When Ken made no response, she bent down and unstrapped it. She drew closer, squatting low, moving slowly. Ken could not ignore how pretty she was. She reminded him of that other girl he had known so long ago. There had been something between them, something unfinished. He wanted this woman to be her.
She stopped within reach of the gun. “Are you hurt, Ken? Are you in any pain?”
Flashes of his lost team moved through his mind. Their names were like physical blows. Brandon. Olaf. Ron. Kara. Tom. Lee. Tears fell soundlessly down his face. The gun nodded once with him.
“Can I see? Let me help.”
“No!” He cringed from her outstretched arm.
Then someone else came down the slope. Ken’s eyes flashed upward. Another hiker came into view, this one a man. At seeing Ken, he gently removed his pack and joined the girl before him.
He said, “Hey, old buddy. How the hell are ya?”
Ken looked at him closely, seeing a striking resemblance to another person he knew. He said nothing.
“You’ve led us on a hell of a chase,” the man said. When Ken didn’t respond, he asked the girl, “How is he? Where did he get the cannon?”
“I don’t know,” she said calmly. “It looks like severe shock to me.”
“Give me the gun, Kenny,” the man said. He reached out his hand for it. Ken shifted the gun from the girl to him. The man’s eyes widened.
“Ken,” the girl said softly. “Ken, I don’t know what happened to you out here, but it’s okay now. You’re with friends.”
Ken looked at her, held the gun on the man and said nothing.
Agonizing seconds passed as voices called down from above. Ken’s trigger finger began to twitch.
“Ken,” the girl said. “It’s me, Paula.”
Paula! That was her name. He looked at her closely. He felt the fog in his mind lift and the images of the woman he remembered and the Paula squatting before him merged into one person, one reality. Ken forced his lips around her name. “Paula?”
“Yes, Ken, it’s me. We have a date, remember? You’re not going to stand me up, are you?”
More tears came into his eyes and he almost lowered the gun until the man intruded in their moment by reaching for him. Ken retreated but held his weapon firm.
Paula continued to smile. “Ken, this is Bruce. Remember Bruce?”
The man smiled too. “Of course he does. Don’t you, Kenny? How could you forget a big pain in the ass like me?”
The gun did not waver.
“Oh come on, Kenny. Talk to me. I know you remember me. Say something. Anything. We’re here to help you.”
Ken squinted at the man for a moment, lost in the fog. Bruce looked at Paula and signaled that he was going to lunge for the gun. She put her hand on his arm to stop him just as Ken’s eyes cleared.
“You…old…goat,” Ken told him.
“Yes, that’s me. That’s it, Kenny. Now, put down the gun.”
Ken suddenly found the gun in his hands, pointed at his friends. He couldn’t remember how it had gotten there. He lowered it to his side, clicked on the safety, and tossed it toward the creek.
Then Paula filled his arms, followed by Bruce. They held each other in an awkward three-way hug. Other searchers came down to join them, radioing the search base of their success.
Ken let them carry him out in a stretcher. It was nice not to have to walk. Everybody knew his name. It was nice to see them.
“Kenny,” Bruce asked him, “where’s your team?”
“Lost,” he told them. “All lost.”
When they loaded Ken into the ambulance, Bruce asked Paula, “Are you going with him?”
“Yes,” she said. “Are you going back out?”
“Yep,” Bruce told her. “Someone has to find those kids. And the Petersons. They may all be hurt, or worse.”
“Something tells me you’re not going to find them.”
“You didn’t think we were going to find Kenny.”
Paula glanced at Ken through the ambulance window. “I don’t think we have, Bruce. Not really. I think the Ken we knew is still lost out there, and will be for a long time.”
About the Author
E. Michael Lewis studied creative writing at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. He loves to write short stories. His story “Cargo” was chosen for Best Horror of the Year Volume One, and will be reprinted in 2013 in Hauntings. He is currently under contract to write the screenplay. His other stories can be found in Exotic Gothic 4, The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies, All Hallows, and on various websites. He’s also on Facebook. Mr. Lewis is a lifelong native of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives with his two sons.
The dead have been alive for centuries!
Zombies of Byzantium
© 2013 Sean Munger
It’s the 8th century A.D., and the Byzantine Empire has got problems. A ruthless schemer has just overthrown the emperor and taken the crown for himself. The Saracen army is attacking Constantinople. Only one thing could make these problems look petty by comparison: an invasion of undead, flesh-eating zombies.
One young monk has witnessed the horror of the zombies and lived to tell the tale. When the new emperor hears of the danger, he hatches a wild plan. He puts the young monk in charge of creating an army of zombies to defeat the invaders. But it’s not that easy to control the living dead…
Enjoy the following excerpt for Zombies of Byzantium:
I’ll skip over the details of my last weeks at Chenolakkos. I finished the icon, it was delivered to the fat old rich man in Nicaea, I packed up my stuff and Theophilus made ready to accompany me on the road to Constantinople. We left on a warm morning in mid-June. Our path would take us down out of the mountains, past Nicaea and northward toward Kios, where (I hoped) we could catch a boat to Constantinople. We traveled light. I brought only a small leather shoulder bag containing my paints and a Bible. Theophilus brought an extra cassock and one blanket. We had no food other than a few scraps of bread. Between us we had only a few gold solidi in a leather drawstring purse that Theophilus insisted on carrying. It would probably be a four-day journey to Kios and who knew how long after that. We’d be depending on the Christian kindness of strangers and innkeepers to sustain us along the way.
Theophilus was a perfectly humorless man. Dressed winter or summer in a long thick black cloak and hood, he had long snow-white hair and a scraggly beard reaching down to his chest. In the six years I’d been at Chenolakkos, I’d heard the old guy say three words, and “Amen” was two of them. Even that morning as we set off from the monastery he said nothing. At the start of the old cobbled road leading down from the hills we paused, looking up at the blocky building with its bell tower and single gnarled turret, and I remarked, “You’ll probably be back, Theophilus, but I doubt I’ll see the place ever again. Makes you think, you know?”
He looked back at the monastery, but then turned his head, planted his walking stick (which was a foot taller than he was) and moved past me toward the road. Theophilus didn’t strike me as the sentimental type, and surely he’d return after dropping me off at Constantinople, but I doubt he’d been outside the walls of the monastery in years and you’d think he’d have something to say about it. When he remained impassively silent, I realized that I was going to have to entertain myself on this trip.
The day grew stifling hot. It’s a weird thing to be roasting to death in a woolen cowl on a rocky sun-drenched road and to see the desolate snows of the mountain off in the distance at the same time. There weren’t even many trees along the route so there was no shelter from the beating sun. There were no other travelers going our direction or the opposite on the road, which was a little strange, considering the profusion of monasteries in the area and the many monks and pilgrims who made the rounds among them. I did my best to get Theophilus to talk. “So, when was the last time you were in Constantinople?” was greeted with a shrug of the shoulders that suggested he was damned if he knew. “Anything in particular you want t
o do there?” met with a one-word answer, “Pray.”
I shook my head. “Real life of the party, aren’t you, Theophilus?”
Despite the heat and the taciturn company, I was excited. I’d never seen the capital before. Being a monk, it probably wasn’t realistic to expect I’d get a chance to take in a show or even a chariot race at the Hippodrome, but I thought a nice bath and a tour of St. Sofia weren’t out of the question—that was, if Rhetorios of St. Stoudios didn’t chain me to a desk in the icon studio the moment I set foot in the monastery.
In the late afternoon we spotted a faint smudge on the horizon. After another turn or three on the stone road, we saw it was a plume of smoke. Theophilus stopped, planted his stick and shaded his eyes with his hand. “Village,” he said.
“Ah, good.” I wiped sweat off my forehead with the sleeve of my robe. “Maybe we can get some fresh water there. I’m parched.”
“Strange,” Theophilus remarked. “So many chimney smokes for such a hot day.”
“Hopefully that means they’re cooking up a feast for us.”
As we drew closer, it became obvious from the amount of smoke and its black color that these were no chimney fires. A couple of miles away Theophilus paused again. “I think something’s wrong,” he said. You had to know something unusual was up; Theophilus had said more words to me today already than he probably had to anyone in the last ten years at the monastery.
“Do you think it could be a raid?” I said. “By the Saracens, maybe?”
Theophilus shook his head. “If the Saracen army was in these parts, we would have heard. There would have been a mass exodus.” He planted his stick for another pace and continued walking.
The village nestled in a little valley near a small stream. The fields surrounding it were strangely deserted; there were no farmers or workmen in sight. From a ridge above the town we could see a cluster of shabby peasants’ houses and a larger building that looked like a storehouse or granary of some kind. That building wasn’t on fire, which told me this wasn’t a raid because Saracens or other brigands seeking loot would have cleaned it out and burned it behind them the first thing. Several of the houses were aflame, however. We could see no activity in the town itself. I looked at Theophilus. “Should we go down there?”
“Do we have a choice?” he replied. “There may be people in need of help.”
“It could be dangerous. We have no idea how this happened. If it was bandits or outlaws, they might still be down there waiting to pick off anyone who comes to investigate.”
His cold gray eyes stared at me with an almost sarcastic look. “You are the young one, and I’m old,” he said, “and yet you’re the one shrinking from danger?” He shook his head. Starting down the road, he muttered, “The youth of Byzantium is not as hardy as it once was.”
Down in the valley, closer to the smoldering village, the mystery deepened. The deserted fields were filled with ripening crops. We passed a plow abandoned in a field of rye. The horse who had pulled it grazed lazily some distance away. That was telling. Anyone who had come to sack this village would surely have taken the horses, oxen and any donkeys with them to carry off their loot, and they probably would have burned the crops too. Then we started to see bodies. Theophilus noticed them before I did. He suddenly stopped, crossed himself and murmured a little prayer. Peering through the smoke of one of the nearby farmhouses, reduced to a cluster of charred timbers, I could see three human figures lying motionless in the dust. Buzzards were already circling. A mangy dog with bloody whiskers barked at our approach. Theophilus paused, and then ran (as best he could on his thin wobbly legs) toward the victims. As he neared them, he suddenly recoiled. “Dear God, preserve us!” he gasped.
Two women and a man were lying on the ground before us. Their clothes—the plain rough garb of country peasants—were covered in blood. The man’s arm had been torn brutally from its socket, the arm itself missing. The corpses looked as if they had been feasted upon by ravenous wolves. One woman’s stomach was torn open, her guts oozing into the dust, already attracting flies. I could see what looked like teeth marks in the neck of the other woman. I’ve seen death before, but I’d never seen anything like this. I backed away from the corpses, crossing myself. The stench of death in the village was like the breath of the Devil himself.
“Who could have done such a thing?” said Theophilus.
“Somebody with some very serious issues,” I replied. I looked ahead through the village at the smoldering houses. “Come on, let’s see if there’s anyone left alive.”
In our search, we found several more corpses. They, like the three at the entrance to the village, were also violently torn. One, heartbreakingly, was a little girl. “Could it have been wolves or some other wild beast?” I asked Theophilus.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “The horses and oxen haven’t been touched. Only the people.”
“But why? Who would want to attack this village? Doesn’t look like these people would have anything of value. If it wasn’t raiders—”
Theophilus silenced me with a wave of his hand. He looked off to his left, hearing something. I heard it too. Above the crackle of burning wood there was a low moaning sound, the lowing of indeterminate voices. With his walking stick, Theophilus motioned toward the church at the end of the dusty village street. It had been set on fire, its thatch roof already burned away. The thick packed-mud walls were charred and scorched. The strange moaning seemed to be coming from there.
Hesitantly we approached. There were many bloody footprints in the dust before the doors of the church, and carnage, including a severed human hand. We paused perhaps fifteen feet from the doors. They were partially burned, but I could see, charred and blackened, the links of a great chain that had been drawn across the portal.
“Dear Lord!” I gasped. “They herded the villagers inside the church and set fire to it!” I sprang toward the doors, but Theophilus held me back with an outstretched hand.
“No,” he cautioned. “Don’t touch it. The fire is too hot.”
We then saw the most curious—and the most horrible—of the sights upon which we’d laid eyes that day. The church had been burning for a while and a section of its exterior wall had collapsed. Through an aperture in the ruined wall a shambling figure emerged. It was impossible to tell whether it was a man or woman, for all the clothes had long since been burned off its frame. Indeed the person’s skin itself was on fire. The figure, stumbling over the wreckage of the wall and lurching awkwardly toward us, was but one vast human-shaped torch. The figure did not scream in pain nor thrash about in utter panic as one would expect if he (or she) were engulfed in flame from head to toe. Instead it emitted a low mindless moan, very much like the other strange sounds emanating from inside the church. Shocked, horrified, Theophilus and I both sprang backwards. The flaming figure did not move quickly. It shambled, as if unsure of its steps. Flailing its arms, one of them, burnt through at the shoulder, crumbled into chunks of flaming flesh, but the figure did not stop. It continued its approach toward us.
Theophilus and I glanced at each other. His eyes, wide and staring, must have looked like mine. “Run!” we both cried, and bolted for the road that led down out of the village.
The old man was not very quick. After only a few steps he stumbled. He managed to catch himself with the walking stick before we went down, but the flaming ghoul was able to gain on him. I ran back to Theophilus. Shifting the leather bag containing my paints to the other shoulder, I knelt down. “Get up on my back,” I demanded. He did so as best he could, and I began to run. With Theophilus on my back, I was slower than I would have been otherwise, but together we were still faster than the torch pursuing us. Every half-minute or so I paused to look over my shoulder. The incendiary specter continued to pursue us, but it had not increased its pace. It was as dumb and unyielding as it was terrifying.
“What is it?” I whispered to Theophilus, watching the flaming ghoul stumble on the stones of the road ac
ross which we’d just come.
“The Devil,” the old man said. “We must run!”
Lost and Found
E. Michael Lewis
Some things were never meant to be found.
When a family goes missing in the wilds of Washington State, veteran outdoorsman Ken Holbrook agrees one last time to lead a team of teenage search-and-rescue trainees—a joker, a brain, an Eagle Scout, a cute couple and a bully—deep into the forest to find them. But their compasses point them in wrong directions, their terrain doesn’t match their maps, and their radio—their only link to the outside world—spews only static. They will soon discover that the family they are looking for is not the only thing lost in those woods. Something truly terrible waits for them. Ken and his team of misfits will have to work together to battle a relentless, faceless evil if they hope to get out of the woods alive.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
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Lost and Found
Copyright © 2013 by E. Michael Lewis
ISBN: 978-1-61921-432-3
Edited by Don D’Auria
Cover by Lyn Taylor
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