But whatever you do, do not stop to explain yourself. You are beyond explanation now.
Step 6. Follow the Stench
As implied earlier, the local dump will make the perfect home. If you don’t know where it is, trust your olfactory sensilla (nose, but not really) and let the malodorous air be your guide.
Finding sustenance will not be a problem. Think of the landfill as your personal buffet. General rule of thumb: if it’s rancid, it’s ready to eat. Don’t take on airs! Insects can—and do—eat pretty much anything, even other insects or their own excrement. No, you won’t get sick! Ever hear of an insect getting sick? They are hardy creatures, nearly indestructible. Nothing can survive like an insect.
Step 7. Send a Friend Request, Insect Style
When the sun sinks below the landfill, rub your wings together. Harder! Faster! Louder! What beautiful music! Send your song deep into the night. Call your exiled brethren. We are waiting for you.
Step 8. Bugger the Buggers
Mate. Like crazy. There is strength in numbers.
Step 9. Teach Your Children Well
The only lesson they need to learn: humanity is the true pestilence on this earth.
Step 10. Sing the Song of the Night
When we are legion, the landfill overflowing with our armor-backed, many-legged children, we will unleash the swarms into the night where they will howl their insect song and descend like black swirling clouds of death upon those who would look upon us as cigarette butts to be ground out under their soles.
Never forget, insect: you are a light in this world, perfect in all your flaws.
MAYHEM
“People like death and mayhem.”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
Hart House
(Originally published DarkFuse Magazine)
Warm, dark blood ran down Rosalind Hart’s hands as she held her daughter to her chest. She did not cry.
She laid the child on the soft dirt in the middle of the cellar after the blood had grown cold. She expected a frozen expression of horror, a last demented snarl of defiance, but instead her daughter’s face was peaceful and unperturbed. Now, dead, she looked every bit the child she had wanted for so long. It was a dirty fucking lie, that face.
Then the tears came.
Rosalind let them run into the dirt as she dug the grave. It was the same spot where the girl was conceived, six years ago, within the boundaries of a circle, a place of dark magic that helped to bring the child into existence.
She lowered the body into the shallow grave, placed the knife beside her, and filled it back with the dirt.
Returned to the earth. Returned to hell.
The sound of her husband pulling into the driveway was like an alarm bell rousing her from a deep slumber. The reality of her actions suddenly flashed white-hot inside her and fear washed over her like icy water.
She raced up the stairs, threw a bathrobe over her bloody clothes, and steeled herself. What could she say? How was she supposed to react? Could she hide what she had done?
There was no need for subterfuge. The moment her husband entered the house, he knew. The house was silent, dead, frozen. When Abigail was alive the house was never quiet, never still. It was always full of energy (dark energy).
“You did it, didn’t you?” he asked.
She closed her eyes, lowered her head. She sensed that he wanted to strike her, but he didn’t.
“She was evil, Thomas. You know that as well as I do. I couldn’t take it anymore. She was killing us both. Haven’t you felt it inside this house? Our personalities were changing. The terrible thoughts I’ve been having. And your nightmares.” Thomas rubbed his temples. “Don’t you see? We can leave now. Start over.”
“Where is she?”
Rosalind turned her head toward the cellar door and he dashed past her. She followed, weeping.
Thomas kneeled over the mound of freshly dug earth and wept, too.
She put her hand on her husband’s shoulder. He jerked away. “I’m sorry,” he said, but his voice was more accusative than apologetic. “We made a mistake.”
Rosalind spent the night in the living room, pacing in a circle. Thomas sat in the study, drinking.
It began with the soft thump thump thump of a heart where there was none; the sound no louder than the creaking of a casket lid or a cry muffled by a clamped hand.
Snow drifted through the black midnight sky, accumulated on the roof, settled on the front steps.
The thumping rattled throughout the damp cellar, and then moved farther into Hart House.
The sound swept into the parlor, and into the kitchen and dining room. It rose higher, reaching like a desperate, searching hand.
The thumping swelled, and even though Hart House was dark, even darker shadows slithered along its soft, moldy walls and scarred floors. Doors bulged, windows rattled.
The knocking rose to a crescendo—
—and then stopped.
Thomas rose from his chair and headed to the kitchen.
Hart House groaned and sagged into itself.
When Thomas entered the living room, he held up a butcher’s knife. Rosalind was still pacing as he drove the blade into her chest. The knife resisted at first but then it slid into the flesh smoothly and firmly, as it always did in his nightmares.
He jerked out the knife and she fell to the ground, wailing. Instantly he was on top of her, straddling her, and he raised the knife over his head and brought it down, into her chest, into her face, into her neck, again and again.
Rosalind’s screams filled the darkness.
Hart House shuddered.
Blood spread like hot lava around the husband and wife. When Rosalind fell silent, Thomas knew what he must do. He did it every night in his dreams, just before he would awake screaming. He slid the slick knife across his throat.
The Harts’ commingled blood pooled around their bodies.
Hart House laughed.
Its floorboards drank up the blood.
Three drops dripped from the ceiling of the cellar, landing on the freshly dug mound of dirt where Abigail Hart was conceived and where she died.
The interior doors of Hart House yawned opened, one by one, click click click. The last to open: the cellar door.
Up came footsteps, broken and splintered. Tiny steps. One by one. Rough, arrhythmic steps that stabbed into the cold floor blindly.
The footsteps drummed up the rotten, age-eaten stairs, along the long, narrow hall, until it reached the foyer.
Abigail Hart threw opened the front door.
A frigid wind swept into the mansion. Hart House inhaled, seemed to expand. The hearth sparked to life. The smell of cocoa and pine drifted out from the parlor. Lights blazed in every room. Shadows quaked and expanded along the walls and floors. But the cellar remained heavy with darkness, as it always would.
Abigail squatted beside her parents, lovingly heaped upon one another. A lover’s embrace. She didn’t rouse them. They seemed so peaceful, so in love. Hart House was alive now and it was their forever home. And sooner or later, Mommy and Daddy would learn to love their little girl, their only child. Even if it killed them, again and again.
The Zombie Who Had a Name
(Originally published in Bards and Sages Quarterly)
The dead have existed for as long as the living, give or take a few years. But what good has that done them? The living’s numerous advantages—locomotion, speech, non-putrefying body parts—have given them a sense of superiority. Certainly, they were too high and mighty to share the world with these good-for-nothing, foul-smelling corpses. Besides, the living were terrified of the things.
So, what did the living do? They buried the dead in the ground, burned them, scattered their ashes, abandoned them in the wilderness for wild animals to devour. They spread nasty rumors about their dearly departed, cast them as nightmare monsters, blamed them for their own misdeeds. Sometimes they even ate the poor, lifeless creatures. But their worst insult
? They ignored the fact that the dead were once the living.
Throughout the history of the living and the dead, corpses have had it bad.
Then, one day, the undead appeared.
No one knew how it happened. It was just one of those things, really—like the Big Bang or the popularity of NASCAR. Still, word of the so-called Zombie Apocalypse spread quickly after the first recently dead person rose from its grave. Years of paranoia, B-movies, TV shows, and semi-serious how-to manuals had prepared the world for an undead outbreak—it was as if they were waiting for it, honestly. And it was met with a rapid response. Within hours, mass exoduses emptied entire cities. Doomsday-preppers locked themselves in their underground bunkers, while the unprepared barricaded themselves in their basements or went on the run.
In those first, frenzied days, information about the undead consisted mainly of legend and lies. Farmhouses were widely believed to be a favorite zombie target and were among the first places abandoned.
The farmhouse at 1515 Grove Road had been abandoned for three days now, and yet a zombie still headed toward it, stumbling along the gravel driveway, the creature’s appendages at impossible angles, its head bent like a hanged man’s, its eyes frozen and vacant.
The undead thing was not attracted to the dwelling because it was a farmhouse, per se. The zombie wouldn’t have recognized it as such. Its eyesight, like most of its senses, was extremely limited. To the walking corpse, the structure was just a large, gray shape against the stark white sky. It wouldn’t have been attracted to the lingering scent of the living. While alive, it wasn’t able to smell other humans, at least not from a great distance. And since death does not give one super powers, there was no reason to believe the zombie could detect odors any better than a living person. The same went for its hearing. But there was one area where the creature did have an advantage: its sense of touch was practically nil. Physical pain is unknown to the zombie. With its senses greatly diminished, the reanimated human operates mostly on instinct, muscle memory. Perhaps this explained why it headed toward the farmhouse, much like a person coming home after a long day at the office.
The zombie struggled up the bowed porch steps and entered the house through the open doorway. Shattered and jagged pieces of the front door lay in the hall.
Sunlight shined in bright white bands through the broken window in the living room. It glinted off the picture frames on the mantel and caught the zombie’s attention. The creature stumbled into the room and stopped before the mantel. It stared with black eyes at the dark shapes there. The photos depicted Christmas scenes, a wedding, a birthday party. The zombie picked up one of the shapes, seemed to regard it for a long while. Then it ran a bony finger over the letters engraved along the bottom edge of the photo, which showed a mother, father, and daughter on a camping trip.
Footsteps. Hurried and heavy.
The zombie turned. There was a white flash of movement. Then the undead thing was falling backward, crashing against the mantel. It felt nothing, of course, but its left arm had been severed at the shoulder. The appendage now lay on the floor among the fallen picture frames. The axe that severed the arm was firmly wedged into the mantel. The living human who swung the axe was backing away from the animated corpse, shouting, “Oh shit, oh shit.”
A low, dark moan hissed out of the zombie’s ragged, black mouth.
A voice from outside shouted, “Get the fuck out of there before that thing eats you!”
* * *
Death is the living’s greatest fear. Cannibals run a close second. Add the fact that the living love to scare the piss out of themselves and the myth of flesh-eating dead people is born.
Why would zombies eat the living? Their taste buds, like their nerve endings, are dead. They have no need for sustenance. Their organs do not function. Therefore, there is little reason for the walking dead to eat anything.
Throughout the history of the world, there has never been a single instance of a dead person eating a living person. On the other hand, there have been innumerable cases of the living eating the dead, human and otherwise.
* * *
The human dashed out of the room. A few seconds later came the sound of a car door slamming and a car speeding away.
The zombie left the farmhouse.
When the creature stepped off the porch steps, dull, sepia tones replaced the blacks and whites and grays of the world. An arrhythmic electric buzz began to sound in its head. But, as the creature shambled toward the woods behind the farmhouse, something even more remarkable happened: The zombie had a thought.
The thought barely flickered inside its maggot-eaten brain, but it was there, like the memory of an echo.
The thought was a question.
The question was: What was my name?
The zombie entered the woods and followed a narrow path. But when the path hooked to the north, the animated corpse continued in a straight line, plunging into the chaos of the woods. Several times it stumbled over rocks or downed trees and fell to the ground, but each time it lifted itself with its lone arm and moved forward in as straight a line as possible.
The buzzing in its head grew louder. The edges of the sharp geometric shapes it saw softened and blurred. The zombie moved more quickly now, its tics and spasms becoming more pronounced.
It was making its way along the edge of a precipice when it stopped. The zombie watched a human shape standing in the middle of a clearing a few yards ahead. In time, the creature was able to discern that the shape was a young girl. The zombie didn’t know how it knew this. It didn’t know how it knew anything. It just did. Just as it knew its name was somewhere out there.
“Where are you, Evie?” A man’s voice rang out.
At the sound the zombie leaped out of the woods and rushed at the girl.
* * *
Why are the walking dead attracted to the living? For the same reason the living are attracted to each other. Companionship. No one is lonelier than a zombie.
* * *
The creature was nearly on top of the girl before she noticed it. The girl screamed, a piercing, bird-like yowl. The walking corpse stopped, opened its mouth, but only zombie sounds came out.
The girl ran.
“Evie!”
The creature turned toward the voice and was greeted by an explosion of sound. It barely felt the slug ripping through the dry, brittle skin of its leg.
A man stood about twenty yards away, pointing a shotgun at the zombie. The girl was at his side.
“Daddy, wait!”
The zombie moaned, and the man fired again, hitting the creature high in the chest. This time the zombie was thrown backward, and went over the precipice. The world tumbled and whirled for a few long seconds. Then, suddenly, the world righted itself and the zombie struggled up to a standing position at the bottom of a ravine. It felt no pain, of course, even though the side of its head was bashed in and a jagged piece of bone stuck out of its leg.
The creature stood, unmoving. The buzzing in its head faded to silence. For the briefest moment the zombie held an image in its mind of light breaking through the darkness and a gnarled hand—its hand—reaching up and into the world above.
Then the zombie remembered its question and its search and, even more slowly, it jerked and stumbled forward.
As the zombie traveled alongside a narrow, dry creek bed, it worked on its question, picking at it like a scab until it bled.
In time, the colors of the woods bled through and brightened. Now the zombie saw, not shapes, but trees and rocks and tiny animals flitting through the deadfall.
What was my name? Before. Before. Before...
Soon the zombie came to a gravel road where the wood ended. It had traveled only a few yards when it heard a sound rising toward it. It grew and grew until it was a roar that blotted out everything else. A dazzling light appeared around the bend in the road up ahead and expanded as it moved toward the zombie. Suddenly the world turned a bright white and was filled with a deafeni
ng roar. Then the creature felt itself being propelled backward at great speed. There was a crash and the light died, the sound died. The creature tried to continue on, but it could not move. Its back was pressed against the trunk of a tree and its front was pressed against the grille of a pickup truck. The two occupants of the truck weren’t moving. The zombie pushed against the hood of the truck, and in a short while the creature’s upper half tore off from its lower half like a perforated sheet of paper. The creature continued on its way, pulling itself along the ground with its remaining arm.
* * *
Perseverance is the zombie’s greatest strength. But what would you expect from someone who doesn’t stay dead?
* * *
A few minutes later, the two men inside the truck awoke. One was bleeding from the forehead; the other from the mouth and eye. The driver tried to start the vehicle, but the engine only sputtered and coughed.
“What were you thinking, Harry? That’s not how you kill a zombie.”
“How the hell would you know? You’ve never killed one of them dead bastards before. You’ve been hiding in your basement ever since this started.”
“Grab the guns and let’s find that thing. I’ll show you how to kill a zombie.”
When they got out of the truck, Harry said, “Well, I’ll be damned, Billy boy. Look over there.”
He looked where Harry was pointing. Not far off the road, across a field, was a graveyard.
“Looks like our zombie is going home.”
* * *
When the zombie passed the fallen gate, it smelled the cemetery air, the recently upturned dirt, the sour miasma of recently opened tombs. It crawled like a crippled beetle until it came to a row of headstones in the middle of the graveyard. The creature stopped, sat up, and faced one of the tombstones. The thought was coming bright and clear now, like a beacon. I had a name. My name is here. Here. Here. It stared at the square of stone, not seeing—not at first—but then the dim shapes began to resolve themselves into something understandable. The zombie traced the carved letters on the stone with its skeletal fingers.
Madness & Mayhem: 23 Tales of Horror and Humor Page 9
