“What the hell are we doing down here?” Patrick asked. “We are leaving our lives in the hand of a goddamn kid.”
Evan Brown, Alan Donahue, his wife, and Lisa had all seen what Russ was capable of. Evan the most. The statement from Patrick brought back the quick memory of being in the field of dead bodies and then going into the Brownsville High School gym. Russ had sucked all the evil away. He had even helped destroy it. If there was a man that was capable of fighting those sons of bitches it was Russ. His mind was more valuable than Evan’s mp5, desert eagle and military skills put together.
“He’s more than a kid,” Evan said. “If you would have seen what he did, you wouldn’t be asking that question. I was stuck in a horrific world, with dead bodies all over the place. The stink was so bad I couldn’t even breathe. He brought me out of it. And he’s going to bring us out of this.”
Patrick sighed and slouched down into his chair. He didn’t want to accept Evan’s word for this, but he really didn’t have a choice. The man had saved his daughter’s life. He owed him that much, maybe.
Jessica had grabbed a choir robe before running to the basement. She was sitting next to Lisa just across from her parents, proudly wearing her new piece of clothing. Part of her was jealous of the woman sitting next to her, and the other part was awestruck by the man upstairs and how much he had changed since high school. Russ had been awkward, geeky at best before. But now he was leading them. Now he was the alpha male, saving the pack from the aliens.
It sounded corny. It sounded so fucking corny that Jessica was having trouble believing that it was the true reason she was there. She was there because some ET mother fucker landed in Brownsville, an alien from outer fucking space. How unlikely it was that something from a planet, God knew where, had brought her back to her family. And back to Russ, almost as important.
When she looked at Lisa she remembered the girl back in the high school bathroom that had caught her puking in the toilet one day. She had told her she was trying to lose a few pounds for cheerleading, which didn’t work out in the end. She dropped out of cheerleading when the drugs and alcohol started. That episode lasted a few weeks, thank God it wasn’t more. Then there was prom, where she made the worst mistake of her life to that point. The only mistake that was worse was the fact that she stayed with him after he beat her.
“So how long have you been with Russ?” Jessica whispered. No one else really paid attention. Willis and Patrick were in deep argument about something on the other side of the room.
“Since about four o’clock this afternoon,” Lisa said.
Jessica held her laugh in. Lisa noticed the smart ass smirk on her face. She thought about telling her the whole story. About how destruction can bring people together faster than anything else in the world. But she ignored the bitch.
Patrick and Willis stopped arguing when Evan fell out of his chair. His eyes were closed and nothing was moving. The dead silence that befell room was disturbing, even the hum had stopped. The next thirty seconds were completely silent.
Lisa tried to get up from her chair, but couldn’t move. There was nothing holding her down, but she couldn’t move. She tried to mouth out a scream, but it didn’t matter. It was like her entire body was paralyzed. Everyone around her was still too.
What the fuck?
Evan twitched, and his body came to life. He aimed the desert eagle at Reverend Willis’s head.
“I want you to pray to your God, right fucking now. Pray that I won’t blow off your fucking head.”
Willis moved. It was really more of a shiver. Alan wanted to jump up and tackle him before it went any further. But he couldn’t move. He couldn’t fucking move. People were going to start dying right in front of him and there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it. Maybe Russ had failed. Maybe the aliens were controlling Evan. There wasn’t a chance that Evan would actually pull something like that.
Willis didn’t do anything. He just shivered.
“Get down on your knees.”
Willis didn’t move.
“I said get down on your fucking knees!” Evan grabbed him by his neck and pulled him to the floor. The barrel of the gun was jammed into the back of his head. “Now pray!”
“Our father, who art in heaven…” He continued as a cold sensation rippled down his back. It was the same feeling he got when Evan had grabbed him by the throat earlier, but he had a feeling that Evan wasn’t doing this to him. It was the alien bastards outside. The kid upstairs was failing.
As he finished up, Evan smiled, then grabbed him by the neck again and tossed him in front of Patrick.
It knew. The fucking thing knew.
“I want you to tell him about your secret, Reverend.”
“I don’t have any secrets,” he stuttered the words. The cold barrel was turning his skin to gooseflesh, but at the same time he couldn’t stop sweating.
“The fuck you don’t!” He pulled him up by his gray hair and made him face Patrick. “Look into this man’s eyes, and tell him what you’ve been doing!”
If Cecilia could move, she would have run. She would have run out that goddamn door and straight for the car outside. It wouldn’t have bothered her one bit if those things caught her –wouldn’t have bothered her at all. Her entire life was about to come crashing down and end with big bang. Willis’s brains would be spread all over the dusty floor, and the secret would be out. Patrick would never talk to her again, and God knew what would happen with Jessica.
But she couldn’t move, and she was nothing.
“Fucking tell him!” Evan shouted.
Willis looked into his eyes. Patrick’s confusion had been growing more and more and fucking more since the day started. It all started with a goddamn piece of burnt toast and a fucking glass of orange juice. There was a hectic day at work where Patty, his secretary, called in sick and the workload went through the goddamn roof. That’s how it always was anyway. But he came home to helicopters flying around saying things about a military quarantine of the area. Then came the undead creatures, and then came the story about the aliens, and now he was about to watch Reverend Willis reveal some god awful secret and then get his brains blasted all over his shoes.
“I slept with Cecilia,” he stuttered.
Evan smiled as Willis spoke. “You make it sound so innocent. I slept with Cecilia. Tell the truth. It wasn’t clean. Tell him what fucking happened!”
Jennifer tried to shake her head, or even turn away, but she couldn’t. The only movement going on within her was her heart. It was pounding adrenaline through her veins. She wanted to run, get away from this fucking place. If they lived through this they would move out of state. Los Angeles, Chicago, or Kansas City –some place where the government wouldn’t let shit like this happen. Where the hell was the military anyway? It was in front of her, with a desert eagle in its hand pointed at the back of a reverend's skull.
“What do you want me to say?” Willis whined.
“Tell him what you fucking did or I’ll paint his shoes with your goddamn brain!”
“I had sex with Cecilia!”
“You’re getting better, hoss. Still not true enough. Fucking tell him!”
“What should I say?”
At that point Patrick didn’t care. He wanted this to be over with. He wanted every goddamn walking abomination outside to die, and every goddamn alien to fly back to their goddamn home planet. Having someone sleep with your wife was bad enough, but walking home with brains on your shoes would be worse.
“You fucked her!”
“I fucked her!”
“Hard!”
“Hard!”
“And it felt fucking great!”
“And it felt fucking great.”
“Shout it!”
“And it felt fucking great!”
Willis had been reduced to complete tears. Everything within him wanted to run, or to fight this man off, but there wasn’t a chance of that. He had a gun, and Willis was a bit slow on foot
.
“That’s better! Now come here!” He pulled him into the middle of the circle of chairs. “I want you to ask your God for forgiveness.”
“Lord please forgive me. It was an awful thing to do and I knew better…” His voice trailed off into a tearful prayer. Evan smiled through the whole thing.
He’s smiling. He was fucking smiling. Alan tried with everything inside of him to move, but he was being held still by some invisible force. Russ had failed, big time. Blood was going to be spilled all over the floor.
“This is why we hate your kind,” he said. “You’re pathetic.”
The shot was loud. It dulled through everyone’s ears, and it briefly reminded Jessica of the dull hearing she had gotten after the shot zipped through her boyfriend’s skull. Only this time the blood and brains were on the dusty floor, not her.
And then they could move, and Evan fell to the ground as if he had fainted. The show was over, but there was a lot on the floor to clean up. Cecilia puked. Patrick couldn’t stand to look at her, and Jessica was in tears. The room was silent.
29
“Get off of me,” Russ said. “This isn’t working.”
Jessica crawled back over to the passenger seat and gave him the look of a child that had just been told no. It was difficult for Russ to look at, but he knew it wasn’t real. None of this world was, and he had wasted precious time trying to determine that. The people back in the basement could have been in danger during that allotted time. For some reason he still couldn’t take control of the dream world, but perhaps he could frighten the alien within it.
“None of this is real. I know it. You can stop hiding you piece of shit!”
“Russ, please. Just stop this!”
He got out of the car and walked over to the passenger side. Jessica just didn’t look like she had in reality. The dream version was intelligent, a little crazy too. But that wasn’t her. Aliens could mimic everything around him, but they couldn’t mimic the personality of a superficial teenage girl that let emotions rule her actions.
“Why don’t you shit heads just get this over with and send the horde of monsters through the goddamn door to rip us to pieces. You’re not fooling me.”
Jessica stepped out of the car and with one swift motion brought her hand across his face. It stung, but besides a nasty red cheek it also delivered the imprint of her wedding ring. “I thought you loved me.”
“Maybe when I was in high school, when I was a desperate geek. But you’re just not real, Jessica. In this world you’re seemingly more intelligent, but a little hot headed. Back in reality you were superficial, stupid and blonde.”
“You’re an asshole.”
Russ closed his eyes and smiled. He could feel it. He could feel the room around him transform back into Willis’s office. That was all the alien had in it. Russ could even see him, sitting inside of his little spherical space ship, holding his tiny green arm over a controller.
“Now it’s my turn,” Russ whispered.
The world around him transformed into a small room with white tiled walls and floors. There was a drain in the middle, and a small metal table above it.
This is your fate.
The alien was on top of the table, and it couldn’t move. It was held down with metallic restraints. Men in white suits gathered around him. A young woman brought over a tray containing scalpels and other dissection instruments. Russ could feel its fear rise. Not only was it about to get dissected like a frog in a first grade science class, it couldn’t tell if the whole ordeal in front of it was real.
One of the men took the scalpel and made the first incision. Black blood flooded out of the small cut across the chest. And it could feel it. It could feel its chest being slashed open. Russ smiled. He was winning.
Then the man branched off and cut it down its abdomen. The gooey black substance continued to squirt out. It looked like tar or oil. Russ could hear the alien’s scream. It sounded like a child with a deep voice, if that was possible. He hoped that the depth of pain was worse than anything anyone in Brownsville had experienced that night, although he knew it couldn’t have been. Nothing was more hurtful than losing a mother.
Bleed mother fucker.
Its hideous screams continued as the man took his body apart one cut at time. Each incision became more painful than the last. The blood was dripping on to the floor and running down into the drain.
I want you to feel the pain of every person in Brownsville, alive or dead. You’ll feel it. You’ll feel it all.
But there was no possible way he could inflict it, and Russ knew it. He could come as close as he possibly could with the physical part, though. The dreams could not imitate the feelings, but they could generate pain physically, or perhaps provoke the pain from the inside.
The alien looked up from the table and saw his organs dripping out his stomach when it cracked. This had happened before to some of his buddies back on his home planet. He had heard about it several times. Radar cloaks and camouflage were the new way to get in, but even those failed. And once those Earthling mother fuckers caught you, they’d chop you up like they do with their cattle, then use your organs for toilet paper. Russ could feel all of its confused thoughts.
How did this happen to me? How did I lose control of this?
And there were others. It had been to this planet before, and the disease had been spread before as well. The attacks were as common as farts. The PMD wouldn’t let us know about it though. They kept it under control, except for this one time. This one time it had gone all wrong. And the alien bastard had dropped its turd in the unflushable toilet. Russ was the goddamn custodian to clean it up.
And it left. The entire scene went away. Russ stared at the window and nothing was there, except a thousand dead bodies. But these ones were actually dead, not walking around like drones.
“I scared it away,” Russ laughed. “It’s over.”
The sea of bodies reminded him of the dream with Evan. There were so many, and soon there would be a nasty smell and blood would run the gutters of every street in the God forsaken town. But he was leaving, and he promised himself that he would never return to this town, or any town out in rural Kansas. Seeing the homey atmosphere wouldn’t remind him of a happy time in a small town. It would remind him of blood, chaos, and the walking dead.
* * * * *
The entire room had crowded around the fainted body of Lt. Evan Brown of the United States Paranormal Military Division, except for the Welch family. Patrick had his face resting in his hands. He couldn’t look up to make eye contact with his wife. Not after what she had done. He would never talk to her again if he could help it. Jessica seemed to have the same reaction. It wasn’t that she cheated, it was that she cheated with a reverend –an old reverend with a wrinkly penis that had been stuffed in her groin. Why would she sacrifice her family for that?
“I’m sorry,” Cecilia whispered as she cried. “I just felt alone. You were too busy with work for me.”
“The fuck I was!” Patrick shouted. “I tried to be fucking intimate, but you wouldn’t go for it! I don’t want to see you again!”
Cecilia got up and ran to the dusty room they had been staying in earlier. None of it mattered to her anyway. The world was going to be over pretty soon, and they would all be dead.
Jessica finally stood up and walked over behind her father, then began to massage his neck. Patrick looked back into her eyes and found something for himself. It was the love of his daughter. She was twenty, but still vulnerable, especially during a disaster like this. He wanted to be there for her. He was going to be the best father he could possibly be.
The crowd standing around Evan sighed when his head lifted from the ground. None of them seemed to notice the brains and blood of Reverend Willis all over the floor, just a few feet from them. Evan gave them a vacant stare when he sat up. He couldn’t remember anything.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I think they took control of you,” Al
an said. “You shot him.”
Evan turned around and looked at the body on the floor. He had hoped for a minimal amount of bloodshed, and after seeing that he slammed his fist into the white tile beneath him.
“I didn’t want anyone else to die in here tonight,” he said. “I couldn’t fucking stop it. My job was to come in here and take out every goddamn one of these creatures and then the alien itself. I couldn’t do it. I watched my men die. I haven’t seen anyone die so horribly.” By the end of his short speech he was crying. It had been the first time since he was a teenager, and that was when his mother had passed away.
Jennifer reached out to her husband for a hug and she wept on his shoulder. They were all going to die down there in that miserable basement. The aliens would take control of him again in a little bit and then shoot them all. It was over.
Lisa remained speechless while she hugged her knees and sat on the floor. What if Russ had failed? Was he really the man that would take them away from this horrid town? The preacher was on the floor with a smashed head brains leaking out. It was enough of a sign for her. Where was Russ and what the hell was he doing?
“It’s over,” a voice came from the hallway behind them. Russ walked into the room. “It’s all over.”
Lisa rushed up to him and hugged him. She wasn’t sure of what he meant by it’s over but seeing his face again made her feel safe again. He wasn’t dead yet, and neither was she.
“What do you mean?” Alan said.
“The alien is gone.”
A deep silence swept the room. Lisa took a step away from him and glared at him as if he were the alien itself. “Are you sure?”
Russ smiled and threw his hands up. “We can leave!”
With tears forming in her eyes Lisa wrapped her arms around him as hard as she could. Russ felt crushed by her, but he liked it. It was a good feeling to have, and he was going to be able to experience it every day for the rest of his life. The bastards were gone. The destruction was over. Peace and happiness could resume.
Super Zombies from Outer-Space Page 18
