by Ray Wallace
The few seconds of agony seemed to stretch on for hours. When the cigar was extinguished, the presence in his mind disappeared and he collapsed to the floor, rubbing the blister that was already forming under his arm. The need to scream had passed and he lay there, moaning and breathing heavily. At some point he realized that his name was being called, that there was a banging at the door. With no little effort he got to his feet, pulled on his shirt, turned the ceiling fan on high to dissipate the smell. After taking a few more deep breaths he forced a smile onto his face and opened the door.
"Sorry, honey," he said. "I dozed off."
"You were making noises. I thought you hurt yourself."
"A bad dream, that's all."
"The door was locked."
"Was it? Damn thing. I've been meaning to replace that handle for a while now."
She looked worried but what could she say? Theirs was a very open relationship. It was during their honeymoon those eight years ago when they had agreed that they would never hide anything from one another.
I guess there's a first time for everything, thought Bob as he made his way to the bathroom to put some cream on his burn mark.
*
That night Bob couldn't sleep. He lay there in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling barely visible in the glow from a streetlight outside. The burn mark under his arm throbbed dully, a constant reminder of the afternoon's insanity. Just what, exactly, had happened? Was he possessed by a demon? The thought almost made him laugh as he had never considered himself a particularly religious person, certainly didn't believe that demons actually existed. The only logical explanation was that he was losing his mind since he could think of no way in which any sane individual would behave in such a way. The thought terrified him.
He recalled a time, many years ago, when his uncle had "flipped his lid" as his father had put it. The man was a Vietnam vet and had apparently given in to delusions that his neighbors were in fact "Charlie," had barricaded himself inside his house during a stand-off against the police, eventually surrendered without harming anybody. His uncle had been taken away to "the nuthouse," a place in which young Bobby assumed he would spend the rest of his days in a straightjacket, staring at a wall, pumped full of drugs, taken to a "special room" for the occasional electric shock treatment. Or so he had been led to believe by schoolmates and a particularly sadistic older cousin whom he would encounter at the, thankfully, rare holiday get-together.
Of course, when he had gotten older, he realized that such tales were not true or were, at the very least, grave exaggerations. His crazy uncle had eventually come to grips with reality and was released from the mental institution in which he'd undergone his therapy. But the seeds of fear, irrational as they were, had been planted in his young mind and over the years they had grown into thorny bushes leaving him with an innate dread of ever "losing his mind" himself. Which was exactly what seemed seemed to be happening.
A car drove by outside and the subtle glow in the room intensified for a moment. He turned toward his wife, placed a hand on her thigh, took some comfort in the simple fact that she was near. He looked past her to the dull green numbers on the clock: 3:22 AM. Gotta get some sleep, he told himself and rolled over into a more comfortable position. The worrying can wait until tomorrow, when the sun is up and the world is a more logical place. He made himself think pleasant thoughts, forced himself to breathe in long, measured breaths, was pleasantly surprised to feel his dread fading, to find himself drifting toward slumber.
And that's when it happened. Again.
A will that was not his own forced him to sit up and get out of bed slowly, gently so as not to wake his wife, to pull on his slippers and walk through the darkness over to the dresser near the bathroom door. He pulled open the top right drawer, slid his hand beneath the shirts located within, removed the twenty-two caliber handgun hidden there. The weapon felt solid, surprisingly heavy in his hand as it always did on the few occasions he found the nerve to actually handle it. He didn't like guns, had only purchased one after a colleague of his had become the victim of a home invasion.
Bob left the room without checking to see if the gun was loaded - it always was - walked out into the hallway and down the stairs to the kitchen, grabbed his keys from the table where he had left them. After turning off the house alarm he went out into the garage. Moments later the garage door slid open and he was guiding his BMW down the driveway then out onto the street where he turned left and drove away into the night.
Bob's dread had turned to terror. What the fuck?! What the fuck?! echoed through his mind as he made his way toward the downtown area, no clue as to where he was going or what he would do when he got there. Something with a gun, that much was obvious. Oh, God no...
Eventually, he pulled up in front of an all-night diner. With a hand that was beyond his control, he reached out and opened the driver's side door, exited the car on legs no longer his own. Dressed in a t-shirt, blue pajama pants, and a pair of brown slippers, Bob walked across the parking lot and into the diner, a shiny silver pistol in his hand.
A young woman wearing a tired smile opened her mouth to greet him. He shot her in the face. Rounding a corner he entered the brightly illuminated main dining area, watched the few people eating there and the single waitperson scurry away from him, trying in vain to find some cover. Firing with a deadly precision he had never before possessed, he killed four more people on the spot then put the barrel of the gun to his temple, unknowingly aimed at the place where a tiny black sliver of something that looked like plastic but definitely was not was located...
And then Bob's finger pulled the trigger.
*
Three tall, gray, humanoid creatures materialized next to the bed where a distinguished looking older man and his wife lay sleeping. Twenty tests they had run. The last seven had been resounding successes. The time for testing was over.
One of the trio gave the couple a heavy dose of a hypersonic frequency from a small metal box before they grabbed the man and disappeared.
The First Lady never had a clue that her husband was gone.
- WITH A WHIMPER, AFTER ALL -
Author's note: Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice... What if it's neither? What if, instead, there is a man in a black suit and a top hat with a gun and a seemingly endless supply of bullets? A man impervious to harm. A man who one day decides to start shooting every man, woman, and child he comes across. What then?...
*
The killing started in a small village located at the southernmost tip of South America. A tall, thin, pale-skinned man dressed in a black suit and a top hat walked into the village with a big black-and-silver gun in his hand and started shooting. One shot per person, head or heart, his aim was true. A mother of three hanging laundry behind the wooden shack that was her home was the first to die. Her children were next. Then the old man across the road. His daughter. Two of her friends. And on and on until all four-hundred-and-seventy-two people who lived in that village were dead. Sure, some people tried to run or hide once it became clear what was happening, and a few tried to fight, but it did no good. The tall, pale man was fast. Too fast. None escaped him nor got near enough to leave even so much as a smudge upon his immaculately pressed suit. And he seemed able to sniff out anyone who was hiding. Not once was the man seen reloading his weapon. And not once did the smile leave his face during all that killing.
The next village fell in short order. And the next one after that. Anyone encountered along the roadways between villages was laid low. Then it was on to the towns and the cities, the banks of rivers where the boat families lived, the depths of the forests where primitive tribes had been living since time immemorial. The old, the young, the innocent, the purveyors of sin, it mattered not. They all fell. Every last one of them. Not a single person was spared.
The wholesale slaughter of the millions who lived in Buenos Aires went on for a very long time. By now, word had spread to the rest of the world abou
t what was happening. As unbelievable as it seemed, there was a man, a lone man, going about the business of single-handedly exterminating the entire population of a major city. Aerial footage showed the killer at his work. People retaliated. Guns and even major explosives were used - mostly rocket launchers and hand grenades. And when the smoke would settle and the dust would clear it could be seen that these weapons had no effect at all. The man calmly went about his business, walking up to people and shooting them dead. No mark could be discerned upon his person. The suit he wore always looked as though it had come straight off the tailor's rack. It, like the man, were obviously impervious to harm.
An invisible barrier surrounded the city. The people trying to flee the unstoppable killer found themselves hemmed in, unable to pass beyond the city limits. The dead piled higher and higher near the barrier like flesh and blood snowdrifts. The news helicopters hovering high above caught the killing in all its gory details and broadcast it for the rest of the world to see.
When nothing on two legs moved within that city except for the man in the black suit, he passed through the barrier as if it wasn't really there at all and took his murderous intent to other nearby towns, to other cities.
Years passed and the killing continued. No one was spared. Babies, for God's sake; he even killed the babies. Throughout North America the man took his grisly business. Europe. Asia. Australia. New Zealand. Islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. If there were people there the man would eventually appear, as if out of nowhere, and his gun would sound and the screaming and the pleading would begin. Through it all he wore that smile on his bone white face. It was obvious to all who saw that expression in the few moments before they died that the man was truly enjoying himself, that here was someone doing what it was that he'd been brought into the world to do.
Decades went by and nearly half the world's population was laid low. Anarchy reigned. The man with the gun was helped in his business when a certain global power panicked after a hundred million or so of its citizens were murdered, including some members of the ruling class, and launched its nuclear arsenal. Other countries responded in kind. The war that everyone had long feared came and went. Billions died. But there were survivors, hiding in the caves carved by time and erosion in the faces of mountains, or below the earth in manmade bunkers. But, eventually, these people too were found. Throughout the long winter darkness following the war, the man kept right on killing until, eventually, there was one man left, sitting near a fire beneath the starless black sky. He was wrapped in thick furs, the exposed skin of his face a map of sores. In his hand he held a stick on the end of which was impaled the carcass of some scrawny animal, sizzling in the heat of the flames.
The man in the suit stood staring down at the other man for a while, his head tilted to the side just a bit, like a cat watching a bird with a shattered wing. The seated man stared back, the fear evident in his face along with something else there. Acceptance. Without warning the gun spoke and the seated man dropped his dinner into the fire then grabbed at his stomach, moaning. He fell onto his side and lay there twitching for a time, various expressions of the agony he felt escaping his mouth. These noises became less and less until they were no more. Then there was only the sound of the wind.
The man in the suit looked to the sky, that omnipresent smile on his face, and spoke for the first time since he'd come into the world: "It is done." This was followed a few moments later by: "Thank you."
Then he turned and walked away from the fire's paltry light and let the darkness consume him.
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR -
Ray Wallace is the author of
The Nameless, The Hell Season,
and the One Way Out novels
Escape from Zombie City and Escape from Zombie Island.
He also writes reviews for chizne.com.
You can find him online at
raywallacefiction.com
or
facebook.com/RayWallacefictionpage
among other places.
Table of Contents
- ONE OF THE SIX -
- IT CAME FROM THE SWIMMING POOL -
- A DREAM OF AN ENDLESS HIGHWAY -
- THE FEW FOR THE MANY -
- SHOWDOWN IN ZOMBIE TOWN -
- THE LATEST CRAZE -
- THE NAMELESS -
- KEEPSAKE -
- TIMES LONG PAST -
- THE THING WITHIN -
- LETTING THE DEMONS OUT -
- THE FULL SEVEN COURSES -
- DISCONNECTED -
- WHO'S LAUGHING NOW? -
- TEST RUN -
- WITH A WHIMPER, AFTER ALL -
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR -
