While she’d been waiting, she’d counted twenty-seven pregnant men and three who appeared normal. She scanned the room quickly. White shaped figures milled in confusion. When her vision reached the small stage at the other end of the room she stopped. Atop the stage were three white shapes. Two stood, and one knelt, his head bobbing in a familiar rhythm.
Concentrating, She finally made out, not a white figure, but a figure made of complete darkness standing in front of the kneeling figure. Even the technology of the goggles could not illuminate the form, and that fact told her much.
A man bumped into her and she spun, catching him on the side of the head with the butt of the shotgun. He screamed as he went down and the sound stilled the milling men. A moment later, they were running blindly, adding their screams to the increasing din.
Greta fired mechanically. Although each flash of the barrel temporarily blinded her enhanced sight, with so many targets, she hardly needed to aim. When the shotgun was empty, she let it clatter to the floor rather than reloading. She snatched up her Colt AR-15 that a Good Old Boy over in Sweetwater had modified to automatic for her. The staccato sounds of supersonic death thundered over the screams as she raked the barrel from side to side. She reloaded five times, sending one hundred and eighty rounds of 5.56 millimeter murder into the crazy harem that had been an Elks Lodge.
She dropped the smoking rifle and drew two nine-millimeter pistols. Greta stalked among the bodies. Where she saw movement, she placed a round into a head. She was like a rancher culling a herd.
Chest heaving and sweat dripping from her body, she found herself at the foot of the small raised stage. She saw three illuminated forms sprawled along the wooden floor, unmoving. The darker figure was nowhere to be seen.
Greta cursed and ripped off the goggles, becoming as blind as her prey. She reached into her cargo pocket and removed a flare. Closing her eyes, she removed an end and lit the phosphorous. The initial spark blinded her even through closed lids, but it was nothing like it would have done had her eyes been open. Greta tossed the flare onto the stage and grabbed her last shotgun—this one had a pistol grip and hung from a strap from over her shoulder and held special ammo.
She heard laughter. “Why did you come?”
Greta spun toward the source of the question and blinked her eyes trying furiously to clear her ruined vision. She recognized the voice and felt the ghosts of hands along her camouflage-covered skin as it returned the memories of the rape.
“You know why!” she screamed.
Her vision began to clear. The immense figure, that had been mere darkness with the goggles, appeared in all its frightening reality. The figure in front of her stood nearly eight feet tall. Spines protruded along its naked body at odd, uneven angles. Broad feet displayed seven wicked claws. A mane of hair flowed down its back in a parody of a punkish mohawk. Two red eyes sat above a mouthful of dagger-like teeth. From between muscular legs hung a great dangling penis, easily two feet long, covered with purple slickness.
Greta gagged as the reality of the form struck her.
“Not what you expected?” came the warm voice.
“I... I didn’t know what to expect.”
“What form did you expect your rage to take, Greta?”
“My rage... ?”
“It was you who made me. Who called me forth.” The demon laughed harshly. “I am what you wanted.”
“No,” Greta screamed. “It was you!”
“Ah, my dear Greta. My poor misunderstood sperm-recycler. You begged me to do this. You are the one who proposed this,” he said indicating the carnage with a taloned hand.
“Did you know that your father was the first?”
She screamed and fired the shotgun at the laughing demon. Five rounds exploded in the flesh, creating huge divots of purple wounds. When the priest had seen her soaking the buckshot in the church’s baptismal, she’d told him to fuck off. He wouldn’t have understood, anyway.
The demon fell backwards, the sounds of its multi-octave pain like an airplane engine in the confined space of the lodge. Greta staggered forward, the discordancy threatening her consciousness. She fired the remaining two rounds into the ugly penis and reveled as it disappeared in an explosion of purple flesh and blood.
She stood over the thing that had been part of her for the last two years. Powerful eyes stared back into her soul and visions of her father on his knees shot through her like a bullet.
“You have gotten the best of me, child,” came the wheezing voice. “I feel the tug. I am not long here.”
Whatever Greta expected to feel at this point, sadness wasn’t it. Empathy poured from the demon in waves and as it washed over her, her rage was sublimated with melancholy grief and the senseless deaths of the men.
The thing smiled as its skin began to slough off and its eyes collapsed inwards.
“I will return, Greta,” it said as several teeth fell blackened to the ground. “Until then, my progeny shall rule.”
All firmness left the demon and she watched as it slid into a pool of flesh and bone. The liquid reflected the white light of the flare and as she stared into it, she could see a swirling of faces: her father, Henry, Fred, Alvin and dozens more she didn’t recognize, each agonized and screaming somewhere far away. Laughter echoed in her head as the pool shrank upon itself and disappeared in a pop that sent her to her knees with the pressure.
“Progeny,” she said, the word echoing in the dead room. And they were her children.
It’s a Sick World
by David Whitman
“This grave better not be the same as the last one,” Brooks said, gazing down at the coffin and brushing the dirt away from the lid. He pulled at his goatee as he stared at the casket.
The full moon shone down on us, granting more light than we wanted while doing such an illegal task. The night air was unnaturally cool, giving me the unsettling impression that I could feel the physical presence of the dead. Every time the wind would blow through the trees, sending shadows moving about in dream-like dances, I would jump.
City boys like me don’t function well in the south. Being a black man didn’t help matters any, either. I was more paranoid this far down south than I was in any big city area, but so far, everywhere I went stereotypes were being broken. I hadn’t heard the word “nigger” uttered one time, nor had I felt any racism. Being in a graveyard at night, though, dug up all my fears of cartoony redneck motherfuckers with red plaid shirts and memberships in the local Ku Klux Klan. It wasn’t too hard to imagine a brother hanging from one of the thick-limbed trees dotting the graveyard, a circle of white sheeted Klansman standing around with flickering torches.
I had a bad feeling about tonight. The whole atmosphere reminded me of a horror movie. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a brother survive a horror movie. That shit always pissed me off. Even when they were heroes, like in Night of the Living Dead, the brother got his ass killed.
We had spent the last few months trying to make a living at our various cons and scams and not doing a very good job of it. It was Brooks’ idea to get out of New Orleans and go out here in the Deep South to make some money. He figured the city folk were just too smart anymore, and that we would have a much easier time pulling a con on the country bumpkins. Shit didn’t work out that way, though. If anything, they were even wiser-more suspicious to anything we tried to pull. The pickings were damn scarce. It was Brooks’ idea to rob the dead, not mine. I figured that most people who had expensive jewelry willed it to their relatives.
“No, Rudy,” Brooks had said as I tried to shoot down his dumbass idea. “The dead are fucking rich. I had a buddy that used to do it and he made a shitload of money. Not only that, but this kind of jewelry could never be traced back to us. Who would think of tracing it back to the dead?”
The only problem was that things got a little strange when we dug up our first grave. We shrugged that off and moved on to the second, only to have the same damn problem. This was our fourth nig
ht in Greyson’s Cemetery and our fourth freshly dug grave. Shit just wasn’t working out.
See, I’ve always believed in karma. This is why my life is so fucked up. My granddaddy always used to say, “It always comes back to bite you in the ass.” I can’t tell you how many times that came true. I spent my whole damn life getting bit in the ass. I just can’t help myself. I keep damning myself no matter how much I try to see straight. I used to be in college. Look at me now. Shit, to think I was going to be a writer at one time in my sorry life.
I hate cemeteries to begin with. They scare the living shit outta me. Robbing graves was probably fucking up my karma in a real big way. Sometimes, I tried to rationalize our scams. I felt that if they were stupid enough to fall for our little tricks, then they deserved the loss of their money. To Brooks and I, it was like a game—a game which we lost more than we won. Robbing the dead was different—it was invading a place that should not be entered. Taking what was not meant to be ours. I just knew it was going to blow the hell up in our faces.
“Shit,” Brooks muttered, as he began to pry at the coffin lid, his round belly shaking up and down. “If it happens again, I think I’m gonna cry.”
I nodded and held my breath. This grave was a relatively old one belonging to a corpse by the name of Bannen Wilde. “I think it is,” I said. “It looks tampered with.”
The coffin opened, sending up a vague scent of dirt and mildew. We leaned over and peered in.
It was empty.
“Shit!” I shouted, falling back into the soft dirt. “Another five hours lost. Screw this shit, Brooks.”
“How the hell could the whole cemetery be empty?” Brooks asked.
He knew I sure as hell didn’t know the answer. Just thinking about it gave me the chills, big time.
Brooks slammed the coffin lid down, sending the stale and musty air into my face. “Fuck this,” he said. “Let’s not even bother putting the dirt back. Some sick bastard is beating us to it.”
I threw him a smile. “Sick bastard? As opposed to our grave robbing asses?”
He nodded and rubbed his shaven head. “Well, yeah. We only want the damn jewelry. Whatever sick fuck-”
“Fucks,” I added. “Sick fucks as in plural. I doubt one person would rob a grave by himself. Too much work.”
Brooks paused and looked at me, thinking about what I said. His face registered his annoyance. “Whatever sick fucks did this are different. They are stealing the bodies. What would anyone want with a corpse?”
“I don’t even wanna think about that,” I said, offering the handle of my shovel to Brooks as he climbed out.
Brooks sat down on a tombstone and lit a cigarette, the glow of the match making his pale face look eerie. He held the pack out to me and I grabbed one hungrily. I watched as he blew smoke into the black night, wondering what we were going to do.
I gazed around the place with my writer’s eye. Greyson’s Cemetery had a mix of graves, both old and new—some of the graves dated back all the way to the colonial period. Thick trees reached out to the moonlight like mottled arms. The tombstones dotted the landscape like crooked teeth, a light breeze blowing through them. After spending the last four nights in here, I had begun to hate it.
“You know, there is a way to make money out of this,” Brooks said, inhaling deeply on his cigarette.
I knew exactly where he was going. “Yeah. The kind of people that rob graves would hardly want the police to find about it.”
It was decided that easily. We spent the rest of the evening putting the dirt back in the hole. The plan was to catch the sick motherfuckers in the act of stealing the bodies. We would ask for a nice sum of money and then disappear with the loot.
There was only one dark road that led to Greyson’s Cemetery, so we parked just outside, hiding the Cadillac carefully in a thick clearing of trees and shrubbery. Any car that passed by in the darkness would have no choice but to ride right by us.
They didn’t show up until four nights later.
A truck cruised by, its headlights off. It drove about a hundred yards past where we were hidden and stopped. It pulled inside the trees, not unlike the way we had done. We didn’t see them again, they had probably just entered the graveyard from the woods.
We waited about ten minutes and then quietly crept up to where they had parked. We both had our guns out, not taking any chances.
We moved as silently as possible through the darkness. Although we didn’t see anyone, I still held my gun out in front of my face like a talisman. No one was in the front seat. The back of the truck was empty as well and smelled vaguely of rotting meat.
“Should we wait for them here, or go get them inside the graveyard?” I asked, studying the trees for any kind of movement.
“Let’s wait here,” Brooks said, just as the world exploded into noise.
Brooks’ fat body was sent airborne. He landed on me heavily, crushing me into the ground like a pinned bug. Brooks was gasping as if he couldn’t breathe.
A boot stomped down onto my wrist, sending waves of exploding pain spidering up my arm.
“Let go of the gun,” a deep, cold voice said in an odd accent that I couldn’t quite place. He kicked the gun out of my hand and stepped back.
I couldn’t see his features. His body was unnaturally thin and his arms and legs jutted out in spider-like sticks. The glare of the flashlight hit me in the face, blinding me.
Brooks was still coughing to my left. The flashlight moved over to him, revealing a huge gaping wound in his stomach.
The flashlight stabbed back into my face. “Who the hell are you, nigger?” the man asked. “You sure as hell don’t look like no cops.”
“We were just curious,” I said, squinting in the light.
The man laughed, a sound like glass being ground together between two cinderblocks. “You just entered into a fucking nightmare, kitty cat.”
“What in the hell is going on, Caleb?” a voice said from behind the truck.
“Looks like you won’t need to dig tonight, Jobe,” the man answered. “I got your corpse right here.”
Two more shadowy figures walked down and stopped a few feet from me. Although I couldn’t tell in the darkness, one appeared to be a child.
“Don’t go too close, Hezekiah,” Jobe said. “We gonna take them both?”
“Yeah,” Caleb said. “Daddy will be happy. Hold this flashlight into the nigger’s eyes.” He moved forward and stuck the barrel of the shotgun into my forehead. “Roll the hell over and put your hands behind your back. Hezekiah, go grab that wire that’s under the seat.”
A few minutes later and I was hog-tied, my hands attached to my ankles. They lifted me up and tossed me in the back of the truck like a bag of garbage.
“Oh shit, this is a fat one,” Jobe said and I felt Brooks’ body land heavily on my leg in a flash of bone cracking pain. Warm blood spilled out onto my thigh from Brook’s wound.
The truck lurched forward as I struggled, the wire digging excruciatingly into my skin. We drove on for about forty-five minutes. I had given up trying to get out, because every time I pulled, the wire sunk deeper into my flesh. Every time we hit a bump, Brooks’ heavy body would bounce up and down painfully on my ankle.
When the truck came to a stop, I was almost weeping. My imagination was beginning to taunt me with all sorts of heavy shit. Every redneck movie I ever saw was beginning to creep up on me. I half expected that retarded boy from Deliverance to jump out and start plucking away on his banjo.
A family that needed corpses would do anything.
“Hezekiah, go tell Daddy we got a surprise for him,” Caleb said, pulling the back of the truck open. “The nightmare is only beginning, kitty cat.”
Jobe laughed, sounding like a man who was being choked and was enjoying it sexually. “Why do you keep calling him kitty cat?”
“The poor nigger told me he was just curious. Curiosity killed the cat, get it?”
“That’s just ripe,” Jobe
said in between fits of giggling.
They pulled Brooks’ corpse from the back of the truck and left me alone for a few moments. I was surprised by what I had glimpsed of their house. Judging by the way these sick dudes were acting, I expected to be taken to a trailer or something, but it was a large two-story Victorian that appeared to be well maintained. The porch light was on, diminishing the darkness considerably.
An old man was watching at me from the end of the truck.
He studied me quietly, cocking his head to the side as if he heard something that my ears could not pick up. His eyes, in the dim light, looked like those of an insect-no pupils, impossibly large and expressionless. His neck was wrinkled, leading up to an unnaturally smooth face. White hair stuck out of his head in dirty and greasy tufts.
“Oh, Maria,” the old man rasped. “I will bring you back to me, I promise.”
He walked away, leaving me to puzzle out what he had meant. For some reason his sentence scared the hell out of me. It sounded so bizarre—so insane.
Caleb appeared at the end of the truck. His hair was shoulder length, protruding out of his skull like thin spider webs. His skin clung to his face in the same way rotting skin clings to a decomposing skull. He smiled widely, his cheekbones jutting out as they threatened to break through his frail skin like knives. “Hello, Kitty cat.”
Jobe came up from behind him, his eyes narrowing under a thick bushy eyebrow. He had one of those brows that my daddy used to call a unibrow—one solid line of hair from eye to eye. A smile appeared in the confines of his wooly beard. “Here, kitty kitty.”
They untied my hands from my ankles, but tightened the wire into my wrists. I could feel the blood dripping down into my fingers as the wire dug deep into my flesh.
They led me onto the porch of the Victorian house and through the freshly painted front door. The smell hit me like a brick, smashing into my nose in a way that could only be called intrusive. The word that came to mind was rancid. It smelled like someone had opened up a mass grave.
To my left was a living room. The tow-headed boy, Hezekiah, sat mesmerized by a television. He glanced at me as we walked by but showed little emotion. Family photographs dotted the wall. They led me down damp stairway and into a brightly-lit basement.
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