by A. L. Mengel
“Come with me…live forever…be immortal…don’t feel the cold…”
Ned stopped. He ducked behind a tree. The voices stopped, and he felt like he was being watched. But he remained still and silent. He didn’t know what was happening with Stephen, but he felt he didn’t want to be a part of it.
And then the voices continued.
“Yes,” Stephen said.
Ned didn’t know what Stephen was saying yes to. He didn’t know what was about to happen. All he knew was that he saw his brother, standing in the clearing in the middle of the trees, and another man was there with him. The mysterious man that Stephen was with had long hair like his brothers, and moved closer to his brother, and embraced him.
And then the brightness blinded him. Shielding his eyes with his arm, Ned was blown backwards by some unseen force.
And then there was blackness.
*~*~*
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hernan paused, and sat down hard in a metal folding chair. “Where am I?”
He scanned the room.
The woman sat hunched over at a desk opposite him. Her red hair hung low down towards her shoulders as she looked over at him. “You don’t remember? Take this.” She tossed a coat at him.
Hernan paused, wrapped the trench coat around his body, staring at her but apparently deep in thought. “I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“I figured as much.” She got up from behind the desk and took a seat right in front of him. “Antoine killed you. Do you remember Antoine?”
Hernan sat back and closed his eyes. “Yes. Yes, I remember Antoine. He was all over the TV.”
Welcome to my world, Hernan.
She smiled. “So you do remember.”
Hernan concentrated on each breath he took. And then he remembered some things about that night, when the storm was raging outside, when Antoine was climbing the stairs. Yes, he remembered hearing the footsteps climbing the stairs.
He hadn’t forgotten how much he had to drink that night. And passing out in his bedroom. And he hadn’t forgotten staring into Roberto’s bedroom as a giant winged demon flew up from the bed and towards the door.
But what he remembered most from the evening was Antoine’s face.
The smile, the blood, the mussed, long, black hair, the smile and the welcome. “Welcome to my world, Hernan.”
And then the rest was blackness.
“And then I woke up here. But my memory, it’s a little choppy. I remember his face though.”
She rose from her chair. “Your memory will return in time. You are part of a movement, Hernan. You are very important to me. You are part of the dead that I am calling back. You see, Antoine has what is mine. We need to get it back.”
Hernan opened his eyes and looked up at her. “What is that?” She smiled and hooked her red hair behind her ears. “The cup of Christ.”
“The Holy Grail? The cup?”
She nodded.
Hernan chuckled. “Right…I have to get back to my house. Work…and I need to find Roberto.”
She slammed her hands down on the desk. “You are dead, Hernan. There is nothing to go back to. I will put you right back in that cooler if I have to. Your life as you knew it, Hernan, is over. Antoine killed you. I am giving you a gift. You best choose to accept it. For you don’t want the alternative.”
“What is that?”
She sat back behind the desk. “Let’s just say you weren’t a prime contender for the Pearly Gates.”
Hernan looked up at Claret. “What is the gift?”
Claret smiled, and sat back down in a chair across from him. “I was wondering if you would ask that. You are part of a movement. Those like you, who wake after death, are immortal. You are immortal, Hernan. And I chose you. Antoine gave you the gift, but I have claimed you.”
“What gift?”
“Immortality, Hernan. You will never age, at least not any more than you had when you were alive. And you will never die again.”
He shivered and pulled the body bag around him, covering himself like it was a blanket.
Hernan sighed. “What do I have to do, Claret?”
*~*~*
All of a sudden, the streets of Miami were littered with bloodied, rotting corpses. The cadavers littered the sidewalks, streets and parks – they lay splayed out on roofs of homes and businesses, and stank in the hot, afternoon blazing sun.
Cars screeched their brakes, swerving from the invading dead bodies that appeared so suddenly in the road. The wide thoroughfare of Ponce De Leon did not escape this travesty. The long, sleek black limousine that Douglas Kahn had been riding in, sipping on some Woodford Reserve bourbon on the rocks and admiring the palms and Coral Gables architecture stopped suddenly to a halt in the middle of the road.
Doug cursed as he spilled his drink on his lap. Looking forward to the front of the car, he lowered the smoked glass divider.
“Jim?” he called forward expectantly. He craned his neck to the front, and saw the silhouette of the driver but he was temporarily blinded from the bright light emanating through the windshield and the effects of the alcohol.
“Jim, are you there?” he asked again.
Jim did not move. He remained still as a statue.
Doug set his drink down and reached for the door handle. Stepping outside, he looked around and saw that all of the cars were stopped. Nothing was moving. The stillness and silence was eerie, and it stark contrast to the brightness and heat of the sun.
He walked around to the front of the car, peering inside the windshield. He covered his eyes with his hand to shield his face from the sun, but he only saw his reflection in the glass.
And he did see something else.
Jim was definitely there.
Doug could squint his eyes and still see the wisps of hair sticking out from beneath the vinyl cap that read “A-1 Limo” embroidered on the front; the curly hair with wisps of grey had framed the man’s dark and sunken face.
Jim was sitting still as ever in his seat. The car had stopped, and now here Jim was, in the seat, not moving a muscle.
He scanned the area again. Not a soul. But stopped cars everywhere. And then, squinting, he took a closer look.
“What the…”
Dead bodies.
Yes, they were dead bodies. Littered everywhere.
He did not bother to look any closer. He noticed a lake of crimson red blood oozing out from beneath the limousine, and he ran the front door and started banging on the window.
“Jim! Jim! Open up! Something has happened!”
But no response.
So he chose to open the door, but the handle did not budge. Locked. He ran around to the back of the limo, hopped inside, and spotted his waiting glass of Woodford. The glass was sweating from the Florida humidity.
Without a second thought, he downed the bourbon, feeling it burn his throat and warm his insides. Whatever happened to Jim, he saw the driver was still sitting motionless in the front seat, totally unresponsive – staring straight ahead at the hot afternoon sun.
“Jim!” he called again to the front seat. But calling out the drivers name has proven to be useless. He threw the glass down and lunged forward to the front seat, climbing over the dividing wall to the passenger’s side. And when he turned his head, and when he saw Jim clearly, he screamed like a child, reaching his hands behind him in terror, fumbling for the door handle. He managed to get the door open and spill out onto the sidewalk on Ponce De Leon and ran, as fast as his legs could take him, away from that Limo.
*~*~*
But he had to stop.
There he found himself, in a pile of bodies. There was nowhere he could go. He fought to rise from the corpses. From the stink and the stench, from the blood and the rotting and decay. From the bodies full of blood.
He caught himself, his stomach heaving, and rolled himself off the pile of bodies and lay on the hot pavement, panting, trying to catch his breath.
He closed his eyes for a moment and
thought of the dream he had the other night.
When the city dies, I will find you.
He cocked his head up, and looked at the limo, now in the distance, the headlights staring at him like eyes. He was on the ground, lying on the sidewalk, sweating in the afternoon sun, wishing that he hadn’t downed the rest of the bourbon.
But he had.
And then he looked downwards, towards the fading sun; piles of the dead lined the sidewalks in giant mountains of flesh and blood. Trash littered the street, along with crashed cars and fallen trees. The city just looked done with.
Was this a continuation of the dream? Some secondary horrible dream? Could he really be sitting back in the plush black leather seat, basking in the cool air conditioning, dreaming and dozing and waiting for the car to pull up to his hotel?
But his hands were covered in blood.
He turned his head to the left and stared right into an eye dangling from its socket and then he screamed. He screamed like had hadn’t since he was a small boy, and he scrambled back, falling over himself and away from the pile of bodies.
“What the fuck has happened?” he asked out loud.
He took a deep breath, standing and smoothing his shirt.
“Dr. Kahn?”
Doug snapped his head in the direction of the voice.
The Hooded Man.
“Dr. Kahn, please come with me.”
Doug exhaled and started to speak, and looked at the man. Like the dream, he had no face. Just a hood…and…darkness. He mustered up the courage to speak. “Who…”
“Don’t speak,” the man said, drawing his finger against his lips. “You must not speak. Or they will hear you and come for you.”
“What the…”
“Don’t speak. Just come with me.”
As Doug followed the strange man down Ponce, he wondered how this man knew his name. But at this point, he didn’t think anything else could be stranger than all of the dead bodies they were stepping over.
The man turned around as they approached Andelusia.
“All will be explained to you when we get below,” he said. “But now – we have to get below fast. It will be dark soon. And they come out when it’s dark.”
“Who comes out?”
“Don’t speak!” he hissed. “They are listening! They are all around us!” He shifted his head and darted his eyes around the deserted street – breathless and wide eyed. “Look down there! There is one of them!”
Doug squinted against the setting sun and saw some movement in the crimson hues.
Dark, shadowy.
He could not tell what it was. It seemed blurred. It just looked like a dark blotch against the horizon. He looked over at the man, who now was heading towards the building. He gestured with his arm, urging Doug to proceed.
“We must get below! We must get below or you will die like all of these people lying in the street around us!”
Doug didn’t want to find out what was down the street. Even though this man was acting like he was on some sort of medication, he looked well groomed and was certainly well dressed. He didn’t seem like he was some deranged street person. The man’s look of fear did little to mask his mysterious, dark beauty.
Doug figured that he would wake up in the limo. That he would pull up in front of his hotel, and that all would be normal and that he would probably be drenched in sweat. How many bourbons did he have coming from the airport again? He couldn’t remember.
All he could remember was his reasons for coming here. Sheldon was dead.
“Now!” the man screamed.
Doug backed away from the man, but started to follow. He uneasily glanced over at the large, dark object that was now much closer to them, creating a shadow in the setting sun.
The man led Doug through a trashed office – windows were smashed, blinds hung off the window twisted and skewed; chairs were overturned in the middle of the floor and they had to climb over piles of papers, boxes and broken picture frames.
Doug noticed that the daylight was fading fast and it was getting darker by the second. He looked at his watch and saw that it was not yet five.
“We have to hurry – they are stealing the light!”
Doug looked behind his shoulder one last time as the man led him into a small room with a door in the floor. He stared in disbelief out through the broken windows, watching a deep dark green mist roll into the street like thick, blinding fog, and felt a tug on his arm as the mist entered the office towards the two men, fingering its way into the building like an unwelcomed whore.
“Come down with me! We have to go!”
Doug stood for a moment, looking outwards through the door. Doug did not want to enter that mist. Whatever it was, he felt uneasy about how quickly it was stealing the light. Turning towards the man, he saw he was already heading down a skinny and very steep set of stairs, leading down below the offices.
“Close the door behind you!” the man called up, already a good way down the stairs.
Doug reached up and slammed the door shut, emitting a deep thud and a slight shaking of the ground.
“Lock it! Lock it now!”
Doug looked down the stairs, lit only by a small, yellowish light, and then looked back at the door and searched for the lock, and snapped it shut.
“Are you there?” Doug called down the dark and dingy stairs.
There was no answer.
Douglas Kahn did not know how he got in this situation. He didn’t know what had happened to the city of Miami. But he did know one thing. Something was out there. Up above. On the other side of the door. He could hear the grunted breathing.
And just as quickly as he had come, The Hooded Man was now gone.
*~*~*
The mist came once again to Miami.
It came as it did each evening, just as the sun was settling into the sky in a sea of crimson hues, ushering in the darkness of the early evening hours. Like a giant fog of greenish clouds, it would come out from the dark horizon of the murky blue Atlantic waters, coming closer, and closer; the mist would grow and rise and billow out in its cloudiness as it approached the shores of Miami Beach.
As it swallowed the brown sandy beaches and shoreline, it engulfed buildings and skyscrapers, houses, shops, restaurants and cars.
But it did not matter, because everyone was dead.
The mist rose through the downtown skyscrapers and further west, to the Spanish monasteries of Coral Gables and beyond, covering the empty cars, deserted storefronts and all of the corpses.
The corpses.
They littered the streets everywhere, some dead with fresh gaping wounds and fresh dripping blood, others long gone and decaying with rotted hanging flesh.
Everything was swallowed by the green mist.
Including the gutted offices of The Astral, long since ransacked of any valuable books and files on the paranormal. The stark, white walls were still intact, as were the golden framed paintings that still hung on the wall; and, perhaps, if one were to only look at the walls and admire the paintings, they might overlook the broken glass, the strewn paperwork, magazines and files on the floor, and the lake of dried blood in the back office where the furniture was long ago overturned and shredded.
Farther back into the offices, a door slammed and, seconds later, a lock clicked, which caused Doug, who had been sitting on a set of earthen stairs below in total darkness, to snap out of a dreamlike state, and look upwards.
He snapped his head towards the direction of the clicking lock.
He knew he had earlier descended some stairs, but grew wary of proceeding. But now, he saw the warm, yellowish glow of light filter down from the top of the stairs.
Remember, Doug, the only way out is farther in…
*~*~*
CHAPTER EIGHT
There was an influx of bodies in the Miami City Morgue, and Heavenly Slumber Funeral Home in Coral Gables was the busiest they had seen in years.
Some of the older members of the Jenson
family (they acquired Heavenly Slumber two decades after the Harrelson family founded it) agreed that it was the busiest that they had seen in decades.
There weren’t enough vans to pick up the bodies.
But people were dying all over the city, more so than normal and more than ever before, and Heavenly Slumber, among the other Funeral Parlors across South Florida, were struggling to keep with up with the unusual spike in demand for their services.
Tearful family members lined up outside the front doors, all wishing to plan a farewell service for a recently deceased family member.
But what was very perplexing, not only to the Morticians of the city, but of the city officials, was how quickly each person died.
They literally just dropped dead on the pavement, without another movement. There were no arms clutching chests, there were no heart attacks, or strokes, or gunshots fired.
The dead simply died.
And then, the chaos that ensued after the event, would have been obvious and apparent to whomever might have been still alive.
But the city became a desolate wasteland of corpses once the event concluded.
*~*~*
But it had been Douglas who had first noticed the calamity.
And when he finally made it down the stairs to the catacombs underneath The Astral, he finally met someone who offered some answers. He saw a man sitting at a desk in the corner of a large, stone room, hovering over a desk in candle light. The man appeared to be reading Doug’s thoughts.
“This happens on a daily basis,” the man said, as he stroked a long, grey beard. He thumbed through a large, open book, running through text, back and forth, with a pen. He did not look up.
Douglas questioned him again. “I am not sure where I am…”
He scanned the room. A large, open room with stone walls. Large, rectangular wooden tables placed next to each other with a precise exactness. It looked like it could be a dining hall. “…I was following someone…”