Happy Little Horrors

by Reuben, David

  What I wouldn’t give to look through her eyes for a mere second. She knows something more. She’s not empty or “blank” like the fundamentalists call her. Just because the rest of us can’t see it, or hear it, or smell it, or feel it, or something else entirely that we can’t even imagine, doesn’t mean it’s not there. Just because we don’t know something doesn’t mean the knowledge doesn’t exist. The judgments we make in our limited realm have no value to those who open their mind, who can see like Stormy, who can just stop and realize that we survived the fucking apocalypse and now all we have to do is live our lives.

  Stormy would be proud of my outlook. She would be happy for me, and she wouldn’t be the only thing to live for anymore. I’ve realized that there’s more. I’ve realized what she always wanted me to. I now know that our senses are limited. She’s not as crazy as I pegged her to be throughout my drunken stupors. I ignored her when she told me there were cascades of light I couldn’t see, decibels of sound I couldn’t hear, and I thought she was crazy when she told me that just because I couldn’t fathom it didn’t mean it didn’t exist. That’s why she isn’t all there. She had this knowledge, so when she left, she saw it and refuses to come back to be constricted once more.

  I talk to her sometimes, but it’s unfulfilling. It’s like talking to a blank wall … there’s just nothing. She doesn’t comprehend what I’m saying, what I’m going through, she doesn’t feel the earthly emotions we know. I try to carry on and just talk … it helped when my brother died, but then again I wasn’t looking at his catatonic body. When I talk to Stormy, it’s like I’m grasping at something I know isn’t there. I have absolutely no idea how to deal with this, but I feel like I already should have.

  I guess I always thought the vaccination would make it easier even if it didn’t work. I’d at least feel her energy around the house, or get some small words out of her … wrong. There’s nothing. I remember that for a while I obsessed with finding something … I’d make a big deal out of her blinking pattern, or subtle mouth movements. But really there’s nothing. I’m worried if I go back to looking for something, I’ll drive myself crazy.

  She never talked about death. I don’t know what she thought would happen. I suppose it’s one of the reasons I went through all I did to keep her out of harm’s reach when she was a full-blown zombie. It killed me to keep her chained up, to not touch her for fear of her bite. I thought it would be all worth it when they finally came out with the vaccination. I don’t know if it was or wasn’t. All I know is that I can’t go on living this way. It’s no life, and she wouldn’t want this for me either.

  I can’t leave Brooke here, and I can’t leave Stormy either. God only knows what those fundamentalists would do to her once I wasn’t here to protect her. I couldn’t think anymore. It’d been a long day … I had a feeling it would be an even longer night if I continued to let my mind rumble with worry.

  “You ready for bed, sweetheart?” I ask, gently taking her hand in mine. She looks up at me with those eyes that I will never forget. If there is one thing that the vaccination returned to her, it’s her eyes.

  In the bedroom, I lay her down in the bed. I see her figure through the candlelight from the bedside table. Her eyes connect with mine and for the first time since the night she changed, she cries. Two tears leak from her right eye. They join paths on her cheek and seem to thicken and pool together. My reflection peers back at me … no, not my physical appearance, but rather my inner-light. My life begins draining away as the tear flows down her rosy cheek. The light fades and I scream out into the darkness, becoming nothing but a tiny flicker.

  Save me, I think as I become entranced in her eyes. I feel her voice calling out to me … no she isn’t speaking: it’s a feeling. Suddenly, we have an unspoken connection. She begs for me to join her. If only I knew how. Like a shared dream, for a mere instant we exist on the same plane. How much longer can I wait until I’m here forever? As much as I like to think she would’ve broken up with me that night, I can’t deny our connection and our fate. The universe has something bigger planned, and I can’t let her slip away like I would have that night. Our love became a blanket that kept me warm at night, and needing to care for her helped me grow on my own. Now, after all I’ve learned and all Stormy and I have been through, I only want to be with her and enjoy our eternity in the present.

  I shoot out of bed, suddenly knowing what I have to do. I can’t take this any longer. God knows what will happen to Brooke. Hopefully she’ll be able to go back to town and have a life. I have to be the man I knew I could be. I am gruff these days for a reason, and now that is painstakingly clear.

  I kiss Stormy on the forehead as she sleeps soundly. This will be the last time. Hell if I know what will come next.

  Outside, the dark sky is foreboding, but on a night like this it makes perfect sense. I start my old pick-up truck and prepare myself for town. Hopefully everybody will be asleep. If I’m not spotted, it will make this trip a whole lot easier. Despite the years it hasn’t been driven, the truck starts with the first crank. I pull out of the driveway in a hurry and hope that Brooke doesn’t wake up.

  Town is a fifteen-minute drive down windy dirt roads. I eye the gas gauge; I have enough to get there and back, but not enough to reach our final destination. I’ll fill up in town.

  Once I reach the hospital, it’s harder to move than I thought it would be. I stare at it for a long time. Fear sits on one side of me, waiting to grasp my heart with its cold claws, and fate rests on the other side with uncertainty. Worry gnaws at me like ravenous rats.

  “Just do it,” I whisper to myself. With that, the door to the pickup truck opens and the rest is a blur. Through the doors like a breeze as I stalk the long halls down to the room they keep the vaccinations in. But that’s not what I’m after. I need the infection … a vial of it. It’s there, sitting in the fridge as if it’s been here for me the entire time.

  “Hey you!” My heart stops in place and I clutch the vial in my hands. I won’t let them take it … this is my way out. This vial is what holds my fate, my future, my escape.

  I glide down the hallways as if in a trance. I don’t think about where I’m going, my feet just take me there. Around every corner there is a memory … a lost patient, a saved child, the surgery room. Comparatively, life before the outbreak was a breeze. I wonder if being a doctor made the apocalypse easier. I’d dealt with death a lot in my few years as a surgeon; in fact, it was the main reason I became a surgeon.

  As I saw the blue and rotting corpse of a leftover patient, I stopped dead in my tracks. He was young … around thirteen. Here is a memory I don’t want to resurface … then again, it wasn’t like I had a choice. Memories had a tendency to claw their way out of the grave no matter how deep you buried them.

  Thud! A strong hand collapses on my shoulder and grips it tightly. “Just what do you—” he pauses as I turn around to face him.

  “Doctor Dawson?”

  I nod.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Would you believe me if I said for old time’s sake. I see you still haven’t cleaned out all the rooms.”

  “Just the lab is functional.” An awkward silence fills the atmosphere. “I’ve missed you around here.”

  “I’m not coming back.”

  “I understand.” More silence as I can see he’s fighting the urge to ask how Stormy is holding up.

  Eventually he leaves me to my thoughts, and the vial in hand goes unnoticed.

  My gaze returns to the boy, and slowly his face is replaced with that of my younger brother. He didn’t survive the open-heart surgery … there was an infection.

  Stop. I can’t do this. I move on.

  Before I know it, I’m home and hovering over her. She looks so peaceful when she sleeps … she always has. Since before we got together I thought she had angelic qualities to her, but especially at nighttime. I hold the vial in my shaky hands and a syringe in the other. I can’t wake her.
/>   I poured the infection into the syringe and slowly give her the injection. She’s still asleep, but I swear I see curves at the corners of her lips. It’s a few minutes before her eyes dart around the room and she rises again. Her arms and legs thrash about, violently tearing the covers from her sweat-drenched body. Her bright yellow eyes seemingly burn through the night. Charcoal black circles surround them, giving the illusion of deepened sockets.

  It’s not what I want to do, but I hog-tie her. I can’t risk getting bit. As I set her in the back of my pick-up truck, a feeling of relief washes over me. I’m doing the right thing. I’m freeing her, myself, and Brooke from a life of emptiness, a life of running, a life of hiding. The fundamentalist groups are growing, and soon they’ll come wielding fire.

  Memories flash through my mind during the long drive up the mountain roads. Memories of us … when we first met … our first dance … our first kiss … our normal life before the apocalypse. Memories I prepare myself to forget. Memories I won’t want to remember. It’s time to move on and forget about everything else. I’ve lived this life long enough, and it’s time to change. I can’t keep living like this. I can’t keep taking care of her with the hopes that it will get better. I suddenly wonder if this is how she felt that night she was ready to break up. I don’t dwell on it; it doesn’t make a difference now.

  The sun slowly rises above the mountains as I turn off the road. My truck only makes it so far into the woods before I hear the loud pop of a tire. I keep going. I need to be as far away from civilization as possible.

  Finally, I’m lost. The truck runs out of gas. I open the door and pick up Stormy. I hold her the way I wanted to hold her on our wedding day. I caress her soft face and kiss her cold, dead lips. She thrashes and tries to wriggle free, but the knots are too well tied. I set her down on a patch of dead and dried leaves. A cold wind slices through the air, chilling my bones. I bend down and start to untie the knots.

  This is it. I have to be brave. I have to be strong. I have to believe that I am doing the right thing. This is what’s best for all of us.

  I untie the last knot and dart away from her. Having second thoughts, tears fill my eyes. Memories clog my mind as I continue to run away. My leg catches on a sharp rock and I feel the blood dripping to the ground. I turn back around, but she’s already gone. No. I have to do this. I stop running and stand still. I’m ready now. It’s better this way. I feel rooted to the ground, as if the universe is telling me I’m right.

  I blink hard to stop the tears and clear my vision, but before my eyes even focus on anything, I can sense her. She’s a blob in the distance, staggering towards me. My eyes focus in a surreal manner, observing her yellow eyes and limp. Her clothes are battered and her boots are worn. If she had survived, she would have been a hunter because she’s so strong-willed.

  My eyes lock on her, too exhausted to take notice of any other surroundings. She lurches toward me, catching wind of the blood that flows down my leg. Pity fills my heart as she nears; why hadn’t I done this earlier? My breath escapes into the night.

  My knuckles turn white as I make a fist, my trembling muscles unable to hold still. Nevertheless, I’ll free her, set her soul to rest. My feet shuffle mindlessly. I feel cliché, my actions predictable to her, no matter how hard I try to change them. Her harsh eyes judge me, analyzing my every move, or rather lack thereof. I have no guards, no shields, no holds on my mind. My secrets no longer are, but instead freely shared thoughts.

  She rapes my mind, rifling through anything and everything she may find useful. I’m a prisoner in my own consciousness, as she is to her decaying body. I’m to stand idly by, suffering helplessly as she defiles me in a way like no other. This is her silent revenge for all those years before she was a zombie.

  Before I can fully process how, she’s beside me. A deathly searing pain overpowers my intellect, and suddenly I can see into my own brain. It’s like connect the dots, and half of them are pulsating with feelings and emotions, the other half are bursting apart, breaking the connection between me and the physical world I once knew, along with everybody in it. I’m relieved I didn’t kill her. It could have come to that had we stuck around to see how intense the world got. I couldn’t have done it anyways: I only fooled myself. This is how it’s supposed to end. Memories echo in my mind for the last time. This is it. This was the universe’s plan the entire time.

  My knees weaken, and I fall to the cold and hard ground. My eyes are still intertwined with hers–I see inside myself, conscious of my soul. I’m like her now, staring out into the world; a lost soul in the dust-filled world that swirls, continuing on without me as if I never existed. There is nothing and everything all at once. How I continue with Stormy is my choice. Perspective is everything.

  INFLICTION

  By John M. McIlveen

  How do you judge a scar?

  They are all different. Scars are not prejudiced. A ten-pound infant or a ten-ton boulder can scar, or be scarred. In my forty-nine years, I have scarred and been scarred. The knowledge is now more a part of me than my own callous heart.

  My oldest one had nearly healed. I had cast off my demon; exorcised from a thirty-year addiction to the bottle. Any bottle, as long as it held the spirit of numbness within.

  I walked proudly, with my chin high and my nose in the air, swaggering with the arrogance of a winner, but I wanted to be victor in more than the conquest of alcohol, that was merely a battle in the war for my soul.

  It has been more than seven months since I last surrendered to the drink … not so well with the guilt.

  I have destroyed my family.

  It has been four years since Suzi, my only child, ran away. Two years since my wife Tippi stepped off the Hampton Beach jetty, freely surrendering herself to the icy midnight waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Tippi …

  She was a study of smoothness, a classic Japanese beauty. As exquisite as a Monet brushstroke, the way she moved, the way she spoke, the way she loved … and the way she died. In one liquid moment, pouring from my life like mercury into the Atlantic.

  They found her drowned body the following morning, lying on the beach like a gift from the early morning tide. I was at home, unaware; drowning in my own intoxicated death. Too drunk to realize—or care—about her absence from our bed. Unknowing that my only bond to normality was laying not even a mile from where I lay. All her pain and regrets—all her scars—were given up, transposed by water with her last living breath.

  I attended Tippi’s funeral the same way I attended my life, from behind an inebriated gauze curtain. I remember little of the ceremony, but the people with accusation in their eyes will remain with me. Through common respect, while compassionately patting me on the back and emitting a stream of kind words, they tried to hide the blame, but it was like covering an alligator with a bath towel. Regardless of how well they covered it, parts would always show, fully emerging to lash out if I came too near.

  Your fault, the alligator would say. You failed her.

  Tippi, of course, would have seen it as her failure, not mine. That was her way. That was her gift and her curse. I see now that when we met I became her personal venture, her mission of mercy. I know she loved me … her passion was pathos.

  Suzi’s running away was the end for Tippi. She saw it as her final failure; the big push that ultimately and literally drove her over the edge. We knew where Suzi was, though the truth was almost laughable. The idea of a fifteen-year-old girl joining a traveling circus seemed ludicrous, like a plot straight from a child’s book or movie. Tippi searched for two years, while I submerged myself deeper into drunkenness. Then Tippi escaped.

  I found myself in an empty house. Tippi and Suzi were gone and I was suddenly alone to fend for myself. I was an abandoned infant; everything was new and estranged. I hadn’t cooked a meal in over twenty years.

  The only child of parents who passed away over a decade earlier, I was left with only two companions: alcohol and guilt.
Both ate away at my insides, a violent river eroding the walls of my health and sanity.

  Bob Lynch was a large but gracious man whose generous heart was his own tormentor. He owned the garage where I had worked since my teens, though a lesser man would have fired me years earlier. He found me, nearly a year and a half after Tippi’s funeral, lying on my bedroom floor, holding a bottle like a lost lover. He saw a broken man swimming in a sea of empty bottles and his own waste, drowning, yet clinging to the shards of a shattered life. I had not shown up for work in three days.

  Bob signed me into Hawthorne House, a local rehabilitation center, and told them he would pay the bill as long as they did not release me until I was cured. Bob was another love neglected by my weakness. He bestowed the unconditional love of a brother, owing nothing, asking nothing, and getting nothing in return, except a barely adequate mechanic with a life full of troubles.

  I signed myself out the next morning with every intention of returning to my comfortable oblivion, nestled between the familiar sheets of guilt and drunkenness. I wanted to drink myself back to the muted memories of a woman who gave me everything. I wanted to return to my gullible drunken form where I could convince myself of happiness and of times that had never existed.

  All of that changed with three words. What Tippi could not do with twenty-five years of love and begging, one young woman achieved with three words. Sobriety is a wonderful hearing aid.

  I was drawn by the sobs of a teenager who sat in the rehab lobby. She was aged by her addiction, but I figured her between fifteen and eighteen. Her blonde hair was stringy and dirty, and her eyes, sunken and ringed with the mascara of a drug addict. She stared at the floor, tolerating the overplayed sympathy from an attendant.

  “I don’t matter,” she said through her tears. Her desperation was a throat-clutching smoke that filled the room, seeping through the cracks of soberness in a broken man’s armor. The aid tried to convince her otherwise, looking uncomfortable while her eyes scanned the lobby for help. She wore her inexperience like a flamboyant hat.