Autumn's Breath

by Michael Robb

  The sun was setting when she woke again. She was in a cornfield, but possibly not the same one she’d been in earlier.

  Was it a dream? No, her fingers were pale from the cold and covered in dried blood.

  Brian’s semi-translucent form stepped out of a corn row, and he sat beside her. She was huddled in the old blanket, still terrified. A frigid gust blew the remaining cobwebs from her rattled mind. She knew she should run, but something inside wouldn’t let her.

  “What happened?” she asked him. “Why did they kill you?”

  “They didn’t kill me. The freeze did.”

  “How?” Autumn shook her head, making sure it was clear. “Why didn’t you go home?”

  “I heard that deputy talking about the leg, and I had to see it. I got so grossed out that I started crossing rows. I don’t know. I got lost and figured I’d wait until morning. But for the old Brian, morning never came.”

  Autumn could tell the ghostly boy wanted to be alive again.

  “I’m sorry,” was all she could think to say.

  “It’s okay. It’ll only last until midnight. Then I’ll get to leave with them.”

  “Them? That creepy woman and the guy with the mask?”

  “Yep, after last night they only need one more heart to complete the star. Then at midnight, their people will return and take us all back to where they came from. If the Feds don’t catch them.”

  “Their people? Where did they come from?” She was starting to freak out. “The Feds?” She found herself thinking, in the back of her mind, that if she stood up now, she could run her ass off and get out of there. Then she realized she wasn’t quite sure where she was. Running the wrong way might only make the situation worse.

  “Where are we?” she finally asked.

  “Near the new corn maze.” He looked at her. “How did that piece taste?” His sincere question was so unnatural, and not because she could see the corn stalks right through him.

  “Piece of what?” She started to feel queasy again.

  “Craig’s heart.”

  The revelation caused a roil inside her, and she retched twice before vomiting a steaming puddle of bile.

  “You fed me part of Craig’s heart?”

  “He raped you, Autumn. He deserved to die. That’s why they won’t kill you. You’re with child. They want you to go with us, but they won’t make you.”

  Just then a girl screamed, followed by a few others, but giggles took over their fear. Then another scream came, followed by some cursing.

  “He didn’t rape me,” she hissed. Her reply was indignant. “He didn’t.” But she knew he had. The violation of him just looking was bad, but she supposed it was rape, if she was pregnant.

  Was she pregnant? She didn’t know, but she had a feeling.

  And now Craig was dead.

  “They saw him do it,” Brian shrugged as if he wasn’t sure what rape was. “They just couldn’t stop him because you weren’t in the cornfield anymore. They’ve been here for a long time; since we were little kids. They’ve been hiding down in an old well waiting for— waiting for tonight.”

  “What is so special about tonight?”

  “It is the first frozen Halloween since they’ve been here,” Brian giggled, and it sounded a little girlish. “Now that hell’s frozen over, they can come out.”

  “That girl disappeared when we were little kids, Brian,” Autumn growled. “They can’t be from somewhere else, not if she disappeared from our school thirteen years ago and has been here all this time.”

  Brian’s look twisted into something dark, and Autumn realized it wasn’t really Brian she was talking to. She also remembered that she had a cell phone in her pocket.

  She pointed over the apparition’s shoulder, and when it turned to look, she got up and bolted toward the people she could hear in the corn maze.

  To her surprise, it didn’t immediately follow; instead, it roared out and began to grow. Before she knew it, she was running through the corn, and the giant, masked thing was in the row right beside her. They emerged into a cleared corridor, and several young children screamed, as did the two moms and one guy that was with them. The big thing in the mask didn’t stop, though. It palmed the man’s face and kept going, right back into the corn on the other side. The man’s feet were kicking, and the big creature’s paw-like palm muffled his yelling. The little kids and the two women started screaming in earnest.

  Autumn dropped to the ground and tried to dial the sheriff. As she dialed the numbers, she saw her face reflected in the phone screen. It was white now, the outer layer of flesh crackling away to reveal deep green and purple veins. Her perfect teeth were all jagged and broken.

  When a deep-voiced man answered the phone, she started telling the sheriff everything, but after she finished speaking, he simply said, “I don’t care. My family and I have gone south. I don’t want no part of that evil shit.” And then he hung up.

  Suddenly there were more screams, and Autumn dialed her mother. When her mother answered, she started talking as fast as she could, but she was cut off.

  “This isn’t funny. My daughter is in the hospital, and you sick fucking assholes should be ashamed.”

  Autumn was really confused now.

  Up ahead, a bright, sapphire-colored light exploded down from the sky, and she was compelled to run toward it. When she burst into the radiant opening, she saw the big, masked creature ripping the man it had just taken from the maze, limb from limb.

  Inside the circle of light, a circular wind was whipping so hard that all the corn laid down in a uniformed manner, blown over by the unnaturally contained gust, thus forming the most perfect of crop circles.

  The big creature hurled an arm out away from the heart he had dropped in the middle. Then he threw a leg, and the other two blood-drenched limbs. They were thrown in what she guessed were the Cardinal directions, like the limbs of Scott Bell had been. Then, the hulking thing tore off its mask. It was terribly ugly and as alien as Brian, or whatever it was she’d been talking to, had suggested.

  It reached a hand out toward her and looked up. Two dozen people were standing there staring slack-jawed at the spectacle, and more were easing closer by the second. A deep purple ray was slowly reaching down out of the yellow light toward the big creature. It shook its huge hand at her again, beckoning her to come, and she was compelled to do so.

  She started toward it, but a flash of pale energy shot out of the corn. Autumn was shoved down and tackled by the dry, dusty-feeling, white-fleshed woman she’d seen that first night from the minivan. It was wearing a hospital gown and making the same ear-splitting “La, la, la ,la, la!” scream it had made the night Autumn first saw her. The long-dead woman leaned down and pushed her dry, cracking lips against Autumn’s, and they shared a disgusting kiss.

  “The baby will be safe,” the thing hissed. Then she ran up to the alien beast and leapt into him, grabbing him in a bear hug with her arms and legs both.

  A woman fell beside Autumn, an unshucked corncob jutting from her eye socket.

  Whatever was containing the wind gave way, and suddenly heavy stalks and hard ears of corn were spinning around everyone. People were pelted and tripped and screaming in terror or pain. Autumn had to duck and dodge all the flying debris as she watched the pair of beings rise slowly up into the night.

  Two men she recognized from the hospital grabbed her by the arms.

  “Let’s get you back to your mother, Autumn,” one of them said. They didn’t put her in an ambulance as she expected, but in the back seat of an inconspicuous black sedan.

  Nine Months Later

  The sound of her baby crying was music to Autumn’s ears. The nurse, however, had a look on her face that brought back everything Autumn had spent the last nine months trying to forget. And forgetting hadn’t been easy. The whole holiday season following that night was a mash of reporters and scientists and questions she couldn’t answer. Then came the head shrinkers.

  The fi
ve crop circles, as seen from high above, formed a pentagram. Each had a man’s heart in it, and no one could explain what had happened when the weird pair of creatures left like wizards levitating up into the darkness.

  Supposedly, Maggie Gale had gone into the cornfield and found Autumn. Then the newswoman delivered her to the hospital. That wasn’t what Autumn remembered though.

  Had she imagined the men in coats grabbing her and dragging her in? Was Maggie Gale’s story just made up? Autumn couldn’t think about it anymore, and the rest still seemed like a dream, save for the cuffs keeping her hands from being able to hold the child she’d just birthed. That was an undeniable reality.

  It didn’t matter what she said. Maggie Gale and her mother were the only two who believed her, except for Sheriff Taylor, but he wouldn’t admit to it unless they were alone. Brian had been right about the Feds. Men in black suits questioned her daily, through the glass wall of the isolation room in which she was being kept. Autumn just wanted to see her baby and go back to sleep. At least in her cell, with the meds they gave her, she could forget about it all.

  She really wanted to take her baby home, but that wasn’t going to happen until they figured out how her saliva had gotten on the piece of Craig’s heart they’d found near the rest of his torso. She was coherent enough to keep from telling them she spat it out of her mouth, but there was still DNA evidence proving that part of his freshly extracted left ventricle had been in her mouth at some point.

  The look on the nurse’s face was starting to bother her. “What is it?” She squirmed and pulled at the restraints holding her arms and legs in place.

  “Let me see my baby!”

  The nurse swallowed hard and showed her. Autumn saw a tiny, white thing with bloodshot eyes. Its pulsing veins showing through as if its skin were paper thin.

  She met its alien gaze, and something passed between them. Then the room was emptied of medical staff as people in yellow hazmat suits with radiation emblems emblazoned prominently on the chest came storming in, and took the child.

  She recognized the crazy doctor from the television watching from another room.

  Autumn screamed then, and pulled, for it was all she could do. But it was no use. Her violent actions almost pulled her own hand off of her arm, but that didn’t stop her.

  “They said the baby would be all right!” she screamed. “They said it would! Where is my baby!”

  A moment later, a faceless person under a giant hood looked down at her. She saw in the reflection of the mirrored face shield that she was normal, not all white and peeling, as she’d been in the corn maze when the aliens had come.

  “They said the baby would be all right,” she repeated, this time lurching at her own reflection after she spoke. Then tears exploded from her eyes and she started sobbing.

  “They say a lot of crazy ass stuff, girl,” a woman’s voice sounded from inside the suit. “When Autumn’s breath bathes that corn, they say all sorts of crazy shit. Just like you’ve been saying since you’ve been here. That baby, if that’s what you could call it, will be okay, though.” The woman thumped a large needle full of blue liquid. “You, on the other hand, are about to be as high as a kite on a broken string.”

  “You said my baby would be all right?” Autumn managed to ask calmly. She saw herself in the face shield again and was disgusted by how filthy and pathetic she looked. Still, all she wanted was her baby.

  “No, girl. I said I’m not sure that thing can be called a baby.”

  The woman in the biohazard gear then jabbed the needle into the top of Autumn’s IV bag, and Autumn watched, mesmerized by the way the deep blue liquid mingled with the saline she was being drip-fed.

  The whole world fell away from Autumn then, and it never returned.

  The End

  Michael Robb won a Readers Favorite Award in the Horror Fiction category for his full length novel:

  The Butcher's Boy (The Ballad of Billy Badass)

  It is available at in hardcover and paperback, in multiple languages,

  and also in ALL eBook formats.

  Just read these editorial reviews:

  This book is not your typical horror story. The author's work can be compared to Stephen King and Dean Koontz. Like their books, this plot takes you to unexpected places. There are twists and turns that keep the reader guessing: ghosts slipping in and out of bodies both living and dead, shadows and bumps in the night are the least of the main characters' worries in this book.

  Fans of horror will not want to miss this creepy story.

  Readers Favorite International Book Award Contest

  The Butcher's Boy is not a book of immediate horror and gore, but a slow building up of the terror. However, it isn't your classic scary home ghost novel.

  Twists in the story pleasantly surprised. Overall, it’s excellent.

  Michelle Goodreads Review

  Keeps you on the edge of your seat. Possession, murder, kidnapping, and redemption...well thought out plot that builds to a crescendo. I highly recommend this. Full Review: books-treasureortrash. com

  Books-Treasure or Trash

  The novel is a suspenseful page-turner with well-developed characters. Even Lucy the Rottweiler is a round character. The specters, too, have solid personalities... renders them even scarier.

  ForeWord Magazine