He was a father, a husband, and a brother.
Not a murderer.
All is fair in love and war.
They had all died quietly and with as little suffering as possible. None screamed as he punctured the remaining life from their earthly vessels, none looked as he stole their pitiful lives from them. It had needed to be done; given the situation, he could see no other option in order to save his family. He had as little choice in it as they did. All he had to do was get in the car and go, but the fear still remained of the Starers suddenly advancing forward and descending upon him.
The fire had died down now. Having burnt up its brief spell of energy, it now smouldered on the burnt out lawn and the clothes of his brain dead enemies. Those still standing still stared at the house behind him. At Lucy.
It’s not murder. It’s not murder. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not.
All is fair in love and war.
This is survival.
When Dylan emerged from his murderous trance, he had a path to the car as well as dozens of bleeding and burnt bodies at his feet, not all of his own doing.
He looked down; Lennon’s hand, black from fire and swollen fat and sausage-like with decomposition, lay gripped in a loose fist at his feet. The plastic car keys partially melted, the ring still hanging off a charred little finger. Dylan bent low, and with a little force, he managed to pry the key ring out from of his dead brother’s death grip. Nearby he spied Lennon’s now infamous De-Brainer Bat, which had rolled as far as it could before it rested on the rusty bloodied screw.
When Dylan looked up, the remaining crowd shuffled forward as one. Across the road in between the walls of the people corridor, walked the Stranger. He was staring at Dylan with a confident, hypnotising smile, no rush ushered his walk. He strolled with a casual arrogance. He passed the back of the bus and towards the ambulance on Dylan’s side of the road. He was what, twenty metres away? Maybe thirty seconds left before striking distance, ambling casually toward the house, without a care in world.
Except for his daughter and whatever devious ways he intended to spend with her.
The Stranger’s eyes bore into Dylan, and for the briefest of moments, an invading movie played in his mind’s eye, it only lasted a second, but the flash told Dylan everything he needed to know.
A passenger jet, a chorus of people screaming; the stranger has a knife in his hand; he’s encouraging another man to stab a stewardess. His voice is calm as he rests a hand on the young man’s shoulder. Out of one of the windows, Dylan makes out a cityscape, only a few hundred metres below, the engines roar with the fighting strain against gravity. People scream. The stranger smiles as the plane tilts. . .
Celeste Marks took a step forward, the once loved face from Dylan’s past. Except now that face was blackened with smoky soot, her bra had burnt off revealing a red raw skinned breast, her once lustrous auburn hair had singed off on one side of her still steaming scalp, giving her the appearance of a tortured Barbie Doll. It was safe to say that her looks had vastly deteriorated over the devastating last few minutes.
Call it bittersweet revenge Celly, for breaking my heart, no hard feelings, yeah?
Still reeling from the stranger’s vision, Dylan shook the invading image from his mind, levelled the spear and launched it at his ex, half serving as futile warning to the others, half a bitter revenge for screwing his life up so damned well. He cared about the family he had left, not her. She’d had her chance and screwed it up. She was as a good a target as any. She didn’t matter much anymore. Just another face in the crowd, they all were faces in the same crowd.
Dylan Keene struck out against his past.
The blade caught her in the lower neck, severing an artery. The bread knife spear fell away and tumbled to her feet. She didn’t drop, instead she stood, stared and bled, the dark blood washing out over her soot stained skin, a grim waterfall. . .
Another vision penetrated his mind as if it was one of his own memories.
Dylan looks upon a room; two men are by a window looking down onto a city street. One is the stranger; the other is a young man with a rifle. The stranger is talking in a low, hushed, delicate tone, soothing even; yet his voice raises to say “NOW!” as a Lincoln Continental drives past on the street below. The first shot misses its target. The second however, catches a man sitting on the rear seat in the neck, while the third impacts with the back of his head. The stranger pats the young man on the shoulder, nodding and smiling. Nodding and smiling . . .
‘Lucy get out here now!’ Dylan called, blinking away the second vision. He didn’t turn. He kept his eyes on the crowd shuffling forward, the bubbling crimson geyser that erupted from his ex, and him.
Another vision, an unwanted gift from the stranger . . .
Everybody is wearing clothes from a different era, maybe twenties or early thirties. A party in full swing, the smell of spilt alcohol and cigar smoke taint the air. The stranger sits in the corner whispering into the ear of a sober young man with a funny moustache on his top lip. Dylan thinks he looks like a more severe Charlie Chaplin. It’s not Charlie Chaplin at all, but it could be. Everybody is speaking in loud, gregarious German. The stranger hands the young man a book, pointing to it and giving him a firm pat on the shoulder. Nodding and smiling, nodding and smiling. . .
Lucy joined her father at his side. Her jaw jutted out as she clenched her teeth in abject fear. Her eyes were wide, darting back and forth, as she drank in the situation around them.
‘Your mother?’ he asked quickly.
‘She wouldn’t get up. I gave her some water, she won’t wake . . . is . . . that . . . him?’ Lucy pointed at the approaching stranger with a gently quaking finger.
‘It would appear so.’
‘What are we gonna do? Are we leaving Mum?’
‘I don’t want to . . . but we don’t have much choice . . . or time. Dammit!’ Dylan readied the De-Brainer bat, wishing he hadn’t thrown the spear at Celeste after all.
It’s hot. The sun burns bright and white upon a hill above a desertscape. A gathered crowd dressed in robes jeer and holler in a language Dylan can’t even begin to comprehend. Stones are thrown at a bloodied, naked man fixed to a crucifix. He raises his head and looks down upon the stranger, shaking his head weakly. The stranger smiles, pleasant and satisfied.
The stranger stepped closer; they could both see who he was, though neither recognized him; he looked like any ordinary human male, tall, handsome, clean shaven; a successful salesman or a male model perhaps. Healthy tanned skin, slightly Middle Eastern looks; however there was a hint of European about him, like a roguish gypsy or a deceitful spy. Dylan didn’t know for sure, but the Stranger had come from beneath the ground after a long wait. What he also didn’t know was that he’d had every grain of the clinging soil licked clean from his skin by the devoted Starers.
He carried with him the rotting egg reek of sulphur, an all-encompassing stench that turned their stomachs over in a bilious wave. Their inside natures warned them of his this odour, their bodies fearing the touch of its vapour.
He could be any woman’s dream man, yet Dylan got the divine impression that he could take any form. In this case, he had taken the guise of a gentleman. His daughter would find him alluring. Just to make it easier when he did whatever he planned to do to her. He looked so damned normal and that was the scary thing. He could be anybody. Yet something else set him apart from the crowd even further than his looks.
His clothes; what he wore disturbed them both, striking them dumb where they stood. . .
He wore a coat of human faces, grisly stitched and held together with thick woven strands of human hair, covering him as any macabre shroud should, bent and empty noses stuck up from the shoulders, maybe thirty or so faces, some only halves where the perfect tear had failed, he had stitched them on, regardless of their condition. Some eyelids had been sewn shut; others gaped like toothless second and third mouths. Patches of bloody, sticky hair adorned it in places. So
me had beards. Clearly, he wanted to make a horrifying first impression. By the time they had taken in the appalling sight, He was standing in the driveway. He was here. Soon was gone. His shadow was lost amongst the crowds, for his was missing, he scattered light differently somehow, defied it.
He without a shadow spoke in a voice that was both young and old.
‘I only want her,’ he said with a pleasant and winning smile that made you want to put all your trust and savings into his care. His tone was convincing, like that of a friend you’d loan your car to, knowing that you’d get it back in one piece.
‘If you put up a fight, it won’t be pretty. I’ll take you apart atom by atom. Leave me be and I’ll let you and whatever is left of your wife alone. I won’t trouble you again. I promise.’ The stranger vainly put his hand to his chest, as if the simple gesture acted as guarantee for his word. ‘Give her to me, I just want the girl,’ he repeated.
Dylan remained stoic, he didn’t want to start a war of words with this fella, don’t enter into any agreements, offer no handshake, voice no opinion, because somehow, he’ll twist it and come back to haunt him one day. Maybe even today.
Over my dead body, Dylan thought as he ground his teeth to potential dust.
‘That can be arranged my friend, quite easily,’ the stranger said in a sparse instant.
Now he knew that the stranger had a foothold in his mind. He suddenly became aware of invisible fingers massaging unused portions of his grey matter. It was soothing, almost hypnotic and intoxicating the stranger pulled strings of influence.
‘Nobody protests. You’re the first. It’s just easier if you don’t get in my way.’
The stranger grinned; over confident, ferociously charming and without a true care to be had in this world or the next.
This was how he did it.
Dylan shook his head and looked to his scared daughter and handed her the car keys. He toyed with the De-Brainer, slapping the fat end into his hand. Say nothing. Give him nothing.
‘I’m not who you think I am. I’m a mirage, an apparition at most. I’m not him. Nobody is; but we all are in our own little ways.’
Dylan cocked his head at the comment. The Stranger held his palms up to the sky as if holding up an invisible beam, then turned his hands and levelled them by his side. It started to rain thick, leaden drips from a clear sky that hissed when they exploded upon the ground.
‘So be it; your dead body it is. I tried to make it easy for you,’ the grim coated stranger stepped forward with purpose and that forever lasting smile. His skin coat flapped open, revealing his taut and toned nakedness beneath. Dylan shivered sickly, his mind’s cinema imagining the stranger’s gruesome designs on his daughter. To even up with the rain, the sky began to darken as the thick droplets descended with intensity. Clouds of black tumbled into the blue, forming from nowhere, colouring in a slate coloured sky.
‘I’m sure I can get your wife involved with my plans, I know what she really likes.’
Dylan got ready to raise the rain-slickened bat, standing in front of Lucy, using every ounce and seconds left of his life to protect her. It’s what good parents did since time began. Protect the young at all costs, even if it cost you an eye or worse.
The stranger was fast. He became a blur. Reaching up, he grabbed the wet bat from Dylan’s grasp, minute splinters catching his already bleeding fingers as it was rasped from his hands. The Stranger threw it against the Loughery’s house wall, where it bounced then rolled as far as it could down the drive.
A low left punch shattered two of Dylan’s ribs as if they were made of brittle bone china. A rapid right uppercut cracked his jawbone turning it into an enamel vice, slamming tooth against tooth, knocking out three teeth, one of which he swallowed with a slick shot of sharp salty blood. He spat out the others from his grisly mouth with a choking gurgle; they rolled down the slope of the driveway like dice in a game of the macabre.
He fell back hard on the block paving, cracking an elbow that sent a sickening feeling down into his empty pit of a stomach. The unnatural rain drenched his back, causing his clothes to cling and weigh down his movements as if he’d been washed down with liquid lead. He wanted to throw up, but at the same time, a strong desire to breathe overcame him as he dragged in a wheezing lungful of tightened, foul oxygen. The stench of burnt death, Kirsty’s vomit on his clothes, the reek of human foulness and his own impending doom made it a thousand times worse than he ever expected. Was this death? Is this how the last grim last moment kicks off?
Dylan looked at his own blood splattering thick, bright and real, congealing on the driveway, his code, his DNA. A strange though lucid thought process occurred to him as he looked upon his own escaping blood, a sharpened clarity that defined the situation. Was that why he, Lennon and Kirsty had been spared? They all had genes relating to Lucy, whatever spell had been cast across the crowd, turning them into meaty statues, somehow didn’t apply to them. He only wanted her, and this was his way of keeping her in one place whilst he was roused from the belly of the earth. He, his brother and his wife had only been spared from being hypnotised because of some magical genetic loophole. It was only a theory, but it made him feel better that he had some understanding of the situation that had unfolded outside of 68 Westfield Road. It was family that held them together, nothing could tear that apart. Not distance, nor evil, nor fall out over trivial matters. Family fought together.
The Stranger stood over him, a mocking smile plastered across his cheeks. His coat of un-staring faces breezed open, exposing his nakedness beneath. The organ that dangled before Dylan’s eyes didn’t belong on any human; it was more animal or creature even; out of proportion, a caricature of a monster’s phallus. Dylan reasoned that the stranger had every intention of putting that thing inside his daughter. He wouldn’t be surprised if it had a set of smiling teeth.
The Stranger grabbed the dumbfounded Lucy, throwing her on the rain speckled bonnet with a tinny thump, and began to pull off her jogging bottoms with eager, inquisitive fingers. He tossed them over Dylan’s head where they landed behind him. Lucy screamed as the Stranger held her down, gripping her throat with thickset hands that looked like they could snap her trachea with no more than a flick of his fingers.
Dylan felt the vomit rise. He felt weak and useless; he was blinded by the pain in his jaw and had all but given up. The pelting rain hammered his thoughts, drumming a distracting tattoo that soothed and warned his mind away from the unfolding matters.
The Stranger opened his grim coat; a live tentacle slithered out appearing to sniff and taste the air. A syrupy, clear yellow liquid dripped from the end of the monstrous proboscis as it extended forward with eager glee. With his free hand, he began to thumb Lucy’s heart patterned girl boxers to one side; Dylan would never forget the wanton and ill smile on the Stranger’s face for as long as he lived. It was a haunting grin that belonged on the face of madness.
Again, Lucy screamed; a beseeching, primeval shriek that cut through the air and into his soul, causing him to shudder. She screamed again and again; every breath was recycled into an urgent, shiver-inducing vocal.
Do something.
Dylan felt paralysed by fear or maybe even the Stranger’s evilly divine influence. With no hope in sight, all he could do was lay uselessly on the floor like a paraplegic slug, the rain drenching him further. He turned his head, to one side he could see Lucy’s jogging pants, beneath them lay the De-Brainer.
Dylan willed for his hand to move. He found it a struggle to draw breath from the sheer terror he felt pressing down on him. This monster was going to impregnate his daughter with something he didn’t even want to contemplate. This is what it was all about; fucking, a simple action which kept the world turning and fighting. It’s what all life was about when you got down to it. Rutting and impregnating to keep the population topped up. That’s why it was so easy. That’s why death was so easy too, an effort by nature to counteract our fornications.
Dylan’s ga
ze switched from his daughter’s outreaching fingers to the terrified expression on her face. She screamed again as the heathen’s tentacle stroked its wet end against her bare thigh, leaving a sticky trail of rancid goo. The white flesh began to steam and sizzle; the Stranger’s seed was caustic. Why wouldn’t it be?
Dylan retreated within himself, imagining a world without Kirsty’s home cooked meals, without his daughter’s scathing though witty comments; without Lennon’s daft banter . . . scratch the last one. Lennon was gone. It was this bastard’s fault. The hate intensified, burning a red flare in his soul, lighting him up. Dylan wanted to ram the De-Brainer up the fucker’s arse and rag it about twisting his insides to mush. He wanted to cram his thumbs deep into his eye sockets and tickle his brain with his nails before pulling his face apart like an orange. He wanted to break his fingers off one by one and force-feed them down his vile throat, then start on his toes. That appendage wanted chopping off and flushing down the toilet. He wanted . . . Dylan’s fingers twitched, his palm flexed.
The red mist descended through the fugue, then inked a pure and hateful black.
Hate made him want to love. The thought of his loves taken away forced him into action. This was a power more potent than the Stranger’s influence, which when you realised, the power of evil was nothing more than a tangible thing, something that given the strength of will, could be broken as easily as glass. Nothing could take the place of a strong and willing human heart, not when action needed to be done, for the just of good.
Good was as strong as evil. Don’t believe the lies that try and taint your heart.
Lucy gave a soundless scream as the Stranger moved into her. Her body buckled into a C-shape, banging the back of her head against the bonnet with a dull and violent thud. A clicking croak escaped her mouth as her fists pounded the agony out upon the metal mattress. The croak rose to a seething little girl scream as the Stranger began to slide his hips back and forth, back and forth. His grin was fixed in a grisly pleasure.
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