“And there we shall leave the tale,” Josh concluded, “of the beginnings of the Widows’ Club. To be continued, for sure. To be continued.” He smiled and nodded and took his seat. They all had comments and jokes, but mostly applause and more howls of good, now slightly drunken, intention. Hunter, who had only knocked back two long necks that night, stood up and said quite soberly:
“Awesome. Great job, Josh. So gross! OK, next up is Megan. She’s been dying to get up here and gross you all out.” The hour was getting late, 11:30 p.m., which really wasn’t late until you factored in that it was Friday night and they had all gotten up early for school that morning. But the teenage energy supply is long and powerful and they weren’t even yawning yet. Still, though they loved to tell their gross out tales, once it was over, they could kick back and really enjoy the rest of the night’s drinking and partying. Telling jokes and laughing like loons and playing truth or dare and maybe a little unremembered drunken sex if any of them were lucky. Megan had gotten to her feet and was putting her hair back in a pony tail. They knew she meant business when she did that. Her tale was on the shorter side in comparison to the other tales, but still with a wicked punch. A meteor falls to Earth—through the Northern Lights—and hits a large lake near a cemetery. The meteor wasn’t much bigger than a Volkswagen Beetle but the impact sent the now tainted water up in a tidal wave over the surrounding land in all directions, soaking thoroughly the plots of the graveyard. That night, a strange fog settled over the town as the rotten hands and boney claws of the dearly departed began to work their way up through the sod. Every grave in the place was alive and teeming with undead activity. The rotten, decomposed figures clawed up and free of their organic prisons and began the usual staggering lurch of the undead. Moving in a shambling direction toward town, they began to feed on anyone they encountered. Nothing communicable about these poor schlubs though. If they caught you, they simply fed. Ripping out vital parts and dining on what dripped through their fingers. Men came to fight off the horde, but were unsuccessful. They simply were not prepared—even with all the zombie films floating around out there—for this particular event to become an actual reality. They couldn’t be put down with bullets or knives or any other stabbing utensils; they simply got to you and you were no more. Eventually, with most of the town having been cleared out, the military was called in. First the guard, then the real boys showed up. Apparently, 50 cal. bullets did stop the undead. There just wasn’t enough of them left to keep going. A final bloody confrontation had ripped the demons apart all in one location, the town square. As the bodies lay strewn about, the soldiers made final rounds checking the twice dead corpses and pieces. Every so often, a twitching finger would bring about a rapid little pap of gunfire, but then all would fall silent again. The military rounded up all the townsfolk still remaining and quarantined the town, then—the scientists came in. The men in lab coats with full body suits and breathing apparatus on. The men who generally always fuck these sorts of things up in the end. They collected samples and specimens and pieces. Vials and jars full of greenish-black eye core type ooze. Samples of water from the lake that had started all the trouble. The fragments of meteor that could be found by divers was recovered and all taken as specimen. All findings and collections were transported to a nearby waiting military Chinook helicopter and loaded with careful grace. Once the precious cargo was securely stowed, the twin rotors began to whop whop whop and faster and faster until the giant bird lifted up into the waning light and began to fly east. It flew over the now defunct cemetery and over the lake lit up with search lights and crawling with men like an anthill. It flew east until it was directly over a large and raging river where it banked north and continued along following the river beneath it. It made another fifty or so miles before an electrical surge began to fry the control panel. There came a rhythmic humming and static crackling from the fragments of meteor and the control panels went up in a blinding flash that melted the faces of the two pilots in the cockpit. They slumped forward and became fused to the control panel that was now fully in flames. The Chinook began to spiral in an uncontrolled series of downward circles with all aboard screaming and holding on for their lives. A massive energy surge came from the meteor fragment and sent out a bolt of lightning type electricity that jumped from man to man in the cargo hold of the helicopter. The downward spiraling helicopter crashed hard and fast into the raging river and was torn into so many fragments of ripped metal and bloody chunks of passengers. The wreckage sank into the water and was carried away by the vicious undertow taking it south, exactly opposite of its intended destination. The undead were not communicable in any way whatsoever, the meteor on the other hand was still very active and now what it carried flowed and mixed freely with the river leading it ever onward toward the cities and towns and to the waiting ocean below and finally to the entire world. Within four months of the wrecked Chinook, the entire world was feeling and seeing the effects of what they did not understand and did not know the origin of. The governments of the world came to understand what had happened and how badly this project had gone tits up, but no solutions could be devised. They were helpless to stop the spread of corpses, first clawing their way up then out of long forgotten plots. Of dead animals laid out on highways and in forests and all around suddenly regaining some semblance of life and coming with alarming speed in all attack mode. The living ones who were killed would not remain dead long. Not from bites or claw marks, but from the spread of the meteor’s influence on the overall ecosystem of the planet. Another four or five months later and the Earth was a still and mostly quiet place. A few survivors—weren’t there always a few?—remained scattered across the globe, but it was to no avail that they should survive. The planet itself was dying from the poison it was choking on. It was only a matter of time until the Earth itself was a silent, dead moon orbiting a useless sun. “And they all lived happily never after!” She exclaimed at the end. They all cheered and clapped and laughed. Beers and shots were toasted and the wind howled through the trees.
“Goddamn, I love this group and our stories. We should be writing theshe down or recording them or shomething.” Zach exclaimed drunkenly. “You guysh are the shit!” He was slurring pretty badly now. He had the lowest tolerance for booze of the group, but damned if he didn’t put them down like everyone else. Everyone else was incidentally pretty squiffy, too. Everyone, that is, except Hunter. He was feeling good, but far from intoxicated. Everyone stood up to stretch.
“OK,” Hunter said, “everyone have a stretch, grab a drink, take a piss, whatever. I gotta go get my bag and then I’ll come back and blow you all away with the story of the night! Swear!” They all cheered and again raised glasses and bottles. Trinity staggered to her feet and the booze hit her good. She swayed for a second, then turned and vomited behind her log. She leaned on it momentarily gasping for air and laughing. Cheyenne patted her on the back.
“Shit, Trinity, you better slow down. You won’t make it through the alleged story of the night,” she said laughing.
Wiping sick from her lips, Trinity said, “I’m good. I got this.” Caleb and Josh were with Megan getting more drinks and laughing. Caleb was doing his best Chris Rock one liners and killing it. He was very clearly the funniest of the group. Hunter made his way over to the Escape they had all rode up there in. He opened the back door and leaned the middle seat forward to get at the third-row seat and grabbed his little black fanny pack. He always wore this when he told one of his stories because he always kept some type of little prop in it that he’d casually bring out mid-story. His stories quite often fell flat and he knew it. They didn’t always get his brand of humor or horror. His was the type that really could happen and always included their fictitious versions and he knew this made them uneasy. He did it in part because he knew that this made him the unofficial champion. All the other stories were gross outs no doubt, but his could actually happen—and that gave them the most terrifying, horrific edge of them all. He snapped
on his fanny pack and slammed the door. He stopped at the cooler and grabbed out another beer. He snapped off the top and took a long drink. Mustering up the courage he always needed to get up and kill them all over and over again in his stories, he drained the bottle entirely, then made his way back to the fire. Sitting down, he saw Trinity flashing those large breasts at Zach. Cheyenne reached a hand up, grabbed the left breast and jiggled it in Zach face. Zach kissed it, then just as quickly, they were gone again. Ah, the perks of the group, Hunter thought. Slowly, they all meandered their way back over to the fire and took their seats. Hunter stood.
“All right, ladies and gents, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. My story.” They all laughed.
“Yeah, Hunter! Woo!” Josh yelled, swigging his beer.
“Finale!” cried Cheyenne. “Make it brutal!” There was a small amount of general cheering, then he began. God help them, he began.
“Our tale revolves around the young protagonist Hunter. Unbeknownst to the others in this tale of woe, he is really and forever will be the antagonist. Alone with his gaggle of friends in the woods on a moonlit spring evening. The wind through the trees makes a wildly suggestive howl and the rumors of a vicious, mankiller are abound. We’ve spent the evening with a maggot-infested teen, a beast that feeds on monthly blood, the aforementioned she-wolf mankiller, Satan himself and all the minions of hell, exploding biscuit body builders and of course…the undead. The one and only evil we have not seen this evening, we will see now. Man himself. The true nature of all evils. The murderer. The evil in men’s brains that translates into all horror stories and ghost stories and folk lore and religions and death. ‘The evil that men do lives on and on’, so Iron Maiden once sang and truer words have never been spoken. The serial killer, for instance. The murderer of living, breathing human beings. The one you never see coming until he is on you, taking your very life from your body. Our young Hunter, pro-antagonist and secret deviant goes about his life in a day-to-day routine sort of fashion. Things have been bad most of his life, but we shall not dwell upon this fact. Father took off at a very young age to chase skirts and play the tracks back east. The booze did follow him, but a trace of it remained with his mother, who with great gusto, turned a trace into an epidemic. The river of booze brought in a flood of men over the years and some of those men liked to touch our young pro-antagonist in places that mommy herself occasionally liked to touch. Booze has a strange effect on a great many people in this story. Most of the men never came back to the house he and his mother shared once they had gotten their dicks wet, but some came back a time or two again. This drove young Hunter crazy with anger and fear. The ones who touched him and then came back again, often would not come back a third time, but not of their own choosing. They were often found weeks later in a slightly more…um…decomposed fashion. Hunter and his mom lived and found out just how resilient the human spirit was. They never even briefly entertained the thought of suicide. It was always the outsiders who had to pay. The outsiders had to pay for the drinks and the outsiders had to pay for their sins with their lives. Some of the bodies still had yet to be discovered to this day. Some rotted away under their very house. Dirt floors in old, old cellars could be very useful on occasion. He had friends, this young Hunter boy, but most of the kids in school really didn’t want to be very close to him. A few made exceptions, though. They found his personality to be suitable with their own sick fantasies and fetishes.” So far, the others in the group had been smiling and chuckling and even wistfully wincing at the dicey bits of his story so far, now a few of them were leaning in, paying closer attention to the details of the story. Where was he going with this tale? Was it a tale or was he in full-on confession mode at this point? Hunter took a long drink of his beer and threw the bottle against a tree. It smashed into a million pieces and there remains forgotten from time evermore. Still highly intoxicated, the few members of the group—mostly the boys—were trying hard to focus clearly on the somber words coming out of Hunter’s mouth. The swirling, dizzying effects of the alcohol were still in full effect on all of the six of them though as he continued. “They accepted young Hunter into their group, not really realizing what had been done to him, what he was underneath. Not really realizing that monsters were real and sometimes when a monster touched you in real life, you became a monster. You became that fucking thing that you wanted so badly to destroy.” The others all took notice of a single tear tracking a steady course down his cheek, illuminated by the firelight. What they did not notice was his nimble fingers slowly unzipping the black fanny pack and reaching quietly inside.
Individually Wrapped Horrors Page 12
