It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

by Kurtz, Matt; McKenzie, Shane; Strand, Jeff

  “Shit.”

  She gave her ass a quick shake then pulled up her pants. There came another sound, closer this time, and she dropped to her knees, scrabbling around on the dirty floor.

  “Dirk,” she warned. “Piss off.”

  Her hand found the cold shaft of the flashlight and she sighed with relief. She flicked the switch.

  Nothing happened. She flicked it again.

  “Fuck.”

  Somebody opened the door to the bathroom. Her heart froze. She slapped the torch with her palm. The light flickered then equalized. She whipped around to the door.

  “Dirk, I’m going to kick your—”

  There was a flash of steel and a scream ripped from her throat, echoing through the house.

  ***

  Down the hall in the sitting room, the festivities ground to a halt. Dirk, Clifford, Trey, and the tit-less wonder had rejoined the party—it’s not always easy to make the beast with two backs when there is an audience.

  For a moment everyone stood stock still, listening for a repeat of the sound they collectively thought they had collectively heard. But it did not come. Dirk began to get restless—the keg was just out of arms reach. His fingers started to twitch. Finally, Trey shrugged, a ‘what-you-gonna-do’ look on his face.

  “Must have been the wind.”

  Everyone relaxed and slipped back into the groove.

  Maniac Killer one, High School Kids zero.

  Trey wandered over to where Amanda was sitting. She saw him and quickly averted her eyes. Her palms grew sweaty and she tried to wipe them on her jeans without him noticing. She gave a nervous cough and adjusted her glasses just as he sat down beside her.

  “Anyone ever tell you you’re real cute?” His thigh was pressed against hers. She coughed again. “Because you are.”

  He draped his arm across the back of the sofa behind her and began to twine his fingers in her hair. Amanda was painfully aware of Tiffany standing on the other side of the room, watching their every move, her eyes like daggers that threatened to cut them to shreds at any second.

  “Trey,” she called, sweetly enough, but venom flew like spittle through her gritted teeth, “are you coming upstairs?”

  Amanda looked at Trey. He continued to whisper sweet nothings in her ear as though Tiffany had never spoken.

  “Trey!” Her voice sounded like a cat caught in a lawnmower, yet still he ignored her.

  You could have cut the tension with a knife. Dirk had stopped, bent halfway over the keg in an experiment to cut out the middleman, also known as ‘cup’. His bleary eyes darted back and forth between the assembly, trying to find a safe place to rest. “Ennui High?”

  “Fine. I’m going.” Tiffany fluffed her pompoms once and stalked out of the room.

  Everyone looked to Trey, who shrugged his shoulders indifferently. Nikon’s eyes widened and he dropped his drink, actually dropped it deliberately on the floor, and took off in her slipstream, muttering something along the lines of, “I’d eat a mile of shit to get to that ass.”

  “Hey, Tiffany, wait up,” They heard him shout from the hall. “In theory this house may be structurally unsound. Let me...”

  And his voice was lost to the howling wind and the music. Clifford and Dirk high-fived.

  “That nigga be stuffin’ da muffin tonight!”

  ***

  Meanwhile, back on killer-cam, things were heating up. He had gotten a taste for it after Jane Doe, and now two fresh little lambs had been delivered to the slaughterhouse. After number one, he had needed to find a quiet place to...take himself into hand, so to speak. He had helped himself to a room upstairs and had just finished...purging, when the door opened and the two teens stepped into his lair.

  He slipped into the shadows and watched them. It was beginning to get light outside and he could make out the blonde with the short skirt and the lovely buns, and another male. The very fact that they were in the room with him, just inches from his reach, almost made him purge again.

  It was a worthy offering, laid right at his table. And one should never look a gift horse in the mouth.

  ***

  Tiffany plopped down on a bed-like object in the center of the room. Nikon sat beside her, covertly checking the stability of the thing, mentally calculating its ability to stand up to a little pounding. He hoped she wasn’t high maintenance—it was hardly the ideal surroundings in which to bump uglies.

  “He’s such a dick,” she burst out.

  Nikon wrapped his arm around her shoulders, trying to imitate what he had seen Trey doing with Amanda earlier—it had looked smooth.

  “You’re too good for him,” he agreed.

  “I’ve waited for him for six months.”

  She started to cry. He caressed her cheek with his finger. Waited you say?

  “Forget about him,” he advised, having to work hard to not make it sound like the plea that it really was. “You deserve to be with somebody who respects you.”

  She sniffed and looked up at him. Her eyes were unfocussed. Awesome. She was drunk.

  “You’re actually pretty sweet,” she said.

  That was green light enough for him. He leaned over and kissed her. When she did not protest he pushed on with more assurance. Easing her back on the bed, he rolled on top of her.

  “Is that you breathing?” she said.

  “Uh huh,” he said. She could have been asking if he was the tooth fairy in his spare time and he wouldn’t have known any different.

  She planted her hands against his chest and pushed him away.

  “Seriously, I thought I heard someone.”

  Nikon sat up and looked around. The weak light of dawn dispelled the absolute darkness and he was able to make a vague inventory of the room. Door closed, chair, dresser, hulking shadow, check.

  “There’s nobody here but us, babe.”

  She must have been satisfied because she pulled him back to her. He shifted around, easing himself into takeoff position. She caught his bottom lip between her teeth and he gave a powerful jerk. She hung on. He moaned.

  “Oh you like that do you, big boy?” She released his lip with a wet slap.

  Something warm dripped onto her chest.

  “What the...?”

  Her hand flew up to investigate, knocking against his chin. His head rolled to the side, severed from his body. There was a ring of metal and the flash of a blade above her eyes. She did not have time to scream.

  ***

  “Shouldn’t we go check on the others?”

  The idea came from Amanda. As much as she welcomed the attention from Trey, she needed a breather from it. Clifford and Dirk were in the middle of something really bizarre in the corner. Dirk had his pants down and what looked like a long sheet of toilet paper was trailing from his quivering butt cheeks. He was standing in a half squat, as though he was preparing to take a dump. There was a full pint held at the ready in his hand. Clifford was kneeling at his feet, a match poised to strike.

  The charade was doing nothing to ease Amanda’s discomfort. Trey, probably reading something completely different into her question, was more than happy to oblige. They stood up and he reached for her hand. Their eyes met and she smiled, dipping her head shyly.

  “Guys, we’re going to investigate.”

  Clifford gave a vague sign of acknowledgement. As they walked away they heard him count down from three. When he reached one, there was a hiss of flame and he began to chant, “Chug, chug, chug, chug.”

  Their sounds faded as Amanda and Trey wound their way upstairs, kicking open doors and calling for their missing comrades.

  “I really like you, Amanda,” Trey said as he threw open a door at the top of the stairs. “Tiffany?”

  He flashed the light around the empty room and they moved down the hall to the next.

  “Will you go steady with me?”

  Amanda’s vision blanched. She had to convince herself that it was really happening, that it was not just another one of her fant
asies.

  “Tiffany?” Another empty room. Trey closed the door behind him.

  “I’d like that,” she forced herself to croak.

  He looked at her and smiled, then planted a kiss on her lips. It was better than all her dreams put together. She felt like she was flying. Electric tingles coursed through her body, firing hotly at the nerve endings. He reached behind her and turned the handle of the door at her back.

  The torch picked out a soiled mattress in the center of the room. It took a moment for the realization of what they were looking at to sink in, and then Amanda let out a prolonged, bloodcurdling scream.

  Nikon’s dead eyes stared up at them from a sticky puddle on the floor. The rest of his body was sprawled across the bed. There was not much left of Tiffany to identify. The only evidence that she was part of the massacre at all was a minced-meat mess beside Nikon’s lifeless body, and a stained set of blue and yellow pompoms sitting atop.

  Amazingly, Amanda was still screaming, the din providing the background music while they took in the scene. You had to give it to her—the girl had lungs.

  Trey grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the stairs. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  They stumbled down the steps two at a time. There wasn’t a sound coming from the sitting room and they presumed the others had passed out. Perhaps that might have been the case, on a Sunday, when there was no Mass. But when they ran into the room it was a whole different story. They skidded to an abrupt halt. Amanda’s scream bounced off the walls.

  Dirk lay on the floor in a pool of his own blood. His neck and stomach were sliced open. Blood streamed from his mouth and a pitiful gurgling noise came from his throat.

  “Aw, buddy.” Trey fell to his knees by his friend’s side, gripping his bloody hand in his own. “Hold on, man, we’ll get help.”

  Dirk choked out a watery sound. He was trying to say something.

  “What is it, buddy? I can’t hear you.” Trey leaned in closer.

  Dirk coughed again, spraying Trey’s cheek. The scene was sadly lacking a violin or two.

  “En...En...Ennui High...” he wheezed, then his eyes glazed over and his head rolled to the side.

  Trey got up, his face teeming with snot and tears. “Come on,” he said, taking Amanda’s hand again.

  They ran to the front door. Trey yanked at the handle. Nothing happened. He braced himself against the wall and pulled. Still nothing happened, so he tried to ram it with his shoulder. Amanda started to tug him in the opposite direction, deeper into the house.

  “There must be another door.”

  At that exact moment a hand clamped down on her shoulder and her uvula was treated to another blast of the foghorn that was her scream.

  “Girl, what you trippin’ for? Be easy.”

  She almost collapsed in relief at the sound of Clifford’s voice.

  “Dude, we gotta get the hell out of here,” Trey said. “We found Tiffany and Nikon upstairs, they’re dead. And...and Dirk...”

  His sorrowful eyes fell on the sitting room door, his explanation cut short when the waterworks broke again.

  “No shit, foo’,” Clifford said, as cool as a polar bear’s swimsuit. “I just found what’s-her-name in the bathroom, nigga. She’s like sausage meat.”

  “Can we go?” Amanda begged.

  They followed Clifford down the hall to the kitchen—Amanda clung to Trey’s back. The room was empty and they slowly made their way to the paneled door. As Clifford reached for the handle, a figure passed by the window. In the dawning light they could just make it out. Its head was huge, its ears pointed like that of a wolf. Its long snout pressed against the glass, making foggy impressions with each breath.

  Amanda screamed. They turned and ran back into the house. At some point Trey caught her hand and yanked her off the main thoroughfare into one of the connecting rooms. He slammed the door and they found each other again in the darkness.

  “What was that thing?” she said in an undertone.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered.

  They were silent, watching the darkness roughly where the door was.

  “Where’s Clifford?”

  “Shit,” Trey muttered, then as loud as he dared, “Cliff? You here, dude?”

  Silence answered.

  “We have to go find him,” he announced with finality.

  “But, Trey,” there was a fierce urgency to her protest, “you saw what it did to the others.”

  “So we sit here and wait for it to find us?”

  That stopped the airflow to her windbag.

  They linked hands and felt their way to the door. After a steadying breath, they opened it a crack and peered out. The coast was clear. Staying close to the wall, they inched toward the kitchen. There was not a sound in the big old house. The archway into the kitchen was dark and foreboding, like a gateway to hell. As they eased their way through, their eyes were trained on the back door, so at first they did not see what was happening to the left of the room.

  A small noise alerted them and they stiffened, their heads turning reluctantly toward the sound. When they found the source—what do you know—Amanda screamed. Trey clapped his hands against his head.

  “Amanda, babe, seriously, my ears are bleeding here.”

  Sitting at the table, looking as startled as they felt, was the wolf-man. His hands were frozen in the air, one still clutching a carving knife. Folded neatly in his lap was a napkin. Clifford lay along the middle of the table like a ham, roasted and basted, an apple in his mouth and an onion up his arse.

  Unless you are a teen caught in a slasher storyline of that persuasion, you will never understand how long it felt as they stared across the room at each other, wondering who should make the first move. It can only have been seconds, though, before Amanda screamed and Trey winced.

  Despite the fact that there wasn’t a fireplace to be seen, a fire hook stood against the wall. Amanda grabbed it and launched herself at the atrocity on the other side of the room. With a sickening squelch, she drove the dangerous end through the wolf-man’s eye socket. His jaw just had time to drop in surprise before he slumped to the ground, dead as a dodo.

  “Take that, bad guy,” she declared, dusting off her hands.

  Trey had stood to the side, watching it all go down open-mouthed. But when her unforeseen heroic act was done, he jacked up his manhood and slung his arm in a protective crook around her shoulders.

  “Nice one, babe.”

  “That’s what he gets for killing all those people I didn’t know.”

  They pushed open the back door and walked out of the house, cooler than a pair of snow cones. The sun was just coming up as they made their way back to the lane and started toward the main road. At the turning they met a whistling logger on his way to work who tipped his hat to them as he passed. Amanda stopped and looked back at him.

  “What’s up?” Trey said when he realized she was no longer beside him.

  She shook her head. “There was something weird about that guy, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  He watched the man for a second, his eyebrows all askew.

  “It’s been a rough night,” he said.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  They turned their backs on the man and the house, and walked out onto the main road just as the sun peeped its head over the horizon.

  ***

  He felt their eyes on his back, but when that burn dissipated, he turned around. He watched them with a crooked grin until they disappeared from sight, then he swung a mucky spade onto his shoulder, followed by a bloody axe. With that he walked off into the woods surrounding the house, leaving the story wide open for a sequel.

  The Undead Pay the Bills

  by Kara Race-Moore

  Mike stood at the kitchen counter and tallied up his latest stack of checks while he waited for the coffee to finish brewing, silently blessing Congress for passing the Zombie Civil Rights Act.

&
nbsp; He had the TV on just for background noise as he made breakfast. He threw the frozen burrito in the microwave and then glanced at the TV screen. A pretty young woman with lots of makeup smiled at the camera. She had probably been a camera operator assistant herself before the Z.A. Mike snorted. Hell, she might have just been the girl they sent to get lattés. A lot people had gotten to move their careers up quite swiftly after the Z.A.

  “The House,” the young woman reported brightly, “is scheduled to vote today on legislation that will grant further immunity to people currently being prosecuted for looting during the Z.A. The bill is expected to pass through the House, but most members of the Senate are saying they will vote against it, citing that the law must be obeyed, even in times of crisis. The President is urging the passage of the bill, saying that now is the time to move forward.”

  Mike tuned out the rest of the report as various experts were interviewed. The majority leader of the House, who also looked like he’d recently climbed up the ranks pretty quickly, claimed that just because the prisons were now nearly empty, that was no reason to immediately start over crowding them again with people who had just been trying to make sure they didn’t starve during the Z.A.

  The news moved on to cover the latest progress on bringing the surviving members of the Israeli and Palestinian governments to the table, both just finally acknowledging the fact that they were both facing extinction if they didn’t at least try a little fraternization.

  The newscaster moved on to the entertainment section: “The international uproar continues over the casting of Chinese actor Yi Zhu to play the part of Utagawa Kuniyoshi in the upcoming film Last Man in Tokyo.”

  The woman made a sad face, trying to demonstrate empathy at the mention of the man who had come to be a symbol for the tragedy of many. While she talked, the screen showed the now wearily familiar footage shot on Kuniyoshi’s phone as he left a last message of love for his child while taking out a city block of zombies.