us gasps. Not just me. Definitely not just me.

  “Whaaattt?” O’Donnell breathes out from next to me, the word dying on her lips, and I wonder if we’re on the same wavelength now or if she’s still feeling sympathy for these things.

  The deader comes farther into the room, and at first it doesn’t spot us. It casts a shadow across the bloodied sand of the circus tent floor and takes another stumbling step forward, its two heads swiveling both ways as it looks around. Its nose lifts to the air as it finally realizes that it’s not alone and it lets out a long, drawn-out growl that reminds me of a wolf.

  I stare at the conjoined twin deaders and take a small step backwards, feeling a slight repulsion toward the thing in front of me. I get that none of this is its fault, and at one time it was just a normal human like everyone else. Well, it was hardly ever normal, of course. The deaders are joined at the hips, giving it four arms and four legs and two heads. It’s a walking nightmare as it lurches forward in the direction of Phil, its teeth bared and all four hands reaching for him. A long, heavy chain is locked around one of its ankles, keeping it in this tent for all these years.

  It was an inhumane act, and I wonder why they let themselves be treated like that for so long. They aren’t animals—at least they hadn’t been—so why had they been chained up?

  “Guys,” Phil says, his machete raised high, “I might need a little help here.”

  I wait for someone else to step forward and offer to help, but when neither O’Donnell nor Ricky does, I grip my hatchet tightly and move toward Phil. The deader is smacking its lips as if Phil is a Grade-A prime T-bone steak. It’s a surprisingly human gesture that freaks me out all the more. But I still wonder, other than the freak factor, why he can’t handle this kill himself.

  As I get closer, I realize what Phil’s problem is: two heads means two brains, meaning he’ll need to take out both skulls to put this thing down. Probably. This is all just speculation until we do it, of course. It isn’t like this sort of thing happens to us every day.

  I’m behind the deader, and its attention is fixed on Phil so it doesn’t even notice me as I come up and slam my hatchet into the side of the head on the right. It continues to reach forward with all of its arms, but then the right side of the deader starts to sag as if it’s had a stroke and can’t control that side of its body. The weight of the dead right body is pulling the left body down with it, until they’re both on the floor, one motionless and the other still hungry and angry. The deader on the left continues to try and drag itself toward Phil, seeming to get more and more frustrated by the extra weight holding it back.

  It fights to get back up onto its feet, finally doing so as the loud sound of tearing comes from under the bloodied dress it’s wearing. Dark black blood splatters across the floor, and then a gush drops from beneath the tattered remnants of the skirt as the skin between the two conjoined bodies splits open and the dead deader (try saying that when you’re drunk) tumbles to the ground in a heap. The other deader pauses momentarily, blood and gore still tumbling from the side and underneath of her, and she looks down at her fallen comrade, a look of sorrow crossing her features, as if remembering what they’ve been to each other for all of these years.

  We should take that moment to crush the other skull in, but I think Phil and I are both in shock at what just happened. Then, before we can even contemplate it, the deader looks back up, fixing her hungry gaze on Phil, and opens her mouth before letting out a hungry, distressed screech. From behind me I hear Ricky cursing something indecipherable as Phil uses his machete to stab into the left-hand deader. The skull, for some reason, isn’t as soft as on the one I killed, and he has to yank the blade back out. His second attempt at killing her fails as his blow goes wide and instead of the skull he slashes into her shoulder. This time it’s lodged in deep, and with my hatchet still buried in her sister’s skull we’re both weaponless, barring our handguns, which we do not want to use in case it draws more attention to us.

  Phil backs up another step, but then there’s nowhere to go as his back hits one of the display shelves. I pull out my pistol and stare at it for a split second before slamming the butt of the gun into the side of her head. Blood splatters out of the wound and she begins to turn toward me, so I hit her again. Phil pulls out his gun, and as she turns toward me he smashes his gun into her head, opening the wound up farther. Blood splatters across his face, smearing his glasses, but he doesn’t relent as I grapple with her, keeping her at arm’s length as he continues to beat her skull until it finally cracks open and he’s able to smash her brain into mush.

  She drops to the ground suddenly, her whole body sounding like mincemeat as it lands in a heap. Fluids drain from her destroyed head and the side of her body where he twin had once been, and the most putrid smell escapes, as if she’s been holding in a fart for the past five years.

  Phil is gasping for breath, and he pulls his glasses off and wipes them over with the corner of his shirt before putting them back on. The puddle at our feet has grown, and we both step back so we don’t stand in it.

  “That was messed up,” Ricky says from behind us.

  I turn to glare. “You could say that.”

  “I did,” he replies without skipping a beat.

  “You know you can help whenever you like.”

  A small smile rises to his face. “I know.”

  I glance at O’Donnell, who’s grimacing at the smell, and I wonder why I’m not angry at her, yet I am with Ricky. Either of them could have stepped in and helped, yet neither of them did.

  Phil sucks in a breath and reaches down to retrieve his machete, putting his foot on the shoulder of the deader to help free it. I feel shaky and a little sick at the killing of these two deaders, but I don’t really understand why. Though I know it was necessary, and probably the best thing we could have done for them, it still feels…wrong somehow. Perhaps it was the sound of their tearing flesh as they were torn apart after all these years trapped together, both alive and dead. I’m not sure, but I know the image of them will stay with me for a long time, haunting me in the dark lonely nights. That is, of course, if I make it back to Haven at all.

  “Shame we don’t have a camera. Moo would have loved these two,” Phil says, still sounding shocked and freaked out at the same time. He sheaths his machete and then reaches down and pulls my hatchet free of the other deader’s head before handing it to me. I take it with a “thanks,” and I feel the small tremor running through him. I’m glad I’m not the only one affected by these two.

  “You’re disgusting,” O’Donnell says, turning around to continue with her search of the tent.

  “It’s not me, it’s for Moo,” Phil replies indignantly.

  O’Donnell makes a throaty sound. “She’s just a kid. You should know better.”

  “What, so keeping the heads as souvenirs and spiked around your bedroom isn’t disgusting?” Phil trails after h
er.

  She moves to the back wall. “Of course it’s disgusting, but—” she begins, pulling aside another curtain and then jumping back with a scream. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she says as we all rush forward. She drops the curtain back in place to hide whatever is underneath. “Whatever you do, don’t go in there.”

  The curtain twitches and moves as something presses through whatever bars are holding it where it is, and O’Donnell shudders as she watches with a grimace.

  “I have no intention of it,” I reply.

  And I honestly don’t. I don’t care what it is, because whatever it is would only be as bad as or worse than what I’ve seen so far, and it’s all too much for me to take. I need to get out of here and grab some fresh air.

  “I’m heading back outside, this place is giving me the creeps,” I say. I’ve seen enough of this place to know that I want nothing more to do with it. Christ, if Adam came here to hide, then he’s dumber than I thought because this may be a circus, but it isn’t fun or funny in any way; it’s where dreams go to die.

  “Me too,” Ricky says, following me outside.

  He continues to search the circus site while I sit down on one of the benches by the billboards and gratefully suck in gulps of the hot afternoon air. I close my eyes while I try to get rid of the image of those deformed deaders—and their forlorn gaze as they were ripped apart from each other—from my mind. They looked like beasts—chained up, graying flesh—and they were treated like them.

  I open up my eyes, wishing I smoked so I could give my hands something to do. The sun is sitting high in the sky now and I look up, seeing it burning down on us, the bright yellowy-orange blob blinding me. I look across at the billboard next to me, squinting as I read it. It has more information on the conjoined twins, and I find myself reading it in fascination, once again appalled that these people had to put their whole lives on display for the entertainment of others.

  The Songbird Emma Twins.

  Emma Keating and Emma Walker’s mother was a French hooker back in the eighties. A talented fire-eater, their mother joined the circus when it passed through her hometown. She subsequently started two affairs with married men as the circus traveled around the world, and when she fell pregnant she didn’t know who the father was. With both men not wanting anything to do with her or her unborn child, she took her own form of revenge—and thus when the baby was born and it was found to be conjoined twins, she subsequently named the child after both fathers. One Emma for each father.

  The trio stayed with the circus for many years, until the children were teenagers, and the twins were found to have a talent for singing and juggling. Thus their act grew in its notoriety, far outliving their mother’s.

  One night a note was found. Their mother had left, and wished her daughters a long and happy life. She was never seen again, and both Emma Keating and Emma Walker agreed to stay with the traveling circus, their new family.

  “That’s so sad,” O’Donnell says from next to me, making me jump. She laughs. “You startle easy.”

  I force a smile. “Yeah, it’s this place. It’s giving me the heebie-jeebies.”

  “I didn’t think this sort of thing was done anymore. Most of these types of places were shut down in the fifties,” O’Donnell says.

  “Like Phil said earlier, little backwards towns and constantly moving probably kept them under the radar.” I shudder at the mental image of the freak deaders we just saw.

  Ricky comes over, his expression grim. “I don’t think we’re going to find the kid here, but I did find something else.”

  Phil comes out from the freak show tent, a bag hanging from his hand, looking heavy and burdensome. We all see the bag, but none of us question it. We all have an idea what’s in there, and sometimes it’s best not to talk about these things, no matter how disgusting they are.

  We all follow Ricky as he rounds on the tent we were just in, and the barn comes into view. There’s a slight incline, and we follow Ricky’s lead and lie down on our stomachs so that only our heads look out over the top.

  The barn should be a welcome sight—and it is, after all the other thing we just saw. However, between the barn and this circus there appears to be a swamp of some kind, and I realize how damn lucky we actually were earlier not to walk straight into it.

  The field backs up around the side and the back of the barn, just like we had hoped it would. But a small river must run from somewhere around here, and at some point it overflowed. Between the rotting vegetation and the water, it’s now like the bog of eternal stench.

  But that isn’t even the worst of it.

  Trapped within the sludgy field of ruined dreams and the morbid realization that we can’t get to the barn from this way around, are deaders. Only, just like everything else we’ve run into today, they aren’t just any normal deaders. Trapped within the thick gunk, sludge, and decay are clown deaders.

  Bloated and comically horrific clown deaders. And trust me when I say that there is nothing funny about these clowns.

  Their faces are stretched and torn from bird attacks and the elements. Some still have their wigs on, though of course they’re matted and covered in filth now. For some, just a head pokes up out of the gunk, the mud slowly sucking them down, and their swollen, bugged-out eyes stare at us from across the swamp. For others they’re stuck only by their ankles, their bodies toppled over as they lie on top of the sludge, forever reaching for a freedom that won’t come.

  “Fucking clowns,” O’Donnell mutters in disgust. “It had to be fucking clowns, didn’t it?”

  I’m still in shock at the sight of them, though again, I shouldn’t be—not after some of the other things I’ve seen in this place. Yet I can’t contain the small, manic laugh that ripples up my throat at O’Donnell’s words. She turns to glare at me and I laugh even more.

  “Fucking clowns.” I smirk. “Now that would be disgusting. Shit, O’Donnell, why does your mind always go to the gutter?”

  Phil laughs and even Ricky smirks, but O’Donnell looks less than impressed by my comment. It doesn’t stop me from laughing, though. I feel better as I laugh, the horrors of the conjoined twins slipping into the back of my mind.

  “I’m going to be having nightmares for weeks,” she says. One of her hands is resting on the gun at her waist, and the other is gripping onto her rifle. “I want to take them all out while I can.” She raises up her gun. “Say goodbye to your little friends,” she says, mimicking Al Pacino in Scarface.

  “No can do. Not unless you want everyone in a five-mile radius knowing where we are—and that would include whoever is in that barn and the freaks in the masks,” Ricky says, pointing across the field toward the barn. “We are massively outnumbered.”

  It all looks quiet, with no movement at first glance, but as I look closer, staring intently at the trees next to the barn, I see people moving around in the branches and climbing inside the barn through a window at the top. From the looks of it, most of the people going in and out of the barn have white plastic masks covering their faces, and we all recognize at the same time that the masked killers in the field and the shooters from yesterday are one and the same.

  “This is all a crock of shit,” O’Donnell says, not happy at all. “We’re stuck over here with this freak show and a damned swamp with clowns in it between us. Aiken said to take out the barn. Now what the hell are we going to do?”

  Phil’s eyes grow large as he points over the top of O’Donnell’s shoulder. “Well if you thought that was bad, then you’re really not going to like this,” he says to her as we all turn to look.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  O’Donnell turns back around to face the way we had just come, and the sound of her stomach hitting the ground is audible to us all—at least the pretense of it dropping out is. She begins to make a small keening sound when the deader clowns pin her in their sights and snap their jaws at her. Their groaning ups a notch as the thought of fresh meat pokes at their most basic instinct.


  Three clowns lurch toward us in their own unique way, their steps slow and broken. One is on its hands and knees, and the other two are limping toward us, their footsteps clumsy in their oversized clown shoes. Their once-funny outfits, designed to delight children and parents alike, are now every person’s horror story. Blood and gore are splattered across the front of them, as if they’ve all been to an all-you-can-eat lobster buffet and forgot to wear their plastic aprons to protect their clothing.

  These clowns, must have at some point, gotten themselves unstuck from the swamp, because their bottom halves are covered in the stinky swamp mud, and now that they’re out of it they’ve begun to speed up their decaying process. I guess they’d been wandering around their old tents and had heard us all talking.

  The clown on its hands and knees is surprisingly quick and agile as it uses all four limbs to move toward us like a dog hunting its prey. O’Donnell shrieks and steps back as it moves closer. She kicks out with a heavy boot but misses and has to jump around so it won’t bite her feet and grab at her legs. I take her place, swinging down with my hatchet in the hopes of hacking its head clean off, but it moves at the last second and the sharp blade lodges between its shoulder blades.

  I let go of the hatchet and jump out of the way as it reaches for me with bony, raw fingers, noting that Ricky and Phil are attempting to take care of the other deaders, who have now been joined by some more of the circus’s current residents. And I’m at least glad that they’re joining in this time instead of standing there holding their dicks and watching. Some of the deaders joining the fray must have been guests to the circus, and some were performers—going off their tattered yet glitzy clothing.

  I pull out my knife from its sheath at my waist and kick out as the dog-clown swipes at me again, its hand almost getting a good grip on me. I kick it away, my foot hitting its side and sinking into the side membranes of its waist, releasing a foul-smelling odor that soaks into my boots as its insides tumble out in an explosion of rot and gore. The dog-clown is on its side, and I drop to one knee with my knife high, slamming it down into the side of its temple before it can get back up onto all fours.