Onyx Neon Shorts Presents: Horror Collection - 2015

by Wesolowski, MJ

  All of that would have been annoying, but still fit into his idea of reality.

  Now there were dead bodies turning up. Half devoured dead bodies. His junkie co-worker had seen at least one of the creatures, apparently part insect and part squid, that were doing the killing and devouring. Severin didn’t doubt that any more. Trask had shot one, but had not killed it, and it had left a foul looking trail of yellow ichor leading up into the dark toward the sluice gate. There were four gouges in the supposedly shatter proof glass, along with circular tentacle marks, on the outside of the control room window.

  Severin could call an election based on polls six weeks out. He was never wrong. He could judge public reaction, if there was going to be any, to proposed policy changes in foreign policy before it was unveiled to a largely uncaring populace. He had been a political whiz kid since before the think tank had recruited him from MIT where he had been studying particle physics, not political science. His op-eds in the campus paper had brought him to their attention. His dead on analysis of the invasion of Iraq had cemented his reputation. Nothing intimidated him.

  Except for whatever was out there. He was terrified, but Trask couldn’t know. Trask’s brain wasn’t wired to deal with a situation like this. It would take logic, not creativity, to get to the other side of this. Severin couldn’t let Trask know that he believed whatever was out there was some kind of monster. One hysteric was enough. Someone had to solve the problem.

  Finally, Severin said, “I see two realistic options here. The first, and most appealing to me, is we put the bodies in the elevator and send them up for incineration. Even though I mentioned them on the phone, I don’t get the impression anyone was actually listening to, much less recording, me. Plausible deniability. No body, no crime. Not that we would have committed any serious crime anyway, in my opinion. Obstruction of justice? Nobody was looking for those people or someone would have come looking for them already. Burn them and be done with it.”

  “And the other option?”

  Trask sounded like a frightened child.

  “Put them in the HAZMAT room and wait for relief. We can hopefully get someone on the phone again. Someone who understands the gravity of this situation. But, to be honest, Trask, I don’t see that happening.”

  “But the monsters, Severin,” Trask said, desperately. “I’m much more worried about those than disposing of their dinner. I’m mostly worried about becoming their dinner.”

  “The whole crypto-zoology aspect of this worries me the least. In a few hours you’ll have your shotgun. I’ll take both pistols. You’ve only encountered two of these things. I’ve yet to see one, although the evidence on the control room window is compelling. After we clear the next mess we’ll go on a hunting expedition up the canal toward the spillway. Kill anything that moves. Now let’s do away with those bodies, get out of these HAZMATS, and get some food and sleep. We’re going to be busy in a few hours.”

  They put the bodies in the elevator and sent them to the incinerator.

  Trask had misgivings, but couldn’t think of any other option.

  The new HAZMAT, the shotgun with ammo, and the drugs were waiting in the dumbwaiter when Trask woke up. He deliberately set his wrist watch for a four hour alarm so he would get to the dumbwaiter first. Sometimes Severin would take his Dilaudid, destroy it, or use it as a bargaining chip to get Trask to pull extra messy shifts. Trask hoarded, but Severin always managed to find his stash. There weren’t a lot of places to hide it.

  Trask had bathed, eaten, and fixed before Severin emerged from his sleeping quarters. He looked like hell.

  Severin had not slept well. His dreams had been filled with mutilated corpses and crablike monsters attacking his girlfriend, his parents. He didn’t want what was happening to be real.

  The mess was worse than it had been the day before. A dozen bodies. More if you counted dismembered body parts. Severin had gotten back on the phone, but even the hiss and the echoing voices were gone. He had yelled and screamed and banged the hand piece on the table until it broke in his hand.

  “Why don’t we stop, Severin?” asked Trask at one point. “Let the mess pile up until they have to send someone to do something about it?”

  “Because we’ll be dead, you idiot,” Severin snarled. “All they have to do to keep us clearing the canal is stop sending us supplies.”

  “Surely someone, friends, our families…”

  “All they have to say is we died doing a dangerous job, you fool. Maybe they already have. We solve this or we never get out alive. Now let’s go hunt your giant insect rats.”

  They moved slowly uphill along the drainage canal, headlamps shooting beams of light into the blanketing darkness. There were sounds all around them, picked up and amplified by their exterior microphones. Water dripping, slithering, scuttling sounds, creaking noises, the squelching their boots made on the slick, slimy concrete, and an unsettling chirping noise.

  “We need to go back, Severin,” said Trask, his voice labored.

  “Why? So you can shoot more of that junk into your veins?”

  “I’d be lying if I said that didn’t have something to do with it, but look around, man. This is some scary shit.”

  Severin wasn’t about to disagree.

  “We can’t go back until we figure out what you saw. And kill it. Or them. Nothing should be able to survive out here. I don’t know how the rats manage it, but I read somewhere that they can survive almost anything.”

  Trask said, “Severin, when’s the last time you saw a rat? I used to see at least a couple on every mess shift. My last two rotations I haven’t seen any.”

  “What’s your point, Trask?”

  “That there’s something new on the block. A predator. The rats have either already been digested by that thing I saw or have split for greener pastures.”

  “Look, I believe you. I believe you saw something, but not a monster. Some kind of animal. A rare one. One tougher than rats, and one we need to watch out for. It’s the bodies that confuse me. We’ve never seen bodies. It doesn’t make sense that—”

  Trask exploded, interrupting him. “Confuses you? Doesn’t make sense? None of this shit makes sense! Every few weeks, as far as I can tell, they stir the pot. Make a change. First the control board, Severin. There were four levers! Four! Then the rungs on the ladder! 82 rungs! 82! Then this shit. Dead bodies. Mutilated. Some kind of creature neither of us has ever seen or heard of before. A fucking monster! And they won’t answer us and we can’t get out! We can’t fucking get out, Severin!”

  Trask sat down on the slick concrete and started sobbing.

  Severin didn’t have any experience comforting someone. Especially a grown man addicted to drugs, which he suspected had something to do with this breakdown. He took a breath.

  “Calm down, Trask. We’re going to work this out. Oh, fuck me…” he trailed off.

  The beam from his headlamp was reflecting in two faceted eyes. The chirping in his headset had gotten louder without him noticing it. He looked directly at the thing.

  It was exactly as Trask described it. A nest of tentacles undulated under the red faceted eyes reflecting his headlamp. Four segmented legs, ending in what looked like barbs, held its white carapace off the concrete. The ridges of the carapace looked razor sharp. Its head, attached by an invisible neck underneath, shifted as it looked at him from a different angle.

  The chirping grew louder.

  Severin slowly looked around. There were at least a dozen of the things spread out around them on the floor and walls. He was frozen in place.

  “Trask…” Severin said, slowly.

  The shotgun blast was loud in Severin’s headset. The thing that had been studying him, and he it, spun off into the darkness with a shriek. Then both men were running like hell down the drainage canal.

  The things could fly. They would clack loudly by, their razor-edged carapaces proving to be folded wings. One hit Severin on the back, knocking him down onto his face and
held on, its barbed legs piercing the suit. Trask used the shotgun as a club and knocked the thing off, before reversing it and shooting one of the things out of the air. Severin rolled to his feet, a pistol in both hands, and fired at one scuttling toward them. He wasted seven rounds before the eighth hit, practically right at their feet.

  “We can’t fight them, Severin!” yelled Trask. “Run for the airlock!”

  Severin did the best impersonation of a person sprinting that he could in the bulky suit, while Trask came up more slowly behind him, providing cover with the shotgun.

  The ladder climb had never seemed as difficult as it did for Severin as he scrambled up it.

  Trask yelled, “Cover me while I climb up the ladder!” but Severin had no interest in stopping. He ran into the airlock and dogged the hatch from the inside, locking Trask and, more importantly, the creatures, out.

  He could periodically hear the muffled boom of the shotgun as he tore the HAZMAT suit off and checked himself out. His shirt was ripped on the back, but it didn’t look like the things’ barbed legs had actually managed to touch him. Trask had saved his life.

  Trask.

  Severin went into the control room. Trask had made it onto the catwalk and was crouched, only firing when two or three of the things were in his field of fire. There were dozens of the things. Severin saw Trask notice him in the window through the face plate in the HAZMAT. His face contorted as he shouted, and Severin could hear a tinny voice coming from the HAZMAT room where he had left the helmet, along with the radio receiver, laying on the floor. He waited until Trask ran out of ammunition and the things swarmed over him to leave the control room and head back into the bunker.

  Severin sent a note up the dumbwaiter that read, “Partner M. Trask killed by hostile wildlife. Unable to fulfill my job functions. Request immediate evacuation. S. Severin.”

  Twelve hours later the dumbwaiter returned. It was empty.

  There were four of them clinging to the window when the clock chimed the second time after Severin abandoned Trask. Severin had noticed off-handedly that there were six levers now. It didn’t matter whether or not he pulled the red one. After a few minutes the lever would pull itself.

  The water and detritus came. The water subsided. The mess had become gigantic. There were five of the things now. They were digging at the glass with their barbed front legs. Severin thought he had a week before the glass started giving way.

  Nothing came in the dumbwaiter anymore. No food or water. No weapons. Nothing he asked for. He tried getting in the dumbwaiter and using the pipe wrench to push the lever down, but it didn’t work. He assumed that the dumbwaiter wouldn’t go up if there was weight in it, but he didn’t have any way to know for sure.

  A week passed. With a sound like a pistol shot the glass in the control room window cracked. The whole thing was about to break inwards.

  Severin took the pipe wrench and headed for the ladder. 82 rungs and he would make his stand. He heard the window go at 55 rungs. He kept climbing.

  There were 92 rungs.

  What Little Remains

  Franklin Charles Murdock

  We’re all missing down here, lost to people who love us. And nobody knows that this man took us from our lives and then took our lives from us. We all have a story of how it happened, of being snatched out of the dark by lunatic hands, and of the horrors that followed; but they all end down in this pit of what little remains of us.

  The man’s name is Seamus and he pretends to be a farmer outside Palmer, Kansas, just going through the motions until he can go hunting out of state for some other hapless boy or girl to add to the mound. He’s the monster in plain sight, everyone’s good neighbor, until he’s alone with his crooked thoughts.

  Sometimes he comes to look down upon us, sitting on the edge of the hole he began years ago in the back of his barn to hide us from the world. He sits up there and remembers taking us from mothers and fathers who would come to know the deep ache of loss, who had their walking and talking hearts ripped away from them by a man they’d never seen or known. But we know and we see, just as Seamus does. We see the monster inside him. We know the greed in his bones.

  Seamus is sitting there now, whistling a broken tune through a mouth that laughs when the carving begins. An old miner’s shovel is balanced across his lap, teetering on his left knee against the fulcrum of its neck. The shovel means he’s planning to widen the pit and add to the weight and stench of death in this shallow hell born in the heart of an evil man. We see him up there through our hollow eyes just as we’ve seen him bring child after child to this place on a journey of death in place of a normal man’s quest of life. Fate brings them here by his reckoning.

  He stops his song and buries the head of the shovel in the sallow earth at his side to use its shaft to hoist his considerable frame so he can get to the business of deepening our plot. But as he pivots to gain footing, the edge collapses and pulls him down to us.

  Seamus tumbles into the heart of the pit as our remains did when he pitched them into the darkness. He lands hard on what’s left of us, breaking bones—some ours and a few of his. And then he’s looking up the dozen feet to where he’d been perched, reminiscing about his cruel deeds. He smells the countless deaths he’s inflicted. He’s sweating now and gibbering in a much different way than when he’s hacking flesh and meat from tiny bones: he wants out of this darkness because it’s too familiar, and because we’re telling our stories to him in a shrieking chorus through discarded mouths.

  We tell Seamus of being snatched from playgrounds and parking lots, shopping malls and swimming pools. We whisper about being stolen in the night from our own beds. And then he hears of our many deaths, how it feels to be alive and aware as the knife comes down to strip flesh, how his incessant cackle sounds as the blood flows and pain takes over. We flood his mind with the last thought we all had before he was finally done and let us die: that we were all children and that children are filled with hope as well as with blood and bones, that as much as he believes he changed our fates, he cannot change his own.

  In a panic, Seamus begins to crawl up a steep incline of femurs and ribs, mandibles and scapulae. We feel his trembling hands upon us and know his fear, as once he knew ours. He scrambles up our remains and throws himself at the crumbling edge of our pit, but there is nothing that can take his weight. The dead hand he clasps offers no help, and when he lands, it is not softly. He comes to rest on his side, his eyes beholding the harvest of his cruelty and he is terrified, not at what he’d done but at what he now cannot: we will never let him go.

  In his anger and madness, he kicks and flails and tries to roll, driving us deeper into his evil heart. So while he begins to bleed out, our bones are jostled loose and come down upon him, burying him here in his pit of secrets. He struggles beneath our weight and that of his destiny, but hope had left him long before he fell into the darkness.

  And so he joins us in silence, not wanting to scream for fear of being found... and found out. Thus his fate is sealed much like he sealed all of ours throughout his wretched and waning life.

  Sylvia’s Pictures

  DJ Tyrer

  Sylvia sits alone in her room, drawing. She is up there with her pencils and her pastels as much as we will let her, and more besides. Sylvia is obsessed with drawing and it is always the same image. Over and over. I don’t know if she’s disturbed, but it disturbs me.

  Sylvia isn’t my daughter. I’m not sure if that excuses my unease towards her or if it makes me a bad person for not trying harder. Sometimes, I feel like the wicked stepmother. Sylvia’s mother was Peter’s first wife, Cassie. She disappeared about a year after Sylvia was born. I met Peter when Sylvia was eight and we married a year later; two years ago—Cassie having been declared dead. She probably was. Peter admitted she was eccentric and I’d always guessed that was a euphemism for insane. In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder if Sylvia is mad like her mother.

  Always the same image. Slight details
in the background might change, but Sylvia draws the same figure in the same childish pose over and over. I remember when we were first introduced, Sylvia was down on the floor of her room compulsively scribbling; she barely lifted her head to acknowledge me. Tidying her room once when she was at school, I discovered a cache of them, going back, ever cruder, into early years. She brings them home from school, draws them in her exercise book; sometimes the teachers worry about her.

  Her pictures have never really bothered Peter much. I guess that when he was bringing her up alone he was grateful for the peace and quiet. Now, he delegates that side of life to me and, as long as Sylvia isn’t any trouble, is disinclined to worry. She’s never any real trouble, if you ignore her problems at school, her preference for doodling over working, her lack of interest in anything else. But, she never does anything really bad. Just draws.

  When I first saw the pictures, I assumed they were meant to be of her mother, that she was trying to perpetuate an idea of her. I think that’s what Peter thought, probably still does. It was a natural assumption: the figure looked rather like a woman in a dress and her missing mother was an obvious candidate. It wasn’t a woman.

  “It’s the Raggedy Man,” Sylvia told me when I asked. “He lives way off across the sea and he took Mummy away. One day, he’ll take me away too.”

  I asked Peter, but he had no idea. It wasn’t a friend of Cassie’s that she might have a memory of, nor a character in some bedtime story he’d told her. He didn’t think talk of being taken away was anything to worry about.

  “She’s probably just talking about death,” he said. “You see what she’s like; she’s my little Goth girl.”