Hell Hath No Fury...

by Elsa Carruthers

  “Letty! Letty! You knew those brothels used kids! You knew it!” she screamed. A man answered her.

  “Mrs. Loftiss? Mrs. Loftiss?”

  She didn’t move except to make a shushing gesture at Letty.

  “Your groceries, Mrs. Loftiss.” He rapped his knuckles on the kitchen window. His shadow seemed enormous on the white tile floor.

  He kept screaming at her, he was saying something. Then the whistle started and Letty was trying to get away from her by confusing her with a vanilla candle.

  “Mrs. Loftiss, I’ll just leave them here by your back door.” She could see a glimpse of him. He was worse than the kids. With the kids she knew that they’d throw something, yell, and then move on. But the adults? No, they never quit. They wanted her to “do the decent thing” and move. They wanted her to never show her face again. They wanted her to die.

  This was the last time he’d come to harass her, however. She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but he frightened her and she wondered if he was alone. Slowly, she lifted the blind over the sink and peeked out. His face was right there, pressed up to the glass. She screamed and dropped the blind—too quickly. He ran to her door. Was he going to break in?

  What was he saying?

  “I know you’re in there!” he screamed.

  “What do you want? I’m calling the police!”

  “So. Call them. See how long it takes them to come and help.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’ve got daughters and groceries.”

  To that she said nothing; it made no sense.

  After a long time without another word from him, she figured it was safe to look over at Letty. Maybe Letty could find something heavy to hit him with if he decided to break in and attack them. Letty wasn’t in the living room; she probably went to use the phone to call 911.

  The doorframe splintered, and then she was beside herself with fear and rage. He couldn’t leave two helpless women alone. He rammed into it again sending chips of paint and dust into her home. Her lovely home.

  “I’m going to kill you,” he said before finally smashing through.

  Helen stood waiting for him, knife in hand. She stared into the face of the crewcut man who stood in her home, his hand covering his mouth. What did he want? And why were all of those people behind him?

  He had no shame, showing his nasty pedophile face in her home. Her wonderful home that she shared with Letty. But that was all right. She’d show…what’s his name? Rick? Dick?

  Helen smiled and dropped the knife. No, his name was Nick. And he was the bastard who gave Letty SuperSyph. He was the son of a bitch who got off on using kids.

  All those people out there, they looked pissed off. Well, fuck them, she was pissed off herself. Helen sprang up on the man and bit his arm. He screamed and tried to club her off with his other hand, but she had a bulldog grip. She sucked and slurped, suddenly feeling stronger than ever. He was delicious, so she kept on eating, well after his screaming had stopped.

  Tonia lives in the hills of North Carolina with her husband and an ever fluctuating number of cats. She likes fudgesicles and coffee, though, not always together. When she isn't writing zombies, she's writing about steampunk, or sex, or all three.

  You can find out more about her at

  www.thebackseatwriter.com

  * * * * *

  Herman is curious to see what goes on at the girls’ camp after dark. When he sees the chance to indulge in his voyeuristic fantasy, he takes it. With his trusty scooter, Quicksilver, and the cover of a dark night, he slips over to the girls’ encampment to feast his eyes on some young nubile, and he desperately hopes, scantily clad or naked female flesh. But it turns out the residents of Camp Wintataka want to return the favor in an infinitely darker and insatiably hungrier way.

  All Herman wanted was to sneak in and take an innocent peek. Now he’ll need to sneak out or become the ladies’ midnight snack. Settle in and prepare to be scared in this delicious tale from Tonia Brown entitled Chick Magnet. Be careful what you long for, it might just want you more than you want it.

  Chick Magnet

  By Tonia Brown

  Herman pushed his legs harder, trying to close the distance between him and the worn tool shed before his overworked heart could give out on him, which he was pretty sure was about to happen at any moment. Running was not part of Herman’s usual day-to-day routine. As a result, when the need arose for the young man to sprint like a goat on fire, well, Herman found himself in a bad way. But Lady Fate has been known to play each side, both cruel and kind. Considering how cruel she had been with fourteen-year-old Herman Jackson over the last hour or so, one had to suppose she had some kindness in store for the lad.

  Herman assumed the wooden structure toward which he was heading was a tool shed, because his father had a similar outbuilding in which he stored his tools. But as he drew nearer, Herman reckoned that it could have been home to any number of objects. Or even, perhaps, people. He swallowed hard, slowing a little as the idea rested on him. What if it was another kind of cabin? What if it housed more of those…things? A groaning growl sounded, much too close behind him for his taste, spurring Herman to a new burst of speed. Better to face the mystery shack than to remain out in the open one moment longer. Sure, the shed might conceal any number of nightmarish things, but outside the shed?

  Herman had already seen what was wandering around outside, and he didn’t want to see them anymore.

  The irony, of course, lay in the fact that the whole reason he came out to this godforsaken patch of wilderness in the first place was to see them. Herman wasn’t a pervert by nature, he was just a curious lad; hormonal, confused, typical of his age. A budding teenage voyeur with unsure cravings and foolish notions of how to satisfy them.

  Notions like riding his scooter by the light of the full moon across fifty miles of national forest, all the way to Camp Wickataka, where over one hundred oblivious bouncing beauties awaited his prying eyes. His two-hour scooter ride to the exclusive all-female camp was filled with uneasy sexual tension and legitimate legal worry as Herman mulled over the possibility of being caught in the vulgar act of peeping. Now, those worries seemed not only futile, but forever ago. He supposed running for one’s life tended to put things into perspective.

  A sliver of moonlight fell across a coil of garden hose dangling from the wooden door, assuring Herman that it was just an outbuilding and not another cabin. The door was unlocked, a mercy for which the lad took a moment to thank the heavens before he slipped inside. He closed the door behind him as quiet as he could manage, lest he rouse the attention of those hot on his trail. With his back to the door, in the dark stillness of the shed, Herman slid to the floor and tried to silence the cacophony of thumping in his ears that was his pounding heart.

  “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” he whispered in a nervous mantra between heaving gulps of air. He cradled either side of his head with trembling hands, resting his elbows on weak knees. Within moments of that blessed rest, the pounding faded, his breathing evened out, his hands came to rest. But his mind refused to calm down; instead, racing with fear, wild terror spiraling his once borderline psychosis towards full-on in-sanity.

  Crazy. That was it, wasn’t it? He had to be crazy. None of this was real.

  As if hearing the very doubt in his thoughts, another low moan met Herman’s ears, promising him that this was, indeed, as real as it seemed. Herman snapped his head up at the sound, his shaking legs jackrabbit-ready to take flight once again if need be, despite the fact that he was sure they would buckle before he took three more steps. He needed a longer break. He had to stop running, if but for a minute.

  Herman wondered if those things had spied him entering the shed, or if they could somehow see him crouching in the darkness behind the door. But deep down, he knew the truth. It didn’t matter where he hid; they always found him. Over the last hour, he had scurried from cabin to cabin, mess hall to medicine hut, each time sure of his cover a
nd confident in his concealment. And each time, their discovery ousted him from his hidey-hole to the tune of groaning and growling, screaming and sprinting. Herman, who had spent the bulk of his young life invisible to the opposite sex, was now the center of every female camper’s hungry attention.

  Which would be great if they weren’t all dead.

  He didn’t know how it happened, couldn’t begin to explain why they were like that. Maybe it was bad marshmallows or something in the lake water or some kind of disease. He could imagine any number of outrageous explanations for their implausible condition. All he knew for certain was that he arrived under the cover of darkness expecting to get an eyeful of naked, nubile lady campers, but all he found were walking corpses.

  The living dead.

  Zombies.

  It was too outlandish to be real, yet here he was, cowering in the darkness of a tool shed with nothing but the stench of his urine-soaked trousers and a fog of mind-numbing fear to accompany him. If he made it out of this alive, he swore he would never peep at another naked lady again. Not even if she asked him to. Not even if she forced him! He might just give up this idea of sex altogether. After almost dying to satisfy his burgeoning libido, he was pretty sure he would never have a normal sex life anyway.

  A chorus of groans reminded him that such promises would have to wait until he was back on Quicksilver and far away from this nightmare. Despite the bone-chilling sound of walking death surrounding the shed, Herman smiled at the thought of his scooter parked at the border of the campgrounds waiting for his return. He supposed any other guy would have just run into the woods willy-nilly, abandoning his transport. But Herman couldn’t do that to Quicksilver. No way. Not after all they had been through together. All they had seen together. Never mind the fact that the machine was all he had left of his father. Herman couldn’t leave his father’s scooter behind. Besides, fifty miles was an awful long walk back to civilization, even with hot zombies on your trail.

  He just had to find some gas, then they could both be on their way.

  In his lustful visions of bare breasts and other exposed lady bits, Herman forgot that the long trip out to Camp Wickataka would drain his poor scooter’s small fuel tank. He slipped out of the house and hopped on the scooter without so much as a thought as to how he would return. When the meter dipped below empty, Herman went from aroused to alarmed, dreading the fifty-mile walk back with a two-hundred-pound scooter in tow.

  As he made the slow trip out to the isolated campgrounds, Herman expected to see many things. He expected to see teenage girls, or women, depending on which cabin he was peeking into. He expected lace and silk and satin. He expected teddies and panties and bras. But most of all, he expected flesh. Fabulous feminine flesh.

  And flesh was exactly what he got, only not quite the way he expected.

  He had left his scooter well hidden in the woods and crept to the first cabin he chanced across. Crawling under the window, he steeled his nerves and his libido, preparing himself for a visual feast, then lifted his timid frame until his eyes crested the open window. There were women. There was flesh. There was also blood and bone and brains and bile and bits of things fourteen-year-old boys were never meant to see.

  The room was in shambles, with signs of a life-or-death struggle everywhere. The losers were in pieces, limbs and torsos spread in a wide, red splatter across the bloody room. The victors had suffered a good deal of damage as well, but they didn’t seem to notice. In the depths of that bright nightmare stooped three sickly looking women, grey and gaunt, gorging themselves on the remains of countless other ladies. The feasting females were coated in gore, thick layers of crimson splashed across their frilly nighties and silk pajamas, as they tore at the flesh before them, shoving handfuls of sopping wet red into gaping, hungry mouths. Teeth gnashing. Throats moaning. Attention focused on the meal at hand. Herman was not a bright lad, but he had seen enough of modern cinema to realize what was going on here.

  The three women on their unsteady feet were undead. Herman had only seen a few zombie movies, but there was no denying the symptoms. They looked dead. They acted dead. It was in their grey faces, their moans, the way they were eating the flesh of their sisters. Most of all they smelled dead—rotted, wasted, ruined.

  Herman fought to keep his cool, and lost. He let out a high-pitched and embarrassingly feminine shriek before he decided that perhaps alerting the things to his presence wasn’t such a good idea. Herman clapped his hand over his mouth, muffling the last of his howl, but it was too late. The sound reverberated through the bloody room, rang out across the camp and left Herman in the echoing wake of his own girlish cry. He wanted to run, but the grotesque display rooted him to the spot, and there he stood, shivering against the window frame, waiting for the inevitable reaction.

  For a moment it seemed as if the undead ladies were much too busy feasting to hear him. For a heartbeat, for the span of a second, they ignored him and his panicked shout. But it didn’t last long. All at once, they turned to face him, three pairs of milky eyes seeking the source of the noise. In a flash they found it and shuffled across the cabin toward him, arms outstretched, teeth gnashing, clawing at the air. Herman’s bile rose, burning his throat as it fought for purchase against his heaving breath. His feet agreed that it was time to leave, but as he turned to run, he found two more of the things just a few paces behind him. Herman did what came natural to any boy when faced with a pair of shambling corpses set on tearing him apart for their late evening snack.

  He screamed again, wet his pants, and ran like he had never run in the whole of his young life. The women weren’t very fast, but neither was Herman. A lifetime spent playing video games and watching television had left him out of shape and in a sorry state. But the young lad pushed his chunky legs as fast as they could carry him, all while the undead things remained affixed to his slow trail.

  His first instinct had been to return to Quicksilver’s side and get the heck out of here. Only when he reached the scooter did he remember the lack of fuel. The two dead women outside the cabin were gaining on him, as more stumbled free from other buildings, shambling into pursuit. Heaving and gasping, Herman had dashed past the useless scooter, shouting a promise on the wind that he would find gas and return to get them both out of here.

  That was over an hour ago, and he had yet to find anything resembling gas. Now he was curled up on the cold dirt floor of a pitch-dark shed, without a hope in sight or a chance in hell. He was going to have to leave Quicksilver and make a run for it. He was going to have to abandon his best friend and make the entire fifty-mile trek back on foot. He wanted to scream. He wanted to cry. He wanted to just go home and forget this ever happened.

  Herman stretched his tired legs, wondering where he was going to gather the strength to make such a long journey when his foot came to rest with a slight metallic ping against something. He lifted his head, staring into the darkness as he tapped his foot against the thing again. The eyelets of his sneakers tapped against the metal housing of the mystery object as the shadowy form of whatever it was swayed ever so slightly. Herman scooted closer to it, reaching out to grab what he hoped would be there. His fingers closed around a cold, metal handle. Like a blind man, he worked his hands lower in the dark, molesting the thing, taking in the shape and size of the object until he was confident in his discovery.

  It was a lawnmower.

  Where there was a lawnmower, there was bound to be gasoline.

  A smiled crept to his lips as hope sprang in his heart. Rather than risk bumbling about in the darkness, Herman crawled back to the door, got to his shaking legs, and felt along the walls for a switch. The shed lacked windows, so he supposed turning on the light would be okay. Would the zombies even know the difference? His trembling fingers found their prize, and Herman flipped on the switch. The world exploded with light as the sudden brightness blinded him. Herman waited for the effect to pass, blinking until the room came into a blurry focus. As his eyes adjusted, Herman shov
ed the heel of his hand into his mouth to muffle the scream rising in his throat.

  Hanging by the neck from a short length of rope tied to an exposed beam in the center of the room was the body of an older woman. Her face was a puffy, swollen death-mask complete with bulging eyes and a fat tongue protruding from blue lips. She wore a simple jogging suit bearing the camp name across the left breast. Herman turned away, unable to bear another second of looking at her. Chancing upon the shredded remains of the other women was one thing, but this… this was something else. The bloody mess of bodies he had witnessed all night seemed almost unreal, as if he were watching some special effects put on just for him. This, however, was all too real. She sort of reminded him of his mother, which made it even worse.

  A loud pounding jolted Herman from his self-induced stupor. One or more of those things had set to beating the shed walls. He had to get out, now. Keeping his eyes low so he didn’t have to look at the hanging woman’s face again, he searched the room. His gaze landed on a familiar red canister, igniting Herman’s hope. He sprang from his spot, intent on scooping the can up by the handle, but before he could lay a single finger on it, something snatched hold of him by a tuft of his hair.

  Herman grunted in surprise as he tumbled away from the gas can, pulled by his hair to the center of the shed. Unsure of who had a grip on him—though, perhaps, deep down, he just hoped it wasn’t who he feared it was—Herman twisted about to have a look. Bulging eyes met his as a fat tongue writhed, licking swollen blue lips in anticipation of the meal to come. The noose-bound woman had come to life, or rather un-life, and held Herman fast by his shaggy mop as she tried to lift him from the floor, dragging him toward her open mouth. Exhausted from fear and worry and dread and endless running, Herman buckled, unable to fight another second.