Consumed- The Complete Works

by Kyle M. Scott

They had come...

  At first, he spotted only the one figure moving through the shadows across the street, but soon enough the lurker was joined by more. Max counted three, but with only the pale moonlight illuminating the street outside, it was impossible to be sure. He concentrated hard, hoping for his eyes to adjust a little better now that the arcade’s latest generator had been shut down and the place was cloaked in darkness.

  It was no use.

  Henry was stood above him now, leaning forward to stare through the slat for himself. “Fuck,” he moaned.

  Fuck was right.

  From somewhere to his rear, Max heard a familiar yawn. He turned to see Penny, eyes bleary with sleep, still in the process of pulling her shirt over her head. For one tantalizing moment, Max caught sight of the undersides of her ample breasts. Despite the danger creeping outside their sanctuary and their home, he felt himself grow hard.

  Damn, but Henry was a lucky bastard.

  All Max had was Sonia.

  Not many girls to choose from when the world had ended.

  “What’s going on?” she asked through a fresh yawn as she moved up behind Henry and wrapped her arms around his waist lovingly.

  “Outside,” he nodded. “We think they’ve found us.”

  Penny’s arms immediately fell away from Max’s friend. Her eyes wet with alarm, she pushed past Sonia. “Oh Jesus...shit! Let me see!”

  Henry growled. “Keep your fucking voice down, Sonia. They’ve nothing to go on but sound. They may still pass by.”

  “I don’t think so,” Max uttered, his heart jack-hammering in his chest.

  Sonia moved away from the window, letting Penny take her place. “I can’t look anymore,” she whispered, more to herself than the others as she leaned against the ageing Wonder Boy cabinet, trembling.

  Max watched Henry as Henry watched the shadows beyond their walls.

  “What should we do?” He asked.

  Henry’s eyes, though shadowed and hard to make out, were filled with something Max couldn’t quite define. Something he’d never seen in his friend before. In the past four years as they’d scavenged, built and survived, Max had seen and done some terrible things and was under no illusions about how lucky they’d been. Most of the dead had been eradicated or moved on long ago, and the living they’d come across had been friendly, helpful even. Still, fear had been Max’s constant companion in a world where the dead vastly outnumbered the living. He’d suspected it would only be a matter of time before a horde found them, and the fear of it hung like a vapor cloud over all he did.

  He expected that fear to have finally tainted Henry’s soul.

  Henry was terrified, but he also looked defiant.

  Penny, ever the voice of reason, swallowed hard in the silence of the darkened arcade. “We should make for the fire-exit,” she whispered, flatly.

  Henry’s head snapped around. “What!?”

  “We should leave, Henry, while we still can,” she said, determinedly.

  “Leave!?” Henry growled. “We’re not going to just cut and run, Pen! This place is ours! We worked for it, bled for it. We don’t even know what’s out there. It could be ordinary people. We need to get a better look at the fuckers before we decide to...”

  “Shut it a minute!” Max urged. He stared into the deadened night and felt his balls crawl up into his stomach as, out on the street, two of the figures stepped into the silvery moonlight.

  “Penny’s right,” he said, gazing into the gloom at the terrors drifting across the street.

  In the background, Sonia was cursing to herself, over and over. Penny backed away from the window as though she’d bore witness to the coming of the Devil himself.

  As one, more and more shadows coalesced in the street, some emerging like corpses from the coffin of the old, fucked-up video-rental store, some stumbling from the shop’s exterior periphery, limping into the iridescent moonlight, wraiths from a nightmare.

  As they moved closer, Max was afforded a better look at them. The two in front were both male. One of them, the one on the left, moved with his head low, his hungry eyes sheaved behind a curtain of long, lank hair. He wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the Star Wars logo, torn in too many places to count. His sizable gut hung from beneath the ripped-up fabric like a strangely misplaced breast, pale white and jiggling in the rays of the moon as he moved. The one on the right was a skinny fucker. He looked like he’d been bathing in blood. Clinging to his gaunt, emaciated form was a Super Mario shirt.

  Two of a kind.

  Shuddering, Max took in the rest.

  He saw more of the same. All stumbling forward as though driven by some dark internal force, unseen but impossible to resist, eyes glazed over with a dull lusting hunger.

  Some of the others were less well put together than the creeps in the lead. Max noticed one of them was missing an arm. It wore a jacket not unlike the one Marty McFly had worn in Back to the Future, but only one sleeve was filled out, the other hung deflated and loose, housing only the night air. Another licked her lips wordlessly, running her slug-like tongue over toothless gums as she pressed on towards the arcade’s entrance. She wore a baseball cap emblazoned with the word Atari. Short blonde hair, filthy with blood and fuck-knew what else, sprung from the sides of her cap like stubborn weeds.

  Max barely felt the warm wetness as it spread from his groin and down his left leg, darkening his jeans as the procession of horrors moved ever closer.

  Each of the mindless shambling fucks held a weapon.

  The filthy blonde carried some sort of small hatchet, caked in dried, black blood. Marty McFly held a huge metal rebar pipe in his one remaining hand. It swung loose at his side as he moved ever closer to the arcade. Behind the leads, the others brandished every weapon a maniac could dream of...a butcher knife, a claw-hammer, a screwdriver. One of them – a short and plump female, sporting jeans with a print of The Flintstones on them - carried a pink baseball bat.

  As the street filled with the hateful bastards, Max quickly took a head-count.

  Six of them.

  He and his companions were outnumbered by two.

  Not good odds.

  Henry got to his feet on shaky legs, doing his best to look bold and almost pulling it off.

  “This is it, guys,” he said in a voice part-authoritative, part-scared kid. “Get the weapons, quick!”

  Sonia was already up and moving. Max watched her scramble to the weapons cache piled up on one of the arcade’s cafeteria tables. She perused the tools, settled on a sharpened clothes pole and grabbed it in both hands.

  Penny was up, too. She grabbed an axe.

  Max swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and tried to calm the thundering of his heart.

  He’d known they’d come, eventually. This day was inevitable. You didn’t make an arcade hall your home and expect it to go unchallenged...

  “God damn fuckers,” he muttered.

  The gang of nerds, no older than Max and own little group, raised their weapons of war high.

  Then they made for the arcade.

  Max backed away from the awful sight of the approaching geeks and ran for the weapons, swiping up a crowbar. Henry still stood by the window. “We can talk about this!” he shouted through the wood and glass to the filthy horde of social outcasts on the street. “We can share!”

  From outside, a female voice answered. Max, weapon in hand, moved in to get a look. It was the chubby girl with the pink baseball bat. “No talking! We came for the place! Walk away and you get to live, dick!”

  It was the first voice Max had heard utter a single word besides his companions in nearly two years. She spoke with a lilting, almost childlike quality. It would have been cute were her eyes not shining with a murderous hunger as the words cut through the night.

  “There are other places!” Henry shouted back with a wavering voice.

  “Not like this,” she said. “Not with power.”

  “We have food,” he returned.

 
“So do we!”

  “We can share,” Henry begged desperately. “We’re all the same.”

  “We were the same,” the girl – their leader, Max surmised – shouted. “But we haven’t played a fucking game of anything in years besides a few Atari games, and you know those don’t count. Do you know what that feels like? No, you don’t, now get the fuck out here and move on!”

  Max chipped in, “There are plenty of games for all of us!”

  The girl laughed. Her merry band of killer nerds joined in. “You know, somehow I don’t think so.”

  That one-armed bastard, Marty McFly, giggled at her side. “Come on out or we come on in!” he hollered in a nasally, pubescent voice. As Max watched, he coughed up a wad of phlegm and spat it at his feet.

  “You heard him,” the girl said.

  Max turned to Henry and found all eyes were on his friend. The girls, too, were waiting for their orders.

  “What do we do?” Max asked with nerves crackling like exposed wires.

  Henry looked from face to face, weary with the mantle of leadership. His eyes rested on Penny. Beautiful Penny....a girl now sixteen and so damn hot Max near creamed in his jeans every time she smiled his way.

  She looked to Henry with admiration and hope.

  Henry clearly wasn’t ready to give that up.

  “This place is ours, guys. We have everything we ever want in here! Just look around you! Look at what we’ve accomplished! “Penny...what’s your high score on Double Dragon?”

  “It’s pretty fucking high,” she said, proudly.

  “And you, Sonia?” You beat Green Beret without losing a single life the other day! And Galaga...fuck sake...there can’t be a coin-op enthusiast left on Earth who could top your score. Imagine what you could achieve in here with more time!”

  Sonia, though clearly terrified, sniffed away snot, wiped her tears and nodded.

  Finally, Henry turned to Max. He spoke softly, as much a wannabe politician as a leader of geeks. “Max...my best friend since we were five...has there ever been a game we can’t conquer when we double up? We’re amazing, man.”

  It was true.

  Max agreed. “We’re pretty badass.”

  “Fucking right we are! So stand with me this one last time, man. Stand with me and lets Double Dragon the shit out of these fuckers! Are you with me!?”

  Max gave one small, firm nod.

  Penny gave a thumbs-up.

  Sonia sighed.

  “We fight!” Henry hollered.

  At least, he tried to.

  At first, Max had no idea what happened.

  His ears rang with the sound of shattering glass, immediately followed by the crunching of wood, then a soft thud. Both girls lit the night up with their screams.

  Henry, Max realized in mute shock, had stood far too close to the window while he roused his friends.

  Someone on the outside had taken initiative, it seemed.

  Henry stumbled away from the shattered window, blood streaming down his face like a deep red curtain closing on a pale white stage. One of his eyes seemed to have turned upwards, studying his brain and the damage done there. His other eye met Max’s own, questioning what had happened.

  Directly behind Henry’s head, the sharp, blood-soaked edge of an axe protruded from the plywood. Crimson tears dripped from the blade, staining the arcade’s carpet as Henry stumbled forward, muttering something that sounded to Max like ‘cunt’.

  He fell forward, landing at the feet of his beloved Penny, his face crunching hard into her Puma trainers while his cleaved brain spilled from the massive wound in the back of his skull, purple and glistening on the carpet. Penny tried to scream. She managed only a high-pitched whimper before collapsing in a heap by his side. The stink of blood and shit filled the air as Henry’s bowels loosed for the last time. Max threw up, coating the unconscious Penny in a fine film of half-chewed canned-hot-dog and chips. Sonia was screaming.

  From behind him, more breaking of glass followed by the smashing of wood. He spun on his heels, terrified. One pane of the plywood was already down. Now, with nothing between him and the crazy fuckers outside but some splintered wood and a window frame, Max faced the savage horde. They were all grinning, all panting, all near-orgasmic with excitement. Axe, knife, bat and spear shone in the hollow moonlight.

  “Game over,” the girl with the pink baseball crooned.

  Max had often heard that, during the moment of death, one sees their entire life flash before their eyes, a movie in which they are the star...all their foibles, all their successes, all their woes and all their joys, shining up there on the silver screen of the dying person’s mind.

  That’s not what Max saw in his mind’s eye as the game-starved geeks poured through the window like they were the dead themselves.

  Instead, Max saw his achievements in life.

  His high-scores.

  They glowed neon behind his eyes, beautiful pixilated testaments to his video-gaming prowess, to all he’d accomplished in his too-brief time in this world.

  Soon, these evil bastards would wipe those high-scores clean, replace his three beautiful initials with their own on damn near half the games in M & D’s Arcade – Street Fighter 2, Snow Bros, Wonder Boy, Shinobi...even Golden Axe.

  Inside Max, a fire ignited.

  Terror was replaced by rage.

  With a howl of purest primal fury, Max raised his crowbar high and ran for the filthy, grinning throng. Somewhere to his left, he heard Sonia scream his name.

  Ignoring her, he ploughed into his challengers.

  The next few moments were something of a blur.

  Max heard furious roars and agonized screams somewhere off in the distance, as though listening through a thick wall. He smelt blood, piss and sweat. The shrieks were peppered with the sharp cracking of bone and the wet tearing of flesh as he swung wildly at the attacking geeks, lost in a red, fiery haze of hatred and bloodlust.

  Images flashed before his eyes – a kid’s eyeball exploding with a wet pop in its socket as he thrust his crowbar deep, a girl’s neck opening like a second mouth, red and spurting as he swung wildly, the one-armed boy clutching at his forehead while a jet of crimson shot high into the air from the jagged bone and purple meat of his caved in cranium, – but he felt as though he were in a dream. There was pain, sharp and burning in his side, and he seemed to have lost the use of one arm somewhere along the line, but he was the Jason Voorhees rip-off from Splatterhouse - indestructible, undying, all-powerful.

  It lasted only moments before the arcade fell into a semi-quiet calm.

  He stood over the dead and dying, fighting for breath, ignoring the pain. One had fled in terror, her pink bat tossed aside as she’d tore off into the night. The rest were scattered on the arcade carpet, bleeding out, writhing, twitching.

  Max moved between them, caving their skulls in one by one till the movements ceased.

  He’d need to source a new carpet down the line.

  Someone giggled from his rear.

  Max spun, crowbar raised like the reaper’s scythe, ready to bury it deep.

  It was Sonia.

  She stared at him, mouth agape and eyes alight, as though he was a god beamed down from a cut-price Heaven, a savior in her darkest hour.

  “Max...” she finally uttered in awe. “You’re amazing.”

  Max swaggered towards her. “I know.”

  He brought the crowbar down in one savage swing, obliterating her nose, pulverizing her jaw and shattering her teeth. His girlfriend crumpled to the floor, gurgling blood from the spurting mangled mess that had been her face. She reached up with one shaking hand towards him and tried to utter something, but managed only to spit thick globs of blood and teeth into the air.

  Max brought his foot down on her face.

  The crunch was as satisfying as any sound he’d ever heard.

  He stomped on her face twice more for good measure.

  Then, panting with exertion but feeling fine, he turn
ed his attention to the crumpled, still unconscious Penny.

  She was whole. She was safe.

  She was alive.

  Max smiled and couched before her.

  “What’ll you do if she comes back?” Penny asked Max as he slid another handful of coins into Space Ace, one by one. He studied the high-score screen as the coins made their way through the machine, glowering at the high-score still residing there: H.T.S.

  Henry Terrance Stevens.

  Today would be the day.

  “Who?” he asked over his shoulder, not really interested in the conversation.

  Penny huffed. “Who do you think? Her…the one who got away.”

  “That was days ago.”

  “So? She could come back.”

  Smiling, Max turned around to face Penny.

  Damn, she looked good!

  A bit bruised and battered here and there from the times when he’d gotten a little too excited, but still a knockout. Her naked breasts shone with sweat, heaving as she uselessly struggled with the thick ropes he’d used to tie her to the table. He gazed between her spread legs at the tantalizing, fleshy pink folds between and felt pride in his ingenuity. With her arms splayed above her head and her soft, smooth legs bound at each side of the tables opposite end, he had ease of access any time he wanted.

  It felt good to be on top.

  Well... almost on top.

  Max turned his attention back to the game’s screen.

  “I’m coming for you, Henry...”

  He hit ‘Start Game’.

  Max’s arcade filled with sound, vibrant and clear, while outside the walls of his kingdom the dying world listened and yearned.

  Other works by the author:

  Novels

  Devil’s Day

  Aftertaste

  Where the Dead Ones Play

  The Club

  Razorblade Candies

  (Novellas)

  Love Lies Dead

  VHS

  The Wild

  Contact Kyle at –

  authorkylemscott@outlook.com