by Jeff Strand
She stopped abruptly when she heard the moan.
Jimmy.
He was still lying on the white tile floor, but he was squirming slowly, like larvae coming to life. His milky eyes rolled in their sockets until they became fixated on her. He emitted a low-pitched sort of hiss and she gasped.
This was not like any other zombie she had encountered. Sure, she had run-ins with plenty of other people she knew, but this was different.
Is it because I love him?
She couldn’t figure out the answer to this question. The relationship with Jimmy had always been tumultuous in some way—even if things seemed calm on the surface, something was brewing on the horizon. Whether it was stress from his job that built up and contributed to his exploding rages or her own promiscuity, there was always something.
Maybe I hate him.
There it was. Lisa supposed it was a little bit of both. A love/hate relationship.
She had been standing in an aisle that boasted a few basic tools: hammers, screwdrivers, and pliers. She pulled the pliers off the hanger and approached Jimmy slowly, cautiously.
At first, pulling out his teeth and fingernails grossed her out. But soon, she took great delight in it. If Jimmy felt any pain whatsoever, he didn’t express it: his untamed eyes were fixated on her and his jaws snapped mechanically, longing for their first bite of unyielding flesh, but he didn’t flinch or scream.
She had to chuckle. “You can’t hurt me now,” she said through her teeth as she yanked the last tooth. “And you’ll make a nice pet.” She was pleased to see that although he wasn’t quite the same Jimmy, his cock could still get nice and hard. Lisa put a dog collar and leash on him and led him out of the drugstore and into the morning sunlight. The sun was just creeping up over the horizon. Night was fading into a new day. She smiled to herself a little as she yanked Jimmy’s leash and led him to the outskirts of town, on to a new police station, a new library, a new life where she could have things her way. Yes, there would be blood. There would be plenty of death. But the strange, foreboding loneliness?
No more. She looked back at Jimmy lovingly.
The world around them was still.
And she had total control again. Just the way she liked it.
CLARISSA
BY ROBERT ESSIG & JACK BANTRY
_____
Clarissa cried. She cried a lot these days. Her life had been a wealth of tears and now she couldn’t feel more helpless and desperate.
She rubbed her belly, bulging beneath a pair of swollen breasts that had become so tender that she wanted to scream into a pillow, but the pain in her breasts was nothing compared to the thoughts that constantly tormented her mind.
Clarissa had lost the urge to escape until recently. She was so tired, but she couldn’t stay here and have her child subjected to the same abuse, the repeated rape. A sex toy trapped in a cellar. There was no way she could allow that monster to touch her child. Just the thought sent shudders through her slight frame. She didn’t know the last time she had seen daylight. Had no idea how long she had been down there. She had nearly come full term and the length of the pregnancy was just a fraction of her imprisonment.
Clarissa couldn’t remember her life before she was trapped in the cellar but she instinctively knew that she had never been a happy girl. The very idea of happiness must have come from some saccharine television sitcom she’d seen in a past that was further depressed in her mind with every dreary morning she woke up in captivity. Now, her mind was filled with dark corners and spider webs, dank, moldering odors mingling with her own sweat and bodily waste when her “bedpan” hadn’t been properly disposed of.
Someone unlocked the basement door.
Clarissa wiped away the tears on her face, smearing through grime like cheap mascara.
The door opened. A man, cast in shadow, stood in the doorway. He was tall and heavy-set. She knew him as the Monster, any details hidden in the darkness.
She looked at him with large, sad eyes. They would have been beautiful had her life not been so tragic.
She rubbed her belly in a circular motion, a reminder that she was surviving for two. She had to get out of there so she could have this child and raise it on her own, away from the Monster.
If she couldn’t escape, she wished the child dead, rather than lead a life like this.
The cellar was large but the furniture sparse. The Monster had, at some point, removed anything that could have been used as a weapon. Left her in darkness most of the time.
She had been waiting for the man to bring her food.
Clarissa clutched a hammer behind her back. She’d taken it from the Monster’s toolbox when he’d put up a crudely handmade cot for the baby. So far, he hadn’t noticed it missing.
She could feel the knot of worry twist her insides.
The baby kicked. That tiny foot reassured her of what she was putting at risk by attempting to escape. She rubbed her belly again with her free hand, soothing her nerves as much as possible. She would have one chance. If her aim was off, the consequences would be dire.
The man walked down the cellar stairs.
Clarissa gasped. Could she go through with it? What if she failed? He would punish her. He’d punish her anyway. That’s what he normally did. He’d have rough, painful, degrading sex with her before returning upstairs, like nothing had happened, like she wasn’t locked in his cellar.
He truly was a monster.
When he approached he was looking around the cellar, probably admiring his handy work in constructing the cot. She hit him with the hammer and he collapsed like a cow in a slaughterhouse. She scurried up the stairs, towards the light shining down from the room above. Adrenaline surged through her veins. This was her chance. The Monster grabbed hold of her dress and yanked. The light above looked so far away and as she fell backwards, the light seemed to escape. It teased her, forever out of reach. Clarissa shook her head, tears running down her face, her mouth in a trembling rictus.
No!
The scream that erupted as she busted her tailbone on the concrete floor was agonized and shrill. She grabbed her belly, feeling something awful, something like she was going to be sick, only she wasn’t going to vomit from her mouth, but from her vagina.
She’d dropped the hammer on the stairs as the Monster yanked her backwards.
He hefted her slack body into a standing position.
Clarissa screamed and flailed.
“Be quiet,” he said. His voice was slurred like maybe he was dizzy from the hammer blow.
She felt utterly defeated, destined to be imprisoned in the dark cellar and abused, right up to her dying day.
What had she done to deserve such a fate?
His fist hit her in the belly, hard, the shock and pain enough to cause her to vomit. The man took a step back to avoid the bile spray, laughing at her as if she were some sideshow exhibit for his amusement.
“I said be quiet. You’ll wake your mother.”
Clarissa’s head rose, hair matted to her face with sweat and puke.
Mother?
Anger and hatred wracked her belly, then another. She looked up into the face of the man. The light from above showed her the image of her father. She clutched her abused belly, pain erupting from her womb, into her guts, threatening another bout of vomiting. That would have been a blessing, compared to what happened next.
Her body convulsed. Blood spread across the lower half of her filthy dress.
“I made that cot for nothing, now,” he said.
Clarissa acted on impulse. Taking the man off guard, she darted up the stairs towards the taunting light. She slipped and her already traumatized stomach lurched. The slip made her think of the blood running down the insides of her legs. She felt the man—was it really her father?—behind her. His fingernail scratched her calf when he tried to grab her. Instinctively, she kicked backwards and caught the man on the jaw. Looking back over her shoulder, she saw him clatter down the stairs. Relieved, Clar
issa turned her body towards him. He lay unmoving. Her father? She was confused. Had she blocked it out all these years? Could her dad repeatedly rape her like this monster had? Hesitantly, she moved back down, towards the cellar floor, still no movement from the man. He didn’t seem to be breathing. Had he broken his neck? She knelt down and looked him in the face.
It was her father.
And mother waited upstairs.
Clarissa turned away and, clutching her pained belly, walked back up the stairs. On her way, she picked up the hammer.
•
The light as she emerged into a house, she only vaguely remembered; seared into eyes that were only used to the dim glow of the solitary bulb hanging from the cellar ceiling. She blinked several times, trying to gain her focus, before proceeding and was startled by a gasp.
“Oh, it’s … you,” came an uneven voice, Clarissa hadn’t heard in years. Her mother never had much of a soothing voice, not as far as Clarissa could remember.
Clarissa hefted the hammer above her head, eyes still adjusting. Through a gummy fog, she saw a sickly-thin woman standing in the kitchen. Couldn’t make the features out. Clarissa blinked her eyes and things began to come into focus.
Has she been crying?
Emotion flooded through Clarissa. Her mother’s face was sunken and sad, as if all the life had been sucked out of her with a vacuum. Her eyes looked too wide, in a head that appeared too large for the fragile frame of her body, hiding beneath a sundress like a dried up corpse beneath a shroud. Did her mother love her, had her father kept her down below against her mother’s wishes? She yearned to be touched, embraced. She wanted her mother to make everything better.
Her mother’s eyes darted down at the blood on Clarissa’s legs. “Oh, my! You didn’t hurt the baby did you?”
Her mother completely disregarded the hammer and dashed across the linoleum floor, falling to Clarissa’s feet, placing her hands over the protruding belly as if praying to some absurd deity of the flesh.
The hammer wavered in Clarissa’s hand. The feeling of this woman’s hands on her belly drew attention to the fact that something was terribly wrong. One way or the other, the baby was coming.
“Call an ambulance,” said Clarissa, the words coming out in palsied syllables.
“No!” said her mother. “No ambulance, no police. No!”
“B-but …” Clarissa was confused.
“Get on the floor. I’ll deliver the baby. Your father promised me another baby, you know. It’s not yours. It’s mine.”
Clarissa’s face wrinkled in disgust. Was the woman mad? It was her baby.
“No,” said Clarissa. “I need an ambulance. Please, I need help.”
Her mother stood up, the sad, forlorn look wiped away and replaced with one of contempt. She grabbed Clarissa by the arms and threw her to the ground. The impact sent a shockwave of pain through her womb and she knew the baby wouldn’t survive. During the fall, the hammer leapt from her hand, hitting the linoleum floor with a dull thud.
With Clarissa’s mother crouched over her, pinning her arms, Clarissa realized how weak she had become in the years of confinement. She had little muscle tone and was powerless to defend herself, even from a stick-and-bones, waste of a woman.
“Harold!” her mother called. “Harold, get up here and hold her legs! I want my baby!” Clarissa’s mother erupted in tears. “You promised me a baby,” she said through rising sobs.
Looking to the left and the right, Clarissa saw where the hammer had landed. Her mother let go of her arms and wrapped them around her belly, placing her ear to the bulge as if hoping to hear a sign of life.
Her mother swallowed hard and became frighteningly lucid. “If you’re a boy, I’ll name you George. If you’re a girl, I’ll name you Lilly. It’ll be so nice to have a baby in the house again.”
Clarissa grabbed the hammer, wrapping her fingers around the grip. When she lifted it, a scraping sound came from the weight of the hammerhead on the floor. Her mother’s head popped up. Their eyes made contact as Clarissa swung the hammer. It made contact with her mother’s temple. It wasn’t much of a blow, but enough to startle the woman and cause her to fall to the side.
Clarissa maneuvered herself into a more compromising position. Pain radiated from her womb. It felt as if she was peeing all over herself, but she knew it was blood. She could feel herself getting weak from the loss of it.
Moaning, with a hand to her head, Clarissa’s mother wavered as she attempted to get to her knees. Clarissa didn’t allow this to happen. She’d hesitated before, the thought of killing her mother an abstraction that allowed for a disastrous hesitation, but now she realized that this was just a woman. No, a monster, just like her father. She smashed the hammer against her mother’s head repeatedly before the blood on her hands caused the tool to slip and turn around. The final blow landed the claw end, where it stuck like an axe in a tree stump.
Clarissa screamed. Her eyes darted to the open cellar door and then to her mother’s body and back to the door. She felt weak. The smell of blood was so heavy she could taste it. She scuttled out of the kitchen on her hands and knees, coughing and choking on the overwhelming, coppery odor in the room. She wasn’t familiar with the house at all, but somewhere in the banished memories of a life lived before captivation, she remembered the numbers 911, emergency numbers to be dialed on the phone.
There was a phone on the littered coffee table in the living room. Clarissa dialed 911, said something unintelligible and then erupted in a fit of crying. The phone lay beside her, the tiny voice of the dispatcher calling for her. She was too weak. Couldn’t move. A trail of blood followed her from the linoleum onto the carpeted floor. There was too much blood.
Too much.
She felt dizzy. Her eyes closed and opened again. The world seemed to spin, the red trail from the kitchen along with it.
The baby was dead.
WHERE THE SUN DON’T SHINE
BY PETE KAHLE
_____
SATURDAY MORNING—Gordy Melbourne woke in agony on the couch in his living room with no idea where he was or why his gut hurt so much. With a drawn-out groan, he pulled himself to a seated position, immediately realizing that he was completely naked and covered from head to groin in what appeared to be dried vomit.
“Jesus Friggin’ Christ, what did they get me into now?” he moaned under his breath.
By they, he meant his best friends Hector Nieves, Ross McGraw and Seth Mahler—partners in crime since they had all met each other back in 1989 in the same freshman homeroom at Winthrop Crane High School in Stonechurch, MA. Hard to believe that had been over twenty-five years ago since they still acted like foolish teen hooligans whenever they were given the chance to let loose. Gordy was supposedly the responsible one, the one to rein them in when their ideas put them in danger of bodily harm, but from the evidence surrounding him, he had failed miserably this time around.
He leaned forward and rubbed his face vigorously. A flurry of brownish-green puke flakes fell to the stained carpet in a cascade from his whiskered cheeks. Gordy looked around the room, taking in the disaster in all its glory. A trail of mud, gravel and dried leaves led from the front door into the kitchen, before a more recent path meandered into the living room to a spot next to the coffee table. There he had apparently stripped naked, left his filthy clothes in a pile and crawled over to the couch where he had passed out and upchucked on himself in his sleep.
I’m lucky I didn’t choke to death on my own vomit, he thought. I wouldn’t have been found for days while I rotted and became a permanent part of the couch.
Gordy shuddered and began to examine himself. Dried vomit and mud were caked like paint in his chest hair leading all the way down to his matted pubes. His arms and legs were covered with bruises and scratches. The nail on his left forefinger appeared to have been ripped off halfway to the cuticle. The sharp pain on his right flank turned out to be a yard-long abrasion from below his hip to his armpit. There wer
e also a couple of large dime-sized puncture wounds there that wept a cloudy sticky liquid as if he had been stabbed by someone and dragged on the pavement. The holes throbbed in time with his heart.
Have I been in a fight? What the hell is going on?
He stood up and almost immediately fell to his knees with a short shriek. His ass and legs burned as if something had torn away a few layers of skin down to the muscle. Sobbing for a moment, Gordy reached far back between his legs and felt raw meat with shreds of torn flesh and hair stuck to the skin with dried blood.
Raw hamburger, he thought. Something ground my ass into Grade A chopped sirloin. He gingerly moved his fingers forward and was relieved to find that, although bloodied and tender, all of his vital male equipment was still intact.
Holding his breath, he whimpered and staggered to his feet. He leaned against the wall for support, leaving a trail of muddy, bloody streaks on the way to the bathroom down the hall.
The harsh fluorescent light revealed a monstrosity in the mirror. He wasn’t a handsome man by any stretch of the imagination. At 38, he was the typical American white male. Thinning brown hair, muddy brown eyes, thirty to forty extra pounds that had settled in his gut and ass and the stereotypical goatee that many overweight men of his generation thought would give them back their jawline.
Now, however, he looked even worse than he had imagined, like a ghoul risen from its foul, sodden grave. The sclera of his right eye was suffused with blood from burst capillaries and, below it, his cheek looked like an over-ripe plum, swollen with juices and ready to burst. Gordy touched it lightly and nearly blacked out from the pain.
My cheek is broken, he thought, wondering if he had a concussion or worse. Hematoma. Aneurysm. Brain damage. Whatever it is, I should call 9-1-1, he thought, then instantly forgot the notion when he opened the shower door and stepped under the steaming spray.