Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre

by Simon Parker

He was crouched down in stealth mode, obviously trying to figure out his exit strategy, but behind him, his daughter was… unlocking the cage! What the fuck was she doing? Oh my God! My heart leapt into my mouth and my brain screamed at my feet to get a fucking move on, but much like a car crash gathers an audience, this scene held my attention captive.

  For once in my miserable, selfish existence I saw the bigger picture play out. The whole thing. The effect this day would have on each and every soul here; the effect this stupid girl’s actions would have on all of us, every last frikkin’ one of us.

  If I’d had any left in me, I’m sure I would have shat myself again, but I remained glued to the spot watching this army brat swing the gate wide open. I watched as Fukwid looked under his brow at her for a second.

  She smiled at him, actually fucking smiled at him, until that huge bulk of rotting flesh, that frikkin’ mountain of stinking meat lifted himself up and charged at her. Her smile became a gape of fear, then a grimace of pain as Fukwid lifted her off her feet, ripped open her tiny pale neck and threw her aside like a grizzly rag doll. From smiling to dead and broken in what felt like a single heartbeat. Her Dad had no time to react. His daughter’s body had barely landed on the packed dirt floor before Fukwid grabbed him and bit him squarely on the forehead, ripping the front of his head clean off. Well, clean was probably not the best way to describe it. It made bile claw its way up into my throat, burning in its ascent.

  Still my feet refused to move, the VW keys swinging uselessly from my finger, begging me to get the hell away from this sickening scene of carnage. This shit was about as real as it gets. When the event, the apocalypse – call it whatever you want – happened, I heard about this stuff, saw it on the news. And then I went into hiding before it came to our town. I’d seen a couple of isolated incidents, but this shit was real, happening right before my eyes. This was disaster, the undoing of everything that had been done to stop the spread of this hellish infection.

  I stood mortified and watching it like it was a frikkin’ horror movie. Fukwid was on a rampage now, a feeding frenzy. One of the ZAT guys was the next victim to fall…in two pieces. Fuck me! Just how strong was that infect? As I watched, he punched out a second and bit the arm of a third before they could even raise their weapons. The fourth just dropped his rifle and ran in the direction of the main crowd, screaming like a stabbed pig.

  Fukwid moved purposefully to the next cage and—

  “Oh fuck no!” I whispered to myself as he opened the cage. This festering leviathan had a plan. He knew exactly what he was doing. I watched in terror as he moved from cage to cage, releasing all the other infects.

  Everything done by the authorities and the military since this all started was now being undone after just a few weeks because of me and my partner.

  Another shot rang out from the crowd; another owner assassinated in public. It jarred me to my senses. Strangely, I got a feeling that the fallen owner was one of the lucky ones. He wouldn’t witness what was to come. I dropped the car key and ran back into the office. As I turned to secure the door behind me, my last glimpse of the outside world was of a terrified ZAT guy pointing in a blind panic at the rapidly advancing hoard of infects. Then I slammed and locked the heavy steel door, sliding the bolts inside.

  I heard more shots ring out, but surprisingly few considering how many armed men were in the arena. I heard the panicked screams of two hundred souls trying to run for their lives and I swear I could actually hear the growls of the infects. Even the wet, ripping noises of those they caught.

  Then it went quiet for a while. Shockingly, disturbingly quiet. But I knew they were out there. I could hear them feeding.

  I spent days in the office, surviving on biscuits and bottled water, but I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t stay here. I could still hear them moving around out there.

  Then came the banging. I don’t know if they heard me crying or if they smelled me. At first I heard just one dead hand banging on the steel wall… then another. Within a few hours they had been joined by perhaps fifty more, maybe a hundred. I couldn’t tell. Either way, that could mean only one thing… they had won! There were more infects than we’d had in the holding pens, that much was certain. The only possible conclusion was that the crowd, and probably the ZAT guys too, were now infects.

  I sat and sobbed, not knowing what the hell I should do. I couldn’t chicken my way out of this one, nor buy my way out. It was that despair that brought with it a moment of clarity.

  I grabbed the bag of money by the door and unzipped it. Excellent… there it was, the Sig Sauer. I took it from the holdall and checked the clip.

  For the next two hours I carefully piled up all the office furniture until I could just reach the tiny skylight in the roof. All the while, the banging continued on all sides, but I tried to block it out and focus on my desperate plan.

  I climbed my makeshift ladder of furniture and reached up to try to pry open the small plastic cover. One side came free and for an instant I felt a thrilling cool breeze, the first fresh air I’d smelled in days, but my hopes were soon dashed as a hand came plunging, grasping into that tiny gap; reaching, snatching at me like I was a prize in one of those games in an arcade. I couldn’t even shut the damn skylight! Another arm reached in, a different size and colour from the first. I fell heavily to the floor, retreating from their grip. My only hope of escape lay smashed.

  I now knew these infects surrounded me on all sides… including above! I’d seen these things before. When they found food, they wouldn’t leave until they’d eaten. They’d find a way in or they’d just wait for me to come out. There was only one thing left to do. I pulled the Sig from my waistband and cocked it as I slid the oily tasting barrel into my mouth. I said a small prayer for the rest of the world and what I’d helped to do to it.

  Please forgive me.

  Post

  Everybody knew the end was coming, but no-one expected it to begin on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in a sleepy village in the east of England. Maybe ‘they’ knew something was going to happen, but even ‘they’ couldn’t have foreseen the extent.

  Sporadic broadcasts still managed to hit the airwaves since it had happened. The reporters guessed it had been just a single bomb aimed at destroying an American military facility that had started the whole thing. Apparently there was a volcanic fault line running under Suffolk that was long known about and long ignored, until that day. The harmonics of the explosion was perfectly tuned to wreak havoc on the world—and wreak it did.

  Over the next three days the whole world tore itself apart. Mountains had crumbled, cities had fallen, continents shifted, land fell away into boiling seas. It was hell on earth.

  Millions died in those three days, and millions more since. I was alive more by blind luck than any cleverness on my part. Those of us left clung desperately to whatever order we could to try and make sense of what remained. That was why I was here—and he was there.

  He’d tried to take the only things I had left, strip me of the final remnants of my existence. I wasn’t about to let that happen.

  It’s almost comical, how you can watch your car, your pride-and-joy, fall into an open pit of churning lava. Or see your family home burn to the ground seconds after you got out with little more than the clothes on your back. Or could witness hordes of innocent people dying in unthinkable ways. Yet you cope with it and keep moving on, more determined not to be counted among their number. Driven by some invisible force to survive no matter what.

  All these things I witnessed with barely a flicker of emotion. Yet let one person break the rules and invade the only private space I have left – my backpack! – and that’s one step too far.

  Take my home, my car, even my beloved smartphone from a life all but forgotten now, but try to take my waterproof jacket and the photo of my family, and you open yourself up to a whole world of hurt.

  I snapped and now he was paying the price for everything I had suffered over the last few
days. He might have thought I was ripe for the picking. But now it was he who would pay.

  I grinned at the situation, at what I was doing, knowing I was channelling all my anger into this one act, against this pettiest of petty crimes in a world fallen from grace. It was out of all proportion but the floodgates were open. I was like an outside observer in my own life, and things had to run their course. Logic was but a dark shadow in a deep pool far away from here.

  He stood there, tied to the scorched stump in what had once been a forest park. He was conscious again. Probably more conscious than he had ever been. The look of terror in his wet eyes was unmistakeable. They were the eyes of a man who realises that he has bitten off way more than he could ever hope to chew.

  I stared at the glinting metal in my hand, my pulse racing but my mind calm and still. Detached, I wondered momentarily whether it had once been part of some large machine. Then I realized it didn’t matter—the only think important was that I had it, and it was sharp as a scythe.

  The sound of his intestines dropping onto the packed earth reminded me of dropping stones into wet mud when I was a child in this very forest park. A relaxed, fixed smile graced my features as warm memories flooded over me. The recollection was so strong as to replace the stench of spilt viscera with the autumnal aromas of damp earth and mouldering leaves. I breathed slowly and deeply, closing my eyes and savouring those sweet smells. The perfume of a life lived long ago.

  I opened my eyes and banished the ghosts, staring at him under the hood of my brow. The satisfaction I felt watching that indescribable spark leave his eyes was a paradox. It thrilled and repulsed me at the same time.

  It was done.

  I turned my back on the sagging bag of skin that now hung from the bonds like so much leather stretched over sticks. I picked up my waterproof jacket and the photograph of my family. My things, my things…My things. Don’t ever touch my things!

  The Tree in the Void

  While I was still a very small child, I learned that when I slept I could control my dreams. I discovered it quite by accident. I was sitting in my dingy room and I nodded off, as toddlers often do. I walked through sunny fields of corn, with talking animals as my friends, and with all the chocolate I could eat. I soon found that these were not dreams, but a real place… a place in the dark spaces between worlds. I had woken on several occasions to find smells in my room that I had somehow managed to bring back, or itching on my legs from sitting among the corn. My body would stay in the solid world while the real me, my soul, would travel to the void.

  From those early days I realised life could be a struggle. My parents cared less for me than for their next bottle of cheap vodka, so my time in the field was something I quickly learned to cherish. I tried to talk to them about it one day, about the happiness I felt there, hoping maybe they could find that same happiness and leave their nastiness behind, but they just laughed at me and sent me to my room.

  Most of my adolescent dream time was still spent in the sunny fields of corn feeling happy and safe, creating the things I most wanted in my waking life but wasn’t allowed. It was as I reached puberty that it all changed for me. Like most teenagers, I began to think about my own mortality… and sex. I thought about sex a lot back then.

  The field grew and changed with me, the landscape becoming more mature with grasses growing in places that had been bare and romantic little areas where a couple could hide away from any prying eyes that may be around. There were paths that led nowhere and rivers full of strange coloured fish that swarmed in schools, playing with the balls that floated on the surface. The air smelled fresh and clean, and the tall grasses swayed in the gentle breezes of my mind. I met many new friends there and spent happy – and often erotic – times hiding in the long grasses in that bright sun. It didn’t occur to me then that all these friends had been women. Not girls. Not boys or men with whom things less superficial could have been shared… but women. Specifically, women who only seemed interested in what I was interested in at that age.

  I often awoke into the world feeling rested and refreshed but incredibly aroused and ready to go again. That was swiftly replaced by the disappointment of realising it was just another shitty day in the everyday world. I say the everyday world rather than ‘real’ world as I know both my worlds are equally real, but I prefer the one I have a modicum of control over; the world I can change with a thought. The world where my body isn’t, only my spirit is and I can do anything, be anyone.

  On the nights filled with sunshine that I lay in the field on my own, I often thought not of sex, but of death. My own mortality. I was young, I knew that. I felt invincible, immortal in both my worlds, but especially in my field. But the thought that all this was fleeting absorbed me. I knew I was different to most of the kids my age. Well, not different… just more advanced I guess, certainly more advanced than my parents and people like them. I knew for certain that my body and my spirit weren’t inseparable. I knew my body could sleep and get rested while my spirit wandered free in a world of my creation.

  That’s not entirely true, though. The void could be manipulated by what I was thinking but it would exist much like a blank canvas exists before the artist daubs his mind’s image onto it. The more I thought about the actual existence of this place, the more confused I got by the paradoxes it threw at me. The questions it raised, I wasn’t able to answer then. At those times I would lay on my back watching clouds cover the sun and realise it was my darkening thoughts that were shading my world. I would immediately sit up and bathe myself in the glorious sunshine again. A choice, a simple decision rather than a victim of circumstance.

  As I progressed further into my teens, I still visited my field most nights, but more often than not, the clouds covered the sun. I’d wander around the tall grasses, sometimes feeling lost and lonely, looking for something. The understanding of what that something was, though, was just out of reach. “I’d know it if I found it” was as close as I could get to naming it.

  On those nights, as my body slept in its dank bed in its musty room in that other world, I would look to the boundaries of my field. I’d never really noticed them. The field had always seemed immense and possibly endless. I had often seen the trees that circled the field, but they had never seemed like a barrier before, just another part of the scene I had a created as a young boy. It struck me now that even as that child who had loved climbing trees in the waking world, I had never once even thought of straying from the field to climb one of these trees. The trees now formed an impenetrable barrier around what had become quite a small field. As I stood, watching these trees swaying in the strong breeze, I noticed the twilight, and realized the sun must now set as well as rise.

  That concerned me, but this was still my world, I made it what it was. I created it and everything in it … didn’t I? I stood there that night, swaying in time with the shadowy trees as the wind bucked each leaf and branch. I found myself enjoying the darkening, relishing the cool of the evening, the refreshing breeze sweeping away the stale sweat of the sunny day.

  That was the night I ventured into my forest for the first time. What little light remained barely penetrated the canopy. Yet once I was immersed in the trees, I could see perfectly. I half-expected to find either a vast white plain or an all-encompassing black abyss, a virgin canvas untouched by my mind, waiting to have its facets cut and polished. I wandered like an awe-struck child in a fully formed and lush forest where the colours shone defiantly in the gloom, daring the rippling shadows to swallow them. The air was hushed like a cathedral as I moved effortlessly below the vaulted canopy of branches.

  I remember wondering how I could have done such a fine job of creating the smallest details of the leaves, far above and almost out of sight. That was when I realised I couldn’t be the sole artist. If my world had been a blank canvas, with me wielding the brush in the foreground, who had painted the rest? It dawned on me that this forest may not be completely mine as the field had been, that I was strayi
ng beyond the edges for the first time, and that this forest may only be a narrow border between my field and the fields of others. I wondered if those others knew their fields or explored their worlds, but those thoughts never troubled me. I still can’t explain it, but somehow everything just seemed to fit.

  I had no idea where I was heading. As soon as I became aware that I was actually looking for something, I found it. The tree. My tree. It felt familiar to me, as if I had known it as a friend in a previous existence and it had been waiting for me to find it again. It was comfortingly tall, about as broad as my shoulders, and it shone with a darkness that made its appearance seem all the more gnarly. I smiled at the warmth I felt as I caressed its twisted and knotted bark; it felt like home to me. The rest of that night I sat with my back pressed against the trunk, getting reacquainted with my friend of a thousand lifetimes.

  The next night was similar, though I headed straight for my tree instead of searching this time. It welcomed me with its open branches low to the ground, and I watched it in the twilight. As I lay there staring up into its branches, I saw a leaf bud form and burst. I watched, enthralled as the vibrant young green leaf blackened and crisped at the edges before falling. As it fell, I felt a sense of doom drawing ever nearer, a foreboding, like the first fateful pangs of an addiction.

  The leaf touched my forehead on its flight and an idea came to me as fully formed as if it had been absorbed through my skin. I was witnessing something amazing. The revelation startled me a little but explained some of what I’d felt instinctively. This was my tree, but this was not my forest. It was the borderlands of darkness between the fields of light. Each of those fields were furnished from these woods. These borders were not the narrow boundary I had first imagined; rather they were an ocean and the fields merely islands. Though the oceans of dark and twisted wood were vast, I felt safe swimming in its depths.