by Nick Younker
But it would be another seven hours before he showed up at the riverboat, and another three hours of drinking and debauchery before Sandra would be able to convince him to get him back to the room with her.
She had laid it on thick with Larry. Candy was standing beside the bar directing her every move. But he had finally given in and tickled her rear end as they walked off the Riverboat and crossed the street to the hotel. Candy followed them into the hotel room, much to Larry’s surprise.
When they got into the room, Sandra kissed him and loosened his belt. Larry cupped her rear end while trying to pull her pants down.
He was a little skittish at the idea of having her mother in the room with them while they were in the early stages of a sexual encounter, but he was also intoxicated enough that it did not stop him.
Sandra slammed him down on the bed and pulled his pants off. He pulled his shirt over his head and Sandra started undressing in front of him — along with Candy.
Larry’s squeamish feelings about Candy’s presence intensified, but he decided to just not look at her and only focus on the hot little number in front of him so he could get his rocks off and get the hell out of there.
Who cares what kind of sick twisted shit they’re into? One good fuck and I’m out. I’m not touching that other lady, Larry thought to himself.
Sandra crawled on top of him and got right down to business, positioning his penis just right for the soft entry. An all-out sexual frenzy ensued.
Candy had walked around the side and stood behind Sandra during the sex, cupping her breasts and giving her rear leverage.
* * *
Sebby and Ellen had been in their mother’s car in the parking garage for hours now. They had both gotten into their pajamas about an hour before and they were still upset about their dad.
“I think we need to just go live with Dad after we get home. He’s going to be just fine. Don’t listen to Mom,” Sebby said.
Ellen cuddled in close to Sebby and nodded her sad head. She was shivering cold. Sebby was cold too, but he only worried about her.
“You cold, sis?”
Ellen nodded again and scooted closer to him.
“Okay,” Sebby said. He crawled into the front seat and pulled the spare key out of the sun visor.
“What are you doing?” Ellen asked him.
Sebby didn’t answer right away, but started the car and turned the heater on. He returned to the backseat.
“There, that should warm us up soon,” Sebby said.
They huddled together. Their mother may have remembered to bring their pajamas, but she hadn’t brought any blankets or pillows for them. He was also angry that their mother and Candy got to go inside and sleep in the hotel while they had to sleep in the car.
He’d had similar feelings before, and he’d been thinking about living with his Dad a lot lately. His dad may not have had much, but at least he cared enough to pick them up every weekend, and he was always there to do stuff with them. He even played with them, even though Sebby knew that he was tired from working all day.
He was saddened by the fact that he had wanted to leave Patoka this weekend. He hadn’t been able to help himself, though. He had been bored; being up there was nothing like what he’d expected. But he knew it wasn’t his Dad’s fault.
Ellen started to nod off and Sebby put his arm around her. Something that he also realized was that he couldn’t have just left his mother to live with his Dad without Ellen. She depended on him, and his mother would not allow her to go. She may not even allow him to go, but he was going to give it a shot anyway. He didn’t want to live with his mother and grandmother anymore. They weren’t nice people, and he knew it.
“So it’s settled then, right?” Sebby said.
“Huh?” Ellen said, half asleep.
The car was starting to warm up enough that Ellen wasn’t shivering anymore. They could both feel the warmth coming in from the hole in the floorboard. Sebby assumed it was from the warm gears below, but it was actually the noxious mixture of exhaust coming from the engine’s tailpipe. That hole had been a nuisance to them the whole drive up there, letting in the water and crud from the road. But now, it was sending a little warmth their way, and that was good. He didn’t like it when they were cold.
“We’re going to live with Dad when we get back?”
Ellen opened her eyes enough to look straight into her brother’s eyes. She nodded, and then closed them again.
Sebby just smiled. He was proud that they had both decided to do it together. He knew it would make his Dad so happy for them to come and live with him. He couldn’t wait to tell him.
The longer he lay there and thought about it, the more tired he grew, and as the car started to fill up with carbon monoxide, Sebby and Ellen drifted off to sleep . . . and went to live with their Dad.
* * *
The time was approaching 7:30 p.m., and Sandra was trying to finish off Larry McConnell at about the same time her kids were dying of carbon monoxide poisoning outside in her car.
Candy had walked back around them while Sandra straddled the white-collar misogynist. She’d shed her pants, but she was still wearing a shirt.
Larry was slowly approaching his climax when Candy walked up beside the bed and took his hand off Sandra’s waist and placed it between her own legs.
Larry could feel the battered remains of what he could only assume used to be a vagina, but now felt more like a rotten eggplant.
He yanked his hand away and threw Sandra off him. He sat up on the bed and Candy was taken aback, even a little frightened, at his sudden action.
When Larry wiped his hand across his nose, a rancid smell overpowered him and he gave a contorted, frenzied look. He jumped off the bed and went straight to the bathroom to scrub his hands clean.
His comical, frantic response gave Sandra a chuckle, but Candy had been deeply offended by his actions.
She drew her knife and pointed it at the laughing Sandra, whose own demeanor quickly turned.
Candy’s hurt and desperate eyes stared at Sandra for a few moments, and Sandra looked back at her in fear. Candy lowered the knife and walked into the bathroom.
Larry stood over the sink, furiously scrubbing his hand, when Candy entered the room. He didn’t even look at her; he just kept on washing his hands.
“At least one good thing will come of this,” Candy said.
Larry looked over at her and had no time to react before she jabbed the knife into his neck.
He jerked back against the wall with his hand over the gaping wound on his neck. Candy approached him again and jabbed his neck two more times, and then jabbed him in twice the gut.
She stood back to watch him as he slid his back down the wall, trying to hold his wounds, unable to scream or cry for help.
Sandra entered the bathroom and stood beside Candy, watching the man bleed out on the floor. She slowly took the knife out of Candy’s hand and calmly placed it on the sink. Sandra gently patted her back and told her everything was okay, but Candy could not look away from Larry as the blood sputtered out of his neck and abdomen.
Candy’s eyes were fixed on him, nearly hypnotized to the sight of the gushing blood. She was not ashamed of what she’d done. Sandra was also staring at Larry’s bleeding body.
He was fighting to stay alive, withering on the floor. Tears leaked from his eyes and anxiety caused his blood to flow more rapidly out of his body.
Sandra slowly kneeled down beside him and he reached his hand out for help, She gently caressed it and then placed it aside. She couldn’t think of anything else at that moment. She did not have the capacity for emotion. No love. No compassion. No sympathy. There was only one thing on her mind — hunger.
To his surprise, she pinned his weakened body against the wall. He let her, thinking she was about to help him in some way. Her own weakened body would not have been able to do it otherwise.
She could smell his blood. She could smell his body dying and the sweet a
llure of his soon-to-be lifeless corpse pleased her. She was not sure what she wanted to do with him. Choke him? Help him? Hold him?
Bite him.
It was suddenly so clear to her. She had known all day long that she did not want a bologna sandwich. She did not want chips or olives or crackers. She wanted meat.
Larry started to lose consciousness. Sandra squatted lower and opened her mouth around his wounded neck. Her tongue touched the blood and absorbed it. The hunger was being satiated as she licked more and more of the blood. She sucked and sucked until the blood just wasn’t enough. She needed something more, so she started to close her teeth in on Larry’s wounded neck. But as she bit down, his strong skin muscle did not budge. She kept trying, but instead of biting a chunk of meat out of Larry’s neck, her two front teeth broke off and gave her excruciating pain.
She fell backward, holding her mouth, and Candy came out of her own trance to see what happened to her.
Candy kneeled down and saw her teeth had broken off. It bewildered her at the moment to see that Sandra couldn’t have cared less about the pain in her teeth. She was, however, partially satiated by the blood and her body hurt less. Nevertheless, her two front teeth were still dangling from her upper jaw.
They both had a new biology, a taste for humans. But their bodies, their mouths and their own teeth, were too weak to eat fresh meat. They needed something more tender, something brought on from — decomposition. The kind of meat that comes apart from decay or from soaking in water, although neither one of them knew that at the moment.
* * *
After Candy satiated her appetite with Larry’s blood, they both left the room in a hurry. The exhaust had already filled the car and they gave it a second to air out before they got in.
That’s when Sandra found her children.
A sudden jolt ran through her body and she felt the kind of grief she thought she had been immune to. Her children were dead and it was her fault.
Sandra held a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.
Candy grabbed her.
“Pop the trunk, sassy; we need to put them in the back. The police will hold us responsible, and we need to take them somewhere else,” Candy said.
Sandra was slow to respond, still grief-stricken, but popped the trunk while her mother put Sebby and Ellen in the back. They made their way out of the garage and out of Indiana.
They completely forgot about the hidden camera they had left in the hotel room.
Chapter 5
Rise of the Creepers
***
1
It was one of the things that made them different from the other animals in the kingdom: the desire to preserve their species and eat those lower on the food chain. Not for pride, but more out of a sense of duty to their fellow humans, the thought that eating their dead would be considered a crime They had built a society that sustained them and now, they didn’t have to resort to such primitive means as eating the bodies of their dead, consuming their brethren for sustenance.
But in the mind of Harry Keethers, his own life and the lives of people he knew — the people he cared about — were about to set themselves back thousands of years on the evolutionary scale. Trying to figure out a medical explanation for what had happened to him and what they’d done was out of the question. The fog rolled in from the river and there may have been noxious chemicals mixed in with it from the polluted river, but that didn’t help him figure out why they had changed.
It had become apparent to him that they weren’t in the midst of some disease or epidemic. As incomprehensible as it was, they had become the monsters of legend. The Living Dead. Ghouls.
He couldn’t find any way to make sense of that, either, because he could think perfectly fine, and he did not aimlessly wander the streets moaning and stumbling. He did not feel the need to kill people, nor did he want to see people in pain.
One thing was certain: He had to eat human meat, to drink out of a polluted river and scratch the tips of his itchy fingernails along stony surfaces just to get by.
He had scratched so much at that point that his fingernails had become sharp as those curved, pointed paring knives. His body was considerably weaker, but his nails could cut through the deck planking outside on the dock with little effort.
He had already seen what his own eyes looked like in the mirror, and had seen that they matched the eyes of everyone else who had come to the Stow and sipped from the channel. The whites had cleared away and taken on a translucent quality. He could see the vessels that were attached to the pupils and the eyeballs.
It was both scary and remarkable. A glimpse into this changing new biology that no one could have ever predicted. But when he closed his eyes, that’s when the really extraordinary part hit him.
The view was just as clear, if not more defined, with his eyelids shut as it was when they were open. Not only could he see through his eyelids, but he could pick up heat signatures. He could see the biological elements that clung to the walls and floors of the Stow. He could see where people had spit on the floor and where fights had broken out and left blood on the walls. He could see areas where people had drunkenly pissed on the floor and other parts where people had had sex, or maybe fooled around in the back behind a table. They were, of course, invisible to the eyes of a regular human being, which was a good thing because they were disgusting, even to him and his new existence. But now, his new biology had given him this gift.
But with every gift, there is a price to pay. He would never eat a burger or a slice of pizza again. He would never be able to sit down to a Sunday dinner and enjoy a pot roast with rolls. He would never again be able to savor the carved turkey at Thanksgiving with his friends, or sip on eggnog on Christmas Eve.
He would be confined to the background of people’s lives and forced to feed in the shadows of a graveyard, or even in his own laboratory back in Barrelton, as the county coroner.
That was something he knew he could do to take care of himself. But that did not solve the problem for everyone else who had congregated at the Stow, anxiously awaiting someone like him to help them, or guide them to better health. They did not fully comprehend their new biology, but Harry did.
When all was said and done, Harry surmised that he would not be able to help all those people. Most of them would either perish from starvation or be euthanized by a fearful town — once the townspeople had found out, of course.
It was Harry’s duty to make sure that he took care of his own. That meant the original four, which included himself, Perry Dupont, Erin Mills and Arn Simmons. He would have also included those two boys from Izzy’s band, had they not taken off. But Harry had to stick to what was in front of him.
* * *
After a commotion outside of the Stow, Harry was stirred enough to make his way to the dock, followed by Perry and Erin.
Arn was in the kitchen sulking and Harry was afraid he was going to do something to himself. That had always been the thing about Arn. He may have had a gruff, tough-as-nails exterior, but on the inside, he was a man who cared about everybody and everything. There was no capacity within him to do wrong. Arn saw his body as a curse now, one that might cause him to kill someone once his pain and hunger returned, and Harry wouldn’t put it past him to off himself just to avoid it.
Once he got outside, though, he could see that his prayers, the ones he had never actually spoken, had been answered. There were at least seven dead bodies floating in the channel, one of which had arisen from the depths of the water when he first arrived.
The people were scared but also soothed by the thought that they were finally going to get something to eat. Something, in all its horrible glory, that would make their pain go away. A pain that had now been equated to their own bodies fading away. Decomposing while they were very much alive. The pain that people only feel when they are prisoners in their own bodies.
That made the situation even worse for them. They had human souls. Emotions and feelings. Bodi
es that reacted to their consciences, and they had to merge that with their need to survive. The process was a horror that did not jump out and say “BOO,” but rather a “slow burn” that ate away at them, mercilessly, with no emotion.
Now that the rotten bodies had emerged from the water and the people, cloaked in their blankets, their faces gaunt, clung to the edge of the dock. They reached for the floating bodies of people who had been long dead, probably killed in some city up the river in places like Louisville or Pittsburgh, maybe somewhere in between, and dumped in the river. These same bodies that had somehow made their way downstream to dock in their little channel that ran nearly half a mile inland from the Ohio River.
It was a guarantee, in Harry’s mind, that this was not some biological coincidence. He and those people had not just fallen victim to the malicious fog that arose out of the polluted river; rather they had been reborn into a life that had chosen them.
As is the case with any mother who bears a child, she did not do so without a nipple to feed them. The Ohio River had not changed them; it had given birth to them, and now, their mother was feeding her young, who anxiously awaited her nourishment. They would now answer to one parent who would not take no for an answer. They now answered to the river, as horrifying as it may have sounded. They now enforced the will of the river.
* * *
They started hauling the rotting bodies inside the Stow. After each trip they made, another body would emerge from the channel’s dark depths.
When they finally filled the Stow with starving patrons of the Squaw Creek horror, there were a total of eleven dead bodies feeding nearly a hundred people. Men and women all feasted in horrified delight on the rotten flesh. Kids cried as they watched, but dared not interfere. Women forced the rotten, water-softened flesh into their children’s mouths and they ate it. They swallowed, and as time passed, they began to feel the relief they had all wished for.
Their bodies were not getting any stronger, and their faces still appeared gaunt, but they were free of the pain. The same pain a body might feel that was alive in a coffin, rotting away as the Earth slowly reclaimed its biological elements. The pain that can only be described as a slow burn.
