Splatterpunk Fighting Back

by Bracken MacLeod

  Tap, tap, tap.

  He went to the window, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps now, a fever sweat breaking out on his forearm. His trembling fingers found the pull string of the shade, jerking it down until it responded and rolled all the way up. Moonlight flooded in. He could see the rooftops of the city, branching trees, a lone streetlight on the corner with an unoccupied bench next to it. And, yes, he could clearly see the severed arm waiting patiently on the window ledge.

  The fingers were raised to tap once again but had now frozen like a spider caught creeping across a tabletop. Will was frozen, too. He thought of all the usual things: he would call the police, he would cry out for Mrs. Pettiger below or one of the other roomers. But even as these thoughts moved through his head, he knew it would be pointless. The arm would be gone when anyone got here. That’s how things like this always worked.

  It will not be denied, a voice told him. It has been looking for you for a long time and now that it’s found you, it’ll never leave.

  The hand hovered there, fingers inches from the window, as if it saw him and was waiting for him to acknowledge its presence. When he didn’t move, the fingertips tapped on the glass. Hey, Will, remember me? He let out a little cry, moving backward too fast, tripping over his own legs and landing on the bed. He squirmed over its surface and fell off the other side.

  The hand was still there, upraised with spidery fingers. The moonlight had dyed it a sickly yellow that only made it look that much more gruesome.

  The index finger tapped twice more, but it was a weak gesture as if it knew he wanted nothing to do with it.

  He peered over the bed.

  The fingers were shaking out there now out of rage. They balled themselves into a fist and as they did so, the threadbare skin at the knuckles tore open with a shearing sound that he could actually hear. Now it was just waiting there. A ghostly yellow fist set with open putrid sores. It was pissed off. It was part of him and it had come home. It had finally found him and it wanted to crawl into bed next to him and feel his body heat.

  He stood up.

  He didn’t know what came over him, but suddenly he felt empowered as he had the afternoon he had sent it away, back into the toilet. He walked over there and stared down at it on the ledge. It looked worse than ever. Still swollen and split with large gaping cracks and burst sores, but now it looked as if something—or many things—had been eating it. Great sections of flesh had been chewed right down to muscle and ligament. What skin remained looked like it was ready to slough off. He could see the staffs of the ulna and radius, the socket of the humerus which was like a dirty brown knob.

  “What do you want here?” he asked it.

  It raised a few fingers. They quivered in the air. The palm was sheared open. Larva squirmed in its dark, fusty recesses.

  It wasn’t bad enough that he had lost his arm and his job and had no friends he could rely on. He had to be haunted by this fucking limb. And he couldn’t tell anyone about it or they’d put him in goddamn psych ward.

  Kim, you bitch…you started this. You got the ball rolling.

  “I don’t believe you’re real,” he told the arm. Then took it farther: “In fact, I doubt your authenticity.”

  The hand slapped against the window, leaving a smear of yellow pus and drainage. It did not like being doubted. It had come a long way to see him and it didn’t care to be treated like this.

  Kim, Kim.

  It was not just slapping the window now, it was punching it.

  “Stop that,” Will ordered and it did. “Go anywhere! Do anything! Just leave me alone!”

  The arm hesitated. Then it scuttled away out of sight and he stood there for some time, certain his mind was gone but more certain that he had set something perfectly awful in motion.

  He went back to bed and lay down. He needed to rest. He needed to clear his mind. Which was quite easy, as it turned out. And once it was clear, he linked up with the arm as he had done weeks before.

  It crept down moonlit sidewalks and climbed over creaky fences, slid through puddles and dragged itself under bushes. The truly amazing thing was that Will was experiencing it all. His arm was gone, dead, detached and distant…yet, yet, he was connected to it by some impossible psychic neural pathway. He felt the chill, dewy grass and the tickle of weeds in sidewalk cracks. He winced as one of the old wounds, festering and crawling with insects, got snagged on the nail head of an old board fence and split lengthwise. The arm barely paused. A dog picked up its scent and began to chase it. It slipped through a broken cellar window and waited on a bench amongst cans of paint and varnish, jars of nails and screws.

  After a time, it snuck back out and continued on its course.

  By that point, he had a pretty good idea where it was going—to Kim. It was going after Kim.

  No, no, no! Come back! Don’t go there! Please just leave her alone!

  That’s what he thought at it, but it did no good. And he had to wonder, really wonder, if his subconscious mind wasn’t telling it something else, directing it to seek vengeance on the one who had inadvertently caused all this.

  Will didn’t really think he could have called it back even if he wanted to. He picked up his cell twice, thinking about calling the police…but what the hell could he tell them that wouldn’t sound like the ravings of a loony? He called Kim, but she wasn’t answering. He texted her, but she did not reply.

  The arm was moving faster and faster on the hunt by then. Sometimes it lost her trail and circled around, but it always found it again and he began to see it, actually see it, dashing down lanes and cutting through yards on galloping fingertips. It crawled up a tree and then he knew it was outside her building. It crept along a limb and then leaped, grabbing the ivy that clung to the façade and up it went to her room on the second floor. It pulled itself onto the ledge. There was a screen in the window and the hand deftly removed it.

  The arm climbed up the bed and paused. There was a man on top of Kim sliding back and forth, it seemed. And Kim—that whore, that fucking cunt—was enjoying it, moaning and begging for more. Will didn’t tell the arm what to do; it knew.

  It tensed.

  It sprung.

  There was a flurry of activity. A man shouting. A woman screaming. Things crashing and smashing. It was accomplished all within about five minutes of frenetic activity as Kim’s neighbors pounded on the door and called her name and someone made a desperate call to 911 on their cell.

  The arm climbed back up onto the window ledge and surveyed the carnage. In the gossamer moonlight flooding in through the window, Will viewed the scene of slaughter. The blood looked black in the dimness, of course, as if a water balloon of India ink had exploded, splashing over the walls, dripping from the ceiling, and coagulating on the bed. Kim’s lover lay sightless on the floor. His eyes were open, his head twisted completely around, vertebrae snapped. Kim had no eyes. They had been popped from their sockets. Her mouth was sprung wide in a lurid grin and that was because her jaw had been broken in order to yank her tongue out by the roots—

  Will cried out into his pillow because he had made it happen. He had let negative emotions well up inside him like a spurned teenage boy and then he had channeled them into some fucked up puerile revenge fantasy.

  Only it was no fantasy—your zombie arm made it happen because that’s what you wanted. Deep inside, that’s what you wanted. You doubted it was real? Well, now it has proven itself. And don’t think for one moment that it will not want something in return.

  Shivering and shaking, hot bullets of sweat running down his face, he was thankful only for the fact that he was now disconnected from the arm. Where it went and what it did he did not know, and he did not want to know.

  There was nothing to do now but wait.

  It was coming for him and he knew that, and after what he had done he did not honestly believe for a moment that he did not deserve his fate. It had wanted to be part of him from the first. Now it would be.

  It
was several hours later when it tapped at the window. Will was not frightened, not really. It was part of him and it only wanted to come back home. As revolting as the idea was, he knew he must let it. If he didn’t, it might pluck another enemy from his subconscious—someone, perhaps, that Will did not even recognize as such—and wreak havoc. He couldn’t allow that. He couldn’t allow any of this to go any further.

  It had to be stopped.

  He opened the window and lay down on the bed. The arm, now sticky with drying blood, punctured and perforated, filling the room with the stench of rotting meat, waited, threadbare fingers wiggling in the air. The skin hung from them in tatters and loops.

  “Come over here,” he told it. “I won’t keep you away. Come over here where you belong.”

  The arm fell off the ledge, slapped the floor, and crawled towards the bed. Closer like that, its stench was hot and gaseous. It crept up the sheets and waited. In the pale moonlight, it was green and black, writhing with maggots. Slowly, slowly it slid into position until the cold ball of the humerus was poised inches from his shoulder socket.

  Trembling, nauseous with the stink of it, he brushed sweat from his brow and tears from his cheeks, then said, “Do it.”

  It did.

  With unbelievable force, the ball entered the socket, sheering through scar tissue, fusing itself with him, welding the dead and the living into a single unit. Will nearly went out cold from the pain of it. It was his again. It was his arm again. He lifted it up into the moonlight. It was bloated and oozing droplets of corpse drainage, the flesh blackened and green with mildew, pockets of fat maggots just beneath the skin busily feeding on it.

  He felt the cold pass from the limb into him. Cell by cell, it took him, making him part of itself, contaminating him with a communal rot as they decayed together into a solid, seeping mass of carrion.

  The police came the next day and forced Mrs. Pettinger to open the door of Will’s room. He had left bloody fingerprints all over Kim’s room and they knew very well who murdered her. Outside the door, they could smell the fetid stink of what was waiting for them. That they were too late was more than obvious.

  Though they told Mrs. Pettinger to wait outside, she peered between their bulky forms at what lay on the bed. She nearly had a breakdown. The cops weren’t in much better shape. In that job, you see things you can never really explain, and this was one of them.

  On the bed, there was a liquefied mass of fly-specked putrescence, bubbling and steaming. The flesh had run like wax, oozing off the contorted fungous skeleton beneath in runnels and ribbons and snotty tangles. Yellow threads of mould webbed the bones together. The skull, its jaw sprung in a silent scream, was netted in a stringy network. A single eyeball stared in horror at the ceiling.

  Feast of Consequences – WD Gagliani & Dave Benton

  (Anna’s Story)

  An Excerpt from the novel Killer Lake

  It was the unmistakable rumble of a Harley engine that caught Anna’s attention––but she couldn’t tell if it was coming or going, or where exactly it might be as it echoed through the woods. She pushed herself upright from the tree she’d been leaning against and lifted her head hopefully, the tears finally having dried on her cheeks from what felt like days of crying (except it couldn’t have been) as she’d stumbled in circles, lost in the dark that had come up so quickly now that it was late summer.

  She should have just stayed with Jason. She could have cursed him out, refused to give him what he wanted there in the woods, his shorts lowered for her supposed delight, but stayed with him instead of storming off into the unknown. She wasn’t familiar with the area, and she’d barely seen the famous Killdeer Lake. It certainly wasn’t the first time her temper had gotten the better of her common sense, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. So she’d stormed away from the horny Jason in a blind rage. But Jason was her reason for going, damn it. And her cell phone was still in the tent. Ever since then she’d been wandering in the woods, getting attacked by trees, shrubs, bugs, spiderwebs, and who-knew-what (she didn’t want to know). Didn’t help that she was dressed for that damned rich-folks’ kids’ pool party, wearing tight cut-off jean shorts and a strapless hot-red string bikini top with which she’d hoped to harness Jason’s attention. No wonder the bugs had been having a feast, with all that skin exposed. Stupid.

  She’d probably never go near the woods again.

  Ever.

  The growling motorcycle was getting louder and she started to carefully pick her way through the tangled growth, moving in the general direction of the sound. Between the shadow black spaces that had to be tree trunks Anna saw brief flashes of light––like a lightning bug’s mating dance––but this was no bug, it was a motorcycle’s cyclopean headlamp. She hastened her pace.

  Stumbling forward in her sandals, she caught a glimpse of the bike flying by on the local asphalt road just as she reached the edge of the woods, dragging behind it the sound of AC/DC blaring from the cycle’s sound system.

  Damnit!

  All this time she’d been only a few yards from the fucking road.

  “Hey!” she yelled. “Wait!” She waved her hands above her head while running out onto the road, hoping the biker would somehow notice her. There were two people on the bike, but neither of them saw her in the mirrors. Or they didn’t care.

  Was the passenger naked?

  Maybe...

  But they were past in barely a second. The single tail-light grew smaller and smaller until the bike followed a gentle curve and the red ember blinked out.

  But at least now she was standing on a ribbon of fairly smooth blacktop, confident that she would either be able to find her way back to Jason’s house or help would come along soon. She sucked in a deep breath and exhaled with relief.

  She hated the woods.

  She really did.

  Now, which way back to Jason’s house?

  Anna looked the pavement up and down as if hoping it would rise up like a cartoon snake and tell her which way to go.

  Crap, snake. Didn’t want to think about snakes. Were there snakes in these woods?

  After an indecisive moment, she struck off randomly, hoping there really was such a thing as women's intuition and that it was now guiding her.

  She was so relieved to be out from under the trees’ spreading leaves and under a wedge of dark open sky that she forgot how angry she’d been at Jason and his entitled rich-boy act. The fear of being lost in the pitch black, spooky woods melted away as she strode along the edge of the narrow two-lane. Soon she’d be drinking with her friends and her wilderness adventure would be a funny story to tell at future parties.

  After a half hour’s walking along the tree line she’d almost lost hope of reaching Jason’s place, or maybe ever again seeing another human being, when a set of headlights materialized ahead of her, coming her way. She waved her hands above her head, bouncing up and down, making herself as visible as possible.

  Hard to miss a half-naked girl.

  The pickup truck slowed and pulled onto the crumbling asphalt shoulder, stopping across from Anna. She strutted in front of the truck’s low beams to the passenger side door.

  “Hey, thanks a lot for stopping,” Anna said after tugging the door open, aware of the driver’s gaze.

  He grunted as he turned her way. He was obviously a country boy, overweight, wearing a pair of coveralls stretched over a ratty white tee and a cap covering his scruffy hair. Though she normally liked the rugged look, in this case she thought the black stubble that covered the lower half of his face gave him an almost unclean look. He was what her friends––and her––would call a redneck.

  He was staring at her.

  But who wouldn’t be? Given the circumstances…

  “Need a ride, do ya?”

  With a nervous chuckle and fervent nod she climbed up into the truck and avoided slamming the door, rather closing it gently. The truck was old, but maybe it was a classic. Why ask for more trouble? It wasn’t as i
f she had a more appealing offer. She didn’t want to wander the dreaded countryside all night.

  “Where ya headed?” the redneck asked, his voice gruff but not unkind.

  “It’s the Caruthers’ place? Umm… Jason Caruthers? On Killdeer Lake?”

  “Not familiar with it, miss.”

  “It’s a giant house right on the lake.”

  “Lots of giant houses around the lake, miss.”

  Anna slumped in the seat. What now?

  “I tell you what…” the redneck enunciated slowly, “I can take you to this bait shop we got just up ahead some, you can call this Caruthers fella, and if he can give you directions, I’ll take you there. Or he can come pick you up. Don’t make no difference to me.”

  “That would be great. Thanks.”

  He put the truck into gear by wrestling a huge shift lever on the column and glided out to middle of the road. “My name’s Jeb, by the way. It’s actually Jebediah, but everybody just calls me Jeb.” He extended his right hand sideways, and Anna noticed that his hand was small and gnarled like wood. His whole arm was withered. Worse, it was dotted by thick layers of scraggly hair growing in tufts from a dozen ugly pustules. It must have been some kind of congenital abnormality. A birth defect of some kind.

  “I’m…my name is Anna.” She shook his hand awkwardly, reluctantly.

  She hoped she hadn’t been staring at his arm. It kind of freaked her out, but she didn’t want to make Jeb feel self-conscious. Fortunately he either didn’t notice, or she’d played it off well. Then again, he didn’t seem like the self-conscious type. He put that small, knobby hand back on the wheel.

  “So, Anna, you mind if I turn the radio back on?”

  “No, not at all.”

  Jeb turned up the volume on the truck’s old fashioned broadcast radio and a scratchy blend of fiddle, banjo, and pedal-steel guitar emanated from the speakers. She wasn’t a big fan of country music, but it wasn’t entirely foreign to her either. She’d had a couple of boyfriends who’d listened to this stuff. In fact one of them had taken her to see…hmmm…Florida something or other. It wasn’t too bad, just didn’t have enough of a dance beat.