by Bryan Smith
Then she was gone.
Darlene could tell by the sound of the slow, shambling footsteps above her the dead things had filled the cabin by now. And judging by the pitiful sound of Eunice’s final wail of pain and despair, she was now one of them. She imagined the girl going completely still for a moment before tentatively and awkwardly beginning to reanimate, the way it always happened in those old movies they used to watch back in the days when they still had power out here.
Those days were long gone now, just like her momma and daddy. She smiled as she glanced toward the back of the large cellar. The body pit was back there. It was filled with the liquefied remains of most of the victims she and her brothers had taken over the years.
Including Momma and Daddy.
An ammonia-like odor was ever-present down here. That was the lye they used for dissolving the bodies. Most people hated the smell, but she’d grown to love it over the years. It was the odor most inextricably tied to what her life had always been about. Hurting people. Killing them.
She’d always loved it. Killing her brothers hadn’t been an act of vengeance for being forced into a life of murder and terror. The intent hadn’t been to rescue Eunice and escape together to a less insane life somewhere else. The abuse stories she’d fed the former hippie bitch had largely been lies to garner sympathy. Only one person in her life had touched her without her consent and that had been her daddy. And, well, she’d taken care of that sorry-ass motherfucker, hadn’t she?
No, she killed Jasper and Purvis for the simple reason that she wanted Eunice to herself.
It was sheer selfishness, nothing else.
Only now the bitch had betrayed her and she was trapped down here in the cellar with what sounded like dozens of those dead things tromping around on the floor above. She could keep firing rounds up through the roof with her AR-15, but she couldn’t be sure of getting them all. Besides, if movie rules applied here, she’d have to get head shots on all of them to put them down. Pretty much impossible without being able to see what she was shooting at. No, there was only one viable course of action.
She’d have to wait them out.
Without anyone else left alive to feast on inside the cabin, they’d have to leave eventually?
Right?
She didn’t have a definitive answer to that question, of course. That hope was all she had, though. She could survive down here a long time without having to come out of the cellar, which was well-provisioned for riding out apocalyptic scenarios of all kinds. There were cases and cases of bottled water and enough canned food to last a year or longer. She could piss and shit in a bucket and dump the waste in the lye pit.
She smiled.
Nah. I ain’t in any hurry.
She felt a bit miffed at Eunice’s betrayal, but other than that she was okay. Sooner or later, she’d get out of here, and by the time that happened, she was sure this whole zombie thing would’ve blown over. And, hey, if not, she’d get to live the post-apocalypse dream of roaming the land and blowing away walking dead fucks with all the firepower at her disposal.
Which was a lot of fucking firepower.
Chuckling at the thought, she laid the AR-15 down atop a crate of hand grenades and took a seat on the floor, folding her legs beneath her as she stared off toward the lye pit. There was a radio around here somewhere. She’d have to find it at some point. It’d alleviate boredom and help her keep abreast of the situation in the outside world.
She thought of the other hippie kid they’d taken overnight, another quick snatch job from just outside the festival grounds. Before they started in with the torture and other fun stuff, the dumb fuck briefly believed he could win them over by offering them drugs. Consciousness-expanding hippie shit.
What had he called it?
Delish? Delight?
Something along those lines.
She dug one of the pills she’d taken off him out of her pocket and stared at its neon-green coating a moment. Smiling at the memory of how he’d screamed as they strung him up from the rafter of the shed, she shrugged and popped the pill in her mouth. Normally she wasn’t into this ecstasy-type shit. She loved her meth above all else, but there wasn’t any goddamn meth down here.
She smiled again and got ready to enjoy the trip.
TEN
STANDING ON THE SECOND-FLOOR balcony at the back of their house, Helen Ferguson was engaged in what was looking like an increasingly hopeless battle to drive the reanimated invaders away from her property. More and more of the shambling, mud and blood-encrusted, straggly-haired dead things kept coming out of the woods and climbing the gently sloping hill toward the home she’d shared with her dead husband for so many years. There were dozens and dozens of them now. Barely a second went by without another one or two emerging from the distant tree line.
She’d locked all the doors and bolted all the windows on the bottom floor, lowering all the heavy wooden privacy shutters as an extra barrier in case the creatures were able to batter their way through the windows. Going by how they struggled to weave and stagger their way up the hill, she doubted any single one of them would have the strength to do that. The danger would lie in an overwhelming number of them piling up against the house from all sides. Even then, she doubted their combined efforts would be sufficient to force their way in, but doubt wasn’t certainty. She had to allow for the dismaying possibility that it might happen.
Which meant she had to kill as many of them as she could before they could even reach the house. To that end, she again braced the stock of her late husband’s rifle against her shoulder, took aim through the attached scope at a wobbling dead thing about fifty feet distant, and squeezed the trigger. There was a gratifying spray of blood from the back of its head as the round drilled through the thing’s temple. It fell over and did not move. She shifted the rifle over, sighting down on another of the nearby shamblers. The satisfaction she felt at dropping them was not exactly pleasure. It was more a sense of righteous accomplishment. These creatures had been living people not long ago. They had people who loved them and would grieve for them. But Helen couldn’t concern herself for that. Not now. Maybe later, when this was all over. If it was ever all over. The only thing she had room for in her mind at the moment was defending her home. She would not lose it to some sinister, mysterious force, whatever was behind this madness, not if she could help it.
She’d raided Dan’s gun cabinet after retreating to the house and battening down the hatches earlier. He had multiple rifles, handguns, and shotguns. All were out here on the balcony with her now, along with many boxes of ammunition. The rifle she was now using had an expensive scope. She knew it was expensive because she remembered when Dan bought it a decade ago, back when he was still an active hunter. He’d hemmed and hawed about spending the money, but in the end she talked him into it, telling him life was short and getting shorter all the time at their age. Besides that, they had no kids or grandkids to pass their savings onto when they were gone. Might as well spend what money you have on things you enjoy while you still can, that was her philosophy.
So Dan spent the money.
Now, all these years later, she was glad she’d talked him into it, because she could see the things with a startling HD-like clarity, as if they were right in front of her instead of many yards distant. She squeezed the trigger and took down another one as it came out of the trees. That one she eliminated just to again test accuracy and range. Still impressive. She was taking aim on a much closer creature when she began to perceive a strange pulsing sound coming from some indeterminate direction. There was an oddly resonant, warbling quality to it, a rising shrillness that set her teeth on edge and pebbled her arms with goosebumps as it grew steadily louder.
Grimacing, she lowered the rifle and looked up as a shadow began to move over the balcony. Her jaw dropped open when she saw the thing hovering directly above her home. Tojo came out on the balcony and started yipping frantically at the object, a sound vastly different from his usual fu
ll-throated barking. The fear that came over her then was more related to concern for the dog’s safety than any worries she had for herself. She was old. She’d lived a long and full life. The dog was only a few years old. In the event something happened to her, someone else would need to take custody of Tojo and care for him for many years to come. She tried ordering him back inside, but the dog stayed where he was, standing now with his paws braced against the top of the railing and howling for all he was worth.
She considered raising the rifle again, this time to fire on the saucer-like craft, which was silver-colored and of some metallic construction. Lights along the circumference of the craft’s underside blinked on and off in a repeating pattern of bright colors that made her wonder if it was trying to signal her. That didn’t seem likely. This craft was not of this world. It was a UFO. How was she supposed to know what manner of message it was trying to communicate?
Something in the periphery of her vision made her look down again. Her mouth opened in amazement upon seeing that all the dead things had stopped in their tracks and were staring skyward. They seemed hypnotized either by the craft itself, the noise it was making, or the repeating pattern of lights.
Helen wondered if the beings at the helm of the alien craft might be responsible in some way for reanimating the dead. Why else would they be so affected by its presence when they were seemingly oblivious to everything else other than warm, living flesh?
The possibility angered her and she raised the rifle again, this time aiming it skyward. Before she could squeeze the trigger, a round black hole at the center of the craft’s underside irised open and a brilliant shaft of light projected downward, enveloping the entirety of the balcony. The light soon grew so bright she couldn’t see anything anymore. She heard Tojo yipping and howling. She heard the pulsing, warbling sound, now so loud it was making her ears hurt.
Next came a brief, gray moment of unconsciousness.
When she could see again, she and Tojo were sitting in the midst of a peaceful meadow with a picnic blanket and the contents of a lunch basket spread out around them. Tojo abruptly sat up and started barking excitedly. A tall, thin figure was approaching from the distance.
Helen stayed where she was, sitting cross-legged on the ground with a glass of wine dangling from her fingers. Dan would be here in just a few minutes. The three of them were going to be together again, now and forever. She smiled and sipped her wine, feeling better than she had in a long time. In years, in fact.
Tojo, however, could not contain his excitement.
He leapt to his feet and went running to meet his best friend.
Helen breathed a sigh of contentment.
Everything was perfect now. No more worries. No more fear. No more getting old. No more anything that made any of them unhappy.
Perfect.
EPILOGUE
THE FIRST THING OSCAR FELT upon opening his eyes was surprise at still being alive. He sensed the dead milling around him, but they were no longer mauling his shredded flesh. They were no longer even paying attention to him. In another moment, knowledge began to seep into his mind from somewhere else, like a download of information from the ether.
He was not, in fact, still alive.
Delight was more than a drug distributed by an advance invading force. It was a gateway. Though he hadn’t ingested it voluntarily, the dead had transmitted its viral effects by biting him. His body was now undergoing a process of transformation. He was becoming a conduit. An alien consciousness was passing through the link between universes to take up residence in his brain.
He was now two beings existing in one reanimated body.
Oscar sat up and got to his feet. A loud fart popped out of his backside. The smell would’ve caused the living Oscar to recoil in disgust, but now he recognized it only as a side effect of the transference between worlds. The other intelligence residing inside him needed bio-fuel to operate at more than a basic level and continue the transformation.
Meaning human flesh and a lot of it.
Everywhere he looked, Oscar only saw other dead things. He needed to find living people as soon as possible to assuage the burning hunger beginning to take hold of him. Groaning and grimacing at the pain the hunger caused him, Oscar started walking in a direction his new undead instincts told him was the right one. Then he felt an unnatural burst of intense energy and he began to run.
He couldn’t wait to taste human flesh for the first time.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The story that follows is a 10,000-plus word piece that was written inside of 24 hours. So if it reads as if it was written very quickly, well, you’ll know why. This isn’t a serious story. It’s kind of a goof, actually. But I think most people who enjoy my books will at least find it fun. If it seems very random, there’s a good reason for that as well. I had to come up with this story in a very short time frame. Because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about, I posted the following message on my private Facebook page. This should help you figure out why the tale unfolds the way it does.
“That short story I have to come up with so quickly? Not sure what I want to write about. It can basically be anything within the horror genre. So I’m gonna do something a little different here and put it up for a vote. Refer to the numbers below to tell me what this thing should be about.
1. Zombies
2. Vampires
3. A serial killer or killers
4. Werewolves
5. Monsters lurking in the sewers
6. Lesbian cheerleaders with chainsaws
7. The cannibals next door
8. Nazi zombies risen from the grave
9. Some kind of combo of Nazi zombies, lesbian chainsaw-wielding cheerleaders, serial killers, and sewer mutants.
10. Fluffy bunnies.”
So anyway, you may want to review this list again after you’ve read the story. By then you may be able to guess which answers were the most popular.
SOME CRAZY FUCKING SHIT THAT HAPPENED ONE DAY
DARBY HINSON’S GIRLFRIEND DIDN’T LIKE him smoking in their one-bedroom apartment. She didn’t like the smell and she didn’t like to watch him sucking poison down into his lungs. That was how she put it anyway. Of course, it was totally okay for her to fire up her bong and smoke weed all damn day. It wasn’t the same thing, according to Lacy. Tobacco was stinky poison, but weed was organic, natural, and pure. It came from the earth, she said, and was one of God’s most beautiful gifts to the world. Tobacco just made you sick, while weed made you mellow and happy and helped you see things in more enlightened ways and shit. Every now and then when she’d go off on one of her tobacco versus weed rants, he’d tell her that tobacco was a natural product that came from the fucking earth, too, and that, really, she was kind of a goddamn hypocrite. He tried not to lose his cool with her too often or even argue with her at all. She didn’t like to be corrected or told she was wrong about anything. She’d get all wound up, start screaming and even throwing shit, which was no damn fun at all.
Kind of the total damn opposite of mellow, but, like, whatever, man.
So here he was again, strolling around the perimeter of the shabby two-story apartment building’s little parking lot, puffing away on his fifth smoke of the day while again wondering what it was that kept him with Lacy Jones. As always, he recognized there was no easy answer to that question. He didn’t like being alone for one thing. Who the hell did? She was good at sex. Like, really, really super phenomenally good. Probably because she was a former porn actress. So she was kind of a damn expert at fucking. Which was kind of awesome . . . except for when he started thinking about all the dicks that had been all up inside her over the years. That was kind of gross. These days she worked as a stripper down at the Sin Den on 10th Avenue, where, he suspected, she also turned the occasional trick. Lacy was a fine-looking babe, the hottest he’d ever hooked up with by a mile, but there were times, like now, when he wasn’t sure staying with her was the right thing. Even leaving aside all the arguing and pett
y disagreements, the thought of his dick suddenly turning rotten with some funky venereal disease often kept him awake at night.
Such were his thoughts as his walk took him to the sidewalk and down to the street corner near the apartment building. He stood there and stared at the traffic passing through the busy intersection as he smoked his cigarette down to the filter. Then he tossed the butt to the ground and considered whether he ought to head back inside or stay out here a bit longer and have another smoke. While he was mulling it over, he heard the rumble of a big engine approaching from his left. He glanced in that direction and saw a yellow school bus rolling slowly through the intersection. Though the light was green, the bus slowed to a stop at the street corner.
Darby frowned.
What the fuck?
The door hissed open and a stunningly statuesque brunette in a black cheerleader outfit smiled down at him. “Hey, baby, want a ride?”
Darby had a fresh, unlit cigarette out already. He kept his eyes on the smiling stunner as he brought it to his mouth and drew on the filter. He kept his expression frozen as he realized he hadn’t yet lit the cigarette. Then, smiling, he dropped his hand and exhaled imaginary smoke.
Man . . . I gotta look like the world’s biggest fucking goof right now.
The cheerleader laughed. “You might want to actually light that, baby. Better that way.”
Darby snorted. “Right, right. No shit.” He fumbled his lighter out of a pocket and had a scary moment where it almost slipped from his fingers to the sidewalk. But he was able to close his fingers tight around the Zippo and hold it still as he snapped a flame to life. He lit his new smoke and smiled again. “Guess that didn’t look too smooth, huh?”
