Blood Harvest (Book 1): Blood Fruit

by Goodman, D. J.

  Before she could do that, though, she had to figure out what the odor was and where it was coming from. Inside the back door she stood and sniffed the kitchen, but it didn’t seem to be coming from in here. The smell was vaguely like shit, however. That much she could figure out. Immediately she went to the bathroom, but it actually seemed weaker there. She came out again, slowly moving through the short hall into the dining and living room area. Now it was getting stronger. She curled her nose. Maybe it was some kind of sewer leak in the basement. She went to the door in the living room and sniffed at the crack. Yeah, that seemed right. She cursed. That was just great. She and Tony had done well for themselves since they’d been married, but not so well that fixing some kind of major sewage problem wouldn’t hurt.

  Taking a deep breath, she opened the door to the basement and immediately had to turn away. The smell was absolutely foul, far worse than she had realized just by walking in the back door. Now that it could fully assault her nose she realized that it wasn’t just shit, either. There were other stenches mixed in with it. She thought she detected the nasty reek of body odor, although at a level far worse than anything she had whiffed before in her life. But even stronger than that was the unmistakable stench of decay, like someone had left several pounds of hamburger to sit for days in the summer sun. Again she thought back to her friend’s unfortunate story of the possum, but although Peg hadn’t had the misfortune to smell that one firsthand she had a feeling that this was worse. It was as though someone had rolled around in the water from an overflowed toilet and then crawled into their basement to die.

  Peg stopped at that thought. The tinge of body odor was unmistakable. Maybe this wasn’t from something. This smell could very easily have come from someone. The house was old enough that it didn’t just have this one entrance to the basement. There was a door in the ground out in the backyard, an old rusty metal one that Tony kept saying he wanted to replace. They kept it padlocked shut, but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that someone could have gotten it off and come on in. It was possible that Peg was not alone in the house right now.

  Quietly so as not to tip off anyone that might be down there, Peg went back to the kitchen and selected the largest knife they had from the block on the counter. She’d taken a few self-defense classes over the years but hadn’t retained much, despite the nagging knowledge that whoever had taken her sister would have had a harder time if Zoey had known something about defending herself. But Peg hadn’t truly wanted to learn. The self-destructive part of her would have been almost happy if someone had popped out of the shadows of an alley some night and killed her. It had taken years of therapy to convince herself even partly that she didn’t deserve that. So all she had to protect herself now were common household items, but even that was better than going down there unarmed. That death wish she’d once had was gone now. Mostly.

  Back at the top of the basement stairs she hesitated. She was probably overreacting. There were other more logical reasons for the smell than an intruder. She could still sense that somewhat human scent among the other offending odors, but that seemed just as off as the rest of it. She couldn’t picture any possible reason for a human to smell that unbelievably rancid. But she’d been a fan of far too many horror movies to go down there without at least some insurance. She reached through the door and snapped on the light switch, and a naked bulb hanging near the bottom of the stairs flared to life.

  Something moaned.

  Peg froze.

  She listened while she took deep breaths in the hope that her suddenly pounding heart would slow down. The sound didn’t repeat itself, but she was positive that she had heard it. What she couldn’t be sure of, however, was whether it had been human or animal or, for all she knew, maybe a sound from the furnace or hot water heater that her imagination had just interpreted as something more sinister. If it was indeed human then the only smart thing to do would be to call the cops. She still had an instinctual hatred of anyone wearing the blue uniform, but not so bad that she would do the dumb thing and not call them in a moment of real crisis.

  She couldn’t be sure that’s what this was, though. She could call them and then find out that all this was indeed from some sewage problem and the sound had been nothing more than something noxious bubbling up through a hole in a pipe. Or it could be the dead animal. Tony would never let her live it down if she called the police on a rotten raccoon.

  “Hello?” Peg called down the stairs. “Is someone there?” Not that she expected an intruder to actually announce to her if he was here, but it seemed like the only thing to do at the moment. There was no answer.

  She continued to stand at the top of the stairs for several more seconds but heard nothing else. Finally, once her heart had stopped thumping quite so hard, she took the first tentative steps down the stairs. This was stupid, after all. There was very little chance that there was anything down here to worry about, or at least anything that could hurt her. She reminded herself that while Peg Uttech was standing here jumping at random noises Peggy Sellnow would have just made a disgusted grunt at her older self’s hesitation and gone charging done the stairs, waving the knife madly in front of her as though she actually wanted to stab something. In some ways that younger woman wasn’t gone and probably shouldn’t be.

  With that thought clearly in mind, Peg began moving down the stairs a little faster. The stench was so much worse down here and she had to desperately suppress her gag reflex. At the bottom of the stairs she stopped, still keeping the knife held out slightly in front of her, and surveyed the basement. To her right, toward the front of the house, a previous owner had made a half-hearted attempt at finishing the basement and it actually had drywall and linoleum flooring. This was where the washer and dryer sat, along with a work bench and chair where Tony would sometimes come when he got it in his head that he needed a new hobby and somewhere out of the way to practice it. There were a few pieces of electronics equipment on the table next to a tackle box full of acrylic paints that he hadn’t used since the first month they had moved in here. The light in that area was fairly bright and there were only a few small corners where someone or something might try hiding. She looked there quickly but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.

  The other end of the basement was rougher, however. The walls here were nothing but concrete and cobwebs collected in the wood beams overhead. That was the direction of the door that led outside, as well as the furnace and the water heater. There were also brick structures along the walls here and there, architectural holdovers from long ago with purposes that had been long forgotten. A single bulb hung over there and it did little to get light into the nooks and crannies. She sniffed the air, but down here it was impossible to tell what direction the odor might be coming from.

  Peg took a few tentative steps in the direction of the outer door. There was nothing out of the ordinary directly where she could see. She looked up at the ceiling to some of the exposed pipes, but nothing leading in the direction of the bathroom appeared to be broken or leaking. If there were some sort of sewage overflow she would have expected the floor to be wet somewhere, but everything appeared to be dry. The closer she got to the door, however, the more she thought she could see something out of the ordinary by the stairs. She hunched down for a closer look, holding her forearm up over her nose in a futile effort to keep the worst of the smell out of her nostrils. Even breathing through her mouth didn’t seem to help much.

  It was dim over here, and it took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the lack of light. Even after they did it took another couple moments before she grasped what she was seeing, but once she did she temporarily forgot to breathe.

  There were marks going down the stairs. She touched one with her finger and it came away with the tip coated in semi-dried mud. The alternating pattern of the marks clearly denoted them as footprints. Not boot or shoe prints, as there were no patterns in the dirt, but judging from the shape they were clearly bare human feet. The
y appeared to come down into the basement but not back up. Someone had come in through the outer door, and that person seemed to still be here.

  Peg tensed and gripped the knife tighter. Now was clearly the moment where she needed to call the cops, but something else caught her eye before she could rush back upstairs. There was something else on the stair three down from the top, although she couldn’t identify it at first. It looked like a misshapen lump of Play-Doh that someone had squished in their fist, but it gleamed in what little light reflected off it. She didn’t recognize it until she moved in for a closer look. It was a piece of metal with a jagged rod-like piece sticking out of the top, and the rod was what finally identified it. Up until recently, this thing had been the padlock they’d kept on the outside of the outer basement door. It looked like someone had broken it, but not with any bolt cutters. It almost appeared to have been crushed in someone’s bare hands.

  Before Peg had any time to try processing and denying that fact she heard a noise again from somewhere behind her. She spun in her still-hunched position on the stairs, almost toppling over and stabbing herself in the process before she regained her balance. It was the same as the moaning noise she’d heard earlier, but this time there was no mistaking that it had been made by something living. She would have said it was a person, but whatever it was didn’t entirely sound human. There was a deep guttural quality that gave Peg horrible shivers, and yet it seemed pained as well. The footprints clearly belonged to a person, but maybe it wasn’t someone who’d broken in with the intent on doing harm. Maybe the person was hurt.

  And maybe this person is in so much pain that the adrenaline let them crush a steel fucking lock, Peg thought. Stop giving yourself a line of bullshit and run for the fucking hills, woman.

  “Hello?” she called out again against her own better judgment. That little voice in her head hissed in disgust with herself. “Whoever you are, don’t try anything funny. I’m armed.” Not that she really expected a knife to be that much use against someone who could do such a thing to the lock, but she still wouldn’t let herself completely believe that. There was always an explanation. Once she was out of this basement she was sure she would be able to think of it.

  Again the moan, but softer this time. It was almost a whimper. The mother in her reacted to that sound in a primal way, like she needed to find whoever made it and comfort them, but that seemed like just as crazy a reaction as believing someone had broken the lock all by themselves.

  Peg stood back up straight and inched her way in the direction she thought the noise had come. Over by the furnace, she thought. There was a brick wall hiding an area that she thought might have corresponded with an old coal chute from back in the pre-gas furnace days. She’d never had any reason to go back there and take a closer look at it, but she realized now that it would make a perfect hiding place. The smell was so rank here that it made her eyes water. Even though it was clear now that the intruder was a person and not some animal, she could still not comprehend how it was even possible for a human to have such an offensive odor that it could seep all the way through the house.

  She carefully squeezed herself between the furnace and water heaters, making sure not to touch the scorching metal. She paused when it occurred to her that if this mysterious person tried to hurt her she wouldn’t be able to get back out with any speed, but she couldn’t help but think again of that last sound she’d heard, so full of pain, so weak.

  “I’m coming for you,” Peg said. Her voice wasn’t near as strong and commanding as she thought prudent, although when she spoke again it was closer. “I still have a knife. No sudden movements. If you don’t try to hurt me I won’t hurt you.”

  Another sound, this time more of a sigh. With one last deep breath through her mouth Peg went around the wall and into the hidden corner.

  The light didn’t come through here at all, but in such a small alcove Peg didn’t need to see much in order to know she wasn’t alone. Someone was curled in a tight ball in the corner just a foot away. Peg could have reached out her foot and touched the person with her shoe, but she still didn’t want to get any closer yet than she absolutely had to. About the only thing she could tell for certain was that the person was not very large. From what little she could see of the person’s shape in the darkness he or she had their feet toward her with their back to the wall and he/she was on their side with arms clutched tightly to his or her chest. Seeing this, most of Peg’s fear left her. Although it was still possible this person was trying to lull her into a trap, that now appeared to be nothing more than a paranoid delusion. It seemed far more likely that whoever this might be was frightened or hurt, possibly both.

  The lock, Peg thought to herself. No matter how helpless he looks, don’t forget the lock. Keeping that thought in mind, Peg hunched down closer to the person and set the knife aside, although making sure it stayed within easy reach.

  “Are… are you okay?” Peg asked.

  “Help.” The voice, although rough and scratchy as though it had been worn out from too much talk or smoke or possibly even screaming, was nonetheless clearly identifiable as female. As Peg’s eyesight adjusted even more to the darkness she realized the woman, or more likely girl based on her size, was naked. It was impossible to tell the color of her skin, though, as she was completely covered in filth. Beyond the years of black dust and soot that accumulated in this corner that now clung to her prone form the girl also appeared to be covered in a hardening and cracking layer of something else. Peg took it at first to be nothing more than mud until she understood that the patina layered over the girl’s body was apparently the source of most of the hideous smell. She had to force herself not to turn her head to puke as she realizes it wasn’t mud at all. It was shit. Peg had no idea if it was animal shit or human shit or some mixture in between, but she didn’t much care. Shit was shit.

  After the few seconds it took to force herself beyond her initial disgust Peg gently reached out and touched the girl’s arm in a place that seemed at least slightly cleaner than the rest. The girl shifted slightly but otherwise didn’t move.

  “What happened to you?” Peg asked.

  “Help,” the girl said again. “Mish-mash is coming. Walking eyes will find me. Help me, please.”

  Peg took her hand away. This girl was no threat at all. She was frightened, possibly hurt, almost definitely abused at some point. Her naked state could only bring to mind the idea that at some point in the near past she had been raped. All fear left Peg and was replaced by an icy determination. Whatever had happened to this poor girl, Peg would do everything she could to protect her.

  “Listen to me,” Peg said. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back. I left my phone in my purse upstairs. I’m just going to go up and get it so I can call the police, and then…”

  “No!” The word came out of the girl’s mouth with far more force than anything else she’d said so far. Her voice was achingly familiar, so much like Zoey’s had once been, but Peg knew that could only be her imagination. The next words, however, were back to the scratchy moans. “No no no. Can’t call. It will know. It always knows.”

  “Honey, I have to. I’ll have them send an ambulance…”

  “Eyes will see. Eyes that walk. Eyes without a brain.”

  “I promise I’ll be right back down and wait with you until they come…”

  “No!” Now the girl didn’t sound anything remotely like Zoey. Peg could almost swear there was an actual growl like a tiger or a bear coming from deep within her throat. At the same time the girl moved, her hand snatching out and gripping Peg’s arm. The girl’s fingers clenched so tight that Peg couldn’t help but yelp in pain. Without even realizing she was doing it her free hand went down to rest on the knife handle.

  “You’re hurting me,” Peg said.

  “Don’t don’t don’t,” the girl said. She sat up and opened her mouth. In the close quarters Peg could smell her breath and she now understood the source of the rotting meat stench she th
ought she’d detected earlier. But her breath was not even the most startling part. Even in the darkness Peg could see the shapes ringing the girl’s mouth. Her teeth were so perfectly white that Peg could see each one, and not a single one looked normal. All of them came to sharp little points, but two of them, her top canines, stretched longer than the others into a pair of wicked fangs.

  “Don’t,” the girl said again.

  The knife slipped out of Peg’s fingers as she backed away, but she made no effort to go back for it. Instead she found herself seized by a raw animal panic. As Peg tried to get out of the corner and back between the furnace and the water heater the girl held her grip, causing the girl to be dragged out of the darkness with her. The girl finally let go as Peg squeezed out, burning her fingers on the water heater but not caring. She tripped as she came out and fell to the floor but immediately turned around to face the corner in case the girl came after her. Without Peg to support her the girl fell forward onto her chest and stayed there. Peg waited for her to do something but the girl didn’t move. All she said was, “Help,” again, her voice back to the pathetic and scared tone of earlier.