by Alan Spencer
Dr. Krone lied. The coward said there were only three machines. There’s at least fifteen!
The static flashes and the intensity of the current tripled. Crackles exploded in great plumes of smoke and silvery sparks. The machine was fired up, working on all cylinders. They were designed replicas of the ones upstairs—a simple metal refrigerator shape with a chair soldered into the end. The wires trailed to the ceiling and connected to the rafters, hanging like knotted threads of a monstrous sized spider web.
“It’s the house,” Craig muttered, astounded at the sight. “The wires are hooked to the house. The whole place is one big machine. That’s why the walls can change into different scenes. That’s why my memories become real anywhere I am.”
The silver streaks of light allowed him to study the bodies closer. The corpses were kept hidden in clear body bags, positioned with their backs against the wall, torsos up to the head propped up as if watching the show. Many of the bags contained magpie skeletal remains. He caught maggots writhing within the skin of many, eating away the layers of soft human flesh to the bone and core. The corpses were colored in the flickers of electricity. He literally counted hundreds of corpses, and there were many more standing in the back of the room or piled on their backs and bellies in cordwood stacks.
The barricade rattled from a giant shove.
“You owe her an apology.”
“I’m not just a fuck!”
“My baby rots inside of me. Care to see, Daddy?”
“Hell is hungry, Mr. Horsy.”
“The next drink will be on me, compliments of your best friend Willis.”
“It’s too late, Craig. My soul isn’t my own. Listen to me, Craig. You can’t win. We tried. Give up.”
“No, Edith!” Craig shouted back. “I refuse to give up.”
The barrier wouldn’t hold much longer. He had seconds to think. He was alone in a room of hundreds of corpses—maybe a thousand.
He darted to the closest machine in a last-second decision. The computer monitor glowed blue. The screen was blank.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
Two of the carts were shoved back, knocked onto their sides. Two were still lodged in place.
“What the hell do I do?”
He feared touching anything, but he had no choice. He touched the Enter key. The screen displayed a menu. The selections were simple. Enter Memory. Enter Name. Enter Place. Enter Change. He selected Enter Name. He typed A. A list of names popped up—Andrew, Andy, Allison, Alex, Alan, Andrea, Anderson, and the list carried on down the letters of the alphabet. He scanned downwards with the mouse and selected all the names. The screen counted 1,800 names. Enter Place. Craig typed Dr. Krone’s mansion. Enter Memory. He guessed on this one. Alive. Enter Change. He paused on the command. What did it mean, he thought. It made sense to enter person, place, and the memory, but he couldn’t decide what to enter for the change.
“The door is weakening.”
“You will apologize to her, you bastard.”
“My child rots in my womb! Why won’t you acknowledge our child?”
“You could never turn down an open bar, you fucking alcoholic.”
“I’ll char your flesh for added flavor.”
“You can’t just throw away this fuck. Not this time.”
Craig’s fingers trembled at hearing hands bang against the door. Sweat trailed down his arms to his wrists. He shivered in anticipation of the door being thrown open.
He entered all the information he could on the final tab. Protect Craig Horsy. Murder Dr. Krone and his family. Destroy the machines. Find an escape route out of the house.
The double doors shot open.
He struck the Enter key.
The Entrance
Nothing happened. The machine didn’t react. The electricity continued to pulse from the machines. Silver sparks were shed in all corners, illuminating the incoming enemies. The wall of flesh and human limbs, infant limbs, and bones spread out along the walls. Alice was close at hand, mesmerized by what was once a miscarried baby in a toilet. Susan wore a brown sheath dress. She was heartbroken, her face weighed down by discomfort and regret. She clutched two knives, each glinting in the refractions of unnatural light. When she caught sight of him, her face turned wicked. The bent smile. The bloodlust in her eyes. She had reinforcements behind her. Rick Margolia welded a clever in his hand as he coasted the room for his next entrée. Willis was burned up from the bar memory. Pockets of fat popped throughout his skin, still boiling. Tina clutched a razor blade, and beside her, Parker Stevens was slathered in blood and clutching on to the concrete saw Craig’s father had used on him previously. Brandon, headless, swept the blue nozzle of the Browning across the room, ready to pull back the trigger at any indication his son was near. Katie and Edith stayed near the back of the group. Edith was war-torn, bloodied, and she had reclaimed the flame thrower. This time it would be intended for him. Katie was further along in her decomposition. Both eyes had turned to broken grapes. Loose flesh hung from her jawline, the clacking and gritting of misshapen and missing teeth creating a strange rattle. Black blood leaked from the ends of her dress. Her legs had somehow been repaired, and she could walk at will. Her stomach was extended, but concave in the middle. The flesh sank and rose with the shape of a hand reaching through the flesh to escape, but the infant kept failing to break the barrier.
These were his executioners.
Dr. Krone and his family finally entered behind the initial throng. Dr. Krone, Sr. was tickled to be leading the “murder Craig Horsy expedition”. Hillary was engrossed with the wall of flesh as much so as Alice, both caught up in the maternal turn-on.
Dr. Krone stared right at him, spotting him instantly. “I warned you would die.”
The doctor marched to the nearest machine. His hand was arched over the keyboard to type in his fate. “Who will get to murder you? Hmmmmm.”
Katie raised her hand, gritting those bleeding teeth. Susan clanged both the knives together in response. Brandon blasted a shot into the air. Ba-boom! Alice was too busy running her hands through the flesh wall to care, mesmerized by her prolific baby. Edith unleashed a jet of flames. Whoosh.
Rick Margolia and Willis stood side by side, and Rick guffawed, “I’ll cook him like this bastard,” he pointed at Willis, “well fucking done.”
Dr. Krone smiled, impressed by his creations. “Yes, yes, they all want to be the killing hand. What does that say about your life, Mr. Horsy?—you as a person? Everybody’s past has a time or two—or like you, many times—they’re not so proud of. You can’t sweep it under your cognitive rug here. You must face it.”
Craig glanced at the machine he’d typed on. It asked a final question—Proceed with command?
Dr. Krone realized what he’d done. “No—don’t you touch it. Don’t do it, you son of a bitch!”
It was Craig’s turn to laugh. He looked up at the pieces of his past. They were jilted. Unreal. Dead. These weren’t memories swept under his cognitive rug. This was Dr. Krone’s machine at work. And now he would put the machine to a new test. “We all have memories we’re not so proud of, Dr. Krone. You must face your past. That’s what we do here.”
He punched the Enter key.
The Battle
Dr. Krone landed on his knees, flabbergasted, as the life in him seemed to drain out through his feet. “No…you didn’t…WHAT DID YOU TYPE!”
Hillary was alarmed. “I told you it was dangerous to let him roam the mansion. He’s not hooked up to the machine.”
Dr. Krone, Sr. refused to be defeated. “No, it’s not over. The machine works both ways. I can reverse the command.”
Dr. Krone, Sr. raced for the closest machine, but Craig tackled him. “It’s time to enjoy your treatment, you sick asshole.”
“You can’t stop us,” Hillary cheered. She was already standing at the machine, ready to type in new commands. “My husband’s right. We can reverse your commands.”
And that’s when they trudged out f
rom the darkness. Body bags were ripped to shreds. Corpses limped toward them, coming alive. Rotten muscle audibly tore and bones clinked loose beneath the softening flesh of their bodies. The present stench was light comparative to this new moment. The ripe fog carried so thick, everything was demurred by a see-through gray net thick enough to be sticky. Hillary was the first to be forced to the ground. She was surrounded by two dozen walking corpses, pushed from one to the other, each rendering a mouthful of her face and throat until she was screaming and faceless.
“Save me—anybody!” Hillary’s tongue was bitten from the mouth after an intimate kiss from a hungry corpse, and then she vanished beneath the dog pile of feasting corpses, batting her arms for her life and delivering soggy screams.
Dr. Krone, Sr. dove into the pile to reclaim his wife. He was forced onto the ground beside his dissected wife. Heads bent down and lifted up from his resisting body, pecking and rendering his flesh. “Aaack— Guagh— Ahhhhhhh!” Blood-laden cries were quickly smothered until he was dead once again.
Craig didn’t know where Dr. Krone had hidden himself. The enemies were still after Craig. The room bustled with activity, and he was the only living person who owned a real heartbeat.
He flopped onto the floor when Edith shot an arc of flames at him. The heat grazed his back, the flames inches from burning him. A daring corpse of desiccated flesh and browning bones—over a century dead—removed the fuel line from the tank.
Edith screamed, “Oh shit!”
Craig worked to his feet to sprint in retreat.
Kaboom!
Edith and the corpse were engulfed in caustic explosions. Half the room was lit up, firelight dancing alongside the branches of static electricity. Across the room, Brandon drove the concrete saw ahead of him and split four corpses down the middle. If the man had a head, he’d boast a grin. The flesh wall of malformed body parts sucked in corpse after corpse, and after burying them in layers of living, breathing, and deadly skin, they were spit out bones, blood, and organs. The wet splashes and muffled groans—tranquilized wild animals—of the snuffed dead continued unending. Katie strangled a corpse with an umbilical cord, lifting it from the ground and driving it face-first into the floor with a bone-crunching impact. Rick Margolia flanked as many corpses as he could with his cleaver. Brandon was finally overpowered in the opposite corner. Craig caught four corpses tugging on each of his arms and legs and then forcing them from the sockets with a wild blast of blood and uncoiling of cable-thick muscle tissue.
The concrete saw was stolen from his father and claimed by one of the undead, and Rick’s head was dismembered from his neck in one swipe.
Craig eyed the machine within four steps of him. He could type for the war to vanish completely.
He decided not to waste another second waiting.
“We are your family, you can’t destroy us!”
The cold and wet umbilical cord wrapped around his throat. It was so tight, he heard a soft snap. His throat burned and radiated razor-sharp agony. He couldn’t breathe. The pain was as stunning as it was paralyzing. He was on his knees, bent forward in struggle. He couldn’t shrug his wife from strangling him.
Her belly was pressed against his back, the protrusion wet. “Can’t you feel her kick?”
Craig indeed felt the soft touch against his back from a dead foot.
“She could’ve been someone special,” she wheezed from the effort of choking him. “Someone different than you, someone much better!”
The room spun in a dizzying frenzy. The loss of air was stealing his equilibrium. The room was upside down, right-side-up, and then murky and in focus again.
“Aack!—pahlease!”
His concentration spread out across the room. Corpse hands smothered Susan and clenched their nails into her flesh. In one death-delivering effort, the flesh over her sternum and face were removed with the smoothness of butter. She was punched through the torso by six hands and lifted in the air in a grotesque presentation. Willis crumpled on the ground, burning to cinders and ash in the aftermath of the flame-thrower tank fuel explosion. Corpses throughout the chamber reached and battled over the squares of skin and human anatomy they tore from the wall of flesh. Alice stood her ground until she was covered up by fifty corpses and eaten alive, swallowed up.
Craig’s eyes rolled into the back of his head. His vision failed to refocus. Katie’s cold dead breath played against his neck. She kissed behind his ear, leaving a slimy patch of skin and mucus. “I will see you in hell, and then we’ll finally be a family.”
His brain boiled with the need for oxygen. His lungs spastically tried to inhale and exhale to mimic the act of breathing. Each attempt issued the raw agony of broken ribs. Seconds from death, Craig let himself go limp.
He kept thinking, where had Dr. Krone disappeared to?
The Deal
The blink happened again. The umbilical cord disappeared. He could breathe again. He coughed and gagged to set his breathing back to normal, being on his knees. His eyes watered, and a line of spittle fell from his panting maw. The corpses were in their body bags. The enemies from his mind had also vacated the area. They were simply gone.
He waited and listened.
“Mr. Horsy,” Dr. Krone spoke, his throat trembling and giving way to his fear. Craig was proud to realize he’d terrified the man who’d delivered so much heartache and horror to him for the past three to four days—or God knows how long, he thought. “You made a smart play. You’re a special case. Mom was right. It wasn’t safe for you to roam freely. It’s not safe for anybody to be free in this mansion. Don’t you see why it’d be impossible to allow the world to enjoy this? It would simply spiral out of control.”
“Like it hasn’t already?”
“It’s ours and ours only to enjoy,” Dr. Krone said, staying hidden. “That could include you, Mr. Horsy. Would you like to experience only good memories? I could permit it.”
He’s trying to bargain with me. Why the fuck would I trust him after all of this? He’s crazy.
The hairs on his arms were raised. The electric impulses hadn’t ended. Blue arcs traveled up and down the walls and the glow encased each of the machines. He eyed one of the screens and noticed words were being typed out on it.
Craig cracked a smile. Ah, I see his game for what it really is.
He posed himself over the machine. “Would you really allow me to relive only the good times? God, I miss Katie every day. Could you make it so our child was really born?”
“Yes,” Dr. Krone replied, happy to hear Craig was interested. “A burping, farting, healthy little girl, she can be anything you want and everything you ever wanted her to be.”
He searched between the machines. He caught Dr. Krone’s shadow. The man was hunched over the computer screen. His eyes never left the console.
“You can fuck Susan into oblivion.” Dr. Krone’s fidgeted and couldn’t shrug the nervous ticks and tremors in his head. “You want Alice too? She’ll do anything to pleasure you. You can have them both at the same time, and they’d like it. You want to relive your regrets and make a change, then let’s do it. You know how to run the machine. Once you’ve been hooked in so long, you don’t have to be hooked in anymore to travel the memories of your past. The machine has memorized them already…you simply type in the change.”
Craig closed in for the finalizing blow. He leveled a fist into Dr. Krone’s jaw, coldcocking him, swinging like a prize fighter. “I want my life back the way it was before you tried to take it away from me!”
Dr. Krone landed as a helpless pile onto the floor. He waved his hands, pleading, begging, desperate to bargain for his life. Tears glazed over his eyes and wet his cheeks. He blubbered and whimpered, “It’s my machine, and you’re under my control. You do as I say. You can’t be doing this. No, you just can’t!”
He anchored his foot over Dr. Krone’s chest. “We’re in real life now. We’re no longer in each other’s minds. I have free will. You’re helpless in your
own skin. I bet that’s a new feeling for you.”
Dr. Krone refused to make eye contact. He was a child in full temper-tantrum mode. His chubby and waxen skin cringed and frowned. He pounded the floor with his fists. “It’s my machine, and you do as I say! I’m in charge. You’re the patient, and I’m the doctor.”
“I’ve heard that shit before.”
The human pile scavenged about the room, expecting his parents or one of Craig’s memories to materialize, but Dr. Krone had ordered them off via the computer, and they wouldn’t be coming back without being summoned first.
“It’s your machine,” Craig shot back, “but you’ll do as I say.”
He throttled Dr. Krone by the neck. The man was covered in so much stinking sweat Craig’s grip was slippery. He managed to lift him up by seizing his collar. Craig forced him onto the chair of one of the machines. “It’s your turn to be introspected to death.”
Dr. Krone was at a loss for breath. “It’s…not your…not your machine…you…you don’t know…you don’t know how to use it…”
He leveled another punch across the man’s temple. The man was stunned by the blow, and Craig was able to strap Dr. Krone onto the machine. The doctor came back to life when he walked to the other side of the machine to type in his command.
“I know the machine better than you. There are so many intricacies, secrets, and better ways to produce the greatest memories. You want that? I can give it to you.”
