Is he pleading with me?
I think he is.
I wipe the kitchen knife on the bed-sheets, Mother is still asleep so I give her a quick jab with the blade. It sinks into her thigh till I feel it scrape bone. She’s awake now too. Her eyes swarm with horror. Happy she’s now awake to enjoy the show I pull the blade free and turn my attention back to Terry. With my left hand I grip his wormlike, shriveled penis.
I hold it upright from his deflated sack.
Two slices and it’s severed from his body.
One slice forward, one slice back.
Easy.
His eyes are squeezed shut now. Shame he’s not seeing this, but I figure that’s just fine. I’ll get to that in a moment.
First, I lift his severed penis high. It seems to shrivel even further now that it’s no longer tethered to his body, like a worm cooking under a mid-July sun. I’m surprised there is so little blood. It trickles from the ragged stump where my knife sliced, but trickles only.
I’d been hoping for a geyser.
Slightly disappointed, I move up towards his face. He’s doing well. Even under what must be extremely debilitating effects from the drug and the alcohol, Terry is still able to move his head a little.
He’s trying to thrash from side to side. An instinctual symptom of the pain, I imagine.
It makes me smile, just a little.
I pull open his mouth and stuff the seeping, ragged remains of his penis deep down his throat, far enough that he gags. I push it down further, filling his windpipe with his member. As he chokes on his own severed flesh, is eyes shoot open and bug out, just as I’d hoped they would.
I pop both of them with the tip of my knife.
At this point, he actually manages to thrash. Not fully, not properly, but there is a definite display of his agony.
He dies, blind and chocking on a mix of meat and vomit. I cherish every single moment of it.
I turn to my mother.
She’s wonderfully aware.
There’s terror there, of course, and something else.
Is it…shame?
Yes. I think it’s shame.
She knows why I’m here. She may well even welcome it after all she’s done, all she’s allowed me to go through. I still love her. How could I not? She’s my mother. She’s the reason for my existence.
And she was perfect.
Once upon a time.
But love won’t save her.
“This is for Dad,” I tell her, as I hop onto the bed with my knife in hand and fall upon her.
Night terrors are real.
They come in many forms…
Wraiths, devils, demons…
And people.
People are the worst of all.
Just like many of you, I used to suffer from these very particular nightly attacks.
I know the horror.
I’ve felt the helplessness.
I’m no stranger to the damage it can do.
Now, though, I’m free of my fear. I’m free to sleep easy.
Tomorrow is another day, and I’ll give the morning sun a chance to show me a purer world than what I’ve seen, but I won’t hold my breath.
And I won’t cry.
I won’t.
Terror can be beaten down.
It can be.
I promise you.
And while the morning may bring new challenges for me, not least of all where I’ll go or how I’ll get there, I know I’ll be strong enough to make it, because now…
Now I am the thing that goes bump in the night.
Now I am the night terror.
And if, on my travels, I happen upon you, I’ll know what’s been done. I’ll see it in your eyes. I’ll read it in the contours of your sorrow.
And come nightfall, I’ll visit those who would visit you.
NO LIVES LEFT
July 1990
Max peered through the thin space between the wooden slats, straining to pierce the darkness outside. It was no use. He’d been sure he’d seen movement out there. Shadows within shadows, glimpsed only from the corner of his eye.
There, then gone.
“Shit,” he growled.
“You see anyone?” Sonia asked. He could feel her breathing down his neck, and all the while doing that fucking two-tap-hop from one foot to the other that she always did when she was scared or excited or horny. It made Max want to plunge his fist right down her throat. Four years he’d had to put up with her livewire energy, high-pitched mewling and girlish conceits. Not only that, but she was constantly staying up well past midnight, bashing away at Galaga all the way into the small hours of the night while he, Henry and Penny were trying to sleep.
Max loved that video game, but there were only so many bleeps and blips and monotone drones from the old machine a guy could stomach when he was trying to catch some sleep. Masturbating was all but impossible with all that electronic laser-fire buzzing around his skull when all he wanted to focus on was Sam Fox, page-three model and woman of his dreams, slowly peeling off her bra and shaking her melons on the red-lit stage of his mind.
“I can’t see a fucking thing,” Max answered the younger girl. “Too dark...”
He turned away from the gap between the planks they’d placed on the windows, rubbed his eyes and looked at Sonia. It wasn’t her real name. She’d chosen it after a late-night viewing of some barbarian movie starring Arnie and some blonde bimbo who couldn’t act to save herself, believing, in her predictably self-obsessed way, that as the warrior woman in the movie had fiery red hair, and so did she, then it was fate that she took on the moniker. He’d always preferred his girlfriend’s real name, Laura, but bringing it up had always felt like too much work. Over the last few years, he’d weathered enough of her damn whining to last a lifetime without urging her on any further. She could call herself whatever the hell she wanted.
It wasn’t like anyone was doing background checks.
Not since the dead stopped being dead and starting being hungry.
Was it really four years? Jesus. Give or take a few days here, he was pretty sure they’d kept a relatively close eye on the calendar and were somewhere within a week of the actual date, had dates mattered anymore.
Four years, or three years and three-hundred and fifty or so days, what did it matter?
It was still a long time.
So close to him, he could smell the apple-flavored Hubba Bubba on her breath. He hated that smell. Max closed his eyes tight and fought the murderous urges.
“Have another look,” she said, smacking her lips loudly on the chewing gum.
“Give me a minute!” he hissed. There was a headache on the horizon, drifting his way, and it promised to be a motherfucker.
“But what if they’re out there?”
“Then they’re out there. And if they’re out there, they probably know we’re here, Sonia.”
“But what’ll we do if they try to get in?”
From behind them, a confident strident voice sung out: “We’ll make sure they stay out.”
That was Henry. Not the most authoritative name for a wise and powerful leader, but it was his name nonetheless, and at least he had the self-awareness and dignity to use his real name. With his gangly frame and ridiculously large glasses, he wasn’t much to look at, but as the highest scoring player on Space Ace and the oldest of the group by five months, he’d naturally taken the reigns as de-facto front-man in their little band of survivors.
“What’s going on, Max?” Henry asked, resting a hand on Max’s shoulder. Max turned his attention back to the space between the plywood. Allowing his eyes a second to adjust, and glad of the moonlight as it broke the clouds above, he scanned the street beyond the wood and glass.
Outside, the moon’s rays lit the streets and the store beyond, painting the walls of Clanvid - the local off-license and video rental store - a gravestone white, highlighting the spatters of long-dried blood that decorated the premise’s exterior. The bones of some p
oor sucker kept their shape inside tattered, weather-worn clothes by the stores entrance. The door swung to and fro in the gentle late-July breeze, a sentinel of nothing. The wares inside had long since been plundered by early marauders of the apocalypse.
Max and his group had searched it, of course, but even though they’d ventured out onto the streets only a few days after the dead rose to their feet and started gnashing, and had been confident the video store would be intact, they’d been wrong.
It still stung.
Max watched the worthless one-story property now, and memory took him.
June 1986
Max was heartbroken.
Not only the liquor, cider and cigarettes had been snatched up, but almost all of the VHS and Betamax tapes that Clanvid’s owner, Danny, had shelved on three of the shop’s four walls were gone too.
Some tapes remained, bullshit like Splash and Terms of Endearment, but all the good movies – the ‘video nasties’ and the top-shelf soft-core porn like Rosie Dixon -Night Nurse and Confessions of a Window Cleaner - were long gone.
It looked like poor Danny had put up a fight to protect his business. Max couldn’t blame him. The tapes may have been worn down to shit after so many hires, watches and rewinds, but you didn’t let a collection of movies that spectacular just be taken from you.
Whatever fight the shopkeeper had put up, it hadn’t been enough.
Danny – what was left of him - shuffled around aimlessly behind the counter as they entered. The dead, stinking corpse stood still, swaying a little as though grooving to some internal monster-mash.
Then it spotted Penny.
Its demeanor changed pretty fucking quick after that.
Snarling, it reached uselessly across the counter for her with already-rotting arms, fingers grasping, grey, dead eyes fixed on Penny’s reeling form.
“I’ll be outside,” Penny said, backing away in disgust.
“Cool.”
Max took in the once-proud shopkeeper.
Danny’s neck sported a huge, ragged gash, a second bloody mouth. His windpipe peeked out from the red mess of coagulated blood and slowly spoiling meat.
Slit throat.
Deep and gnarly, too...
They’d almost severed the poor guy’s head.
Should have...
It would’ve been a mercy.
The bastards who’d raided his video collection hadn’t even had the decency to put him down properly.
It seemed mean, cold. Max wondered then if, perhaps, the perpetrators of Danny’s demise had been from another town.
He figured they had to be.
Danny had been well-loved by the locals, despite his gruff, somewhat sleazy nature. After all, he was the sole purveyor of under-the-counter, x-rated material for secretive kids and even more secretive husbands, the former looking to catch the latest killing-spree featuring Freddy, Jason or Chucky, and the latter eager for the latest titty-flick. Compared to Danny’s humble yet respectable criminal enterprise, the other video stores were boring as hell, pussies, mainstream.
Even if the temptation to plunder all those wondrous tapes had proven too much for one of Bellshill’s citizens, anyone local would have at least have had the decency to shove the blade through his brain and let the grumpy bastard die permanently.
Max wondered if, somewhere inside Danny’s putrefying brain, the flicker of recognition registered. He studied this new, dead-and-not-too-pleased-about-it version of the shopkeeper for longer than was healthy, wondering what went on in there. He carried no tools in those first days of the dead, so ending Danny’s freewheeling adventures on the rotten side of life wasn’t an option. Not then.
“I’m sorry, Danny.” Max tore off a The Thing poster from the shop’s wall as he stepped over the broken glass in the doorway and made for the street. He’d always admired that poster.
No point in letting it go to waste.
He headed outside, joining Penny, Henry and Sonia.
“Nothing,” he said, deflated.
Henry gifted him with a consoling smile. “Fuck it. It wasn’t our main target anyway.”
“True,” Max agreed.
“Speaking of which...shall we?” Penny grinned.
As one, they turned to face the opposite side of the street and the much-larger property residing there.
Their true destination. A place they’d spent the better part of their summer holidays inside, hidden away from the blinding light of countless summer suns, lost in a world of pixels, electronic drones, flashing lights and the furious clashing of flesh against plastic as a hundred local kids hammered their fists on buttons and wrangled flimsy joysticks into submission, tongues lolling from open mouths in determination, eyes glazed over with concentration as they battled to reach the next level or area of their chosen obsession: Centipede, Chase HQ, Space Harrier, Spy Hunter, Pitfall. A whole universe of bright characters and devilish challenges that honed the senses of the young as it scooped the pennies from shallow pockets.
The greatest place on Earth.
M & D’s Arcade Hall.
Besides a few dead and half-eaten bodies sprawled before the entrance, the place seemed completely untouched. One of the dead bodies out-front hadn’t gotten the memo it was dead yet. Perhaps that was why the fleeing townsfolk had bypassed this grand hall of light, sound and wonder. It was hard to say. But no un-dead asshole was going to stop Max, Henry, Sonia and Penny from getting inside.
Henry bounced on the half-alive meat-sack’s head until the cracking was louder than Sonia’s vocalization of her disgust, and by the time Henry was sliding the sole of his Adidas trainer along the side of the curb to clean of the brains, the zombies head was little more than a grey and red paste, sprinkled with fragments of shining white bone.
Max thought it looked cool as all hell.
Like something from Dawn of the Dead only less...red.
Max tried the door.
It swung open.
They entered the arcade hall, both boys snickering to themselves as the girls balked at Henry’s handiwork.
Inside, Max could only gape in wonder.
The machines still ran, lights still flashed hypnotically around the beautifully painted arcade cabinets, and even the cashier’s area where change was doled out to the kids was open and unattended. It was, with no little hyperbole, a fucking paradise.
“This is really happening,” Henry declared. “We can make a home here.”
No one answered. They were all thinking the same thing. They hadn’t stealthily slipped away from their families during the ‘big evacuation’ for nothing.
This was the plan, this was the dream, and each of the four twelve-year-old kids had re-watched Dawn enough times together to know, as the evening news reported that many of the recently deceased were opening their eyes on the world and sitting upright, that this was their chance to be free.
Free from household chores, free from raking up leaves in the summer, free from curfews, free from rules, free from their parents, school, police, janitors, bullies...
Free!
“We’ll need to barricade the place like they do in the movies,” Penny eventually added, impressing further an already smitten Max. “We can head out in small groups, stick together, collect wood from the houses on our street and the ones around it and turn this place into a fortress. If we’re lucky, we’ll be left alone, but it’s best to be safe, guys.”
Yep, Max was in love. A twelve-year-old’s love, churning with half-understood sexual desire and fanciful notions of heroism and romance, but love nonetheless.
Penny was all he’d ever wanted.
Well, besides his own arcade.
“That’s a great idea,” he added, uselessly.
She flashed him her beautiful smile. He grinned back, one hand in his pocket to hide his growing excitement.
“I can’t believe this!” Sonia cheered. “Our very own arcade! This is the best thing ever, ever, ever!”
Sonia...
&nb
sp; She came as part of the package with Penny, and as Penny was dating Henry, (a fact that burned away at Max’s young heart like acid), she was the undesirable ying to Penny’s life-affirming yang. He was willing to put up with her hanging around, and could bare seeing her hold hands with Henry, if it meant he could be close to the girl of his dreams.
It wasn’t easy, though. Sonia was every bit as annoying as his kid brother, Walter. Or even his parents.
.He wondered if his family were dead by now. If not, did they miss him? The search party had scoured the whole town for Max and his friends, but in Bellshill in the late 80’s if a kid didn’t want to be found, then a kid didn’t get found. Seven summers of constructing underground wooden dens in more and more hidden, off-the-track places had quickly ensured he and his friend’s were counted as ‘among the missing’.
Three days the search had gone on, and two days more before they emerged from their secret place to a town free of both the living and, mostly, of the dead.
Max pushed the thoughts of his family away. What did he care? He was kid with an arcade full of great games with great graphics to call his own, and all the coins he’d ever need to play and conquer till the end of time.
Fuck family.
Three days of hard work reinforcing the building and, with only a few cuts and bruises, the place had been secured.
Safe and sound.
A fortress.
Yet still, in the quiet warmth of the summer nights when the others slept, Max often found sleep frustratingly out of reach. Henry would say he was a worrier and that he should relax, but every night he lay awake with one thought scuttling around his mind like a electronically rendered centipede. Something his constantly fretting mum had always taught him...
Nothing good ever lasts.
July 1990
Max peered out across the street towards the video store. Dread clutched his heart as he glimpsed further movement in the run-down derelict Clanvid.
Mum was right.
Nothing good ever lasts.
Consumed- The Complete Works Page 36