Kit smiled and got to his feet.
“You’re cute, babe. I love that you love blood and guts as much as I do.” Kit stretched his six-foot-three frame toward the ceiling and let out a groan. “But the party’s over. I have to get to work.”
“I can’t believe you agreed to work the night after Christmas.” She tried to pout, but a yawn claimed her features instead. “Although to be honest, you won’t miss much. I’m beat, and will be asleep fifteen minutes after you leave.”
As Kit dragged himself up the stairs to change, Kartya heard a muffled chime, and realized she was sitting on her phone. A preview of the text message scrolled across the screen. Kartya’s friend Laura had written: Better lock your door...
Laura did well as an emergency room nurse, working as an independent contractor in different hospitals from Hartford to Boston. She vacationed often, and had returned that morning from her fourth trip to St. John since the year began. Kartya thumbed at the screen until she could see the rest of the message. In its entirety, it read: Better lock your door... because my house got broken into.
A fat worm of fear speared itself between the layers of Kartya’s intestines. There had been numerous reports of break-ins in Mysticism over the last month, and Laura lived less than a mile from the riverfront home Kartya and Kit rented. Her fingers jerking in furious spasms, Kartya texted Laura back: Were you home? Are you okay? What did they take?
As she waited for Laura’s reply, Kit trudged back down the stairs. He was able to read the worry on her face with a single glance.
“What is it?”
“Laura and Seth’s house got broken into. I asked her what they took and if they were home. She hasn’t answered me yet.”
The concern on Kit’s face mixed with anger. With a grim head shake, he reached out to pull her off the couch.
“This isn’t happening. No way they switch me to the night shift a month before the worst string of burglaries this town’s ever seen. Follow me.”
“Why? Where are we going?” Kartya’s attention was split between his grip on her forearm and her phone announcing a newly-arrived message.
Kit gestured up the stairs, but let go of her so she could navigate to her text message app. She read silently, her brow creased, then raised her eyes to meet Kit’s.
“She said they were out getting drinks and they came home to a broken window in the living room. They’d been on vacation for the past week so someone obviously anticipated an empty house. They took jewelry, cash, some other valuables...” Kartya tried to trail off effectively, as if this was the extent of stolen goods.
“And? What else?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “What else did they take, Kartya?”
“Three guns were missing,” she said, knowing this information would fan Kit’s anger and apprehension into a full-blown blaze.
Motivated anew, Kit took her hand and resumed their ascent. In the guest bedroom, he retrieved a lockbox from an opaque-fronted entertainment stand.
“I would never forgive myself if something happened to you. I know you’re going to protest, but agree to it for my sake.” He pulled a handgun from the box and spun the chamber, counting bullets.
“Kit,” Kartya objected.
“Please, come here so I can give you a quick refresher on how to...”
“Kit—” She was about to insist on an end to this ridiculous conversation. Instead, Kartya sighed and took the gun from Kit’s hands, showing him that she remembered how to wield the weapon properly, cocking the hammer and adopting a shooter’s stance.
“You’ve dragged me to the range a hundred times. I know what I’m doing well enough to defend myself if it came to it.”
Kit nodded, but he was distracted. She cleared the chamber and handed the gun back to Kit. Spinning on her heel for the hall, she stopped short when she heard the scrape of something much larger being liberated from the closet.
Without turning, she said, “Kit, I do not need the shotgun to be within arm’s reach when I go to bed tonight.”
Torn between Kartya’s obvious intention to refuse the shotgun and his need to be assured of her safety, Kit placed the shotgun on top of the stand.
“Fine,” he said, “but I’m leaving it here, just in case. The revolver is going on your nightstand, and that’s not open for discussion.”
“Fine,” Kartya said, her belief that the house was impregnable, that the probability of burglars targeting their quiet, one-acre lot over any other in town causing her to grow bored with the conversation. “Drive safe please, and try to have a good night at work.”
Kartya let Kit lead her into their bedroom, saying nothing as he placed the revolver on a paperback, two feet from where she was to lay her head upon the pillow. He kissed her goodnight and turned off the bedside lamp. Kartya listened to his footsteps on the stairs as she nestled beneath the covers. She had overblown her prediction: it took far less than fifteen minutes after Kit’s departure for Kartya to fall asleep.
—
A noise woke her, what sounded like the skeletal finger of a winter-dead tree tapping on a window. She sat up, disoriented. Had Kit forgotten something, perhaps his badge, or the food he’d packed to eat on his break? She groped for her cell, found the button to illuminate the screen. Ten forty-five. Kit would be forty-five minutes into an hour-long commute, so it wouldn’t be him tapping. She strained to catch the sound again, but it had stopped. Kartya sunk down onto the pillow, drawing the comforter up to her neck, then groaned. She flung the comforter back, forcing herself to bear the cold trek to the bathroom before returning to sleep. Halfway there, the tapping began again.
Kartya froze. There in the hallway, equally removed from both the revolver and the shotgun Kit had set out for her protection, vulnerable in her bare feet, with full bladder and panic fluttering in her brain like a moth inside a lantern, the details of the nearby break-in came roaring back, having been temporarily stolen by the fugue of sleep.
Rooted in paralysis, her rational mind attempted to quell her fears, shuffling through a series of scenarios from the ever-popular home-alone-with-an-overactive-imagination script: It’s nothing... it’s just the wind... the house is settling... there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this... Grasping at these possibilities with the same tenacity as a drowning swimmer flailing for a rescue buoy, she started down the stairs in the dark.
Kartya’s bare feet sunk into the shag carpet as she crossed the living room to the big picture window on the right. Cursing the peaks and gables of the roofline for preventing the moon from aiding her in her endeavor, she changed direction, moving from the window to the front door, whacking her hip on the corner of the heavy oak desk along the way, and switched on the outdoor floodlights.
Giving the desk a wider berth, she crept back to the right, so focused on the grate-free expanse of the window that she did not see the shadow stretched across the ground in front of her.
The Kandarian Demon had possessed a hapless civilian and turned them into a Deadite. At least, this was the only explanation that occurred to Kartya when she came face-to-face with the diseased-looking monstrosity separated from her by only half an inch of glass. For one breathless moment, Kartya thought she was dreaming, or perhaps had slipped on the stairs and knocked herself out, and was now suffering some trauma-induced hallucination. The demon-thing cocked its head to one side, emitted a guttural chuffing noise, and Kartya knew that somehow, what she was seeing was real.
She might have stood staring into the black pits of the creature’s eyes—a creature who had once been a tall, lanky, human man—until Kit returned home from work the next morning, but the now-inhuman thing’s arm shot out as if from a cannon, breaking the spell, and smashing through the six-foot tall window pane with no more effort than a man punching through paper.
Kartya did not think, not in any conscious, deliberate manner. She ran to the stairs on reflex, sprinting up them two at a time, her body knowing where it was taking her, seeing her destination in her
mind as clearly as an earlier scene from Evil Dead. Though it defied logic, though an hour ago it had been impossible, she had to get to the revolver if she wanted to survive. As she flew down the hall for the bedroom, she had the wherewithal to dart her arm into the bathroom and flip the switch, the overhead fixture bright enough to allow a half-moon of light to spill into the hallway.
It took all of Kartya’s willpower not to shut and lock the bedroom door behind her, but knowing how easily the thing had infiltrated the ground floor, it would behoove her to leave the door open and see it coming. She grabbed the gun from the nightstand and slid along the front wall of the bedroom. Molding her hands around the butt in what she hoped was a relaxed position (“Never choke your gun,” the range attendant had told her, “that’s a surefire way to hit everything but your target”), she crouched by the closet, the thinnest rectangle of hallway visible from her spot on the floor.
The sound of footsteps shuffle-dragging up the stairs after her was interrupted by a second downstairs window imploding, and then, horribly, a third. Kartya wanted to curse. She wanted to scream, or cry, or curl up in the fetal position. Instead, she pulled the hammer back, prayed for consistency, squinted one eye, and kept utterly silent.
The thing made it to the top of the stairs and turned the corner. The hallway was short and Kartya had a clear shot, but she held fire. The thing took a long, lumbering step, then another. It wore jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and as it stepped into the crescent of light filtering from the bathroom, Kartya saw strange marks on its forearms. The thing moved forward again.
The first shot shocked Kartya in its loudness, and she realized she’d never experienced gunfire firsthand without protective ear muffs. She recovered quickly, concentrating on readying a second shot despite the knowledge that the thing hadn’t been halted or even slowed in its pursuit. She’d hit it three inches below the chest, a mark devoid of any major organs. Kartya hoped this was the only reason why the creature was still on its feet, but she had a sneaking suspicion that there was something more sinister spurring the demon forward.
Kartya hit the creature again, in the shoulder, and again, clipping its neck, spurts of blood exploding from the torn flesh, and again, another shot to the stomach. Still, it stalked toward her. Kartya took a deep breath and held it, steadying her hands and her gaze, and aimed for its right kneecap. She hit it dead center. The thing’s leg folded backward, threatening to topple the creature ass over teakettle, but it would not go down. Before it could right itself, she aimed for the left kneecap. Another direct hit, and when the thing’s jeans tore and knee shattered, Kartya saw a substantial fragment of bone go catapulting through the air like a haphazardly-thrown Frisbee. Again, the creature stayed on its feet.
Kit had considered the possibility of a break-in serious enough to warrant planting the revolver by her bedside, but not serious enough to provide her with extra bullets. The thing swayed like a drunken sorority girl in too-high heels, but when it took another step—hesitant, but advancing all the same—Kartya knew she had to enact Plan B.
Before she could change her mind, she rushed the thing with calculated strides, coming to a stop as she reached the end of the damask-patterned runner. She bent before the creature, loath to take her eyes off it for even a moment, and took the corner of the rug up in her fingers. She knew she couldn’t yank the runner hard enough to accomplish her end goal of toppling the creature over the bannister and initiating a freefall to the ground floor below, but she hoped to knock it off its feet enough to start that process. Luck was on her side; the creature had already begun to fall off balance, so that when she yanked the runner with a throaty grunt, its back was already pressed against the bannister, and the upward movement of the rug functioned to throw the creature’s legs up and over its head in a graceless backflip over the railing.
It fell the distance of fourteen hardwood steps and crashed to the floor below. Flipping on the hall light, Kartya leaned over and peered down. The thing had already gotten up and was placing one splintered but still-operational leg onto the bottom step.
“You have got be kidding me,” Kartya said, scuttling back from the edge and heading for the guest bedroom.
Kartya had only fired the shotgun on one prior occasion, and even then she’d almost passed on the opportunity, preferring to refine her technique with the handgun. Before she exited the bedroom, she slipped her still-bare feet into a pair of red Victoria’s Secret slippers, the left foot embroidered with the word naughty in white stitching, and the right with the word nice. It occurred to her that it would be immeasurably easier to fight Deadites without a full bladder, so she walked to the bathroom to relieve herself, pointing the shotgun at an opening in the bannister rails as she did, counting herself lucky when she heard what sounded like a scuffle amongst the creatures at the bottom of the stairs, delaying their climb. She declined to flush, not sure if the noise would send their zombie-like brains into a frenzy, and stood at the threshold of the passage to the stairs. What would Ash do? she thought. She looked down at her feet.
“Time to put the naughty foot forward,” she said, forcing a half-grin, and stepped her left foot out into the hallway.
Kartya thudded down the stairs, took in the scene below her, and cocked the shotgun. There were three creatures, as she’d guessed from the equal number of shattered windows, and they appeared more akin to Deadites than she’d have thought possible, seeing as she wasn’t on-set for a taping of Ash vs Evil Dead. They were undeterred by pain but incapable of reason, and they were unable to begin their onslaught of the second floor because they couldn’t decide amongst the three of them who was going to go up first. Kartya helped them out by blowing the arm off the shorter, stocky man on the left, who looked down to regard the blood and sinew hanging from his shoulder with puzzled detachment.
The thing to the right of the tall creature had been female in its human form. Kartya made the mistake of pulling the trigger as she moved down another step, throwing off her aim and catching the she-thing in the upper portion of the skull, blowing off the top half of its scalp, rocking the thing’s head back on its neck. The head snapped back to its original position. Kartya recalled the catchphrase of the popular children’s toy that refused to be bowled over: “Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.” With dark amusement, she wondered if anyone had tried to knock a Weeble down with a double-barrel shotgun.
Kartya told herself to focus on this next shot. She aimed for the center of the tall one’s head. “Boom,” she said, a second before she squeezed the trigger.
The shot was absolute in its devastation, the shell forging a hole in the thing’s skull like the point of a pastry-bag digging through a jelly-filled donut. Kartya was ecstatic to see that with its brain dislodged and projected somewhere into her living room, the Deadite-thing was finally incapable of pursuit.
So that’s it, she thought. They don’t appear human, but they can be killed as such. The Necronomicon proposed three specific ways to release a possessed soul: a live burial, bodily dismemberment, or purification by fire. Thinking that she liked her house, and would rather not burn it to the ground, and that time did not permit the digging of two graves in frozen soil, Kartya re-cocked the shotgun. Wistfully, she pictured Ash’s chainsaw hand. Bodily dismemberment would be a hell of a lot easier with her hero’s weapon of choice than by the excruciatingly slow process of fortuitous shotgun hits, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Oblivious to the flecks of blood and brain matter peppering her body, Kartya closed the distance between her and the two evil things still standing. Needing to make it to the front door, she had to descend the stairs low enough to shoot the creatures sideways, preferably one to the right and one to the left. Getting within arm’s reach of the things was not her idea of a good time, but neither was wasting two barrels of the shotgun into anywhere but their heads.
Kartya had properly determined the direction the undead things would be propelled in, but she wa
sn’t lucky enough to replicate the angle of her shot to the taller creature’s head. Though the things were knocked to the floor and out of her path, they were reanimating quicker than she would have liked.
Imitating a move she’d seen one of Ash’s badass sidekicks perform, Kartya barrel-rolled across the back of the couch, vaulted over the coffee table, and grabbed the plastic Evil Dead toys from their speakers. As she charged the Deadites, she pistoned one arm back, and released the action figure like a cannon. The Army of Darkness soldier’s spear caught the first creature in the eye. Kartya lobbed mini Ash Williams, and it wedged between the second creature’s rot-infested open maw.
“Yes!” Kartya cheered as she swiped her car keys from their hook. Without looking back, she fled into the cold night in only her slippers, sweatpants, and an ash-grey t-shirt, darkened in several places with the demon-things’ blood.
Ten steps down the front walkway and the moon made a glorious reappearance, lighting Kartya’s path to the garage and keeping her from tripping on a bizarre pile of items laid out at the base of the driveway. Allowing a second for curious inspection, Kartya stooped and beheld the needles, spoons, and a Dunkin Donuts cup of what appeared to be coffee-tainted water. Then the water hissed, geysering up from the cup in an angry spout, and she reevaluated her first interpretation.
“Crazed junkies or the infected victims of a science experiment gone wrong,” she said as she jogged for the garage. “Either way, no fucking thanks.”
The garage door groaned in protest as Kartya flung it open. She unlocked the Jeep’s doors with a terse beep, praying the noise was not enough to attract the Deadites. She surveyed the driveway and as much of the yard as was visible: nothing came for her. Hopping into the car, thinking she could be at the police station in less than five minutes, hoping this was quick enough to bring back reinforcements before the creatures could abandon her place for somewhere else, she threw the car into reverse and prepared to backup. The stout male thing and the lone female one took up the entirety of her rearview mirror.
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