There's Blood on the Moon Tonight

by Bryn Roar

  He could prepare for the future, in much the same way they had prepared for the hurricane, but the future, like a large storm, was a force unto itself. All they could hope to do was weather it with the means at their disposal.

  And The Bunker holds all those means.

  Resigning himself to the whims of Fate, Bud sighed. “I think your instincts were right, Gnat,” he said, spitting out the side of his mouth. Tubby barely got out of the way in time. “We’ve got to find Bidwell and get your folks that vaccine.” Like Rusty, Bud ignored his inner voice, telling him it was too late for Ham Huggins (Betty Anne’s Fate was a forgone conclusion). He couldn’t possibly know that, and yet he did. Still, they had to try.

  “Should we tell my parents?” Tubby said, raising his hand. As if he was in school.

  “Don’t see how we can avoid it. It would be unfair to keep the truth from them.”

  “Not to mention dangerous,” said Josie.

  Tubby blinked. “Dangerous?”

  Josie put her hand on the back of his neck. “Yes, love. They’ll need to know what to look out for once we get back to the island…not to mention keeping their distance from Betty Anne and Ham.” The news, while horribly distressing, had at least relieved her about Joel being over in Beaufort. No matter how bad the hurricane might’ve been, it couldn’t begin to compare to the viral storm that might now be raging on Moon.

  Tubby nodded. He didn’t have a clue, though, on how to approach his parents with this sort of news. Not without scaring his mother to death! “My mom will want to speak to Ham…about taking us over to Beaufort, I mean.”

  Bud nixed that. “No one is to approach Ham or Betty Anne until we get the vaccine! That includes you, Rusty. There’s no telling what they might do in their present condition. You said your mother has the red eyes? Is she…is she foaming at the mouth?”

  Rusty swiped at the tears flowing nonstop down his face. He nodded, unable to speak. Josie put her arm around his shoulders and pulled him tight to her.

  “Joe, what about Ham’s eyes?” Bud asked her.

  “I think they’re normal.” Realizing how significant this was, she considered it a moment more. “Yeah! I’m sure of it, Bud! And he wasn’t salivating either!”

  Rusty smiled crookedly. “T-that’s a g-good sign, isn’t it, Buddy boy?”

  “Could be,” Bud said, not wanting to get his friend’s hopes up too much. But yeah, he thought it good news. “Josie, I want you up top with Tubby. Make sure his folks understand the severity of this situation.”

  “No,” said Tubby, shaking his head. “I better tell them myself, Bud.” He knew his mother might go off the deep end, hearing the news, and he didn’t want Josie to witness that spectacle. “But what if my parents insist on taking me over to the mainland with them?”

  ‘Yeah, so? Damn, Tubby! I hope they do just that! And they can take Josie with you while they’re at it!”

  “But I want to help you find a vaccine for Rusty’s folks. What about our motto?”

  Bud shook his head. “Motto?”

  “You know…Creeps go it together…”

  “…always and forever,” Josie said, smiling sadly.

  Bud laughed a little at that. “Yeah. Thanks, Ralph. It’s still up to your folks, though.”

  It was a moot point and Bud knew it. Tubby wasn’t going anywhere. One way or another, like the rest of them, he would live or die on Moon Island. Suddenly, he had a disquieting thought. Mr. T. was up top, on the bow. And Ham, of course, was steering the damn boat. That left one sane person unaccounted for. “Ralph…where’s your mom?”

  *******

  Emma Tolson paused for a moment more at the Captain’s Cabin, situated in-between the two smaller berths, before timidly knocking on the hatch. After telling Frank she was going to start packing up their things, she’d decided at the last second to ignore Rusty’s earlier instructions and look in on his mother anyway. If Betty Anne didn’t answer her knock she’d leave her friend be. Despite the woman’s plea for peace, not offering any assistance to her friend ran completely counter to Emma’s compassionate upbringing.

  Besides, Betty Anne might need some attention she was too proud to ask for; the kind of attention only another woman could properly give.

  “Betty?” she called softly. “It’s me, Emma.” She waited five seconds more, and then knocked again anyway.

  “Enter,” said a guttural voice on the other side.

  Emma was relieved she’d made the extra effort. It sounded as if Betty had taken a turn for the worse. She opened the hatch, which for some reason Rusty had latched from the outside, and held her hand up to her nose.

  Oh, my word! The smell!

  She crossed the room and stopped in front of the privacy curtain covering the Huggins’s bunk. As she slid the muslin drape aside, cold laughter floated out of the shadows on a raft of foul air. The stench bespoke of more than vomit and body waste. Glowing, reptilian eyes peered out at Emma Tolson from within the gloom…

  *******

  “I told you, I locked mom in her berth!” Rusty followed Bud and Josie to the berths below. Tubby had gone up top, where they’d last seen Frank Tolson on deck, hoping Emma was also there by now. “Then I locked the other two cabins down there for good measure! I’m telling you, guys, she can’t get out of her room!”

  Holding onto the railings, Bud leaped down the gangway steps, three at a time. “Yeah, but can anyone get to her?” Reaching the bottom landing, Bud stopped dead in his tracks. Two of the three cabin doors were locked tight, just as Rusty had claimed. The one in the middle, however, stood wide open. Bud brought his hand up to his nose and coughed. “Jesus. What’s that awful stink?” He peered into the murky shadows beyond the open hatch.

  The Captain’s Cabin was dark, the curtains and blinds pulled down over the portholes. A trail of ink-black fluid streamed out of the darkness, flowing to and past Bud’s boots. It looked like oil…No…Blood.

  That’s what it was. Blood. A lot of it, too.

  The hatch opened and closed with the swaying of the surging boat. As the Betty Anne drew closer to land, the seas once more grew choppy and rough. The louvered hatch slammed with a hollow bang each time it struck the metal frame. Like a loose shutter thwacking against a house on a windy night. Scaring the hell out of the kids each time.

  Bud reached out and grabbed it before it could do so again…just in time to hear the stifled giggles. The laughter of a wicked child with an evil little secret.

  He looked back at Josie and Rusty, to see if they’d heard it to—their frightened eyes told the story.

  Again came the giggles. Coming out of the dark. The loose, unhinged laughter of insanity. To Bud, it was an all too familiar refrain. He’d heard that same evil titter eight years ago. In the darkness of his room.

  And in his dreams each night.

  Rusty squirmed his way past Bud. “Momma?” he said, dashing over to the open hatchway. Bud tried to grab him but Rusty was like a spastic squirrel on the move.

  “Come to me, baby!” said the thing in the dark.“COME TO ME NOW!!!”

  “Rusty! No!” cried Josie, also snatching at thin air.

  Finding himself in the midst of a huge red puddle, Rusty paused in gawping wonder, his timidity saving him this terrible day. “Look at all the blood! Oh, Momma! What have you done? For the love of God what have you done?”

  Bud caught up with Rusty and pulled him out of the room, back into the shaft of meager light, streaming dustily down the stairwell. He understood that the light was their sanctuary—just as he had as a child when the Boogeyman had come-a-calling.

  Josie grabbed Ham’s high-powered flashlight, hanging from a hook in the stairwell, and pointed it into the dark berth. Illuminating a scene, surely straight out of Hell’s deepest depths. Two shining eyes peered out from within the reeking gloom. Sly and avaricious. The flashlight found Betty Anne, naked and slick with blood. Crouched over Emma Tolson’s body. Lying together in a viscous pool of gore. Bet
ty Anne had all but severed Emma’s head from her shoulders and was currently feeding from the ragged hole. The blood-bedraggled head flopped backwards on a thin hinge of skin still holding it in place—no more than a band-aid’s width, really.

  Emma’s silvery eyes seemed to look back into the light for some comprehension. Some explanation as to how all this was possible. Her head lolled from side-to-side, side-to-side, side-to-side. The infinitesimal strip of skin the only thing keeping it from rolling away. Terror too awesome to contemplate had frozen the woman’s face at the moment of her death. Her eyes bulging, her mouth gaping open in a silent, eternal shriek.

  The little strip of skin tore free, and Josie gave voice to the dead woman’s lonesome terror…

  *******

  Tubby found his dad right where he’d left him, on the bow of the Betty Anne, as she truddled ever closer to the island.

  “Hey, Daddy. Have you seen mom around?”

  Frank tore his gaze from the Carolina coastline. The somber look on Ralph’s face rocked him back on his heels a little. “Sure. She tried taking some soup down to Betty Anne, but Rusty said his mom didn’t want to be disturbed. I think Emma’s packing up our things right now. She’s eager to get home, you know.” Frank put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “What is it, Ralph? You look so troubled.”

  “Maybe we should find mom first. I have something I need to tell y’all.”

  “Let’s keep your mom out of it for now. She’s worried enough as it is. Tell me what’s on your mind, and then I’ll pass on the bad news when the time is right.”

  Tubby sighed, relieved to pass on that burden. “That sounds fine. To be honest, I’d rather not tell her at all.”

  “Okay, boy. Better shoot it to me straight.”

  “It’s about this rabies business. It, seems that…” Tubby hemmed and hawed, unable to take it any further than that. He looked at his father helplessly.

  “Come on, son, spit it out! What about the rabies?”

  “Sorry, Dad. I just don’t know where to begin.”

  “From the beginning. That’s always the best—”

  A scream from below deck stole the words out of Frank’s mouth, and turned their whole world upside down.

  *******

  Frank and his son rushed into the galley, nearly colliding into Ham Huggins. Hearing Josie’s terrible scream, he’d shut down the engines and dove down the gangway. With Ham in the lead, they flew down the next flight of steps, leading to the berths below, and straight into the backs of Josie and Bud, standing there by the Captain’s Cabin.

  An unintelligible chorus of curses, sobs, and shrieks added to the haze of confusion.

  His son was struggling in Bud’s grasp, desperate to get loose. Ham shoved his way past them.

  “What the hell is going on down—”

  He slipped and fell into the slick tide of blood. A flashlight lay beside him. The one Josie had dropped. Rolling back and forth in the sticky fluid. Its blood-smeary lens briefly caught sight of the carnage before rolling away.

  It seemed to chase after Emma’s severed head.

  “W-what…Was…That…But…No…Em…Emma?” Frank babbled. It took a second pass of the rolling head for Frank to believe his own eyes. “EMMA?!?! OH, GOD, NO!!!” he screamed, running heedless into the dark room. “EEEEEEEMMMMMMMMMMAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”

  “Frank, don’t go in there!” Ham called after him. He grabbed at the flashlight and Frank Tolson’s passing leg. He caught the light, but Frank slipped past him.

  “NO!!!” Tubby shrieked, realizing at last what was going on, that this wasn’t the world’s worst nightmare. “NO DADDY! DON’T! DON’T GO IN THERE!”

  Tubby tried running after his father, but by this time Ham had regained his footing. He grabbed Tubby and heaved the fat boy into Bud’s one free arm.

  “GET THEM OUTTA HERE, BUD!”

  Rusty wailed like a lost child in the woods. “MOMMMMEEEEE!!!” His tiny fists beat impotently at the merciless arm holding him fast to Bud’s side. “LETGOFME!YOUFUCKINGASSHOLE!LETGO!!!”

  “DADDY!!” Tubby sobbed. “COME BACK, DADDY!! COME BACK HERE!!” Like Rusty, he struggled wildly to free himself from Bud’s vise-like grip.

  In the flailing shadows, Frank screamed. Betty Anne had attached herself to his skinny arm like a hungry animal. She roared around the mouthful of meat, letting the others know that this too was her kill.

  “BUD, FOR GOD’S SAKE!” Ham again implored the beleaguered boy behind him. “GET THEM OUT OF HERE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!!!”

  Ham skated across the slippery floor and found Frank Tolson and Betty Anne in the center of the room, in a twisting, growling embrace. Dancing across the cabin in a demonic sort of waltz. He tried to pull the grieving man from Betty Anne’s clutches, but it was like trying to snatch a scarecrow from the jaws of a Pit Bull. Helpless, he watched his once sweet wife tear a chunk out of Frank Tolson’s forearm. As if it was a turkey leg on Thanksgiving. Arterial blood sprayed the low ceiling over their heads, creating a surreal shower from up above, the hot hemoglobin trickling down Ham’s face. The salt from Frank’s veins stinging his eyes.

  Ham stood there in the bloody rain, watching his wife attack Mr. Tolson with a primal rage so rivetingly awesome it took his breath away. Aroused like never before, his penis grew hard as a rail spike.

  OOooohhh, the unbridled ferocity. Like a tigress after the kill. So wild and beautiful! So…so…sexual…

  His eyes flickered on, red and bright, as if some internal light source in his skull had suddenly ignited. Ham was one ofThem now. But by God, he was fighting it!

  Betty Anne ignored her awe-struck husband and went straight for Frank’s throat. Only Frank wasn’t ready to die just yet. He fought back savagely, landing heavy, desperate blows upon her face and head. Enraged by his wife’s murder, he was every bit the demon’s rival. His crushing blows quickly altered the landscape of Betty Anne’s once lovely countenance.

  “STOPTHAT!!!” Ham Huggins implored the heavens, his hands pulling away at his face, his fingernails leaving bloody ditches down his cheeks. “AWWLORDNO!!!PLEASEMAKE‘EMSTOPTHAT!!!”

  His to-the-marrow-despair was grief defined. It was a lonely lament Bud recognized all too well. One he’d voiced himself as a child eight years ago. It brought about a sluggish inertia in him that he found oddly comforting. To just close his eyes and give in to the insanity. It seemed so futile to fight it. He resisted the sleepy torpor, though, and struggled to do as Ham had bidden him—to get his friends out of the feeding lion’s den, so he could bolt the hatch closed. To quarantine that awful frenzy in there.

  Yet strong as Bud was, Rusty and Tubby were more than he could handle together. Rusty flailed about like a lunatic without a straightjacket, determined to go to his father’s side. Tubby likewise had resolved to save his dad—he put all of his two-hundred-and-seventy-plus pounds to work, and had nearly torn free from Bud’s sweat-slicked grasp, when Big Red turned the tide by pushing all three of them up the gangway, like a blocking sled.