by Unknown
Eyes . . .
Rob Smales graduated with a BA in English from Salem State College. Two decades later , after years of people saying he tells a good story, he is trying his hand at writing some of them down. “Playmate Wanted”, which appeared in issue #5 of Dark Moon Digest, was his first time in a print.
SEE JACK RUN
L. A. TOBIN
Before Jack can even think about running, it’s already too late.
The Crenshaw boy holds Jack’s scrawny arm in his catcher’s mitt of a hand, pinning him to the wall next to the urinals.
Cars drone past the barred windows of the nondescript brick structure. A distant siren calls out.
The Crenshaw boy—don’t ever call him Lionel—holds Jack in place. There was no way in hell Jack could outrun Lionel Crenshaw, anyway. And certainly not Billy Norton, who flies like a fart and runs like a queer dog. Supposedly a vicious, queer dog scared Billy’s mother when she was pregnant with Billy. That’s why he runs like a queer dog.
“School taxes!” yells Lionel behind a malicious, toothy smirk. He pounds his dirty fist against Jack’s chest several times, knocking the wind out of him. “Taxes, buddy. Taxes. You have to pay your dues. Oh, did I mention TAXES?” Lionel takes hold of Jack’s spaghetti arm and begins smacking him in his wounded, freckled face. “Quit hitting yourself,” chants Lionel. “Quit hitting yourself, quit hitting yourself.”
Billy Norton spreads a hockey-player’s grin, but falls into a bout of heavy coughing. “Stop hitting yerself, stop hitting (coughcough) yerself. Shit (cough cough)–smoker’s lung,” he wheezes and grins again.
“Well, maybe, you know, it’s time to quit smoking. Ya think? Maybe?” Jack had the words out of his mouth before he even realized he’d spoken.
“Listen to the dead guy,” hisses Lionel. “Awful brave for a dead guy.”
“Dead guy,” repeats Billy, and then breaks into another fit of coughing.
“What a fuckin’ pisser.”
“What a (cough) pisser,” repeats Billy.
A jab to the guts brings bony Jack to his knees gasping, sucking hard to bring air back into his deflated lungs.
Lionel begins searching Jack’s pants and jacket pockets.
Billy slaps Lionel on the back, and Lionel breaks into a fit of laughter, his face turning cherry red. Billy laughs, too, but then starts hacking again.
“I . . . told you . . . you should . . . quit,” Jack said.
His words seep up from the tile floor in a series of short, labored breaths. Dribbling sounds from the urinal; buzzing from overhead lights, muffled traffic passing outside window and . . . freedom.
“You got to be fuckin kiddin’ me!” cries Lionel.
Billy watches Lionel’s face carefully, hoping to glimpse the birth of a sadistic idea. And there it appears in short order.
“There’s something I wanna do,” says Lionel. “Something I wanna try.” He tilts Jack’s bruised and bloody face towards his and grins. The grin blossoms into a cancerous mask of evil. Lionel slips his hand over the smaller boy’s mouth. Jack begins to squeal beneath Lionel’s smothering grip.
Lights.
Oh, the beautiful lights.
It ends.
Jack falls into the black of unconsciousness.
“I got an idea,” repeats Lionel.
Seeing what Lionel does next, Billy wishes Jack had run.
L. A. Tobin was born in Newfoundland and now lives in Ontario. She loves horror and suspense (who doesn't?). She has been writing stories since childhood and recently finished a suspense thriller/horror novel. Writing a collection of short stories and another novel are her next projects.
80 SQUARE FEET
JASON BURUM
The visceral terror I once felt has long been replaced by anger and aggression. The thoughts of any hope I once had have regressed into anxiety and depression. I’ve lost my other, a best friend, my sister and my nephews along with my only child. All I have left is 80 square feet of cold white tile and Rex. I inherited this palace of porcelain on the sheer luck that they don’t have the motor skills to open anything that requires pulling. They operate only in one gear: forward. Moan and go, groan and get, slow and straight ahead—that’s how them boys roll.
I’ve enjoyed six or seven days in this upscale setting. Romantic candle-lit nights spent listening through the ventilation system to the sweet sounds of hundreds of walking corpses lurking outside at the prospect I might still be in here. I’m down to a half of a package of beef jerky, three juice pouches, eight pieces of that cheap pink gum they stuff into piñatas and a nearly empty bottle of yellow mustard.
It’s hard not to laugh at the situation I’m in, but at the same time it’s hard not to cry over the situations I’ve had to endure getting here. To say that I’ve been to hell and back, hanging on by the seat of my pants is an understatement. I’ve seen things no one should have to witness . . . been forced to do things that no man should ever have to experience. I’ve somehow managed to survive during a time when the odds against survival seemed practically insurmountable.
I somehow managed to survive the onslaught . . . only to box myself into a cold, damp corner with no means of escape. Eighty square feet of hard reality slaps me in the face.
The sound of the door creaking as it strains to hold up against a horde of determined creatures isn’t nearly as unsettling as the sound the creaking hinges make as they slowly give away. The eerie screech of the metal doorjamb twisting against the burgeoning mass on the opposite side makes me squeeze Rex tightly, but it’s the sound of the screws in the hinges grinding against the jamb as the door gives way that makes me whimper and shake.
This is it.
All I can think about is how I’m not ready to go.
I’m just not ready. And in that final moment before the lights go out and I cease to be, it hits me:
“Who’s going to take care of Rex?”
Jason Burum is a fiction writer who loves giving his readers a thorough creeping with his stories. Since the age of eleven he’s spent his days writing stories of fear and terror for whomever he could convince to read them. He resides in Oakland with his wife and two children.
A JURY OF HIS PEERS
ANDREW ALFORD
The snap that fried him was not that of Exhibit A: the tracks he’d chained her to, smeared with the crimson path of her body.
Nor was it B, that looked like a mannequin’s arm draped over an iron rail, as over a porcelain tub.
Exhibit C was her bra, strapped to a torso half-blackened at impact.
Exhibit D showed her head and face: sculpture out of not-enough clay.
Neither of these did him in.
It was not even the passengers’ accompanying testimony about the rumbling underfoot of someone becoming something, “like basketballs trapped beneath the rail-car floors.”
The photograph that doomed him he’d taken himself. As it passed among the jurors hand to hand, a woman vomited, a man swooned. Twelve times his trophy photo brought the girl together again for them in her last moment alive. Her face still whole, her eyes still focused—looking right at them but recognizing only him.
It made murderers of them all.
Andrew Alford was born and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey. You can find more of his short fiction in Space and Time Magazine and Supernatural Tales, and hopefully digging their way up out of several other slush piles.
I LIVE IN YOUR CUPBOARD
SANTIAGO EXIMENO
I live in your cupboard, hidden among your clothes. I sleep during daytime, one of my heads leaning onto your old slippers, my body draped over a plastic hanger. At night I wake up and spy on you from the inside, through the crack of the door your mother leaves open. I know you know I live here, I know you’ve told your parents a lot of times.
I hate you just for that.
For you discovered me.
I’d like to go out and tear you to pieces with my teeth, to make you pay what you owe me for your betrayal.
&nbs
p; But I won’t do it. I hide among your clothes and wait, as I always did, suffering my fear in silence.
Because I’m not lurking; I’m skulking.
I’m skulking from the monster that lives under your bed.
Santiago Eximeno (Spain, 1973) has published (in Spanish) several horror/dark fantasy books like Bebés Jugando con Cuchillos (Grupo AJEC, 2008) or Capriccio (23 Escalones, 2010). He has received four Ignotus Award (a national sci-fi/horror/fantasy award in Spain) for Best Short Story and Best Anthology.
THE CHILDREN OF FAITH
SEAN TEMPLETON
The council had deliberated; its verdict was clear. Two bearded men, pulled by a single black horse, now depart westward under a bent white canvas and a fuliginous fog. At least before there were bodies, there was something to blame.
Now, just the returning blacksmith’s din and no laughter from children. Not since ‘06 had such a colony sent out for help; but five years isn’t long for the servants of God.
It’s obvious what the pair will tell the Columbus police. They’ll start with the blackbirds–say they’d come in like always, searching for grain in the village square. But this time, they’ll say, there was something in their eyes: something hellish. They’ll explain three children dropping dead near the schoolhouse, and that the primitive colony prayed in a circle.
The pair will report that a stranger then approached wearing outsiders’ garb, a tan sack over his shoulder. That he asked why they prayed. And when they’d told him, he’d spoken:
“And your god doesn’t care? That your children, that his children die?” They’ll remember him asking. “Hell in birds’ eyes? Can’t he redeem them? Prophets before your prophets, they wrote of a god called Hades. He damned another deity with nothing but pomegranate seeds! You think he can’t condemn blackbirds? Your god refuses you; but Hades speaks. He is real. If I bring him your grain, he’ll accept it as pomegranate seeds.”
The pair will recall that the village fell silent when “Hades’ messenger” demanded its oldest text, a calligraphic Ausbund, in return. The hush careered into fury, they’ll say, and the stranger left carrying grain.
But, the messengers will explain, he returned with red seeds on the night two more children died, and the sobbing Reverend reluctantly accepted his demands. The stranger flung the seeds about the square before departing again.
The men will tell how the colony woke among bird carcasses, but that the reverend hid the Ausbund nonetheless. Then, they’ll claim a plow-man crossed town at noon to find the schoolteacher dead, his schoolchildren missing. The authorities will hear about the council, about its verdict. They’ll hear that . . .
But my daydream dissipates.
. . . I hope they’ll call me Hades’ son, something divine. But in truth, I just couldn’t help myself.
I saw the colony’s sign from a Corvette’s backseat and took foot after I poisoned the driver. The birds were a beautiful coincidence, the town’s prayers pristine irony. All it took was pomegranate seeds, some liquid strychnine in the seeds and a meal, and I got what I wanted.
Not their Ausbund, of course. My bag carries folklore, not fantasy.
No, I craved their uncertainty. I want their doubt. I want to brandish my knife at their young as we trudge up this hillside, to look in their timorous eyes and tell them “there is no God,” and “relax, I won’t hurt you . . . but I’m your god now.”
Sean Templeton grew up in Dickinson, North Dakota. He currently attends Minnesota State University in Moorhead, MN, for English Writing and Business Administration. While he has had several poems published, Sean is just beginning to write prose. His first few pieces have been in his long-time favorite horror genre.
SALLY’S DREAM
GARY R. HOFFMAN
The person standing over her bed had a very large knife in their hand. The knife had a shiny silver blade and red handle.
“What do you want?” Sally asked with a shaky voice.
“Do you not remember me?”
“No. I have no idea who you are.”
“Think hard, and I’ll return when you remember. It will mean nothing if you don’t know who I am.”
Sally woke with a jolt. Her gown was wet with sweat and her heart pounded. She glanced around the empty room. Her bladder ached. She threw the blanket back and heard something clatter to the floor. When she turned on the light, she saw a large, silver-bladed knife with a red handle on the floor by her bed.
Gary R. Hoffman has taught school, been self-employed, and traveled in a motor home. He has published or won prizes for over 300 short stories, poems, and essays. www.garyrhoffman.com.
THEY WON’T GET US
T. J. REED
Sweat dripped down his forehead, between his eyes, and off the tip of Brian’s nose. The pressure was getting to him. From the corner of the living room he could hear the whimpering of his two children, Amy, ten, and Sean, nine. They were hiding in the closet, just as he had told them to. Lying unconscious on the living room floor was his wife Tory, dried blood matting her hair against her head. Brian stood up from his recliner and shuffled to the window for the third time in as many minutes and parted the curtains. The dead were out there. Standing behind cars parked in front of his suburban home.
“Daddy, we’re scared,” Amy whispered.
“I know. So am I, baby. But I won’t let them get us.”
Brian picked up his shotgun that he had propped against the wall next to the window. He could start shooting in hopes of thinning the herd outside, but he was afraid the noise would only bring more of the ghouls to his home. He counted them again. Fourteen.
The masses were growing, and they were surrounded. At least that is what one of the walking dead had said. Brian had been surprised to learn that they could talk. The zombie’s booming voice had sounded like God himself, but God wasn’t in the business of killing and eating his family, as were the maggot sacks outside his once-quiet home.
Tory began to stir from her slumber on the floor.
“Brian . . . what happened?” Then she was out again.
Brian raised the shotgun, and aimed at his wife’s head. He knew there was only one way out for him and his family.
“No! Daddy, please! ” Amy cried to her father.
“I’m sorry, pumpkin, but this is the only way. I will see you on the other side. Now close your eyes and hold your brother. Hold him tight! When you get to heaven, Mama and I will be right behind you, baby. Go ahead now, close your eyes, and wipe away those tears.”
Brian shot his wife first, then both of his children. As he raised the shotgun to place it in his mouth, the living room window shattered in. The shots had excited the dead outside, and now they were flooding into his house in hopes of getting Brian and his family. But Brian knew he had cheated them out of that satisfaction. He pulled the trigger as they grabbed him and dragged him to the floor, but nothing happened. The gun had jammed.
The zombies rolled him onto his stomach and placed cuffs on him.
“We were too late, sir. They’re dead, the wife and the kids. The whacko shot them. Oh my God, he shot them.”
T. J. Reed loves to tell stories and entertain his friends with his tales of zombie survival. He lives in Fredericktown, Missouri with his beautiful supportive wife and four wonderful children. He also is a Combat Engineer in the Missouri National Guard with two combat tours to Iraq. Visit him at http://theywontgetus.blogspot.com.
THE SHACKLES
JAMES S. DORR
He had her at last! He’d waited until day, when she would be asleep, and dragged her torpid body to the chair, sitting it upright, then locked on the shackles.
Slowly, the vampire woke.
“Sandor,” she said in her heavily accented voice. “What is the meaning of this?”
“Countess,” he answered, “you know what I want. You have promised many times—life eternal.”
“I do not make such promises to servants, nor would I let myself be forced to keep them. I am Coun
tess Marya Zaleska, the daughter of Dracula himself! How dare you—”
“Remember, Countess, I helped you to steal back your father’s corpse, and then to burn it. You needed me then. And afterward you have not turned me away. I know your secrets.”
The Countess pulled against her chains. “Perhaps not all of them, Sandor,” she said, “but no matter. Even if I should promise this to gain my freedom, how would you hold me to it?”
Sandor smiled. “The shackles and chains are quite solid, I can guarantee. And do not try turning into a bat, your wings would be shattered before you could pull them out. You see, I’ve learned these things. As for your promise, you will pay me first. You will let me have a flagon of your blood that I might then drink before you have quite completely drained mine.”
She shook her head, straining to pull the chains from the wall, until she sank back again, exhausted.
“It will be night soon enough,” Sandor said. “I have watched you, Countess. I know you will need to have blood before dawn. You may feel strong now, but as the hours go by you will weaken. You will see, Countess.”
Sandor strode to the chamber’s window and peeked through its heavy drapes. “Indeed,” he continued, “the sun is just touching the western horizon. In not many more minutes it will be down. And that is when the lust comes on you, does it not? The desire—the need—to drink? I know you have tried to banish it from you, to deny your nature, but always it comes back. That prostitute, Lili. That doctor who you had thought might cure you. As I have said, Countess, I know your secrets.”
“And I have said, perhaps not all of them.” She fixed him with her dark, deep eyes. “You say it is sundown?”
He opened the curtain so she could see too. “Yes,” he answered. “Now comes the starvation. Unless, of course . . . ”