Terror Town

by James Roy Daley

  Cameron opened her eyes, covered in a silky mesh.

  Below the crude, off-white thread, her exposed skin became darker. Her breasts bloated and elongated and turned completely black. Not a healthy and attractive African black, but the color of tar, the color of something burning in a chemical fire. All of her skin turned this way, even the tips of her fingers and the balls of her feet. The black skin was oily and greasy, covering muscles that had grown large and swollen.

  As time forged ahead she looked like a strangely mutated corpse, except for her eyes and teeth. Her teeth had fangs now, fangs like needles, like daggers. Her eyes bulged and the whites had turned dark. Each eye had a red dot in the center. To look there, into the place surrounded by gloom, was to look into the heart of a demon, a succubus––the devil’s chilling and exotic whore. To look into those eyes could only bring madness.

  Cameron crawled from the tree and sat at its base. She wrapped her arms around her swollen knees. And in time, she picked the silk away, freeing herself of its sheath. She was in no hurry; she was still changing, transforming, post-embryonic.

  Leaning forward, she listened. She could hear so much now; she could hear everything for miles and miles. Yesterday she was deaf in comparison. Now she could hear footfalls in the heart of the town, people laughing at the waterfront cafe, boats slapping against the docks at the Yacht Club. She could hear lovers crawl into bed; fish swim in Cloven Lake, deer rustle in the forest. She could hear radio frequencies in the air, crickets in Nicolas Nehalem’s marsh, the beast from Daniel’s basement.

  And she could hear more––much, much more.

  Cameron could hear George Gramme talking lovingly about motorcycles, even though a Harley had amputated his fingers two summers ago. She could hear Jay Hopper ring in his final sale of the night, all the way out on the 9th line. She could hear Stephen Pebbles brooding inside his two-bedroom apartment. He lived there now––now that a fire had destroyed his farm and everything he owned. She could hear odd-job Martin West limping across the kitchen like a ninety year old man, knowing he wouldn’t have to limp if he hadn’t been shingling his neighbor’s roof––something he was dangerously unqualified to do. She could hear Lizzy Backstrom roll her wheelchair across the hardwood towards the window; for the window was the place she kept watch. Lizzy didn’t trust Cloven Rock, not anymore. Not after seeing the great multi-legged beast creep across the street on that long and terrible night, the night that changed her life forever.

  Cameron could hear Stanley Rosenstein, who had been a foreman at the docks and an all-around good guy before his wife left him and his sanity was questioned: he thought there were monsters in Cloven Rock. Stan pulled his shades down and triple bolted his door. He did that every night, and often times, checked to make sure they were locked.

  She could hear Father Mort Galloway, sitting in his house by the church, secretly and shamefully watching his X-rated movies and thinking about Leanne Wakefield. Ever since Leanne’s husband Simon had drowned in the backyard pool she had been attending church religiously––so to speak. And every Sunday morning at nine, she arrived at mass wearing a shirt that was tight enough to make the Pope take notice. Galloway wasn’t sure if Leanne felt remorse for talking on the phone while Simon died, or if she was trying to land a new husband. Maybe it was both.

  She could hear Nicolas asking questions, and Beth––locked inside the trunk––giving answers. In fact, she could hear Nicolas thinking. And when she put her mind to it, she could hear Beth thinking too. Listening to the thoughts of the entire town seemed almost within reach. She just needed a little more time.

  And––

  She could hear Daniel.

  Oh yes, she could hear Daniel McGee quite well.

  She could hear him breathing while he slept.

  She liked listening to Daniel; he was a good man, a nice man, the right man for her. He was handsome and smart, funny and kind. He was someone she could be with and love––not in conventional ways, of course, not now. But that hardly mattered. She wanted him. She wanted to be with him forever.

  There were others she could hear. Others she needed to see.

  She had a list of them.

  Paul LaFalce was on that list. Paul LaFalce, the lying cheating, cunt-hungry prick that fucked every open-leg slut in town. Oh yes, oh yes. He was on that list for sure. He wasn’t alone, there were more. Like Lizzy Backstrom’s ex-best friend Julie Stapleton, who didn’t know how to keep a secret but knew how to sleep with Paul and act like nothing happened. But Paul was first. Oh yes. She couldn’t wait to see Paul LaFalce. She couldn’t wait to see the ‘the Gasman.’ She wanted to give him a little piece of her mind. And take a piece of his.

  Her dark and bloated skin was fading now, fading, fading––color returning to normal. And beyond. Becoming wilted and pale, insipid and palled, almost toneless. Her organs and bones looked gloomy beneath her skin, which seemed as transparent as the webs she picked from her body.

  With a grin she lifted herself to her feet. She was almost ready.

  Her transformation was nearly complete.

  ∞∞Θ∞∞

  ∞Θ∞

  ~~~~ CHAPTER FOUR: THE KYLE THREAD

  1

  Kyle Van Ryan squeezed Douglas Waterier’s hand.

  Douglas coughed twice, spraying blood into the air. He exhaled one final time and shivered. His fingers opened, his eyes locked on nothing and the tension seeped from his body.

  He was dead.

  Kyle was holding hands with a dead man.

  He looked away from the corpse with grief-stricken eyes, seeing the carnage on the road instead. With the headlights cutting the darkness into various shapes and shadows, the area looked like something from a horror movie. He felt like crying, like turning off his mind and shutting down the world. The dead man’s hand slipped from his own, making a soft thump against the ground. And although he didn’t see it, a moth landed on the unmoving hand after it dropped, fluttering its wings like it found a new home. In time, the insect stood very still, as if waiting for the future.

  Kyle felt terrible, but not for long. Soon enough the feeling was replaced with something unrelated to grief, anguish, misery, and sorrow. This was a new emotion––a vile sentiment, and quite possibly a dangerous one.

  He was being watched.

  Deep down where his instincts dwelled, Kyle Van Ryan knew he wasn’t alone. There was something in close proximity he couldn’t put his finger on. Might have been an animal, might have been something else.

  Something worse.

  He glanced at Barry ‘Wolf’ Doreen’s haunted features, his blue eye and his brown. He sized up the minivan and the bodies within. He looked at the car in the ditch, the ax embedded in Mark Croft’s head, the blood on the road, the tread marks in the gravel. If he could teleport himself into another time and place he would. Of course, he couldn’t. All he could do was gaze across the dark and evocative road to a place he didn’t want to see. And it was there, near Daniel’s car––a white shape against a black background, watching him, studying him, like a ghost. Was it hiding near the forest or was it just too dark to see? He didn’t know; didn’t want to know. He wanted it to be gone, just gone––nothing more and nothing less.

  Go away, he thought. Jeepers bum-fuck, just go away.

  He felt his nerves unraveling and the muscles in his neck stiffen. He felt a cold chill along his spine. His arms grew goosebumps and face felt flush. There was a knot in his stomach tightening like a noose.

  Standing at the side of the road, waiting, lurking, looming. What was it?

  No––not it. Her. It was a girl.

  The woman at the side of the road seemed to be a phantom, but not transparent. Real. With pale skin and the eyes of a demon she moved towards him, naked and seductive, dominant and strong. Her feet, colorless and exposed, dragged against the gravel until she was close enough for Kyle to smell her rotting decay. Or maybe it wasn’t decay; maybe it was something different than decay, some
thing tainted and sour that had no name.

  He wanted to run but couldn’t. His defenses were weak and his will to escape was drifting. She was beautiful, stunning––more breathtaking than his wife on their wedding night, more spectacular than a perfect morning sunrise. But she was hideous too. Creepy and foul; like something that crept from a tomb in a gothic tale from a time long since past. She mixed the two extremes in an equal concoction. He wanted to kiss her passionately and run screaming at the same time. He was excited and terrified. His eyes were wide, his mouth agape, his muscles clenched tighter than ever before.

  “No,” he whispered. But like the moth on the corpse, he stood motionless, waiting for the future.

  Another stride. Two.

  She was less than ten feet away now, getting closer. She almost appeared to be gliding towards him, lighter than the air she breathed, if she breathed.

  He looked at her wilted breasts, her desiccated skin, her strange black eyes––eyes with bright red dots that seemed to dance in circles while not moving at all. The sound of her feet crunching against the pavement was louder now, her stench grew worse, and yet he remained in place, helplessly obeying her unspoken commands.

  Her jaws opened terribly wide, something unnatural. And inside that tragic and cavernous maw, that gaping hole, he could see long, sharp spikes that had no business being inside a human mouth. But she was not human. Couldn’t be. Not now. The teeth belonged to a wolf or a shark, not a woman, not a girl. They were awful and horrific, incisive and dangerous.

  He felt himself growing hard.

  He wanted her. And he wanted to give himself to her, wanted her to bite him; needed it, in fact. He longed for it pensively.

  “Hurry,” he said, sounding desperate and vulnerable. But, oh God, why was he saying that? The voice wasn’t his. It couldn’t be his, could it? It was. That was the worst part; his words were betraying him. He needed to shut up, stop talking, escape his own will. But his will was no longer his to escape. It belonged to her now. He would do what she wanted, what it wanted. He had no choice. He would become her concubine, if nothing more.

  Deep inside, in the little place that still belonged to Kyle, he considered pulling the ax from Mark Croft’s skull and chopping the abomination down. This was no woman; it was a monster, a thing. It looked like a girl but it was not. It was an evil succubus, a vampire, a fiend––or quite possibly a combination of all three.

  She limped now, limped towards him. A living scarecrow wrapped in a corpse’s skin.

  A question mark flashed inside his mind: was the girl the walking dead, a zombie, a living corpse? She couldn’t be, could she?

  He looked at her chest again, and could see the heart beating beneath her skin, beneath her bones. That meant she was alive, didn’t it?

  But oh God, he thought. Why can I see that? Why can I see her heart beating right through her skin and her bones? What’s wrong with this picture? And what’s wrong with her teeth? What’s wrong with her enormous razor-like teeth?

  The answer was simple. She was a vampire.

  Instinctively, he knew it to be true.

  He tilted his head to the side, allowing it to happen, begging for it to happen.

  There was a voice screaming inside his mind now, screaming and screaming, pleading for him to stop what he was doing, demanding that he run away. But the voice had no control. It was powerless.

  She bit his neck. Not in a romantic way. She didn’t leave two flawlessly round incisions in his milky, unblemished skin, like an amorous character from The Vampire Lestat. She didn’t have a red and black satin cape fluttering in the wind. She didn’t step from a wooden carriage along the mountainous slopes of the Transylvanian Alps, taste his sweet nectar, turn into a bat, and fly into the night before the backdrop of a full moon.

  Drooling, she tore the meat from his neck and he cried out, releasing a scream of agony he never knew existed. She devoured him and the pain was overwhelming. A hot spray of blood spewed into the air, splashing his chin and cheek. It squirted across her face too, then it ran over her lips and down her chest––and he knew, right then and there, that she was killing him. He was about to die in a sea of anguish.

  And as she chewed a second helping from his body his arms quivered, he knees became weak and his heart slowed. Then it did the thing that all hearts do in moments of extreme physical trauma. It stopped.

  Everything stopped.

  His eyes rolled back and his life was over; it had been extinguished. She murdered him and he was dead.

  Then the impossible happened. His heart started up again, beating faster now, pumping his blood in reverse, causing an internal torture he had never imagined. His organs labored through the unpredictably faulty design and he screamed with a voice that was different, more animal than man, more beast than being.

  He felt what she felt: hunger, hatred. Rage.

  He was a monster now, but not like her. He was no vampire. He was a zombie, a ghoul, a slave to the Master––a slave to Cameron. His intellect was falling while Cameron’s skills grew greater and greater. And as Cameron devoured him his hunger mounted; his eyes shifted to the bodies on the road. If she allowed him to feed he would. He would rip meat from the bones and drink blood until the human shells had none left to give.

  And she would allow him to feed. She would.

  After––

  After he did his duty.

  The time had come for Cameron to rule the town; the populace had to know who was in charge. This was her time.

  Tonight, it began.

  2

  Time passed. Kyle Van Ryan was on the road, alone. His fireman’s jacket was off. His neck and shoulder had been chewed apart. He looked pale and shriveled, a fireman that had been withered rather than burned, with meat ravished from his body. Each eye had turned dark, with a red glowing dot in place of an iris. His body cooled. Muscles contracted. His cheekbones looked like large knuckles in his face. His fingers were twigs. Knees and elbows like doorknobs. Stranger than this, Kyle’s teeth had begun to elongate. A second row of teeth was forming.

  He lifted himself to his feet and grunted.

  He was not like Cameron, not a true vampire. He was a zombie, but not like the ones he had seen on TV. He was a zombie with a mouthful of daggers, a hybrid zombie-vampire whose blood flowed in reverse, a zombie that needed to avoid sunlight. And although his thoughts slumped along in a thick and dull jumble of disorder, he was a zombie on a mission. He had a job to do. He had a Master.

  Kyle put a foot on Mark Croft’s shoulder and yanked the ax from his head. He entered the forest with blood dripping from the blade. He chopped and gathered long, sturdy pieces of wood. There was no need for Kyle to travel far; the woodland was thick and abundant with all that he desired.

  But it wasn’t his desires he looked to fulfill.

  He was following orders, being a good little henchman, a fiend that knew his place.

  He gathered six long sticks, straight as he could find, two inches thick and twelve feet long. He brought them to the side of the road and removed the branches and leaves, making the sticks relatively smooth. After sharpening the ends into spears, he returned to the forest and found six more. He sharpened and cleaned them. Laid them in a pile.

  The road was hard but the grassy land next to it was soft. The bottom of the ditch was softer still, but he didn’t want that––she didn’t want that. He needed the spears to be in a place high enough for all to see.

  He lifted a single spear from the pile. With straining muscles, he forced the spear into the soft earth at the side of the road. Just hours ago he would have been lucky to bury the stick an inch, but Kyle was different now. Stronger. Some might say he had the strength of ten men.

  He returned to the pile, lifted another stick and repeated the procedure. He did this again and again––and again and again and again. When he was finished his task, four spears pierced the earth on the left side of the road, four more pierced the earth on the right. Another four
stabbed the road itself. These last four were the not easily managed, but he handled it.

  The spears were separated evenly; not perfectly, but close enough. Each stick was fifteen to twenty feet from the one next to it, enclosing Nicolas Nehalem’s war zone in an oval ring.

  Kyle lifted the ax from the ground, returned to the forest, and chopped apart an overturned tree. Once he was done he dropped the ax and returned to the road with a thick log cradled in both arms. He returned to the forest and grabbed another log, and another.

  Placing the logs beneath the nearest spear, he created a makeshift stepladder. Then he eyed the bodies of the dead.

  For no reason at all he started with Gary Sharpe.

  Gary was the fireman with the grey beard and the gigantic black eyebrows. He was the father of three that had taken ax blade square in the face.

  Kyle stripped Gary to his underwear, gripped his hands and dragged the man’s heavy frame across the road. Gary’s broken neck allowed his head to flop back and forth without resistance. Blood drained onto the ground. Kyle lifted the man up and threw him over his shoulder like a large bag of grain. Then he walked up his log stepladder, stood on the top, balanced himself carefully and hoisted Gary onto the spear.

  The spear perforated both skin and muscle, traveling two inches into the dead man’s belly before it became stuck. Kyle grabbed Gary by the hair and the beard and stepped off the log, pulling the corpse to the earth. The spear traveled through Gary’s intestines and spleen quickly; it came through his back with a POP.

  At that point, Kyle decided to get a couple extra spears.