Three rungs, two rungs, one rung and he was through the door in the base of the fort, pulling himself inside the opening and sitting on the dusty floor.
It took scant moments for his eyes to adjust.
The first thing he saw was Austin. He was crouched in a corner, shirtless, in his pee pee pants, and he was grinning. He was sitting next to a dirty little girl, maybe nine or ten. She was grinning, too, but her grin was deranged.
The next thing he saw was a chair with leather cuffs on the arms and legs, and a slop bucket next to it, ready to be filled with gore.
The last thing he saw before he realized that Austin found him, not the other way around, was a big man holding a bowie knife, his black hair wild, his eyes crazed and his shirt stained with his occupation.
And as the man moved forward, so quickly that Yuri barely had a chance to squeal, he heard Austin’s tiny voice sealing his fate.
“Remember what you promised,” the little boy quipped. “You said this time I can use the big knife, Daddy. You promised. You did.”
Z is for Zina
Who Suffers Starvation
THERE ARE TIMES that I can’t remember my life before everyone got sick.
I know I lived it, but it all seems like a dream or a fairytale that was never real in the first place. All that’s left is today. Who knows if tomorrow is ever going to come, and anything that happened yesterday is best left forgotten
That’s how we live now—like each day is our last.
After Diego left, Olive and I ended up in Forest Park. I remember him telling me there wouldn’t be a lot of people in the park, and he was right. Even though it’s still in the city, the park is down a long, wooded road, past the old ice skating rink and the stables where my mom used to take us for pony rides.
The ponies are gone. I’m sure they jumped the fence early on, probably out of fear or hunger, or both.
The baseball fields are overgrown. You almost can’t tell there were ever diamonds there in the first place. The zoo is definitely dead, especially the monkey house. It’s like a weird museum exhibit because all that’s left are bones. Most of the skeletons are intact, but they’ve been picked clean by rats.
I hate rats, but these days I can definitely eat a whole one in one sitting. I’d love to say they taste like chicken but I’ve forgotten what chicken tastes like.
I suppose chicken tastes like rat.
Olive coughs all the time now when she’s not sleeping. She doesn’t have the big, bad bug. She has something else. Her raspy, waning hack is worse at night, often punctuated by explosions off in the distance. When we hear them, she huddles next to me like a whipped dog.
I don’t know what to do for her. She’s so little and sick. She’s so weak.
Diego told me about the secret space underneath the merry-go-round where he and his friends, Pablo and Yhimmy, used to smoke bones and drink beer. Olive and I have carved out a hiding place here. It’s hard to spot even if you’re looking. There’s a trap door between a painted reindeer and a giant ostrich, and it’s hardly noticeable now that we took the handle away.
I carry the broken, metal ring with me all the time, only slipping it back into the little rusted tube on the trap door whenever I need to open it. Without that ring, it’s next to impossible to lift the heavy wood. At least that’s what I tell Olive so she has one less thing to be scared about.
Besides, these days she doesn’t worry about the door. She worries about The Gods.
“I’m scared,” Olive whispers in a soft, hoarse voice.
“I know.”
“Zina, I’m hungry,” she coughs out. Her eyes are half-lidded and her skin is pale.
“I know,” I say again as we huddle in our nest of old newspapers and dirty picnic blankets—anything we can find to keep us warm. I only have a few candles left. I let one burn in the space between us. “I’ll think of something.”
The sky is gray and the air is starting to get cold. Soon, our hidey-hole underneath the merry-go-round isn’t going to be warm enough and we’ll have to find someplace new that’s as safe as the park.
“No one will come there,” Diego had said. “There’s nothing in the park and it’s going to be all about food, now. I don’t think anyone’s desperate enough to eat a rotting polar bear, at least not yet. “
“Forest Park?” I whispered to him as we lay sweaty on his dead madre’s bed after I let him, well, you know.
I didn’t have a choice.
“Yeah,” he said, and then he told me about the trap door.
Olive and I met Diego at the hospital the day our mother died. She lasted almost until the end. By then I suppose it was dumb to try and get her medical help. Everything was in chaos. At the hospital, there were gurneys everywhere and people with blood weeping out of their eyes. That’s how you knew they were sick. They cried red tears.
Diego seemed so much older than me, but he wasn’t. He was just finishing up his senior year at Commerce High. I was only a freshman at Chicopee Comp. What’s that, three years? That’s not a lot.
He had left his abuelo dead in one of the sick wards on the sixth floor. We ran into him in the hospital’s huge entryway. There was death everywhere and the stench of rot. When my mother saw that Diego was healthy she persuaded us to leave with him. We all cried, and Olive clung to her frail frame, but in the end, we left our mother behind on a chair with blood staining her cheeks, and turned our backs on that building of death forever.
Diego lived in an apartment building in the Mexican part of the North End, below Atwater. He told us his family was gone and we could stay with him in their apartment. That first night he fed us with rice and beans. The next day he did the same. The third morning, while Olive slept on the couch in the living room, Diego crawled into bed next to me and told me he wouldn’t feed us anymore unless I was nice.
I’m not stupid.
I did everything he asked without crying. I pretended I was nice and that we were married and Olive was our daughter.
Playing house only lasted a few weeks. The rice and beans he had in the pantry ran out. He told us he was going to go find more, but if he didn’t come back to go to the park. I knew he was lying about coming back. He didn’t want to be stuck with us. Besides, I think he was getting bored and was starting to look at Olive the way he looked at me.
The sad thing is, I might have stayed with Diego if he had come back with food. I might have kept up our charade even though I knew he would eventually hurt me, or worse, hurt my sister. He was right. It was all about the food now.
I blow out the candle and Olive coughs again. As the two of us huddle in the dark underneath the merry-go-round, another explosion goes off. It’s painfully close—maybe only a mile away. Why are human beings so bent on destruction? It seems that chaos only breeds more chaos. You would think people would be banding together to try and find a solution to all this misery, but no—so many of them just want to watch the world come undone.
Diego was like that. He took this disease and turned it into a free pass to anarchy. A few days before he disappeared, a chubby boy with round cheeks and mocha skin knocked on our third floor apartment door and asked for food.
Diego knew him from before, but he didn’t care.
“I went all ‘Lord of the Flies’ on his ass,” he laughed after he came down from the rooftop where he had told the chubby boy we had a secret stash. “Look,” he said and dragged me to the window, pointing at the stained pavement below. “Piggy brains are pink—just like in the book.”
I wasn’t surprised at what he did. I was more surprised that Diego read a novel. I suppose we were all different a year ago.
As Olive and I hide in the unreal safety of the dark, another explosion rocks the night.
“They’re getting closer,” Olive chokes out and tries to burrow into my side.
“It’s just some idiot blowing off steam,” I lie. “I’m sure of it.”
“But what if it’s The Gods?” she whimpers. “What if
it’s them?”
“They won’t find us,” I tell her. Even though it’s dark underneath the merry-go-round, I hold up the round, metal handle from the trap door. I take Olive’s hand and make her feel it. “We have this.”
Thankfully, there aren’t any more explosions after that. Soon, Olive falls asleep again, her breath ragged and shallow. I do, too. When I wake up the next morning I’m so cold that my face hurts. Olive has covered herself with so much trash and debris that only someone who knows can tell there’s a little girl underneath it all.
My stomach is past gurgling. I feel like one of those kids in that creepy story about being locked in a school cafeteria without anything to eat. We have to find food and we have to find someplace better than here. If we don’t, the snows are going to come and we’ll die, even though freezing to death is supposed to feel warm and relaxing while your life slips out of you and floats away on the wind.
“Olive?” I whisper. “We have to go.”
She says nothing.
I reach into the pile of trash and feel around. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s find something to eat.” I pull back the trash, handful after handful, but she doesn’t move. My fingers finally fall on her face, but it’s cold and stiff. I immediately pull back. From the little bit of morning light streaming through the cracks around the trap door, I can see my little sister has left and gone to a better place.
I’m stunned. I’m relieved. Maybe I’m both. Either way, I have no more tears to give. The past is forgotten, and the only thing is the present.
“Crap,” I choke out. It’s the only eulogy Olive will ever get from me. “Crap,” I say again and reach my hand up to push the trap door open.
“Lookee here,” says a familiar voice.
It’s Diego and he’s not alone. He’s dressed all in white, with a heavy hoodie and sweat pants. So are the dozen or so others who are with him. They’re mostly his age. Everyone is painfully clean.
“Diego?” I whisper. “What . . . what are you doing here?”
“Checking on a stash,” he says.
“What?”
A black girl with huge hair all plumped out and perfect snickers. She’s wearing makeup like she’s ready to go to a prom. A few of the others chuckle, too.
“You know,” says Diego. “Like squirrels hide nuts.” He reaches down and takes my hand. I don’t know why, but he seems warm and friendly. Diego isn’t warm and friendly. He rapes vulnerable girls and pushes fat boys off rooftops.
Diego’s part of the sickness.
“Who are you?” I say, not to Diego but to all of them. Part of me is shocked that Olive is gone. Another part is happy because whatever Diego wants, whoever these people are, it can’t be good and Olive won’t have to endure it.
“You look terrible,” says a good-looking boy with black hair and too many earrings. He sounds pissed. “You haven’t been eating.”
I turn in a circle. Everyone looks healthy and well-fed. I feel out of place, ugly, and a little sick.
“Who are you?” I ask again, but I have a sinking suspicion that I know the answer.
“These are The Gods,” says Diego. “They’re my homies.”
In a dying world of disease and corruption, seeing healthy people is almost surreal. I don’t know how they can look as good as they do. I don’t know how the black girl with the big hair can even wear makeup. I don’t even know why any of them would be with Diego, because Diego is sick.
He’s sick and twisted.
“Where’s your cute little sister?” he asks.
“What?”
“Your sister,” Diego prods. “Where’s Olive?”
“She’s dead,” I tell him. The words don’t even hurt coming out. They feel empty and cold.
The good-looking boy with the black hair and the earrings suddenly turns red-faced. “What?” he bellows. “She’s dead?”
Diego shrinks away from him. A few of the others take a step or two back. The boy doesn’t look at me. He only bores a hole into Diego with laser precision.
“I . . . I didn’t . . . um . . . ,” Diego sputters.
“You said two and now there’s only one,” he screams. “And she’s barely even a whole person. Look at her. Just look at her. She’s nothing but skin and bones.”
Diego takes a few steps back but the giant ostrich, impaled on a pole, stops him from moving any further. “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” he stammers. His eyes become wet, and big, fat tears start streaming down his face. “I didn’t know. How could I have known?”
“Shut up,” says the black girl with the makeup as she rolls her eyes. If anything, she sounds bored. She takes two steps forward until she’s right in front of Diego. “Just shut up already.” She pulls something sharp out of her sweatshirt pocket and swiftly shoves it right into the middle of Diego’s chest.
He screams incoherently. His white sweatshirt goes red and his white sweatpants become splattered with his life.
Diego, the boy who brought me back to his apartment and made me do things; who killed a fat boy because he asked for food; and who leered at my sister a little too much, bleeds out on the deck of the merry-go-round.
“Take him,” says the good-looking boy with the black hair to a couple of the other Gods. They are big, and muscular, and obviously well-fed.
“He’s going to get my clothes all bloody,” says one of them.
“Who cares?” says the other. “There’s a whole world of clothes out there. You can get more.”
Meanwhile, the good-looking boy with the black hair steps forward and puts both his hands on my shoulders. My face turns to stone. I am no longer living each day as my last. I am living each minute.
“You look terrible,” he tells me.
I stare at him, unfeeling. “So?” I murmur. I can’t think of anything better to say.
“Why don’t you come with us? We’ll get you some new clothes and something good to eat.” He cocks one finger towards the two big boys who are dragging Diego off the merry-go-round, his feet sliding on the cold earth and splotches of blood dotting the landscape.
“Okay,” I say, numb to everything.
“Awesome,” he says. “Looks like we’re having Mexican for dinner.”
“Sounds good,” I say in a fog as I let him drape his arm around me and lead me past a painted horse. The others follow, laughing and joking, and making absurd jokes about recipes their parents sometimes cooked.
I don’t even take in their words. I no longer care about anything.
As far as I’m concerned, my life is in The Gods’ hands now.
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Acknowledgements
As always, I would like to give special thanks to David Gilfor for reading over my shoulder, story after story, making sure my tales remain compelling and creepy.
In addition, I would like to thank my readers Shira Block McCormick, Tamara Fricke, Lauren Levin, Jeremy Gilfor, Jaime Fisher, and my mother, Joline Odentz, for wading through twenty-six gruesome murders.
I’d like to give a shout out to Karen Santos for letting me read my stories to her out loud, and laughing or cringing appropriately.
I would also like to thank Lois Winston, Ashley Grayson, Debra Dixon, and the team at Bell Bridge Books for their tireless support.
Finally, I would like to once again thank my brilliant nephew, Nick Gilfor, for his b
rutal copy editing. A thumbs-up from Nick is like getting a thumbs-up from your toughest teacher ever. I can’t imagine what he’ll be like when he finally starts shaving every day.
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About Howard Odentz
Author and playwright Howard Odentz is a lifelong resident of the gray area between Western Massachusetts and North Central Connecticut. His love of the region is evident in his writing as he often incorporates the foothills of the Berkshires and the small towns of the Bay and Nutmeg states into his work.
Little Killers A to Z, a full-blown alphabet of murderers, psychopaths, monsters and second graders, is his third work with Bell Bridge Books. Previous novels include the horrifically humorous Dead (a Lot) and the thriller Bloody Bloody Apple.
The mysterious has always played a major role in Howard’s writing. He is endlessly fascinated by the psychological aspects of those who are thrown into thrilling or otherworldly circumstances.
“I like writing about my dark little corner of the world,” he says. “After all, this is New England. There’s more than enough creepiness here to keep me inspired for years to come.”
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