Horror Express Volume Two

by Bentley Little

‘I'm pissed off,’ was his reply. Then the needle went in. He closed his eyes. The drugs hit him almost instantly. Reg rolled over towards Sandy. When I open my eyes, the first thing I'll see is her.

  Then slowly everything started to get ... kind ... of ... wEiRd...

  Too hot. Prickly heat.

  Reg shoved out at the blankets, but they weren't blankets. He was in his clothes.

  Smell of cardboard. Right against his face. He'd been sleeping with his face against cardboard. What on Earth...?

  It came to him slowly, through the fog--the amnesia experiment.

  ‘Ben!’ Reg tried to holler, but something was wrong with his voice. ‘Is it over!? What happened!?’

  Reg looked up. Everything too bright. Just a bright blur. And it was hot. And it stank. A brutal city-alley stench.

  ‘What the hell happened to the citrus orchard?’

  Nobody answered.

  Reg pulled himself up to a sitting position. Everything ached, every joint and tendon. His headache was a nail being pounded through his temple. He sat in a doorway, on some city street. He'd been sleeping in the doorway, on cardboard.

  ‘Ben! Please!’ His voice trembled like the tremolo effect had been turned up to full. ‘Answer me, you asshole!’

  Just echo.

  Where the hell am I? Reg stared at the street. Something like a porno shop across from him. Graffiti. Everything sort of trashed and abandoned. What the hell city is this?

  He stood up and almost collapsed. His head felt too heavy. His legs didn't seem to have regular bones anymore. Every movement brought a cacophony of pops and grinding sounds from his joints. His hands ached. Reg looked at his hands. Covered with scabs. Bad, deep scabs. And filthy. Reg pulled up his coat sleeve--sores and boils all up his wrist. He had several draining sores on his right arm.

  ‘My lord,’ he whimpered, staring down at his poor arm.

  His clothes looked like somebody's soiled, cast-off old suit. He wasn't wearing shoes. Reg could tell his feet were in bad shape, but he didn't have the heart to examine them.

  Before him on the sidewalk stood a plasticy newspaper box with a shiny glass front. Reg stumbled to it, squinting at his reflected face. Then he touched his face and the reflected image was a decrepit mad bum clawing at himself. Along with the rest of it, somewhere along the line, Reg had got old.

  Reg now shifted focus onto the display newspaper inside the box. He read the date: February 1, 2034.

  Numbness. Reg just stared at that date.

  Part of his mind did the math--twenty-seven years. That was useful. Somehow.

  Gradually, his gaze shifted onto the headline, the huge block letters: CAPITULATION!

  And the sub-head: WAR IS OVER. WHAT LIES AHEAD FOR THE EARTH?

  Reg lifted his head. Then he screamed, ‘Sandy!’ until something broke in his throat.

  But no answer. Just echoes.

  Then a distant noise. Something coming.

  Something big.

  1st Avenue. The street names meant nothing to Reg. He kept trudging up the low hill.

  It was the Pike Place Market that made him realise, at last, that he was in Seattle. But the Market was abandoned, now, like it had never been in half a century. Taken over by masses of gulls that nested in the tropical-esque foliage that had sprouted from the roof of that structure.

  Inside the Pike Place Market, in the underlevels of its medieval rat-warren, things moved. Reg could hear their cries echoing up through the black entryways. And their clatter--violence, down there. He caught fragments of their speech, but it sounded only like a perversion of natural language. Slowly but sharply, Reg began to regret his reflexive shouting back down the street. The big thing was still coming, from the south. Reg had the sensation of options, one by one, being cut off.

  Capitulation? To whom? What the hell does it mean? Reg stared at everything around him, trying to fathom it--overgrown empty streets, looted shops. He had spent his career figuring things out and now he struggled with this riddle out of utter defensiveness as he plodded along on his aching feet.

  Item: The newspaper had been dated February 1st and obviously it was high summer. The capitulation event had been perhaps as long as six or seven months in the past. In addition, the last published edition of a major city newspaper had been that long ago.

  Conclusion: Unthinkable.

  Reg stopped at Pike Street. He squinted back, southward. Heat-shimmered air down there. And a funny haze. Birds rising in panic. Reg felt like a bird. He felt like a pigeon too stupid to do anything but run straight ahead when somebody comes walking down the sidewalk.

  Up Pike Street lay Capital Hill. Reg had, as a post-graduate, once taught a class at the community college on the Hill. It was how he'd met Sandy. She'd been in the front row. A very serious student. Often staying after class for individual discussion. By the end of the quarter, she was staying weekends in his hobbit-like townhouse cottage on Capital Hill.

  Sandy . . . No. No time for crying when you're being chased like a stupid pigeon.

  The Hill was the only part of Seattle Reg was even remotely familiar with. He turned quickly up Pike Street. He thought, now, he could feel things moving, far below his feet.

  THEY HUNT US BY BRAIN ACTIVITY.

  Reg stared at it. It had been spray-painted in dripping red letters on the wall of the main corridor of the community college. Graffiti, but perhaps with intention. Reg remembered the graffiti he'd seen down on 1st Avenue that he hadn't bothered to examine.

  It could have multiple meanings, he ruminated. Is the ‘brain activity’ a property of ‘they’, or is it...?

  ‘I'm keeping an eye on things for the Central Intelligence Agency,’ came a man's voice from within the gloom a few feet away.

  Reg's heart nearly stopped. He tried to react, but just fell down on his ass.

  The form in the gloom retreated a few steps. ‘I'm keeping an eye on things,’ he reiterated from within the shadows.

  ‘Wait!’ Reg hollered with his broken voice. ‘Wait, come back!’

  The figure withdrew a few more steps.

  Reg got to his feet and began trotting towards the man, who immediately ran away.

  ‘Come back! I won't hurt you!’ Reg cried.

  A distant yell: ‘I'm working with the Central Intelligence Agency!’

  Reg could just see him. Reg took a few steps, but shattered chunks of wall-plaster posed a hazard to his bare feet. Reg now saw that the brick walls had been heavily damaged by what could only have been machine-gun fire. Up ahead was what looked like a barricade of filing cabinets and desks.

  Reg yelled, ‘I'm unarmed!’ and raised his hands.

  The man came slowly closer. Reg didn't dare move. The man had a stare that was fixed, yet darting. Something not right, inside that mind. The man wore filthy trousers and no shoes. No shirt. The man's torso was pale with some dark tattoos. Tattooed on the man's abdomen was a logo that took Reg a few seconds to recognise, although he was very familiar with it.

  The CIA logo.

  And across the man's chest the words: BRAIN ACTIVITY.

  ‘I'm keeping an eye on things for the Central Intelligence Agency,’ the man said confidentially.

  ‘What is your function, precisely?’

  ‘I'm keeping an eye on things,’ was the fellow's reply.

  ‘Who do you report to?’

  ‘I'm just...’

  ‘Yes.’ Reg nodded. ‘...keeping an eye...’

  ‘...keeping an eye on things for the Central Intelligence Agency.’

  The teacher that had been using Reg's old office had moved the desk over by the window and brought in a Tiffany floor lamp. It worked. Chic, yet unpretentious.

  Something like a mortar had blown a hole through the exterior wall. The window was mostly gone. Gallons of some black residue were splattered all over everything and Reg suspected it might be dried blood. The room had a smell.

  In the near sky beyond the ragged hole in the wall, gulls wheeled, also keepin
g an eye on things. They looked well-fed and they were watching Reg.

  Virtually every house on Capital Hill that Reg passed appeared to have been broken into and looted with evident violence. A lot of stuff was blowing around on the overgrown streets. Reg caught movement a few times--furtive things that shadowed him, watching.

  Every one of the hobbit townhouses in his old court had been savaged by the looters. Food had been taken, but not all of it. A few stereos had been smashed. CDs lay strewn across the tiny unkempt lawns. What on Earth were they stealing? Was it just violence for violence's sake? Insanity.

  His own former cottage had been broken into, but not completely ravaged. The tenant had got a hold of some cushiony hobbit-esque furniture that suited the place quite well. Reg found a can of peaches in sugar juice, but no opener. He used a knife. Then he sat down on the puffy little loveseat, eating the peaches out of the can.

  Well, this is where we first began, Sandy. Reg stared at the tiny bay window. The English Ivy had been trimmed back - it used to cover half the window. This is where our life started...how many years ago?

  After a while, Reg started slowly pacing the soft floorboards of the old love-shack. Then he noticed something on the floor--he'd stepped on it. A note in a clear plastic folder. It had been stapled to the door and later torn off, presumably by the home-invasion squad.

  It had his name on it.

  Reg tore it open. This is what it said:

  Reg - Come to the Freye Institute immediately! - Sandy.

  P.S. I knew you'd come back here, you sentimental old fart.

  The Freye Institute had been a pharmaceutical industry think-tank, back in the old days. Now it resembled something like a fortified NORAD remote missile-control facility.

  At first, Reg wasn't sure how he was supposed to get in. But when he approached the front entrance, he saw that the double steel doors had been blown off their hinges and indeed embedded deep into the thick walls at the rear of the entrance chamber. A fortification of sandbags on either side of the entrance had been blown apart--sand covered the front sidewalk.

  ‘Sandy!’ Reg called. He didn't want to go in there. It was dark in there. But nobody answered.

  Then Reg felt the vibration again. The Big Thing, closing in on him. It had left him alone for a while, but no longer. Why? And why didn't it home on one of the crazies? I can feel you watching me; you spawn of Mephistopheles or whatever you are. The Shatterer of Worlds - Oppenheimer's comment at the first A-bomb test. Oppenheimer had helped win the war with science, but all those brilliant atomic scientists were gone. Now it was just old Professor Reg left by himself to do battle with the Shatterer of Worlds.

  Perhaps this was not an accident.

  They hunt us by brain activity.

  Reg felt a prickle, then. And a sense of purpose. He entered the Freye Institute at a run--the time for dithering was over.

  ‘Keep back, I'm armed and dangerous!’ he screamed into the darkness. But no scurrying noises. They stayed away from this place, evidently.

  And it did not appear to have been looted, just opened up like a tin can by some unnameable force. Here and there, skylights provided dank illumination. Deep in the building, the mildewy humidity got oppressive.

  Reg ditched his coat and it didn't help much. He stripped off the shirt and proceeded bare-chested. He'd had an office here, once. As long as we're touring the old haunts...

  His old office looked quite the same. A skylight lit it brightly. The full-length mirror was still on the wall and Reg hazarded a glance at himself. And there it was.

  The CIA logo.

  BRAIN ACTIVITY.

  Tattooed across his chest.

  ‘My lord,’ Reg whispered. He stared down at himself, turning slowly around.

  Then he saw the video camera. Sitting in the middle of the desk. It looked as though the things on the desk had been swept off and the video camera placed there prominently, along with a piece of paper with his name on it and an arrow. Pointing at the video camera.

  Reg picked up the video camera. It still had a charge. He pressed ‘play’.

  On the camera's two-inch monitor, a middle-aged lady's face appeared.

  ‘Sandy,’ Reg muttered. Tears and fluids springing from his face in sudden fonts. ‘Oh my.’

  ‘Christ, Reg, I hope you find this,’ Sandy blurted. ‘We capitulated and the hunters aren't stopping. The UN Security Council signed a full unconditional surrender and NATO stepped down, and they're still coming after us. The Scanner picks us out by certain wavelengths of higher brain activity. We don't really understand it. It points to the scientists, primarily. People with certain types of mental illness and mentally retarded people seem to be invisible to it. We've had success replicating these states, actually inducing temporary insanity accompanied by retrograde amnesia, but the effects are hard to control. Now it looks like this is all we've got. We're gonna try the drugs, Reg. The last surviving scientists are gonna take the drug cocktail originally developed by Ben Burleson. It will affect you differently because you took it before, all those years ago. Do you remember, Reg? Do you remember that day when you took Burleson's drugs and I...chickened out?’

  And then Reg had the first wincing glimpses of returning memory. The invaders. The war. The CIA's desperate attempts to hide the human brain trust. The dire capitulation. Reg didn't want to remember. He wanted to be amnesiac again.

  ‘Well, I'm chickening out again, Reg. So I guess I'm gonna have to help hold down the fort here while we let you guys loose. You'll be invisible to the Scanner while you're insane. Please don't recover until the Scanner's gone, Reg! And then please find me! Please survive! There isn't much time. We held out for a while in this bunker, but now the Scanner's got us. I can hear them coming!’

  Reg dropped the camera. It broke.

  He, as well, could hear them coming.

  Jim Pendrick

  AUNT JUDITH

  If only they were stuck in a traffic jam now, right this minute. Clive cursed inwardly. He had been enjoying listening to The Witches Promise by Jethro Tull, just to annoy Sabrina; she hated rock music, she hated all music, when the radio had cut out and was filled with pink noise. He could get nothing now not even the local BBC. There was an eerie crackle to the reception; a distorted inhuman voice. He was missing London already. He missed busy roads, choked with toxic fumes, traffic jams. Where were they? Sabrina quipped, when redoing the lipstick with the car mirror. He had visited the location many times. Admittedly not for twenty years, but this was the first time he had ever gotten lost. Clive peered out into the rain; jagged rocks wreathed in mist, lonely trees and sinister looking crows were all that he had seen for the past hour. Dusk was now threatening to set like aspic around them.

  ‘Clive! Where the Hell are we?’

  ‘North Cumbria my darling’

  He retorted with fake joviality. As though they were a happy couple in some vapid sitcom. He was dying for a drink. Just to calm his nerves. Things were turning grim as they always did. That was married life. Still at least the old harridan was dead. Clive would take great pleasure in toasting her demise. Craglin House Estate would soon be his. He was next in line. The heir. And he had plans for the decrepit pile. Oh yes indeed. A luxury health farm would be a great asset to this remote godforsaken quagmire. Clive chuckled to himself, thinking about his brother Nigel crying crocodile tears in Hong Kong. But knowing all along that he was powerless to stop his brother becoming heir to the family seat. And what a family; a bunch of Anglo-Caledonian robber barons. He was proud to be keeping familial traditions alive.

  A sign loomed out of the mist.

  CRAGLINTON

  At last! He was in the village. All he had to do was turn left at the Crossroads onto the Sweethope Rd and the drive five miles or so to Craglin House.

  ‘This is the village?’

  Sabrina obviously didn’t think the village was up to much. She obviously didn’t like the damp grey slate houses. She was a continental rich bitch
who had this skewed impression that picture box Home Counties England was Albion personified. When they reached the grim industry of the Midlands her face had contorted in horror. As the Jaguar raced along the motorway passing factories and industrial decay, she had looked at Clive as though he was transporting her through a region of Hades. Which of course he was. But these infernal northern regions had made the Grimwade-Pow’s very rich indeed. From landed gentry to coal mine owners to cut and thrust city slickers.

  Before long Clive took the car up the distinctly crepuscular and wintry drive. It seemed that the grounds had been looked after in a haphazard manner. Not to the standard that Clive could remember. The wilderness had taken over. He parked the car as close to the front entrance as he could. The rain had seemed to have gotten stronger. It fell like flak. Thick globules drummed off the roof, sounding like an army of ghosts were trying to smash their way into the car. Clive could feel the black mood from Sabrina; it was almost tangible. He put on his sitcom voice.

  ‘Darling, welcome to Craglin House!

  Clive pushed the creaky front door open. Luckily the open porch had afforded some protection from the rains fury. They really were far away from the creature comforts of Wimbledon and Chelsea. A monochrome world. They walked into purple gloom. On the threshold Clive had a recollection. Oh Shit! Clive cursed himself. The solicitor had stated that for some reason Aunt Judith the last proprietor of the house had dispensed with using the large electrical generator. Craglin was not on the mains. Even when farmer Haslett had offered to assist her with the running of it. She refused. The eccentric Judith had by that point decided to become fully psychotic and dispense with modernity. The front door suddenly slammed leaving them locked in the vestibule. The wind screamed and moaned through the keyhole sounding like a tortured soul.

  ‘Bear with me’

  Clive remembered that he had a large emergency torch in the boot of the jaguar.

  ‘I don’t like this place!’

  Sabrina whispered looking scared.