by Taylor Grand
He gathered cans of soup (Mondo-branded tomato was a favorite, both cheap and good) and other non-refrigerated items. He could sense the eyes of other customers burning into him, but that was hardly a surprise; good grooming and personal hygiene had taken a back seat to survival over the past few months. Way, way back.
These were normal people, he thought enviously, thinking about normal things like their rising cholesterol, the rising cost of milk, and for the teenage boy he saw flipping through Maxim magazine—the rise in his pants.
He watched people tap at their wireless devices, yell at their kids, and dig for products with the best expiration dates. He noted how blissfully unaware they seemed; unaware of the fragility of their lives, and that despite ignorance, denial or both, death would eventually claim them all.
A portly man with a ten-dollar crew cut and his even fatter wife wheeled an overloaded shopping cart around him and hurriedly moved on, clearly uncomfortable under his scrutiny. He wondered what the rotund couple would do if they could see what death had in store for them. Would they overturn their cart of prepackaged poisons in horror and start eating sensibly? Or would they choose to hide from the world like him?
He recalled something from a book he’d read recently entitled Mysterious Supernatural Phenomena. The authors had claimed it was fairly common for the terminally ill, the extremely aged, and occasionally people found dying at the scene of an accident, to see what were called “messengers of death.” The authors made the absurd postulation that they were angels or the spirits of loved ones, and that they helped the dying cross over.
Grady had hurled the book across the room in disgust. The schmaltzy, unsubstantiated conclusions were practically criminal, trying to delude readers into believing that these messengers of death were benevolent, simply because books about angels sold better than the cold, hard truth ever would.
However, of all the speculations in the book, there had been one that he agreed with: that those who could perceive death were those closest to it. It not only explained why Feckler had been able to see the Vood just before he died, but also why Grady had finally seen it on that fateful day in his mother’s bedroom.
Somehow, he had escaped his fate that day. But apparently death didn’t suffer unfinished business. It was relentless. It was unforgiving. And it had sharp, gnashing teeth.
Grady pushed his wobbling cart through an aisle that was stacked floor to ceiling with enough sugary treats to turn the entire country into diabetics. He didn’t want to think anymore. He didn’t want to theorize anymore. More than anything, he just wanted the comfort of some goddamn cream-filled cupcakes.
Grady stopped at the store’s Customer Service booth before heading home and tried, for the second time, to convince the store manager—who wore a frozen mask of disinterest—to make an exception and deliver groceries to his apartment.
It was the same old story.
“I’m sorry, sir…but we don’t offer those services here,” the pasty man said as if there were a preprogrammed recording spewing from his mouth.
Disappointed and weary, Grady exited through a whoosh of the store’s automatic doors. When he reached the street, he was hit with an unexpected blast of cold air. Up in the sky, a massive cloak of darkness had formed—skimming above the tops of buildings.
A whimper of panic escaped his throat.
No, he thought. Please…not a storm today.
His plea went unheard; a swarm of wrathful looking clouds suddenly devoured the sun.
Within moments, tenebrous fingers moved toward him, reaching from every direction, frantic and craving flesh. Grady lost control of his bladder and spilled his groceries. He literally ran for his life; the Vood’s presence was everywhere, its hunger as palpable as the coldness in the air.
He didn’t remember much after that, just bits and pieces of fragmented imagery—like a fever dream: a honking car…a hissing cat…horrified looks from bystanders as he tore past. Long tendrils of blackness clutched at his heels every step of the way.
He ran wildly…blindly, as he had those many years ago, when he’d first spotted the murderous thing in his mother’s room. Not much had changed since then. His life was still a perpetual game of cat and mouse.
He was still forever on the run.
****
Grady awoke the next morning kissing the tile of his bathroom floor, where he’d passed out after regurgitating what felt like his entire large intestine. Weakened from hunger and nursing several pulled muscles in his legs, he found it a struggle just to climb to his feet. He groaned at a sharp spasm that clutched his left leg, and then groaned even louder at the memory of spilled groceries.
He limped into the living room and stopped so suddenly that anyone observing might have thought he had stepped into an invisible wall. What he saw there caused gooseflesh to ripple across his arms like a pool disturbed by a night’s chill wind. Gone were the thin shafts of sunlight that normally peeked through the edges of his window coverings.
He glanced at his watch. It read: 11:00AM.
It couldn’t be…
He hobbled to the nearest window with a grunt of agony and inspected the reflective cloth taped over it.
He looked at his watch again. The second hand still worked fine and the date was correct. Uneasily, he peeled a corner of duct tape from a window, peering out…eyes growing wide.
No! No no no…
He ripped away the cloth from every window, desperate to find a single ray of sunlight. He knocked over two floor lamps and his portable TV in the process, but didn’t take notice.
Beyond his apartment there was only blackness, an endless, impenetrable thing that pressed against the windows with silent, deliberate breaths.
He dropped to his knees with a painful crack and began to sob uncontrollably. Not for himself—but for the rest of the world.
****
When the power to Grady’s apartment died, he hadn’t panicked; he’d been prepared for such an eventuality. He quickly mobilized three battery-powered lanterns, which managed to take the bite out of the darkness for a while. But after five of the longest days and nights of his life, the batteries were stone dead, and his backup candles weren’t far behind. The remnants of six of them—melted, misshapen blobs now—formed a partial circle around him in the living room. The remaining five candles balanced their fragile flames over glistening pools of wax. Grady guessed he had less than an hour before those last, terrible flickers of light winked out.
The vantage point from the living-room windows revealed that an endless nightfall had befallen the earth; the Vood, it seemed, had become omnipresent. At first, Grady had imagined that it would come for him like a blood-crazed tsunami and carry him away.
Now, he wished that it would have. Anything would have been better than this.
The Vood had crept into his home insidiously and spread—like a field of malignant weeds. Savage attacks had come daily, sometimes more than once. A nibble here, and a nibble there; each one left him less of a man, and more of a mutilated thing.
Now, as he lay butchered and immobilized on the floor, he sensed it again; a formless malevolence that, if he looked closely enough, revealed hints of teeth and the barest outline of a grin.
It seemed to be playing with him, he thought, like a predator toying with its prey.
He caught a glimpse of his legs just then and the repulsiveness of it made him look away; they resembled two slabs of raw, gristly meat delivered fresh from the slaughterhouse. He closed his inflamed eyes and tried to ignore the sickening smell of blood that permeated the room.
For perhaps the thousandth time he pictured the end of everything, a surreal horror film stuck on a continual loop, projected onto the flickering screen of his mind. The opening scene was always the same: Grady trudged home from Mondo Market with a stuffed bag of groceries underneath each arm. He stopped suddenly as invisible claws of cold air raked across his skin. Then, gazing upward, he noticed an angry legion of storm clouds as they
moved into position.
But as Grady studied the scene again and again, it had become clear that what he’d seen weren’t storm clouds after all.
In that terrible moment, the Vood had spread across the sky like a cosmic bottle of ink spilled over the world. It consumed the great fire of the sun, and then, like some kind of celestial leech, sucked the blue right out the sky.
As far as the eye could see, the city was buried in shadow. And at that moment, Grady knew it was the beginning of the end.
So, he ran.
He ran and he ran.
And that was where his memory ended and his imagination began, a Grand Guignol of epic proportions as the Vood had its final, greatest feast—swimming through all of humanity in oceans of its own blood.
As he listened even now, there was nothing to be heard except the beat of his own heart. The world had been silenced forever. And somehow, the oppressive quiet was worse than a billion screams.
It had been inevitable, he supposed, that it would come down to this: just he and the Vood. And the loneliness of that thought was more painful than the tears and ruptures of his mangled flesh.
He forced his weary eyes open once again and gazed deeply, into the heart of the dark beast that filled the room. Immediately, he was struck by a disturbing sensation, an odd sense of…familiarity. There was a monstrous loneliness to the Vood that he knew all too well; a bottomless hollow that cried out to be filled.
Weakly, he reached out for it; his bloodstained index finger stretched just past the periphery of light. He watched, as that finger was torn away and swallowed.
The wail of the Vood’s name echoed in his mind.
He saw the specter of his mother then, offering a lovely smile. It was a smile he craved more than anything as a boy, a smile that disappeared forever on the day she abandoned him to face the world alone.
Despite an agony so great it brought tears to his eyes, he pulled what remained of his body towards the glow of the last candles. It was as if he were watching from outside himself, his body propelled by a force not his own. Inch by inch, he dragged himself across the floor, painting it with what looked like the crimson abstractions of a crazed artist.
It was during these last moments of cognizance that Grady heard the Vood wailing in his mind clearly for the first time.
And finally, he understood.
Food is what his mind had been wailing all these years, not Vood.
FOOD…FOOD…FOOD…
Slowly. Deliberately. He blew out each candle.
Waiting for him was the darkness.
****
What the police found inside Grady’s apartment caused the first uniform on the scene to race for the bathroom with his hand clutched over his mouth.
Now, as Detective Alfonso Guiterrez stood amidst the blood-drenched horror of the apartment, he was feeling a little sick himself. Loose, crimson-stained floorboards had already yielded several piles of human bones in various stages of decomposition, and the crime scene techs were just getting started. A majority of the bones, they noted, were marred with what looked like chew-mark patterns—like those on an eaten cob of corn.
In the bedroom closet they discovered a collection of heavy-duty trash bags bulging with putrefied human entrails. And so far, in the kitchen, he had seen three boiled human heads, and a miscellany of old bone fragments in a mixing bowl.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst of it was sprawled just a few feet from Gutierrez; a poor excuse for a corpse that looked like it had been chewed up, partially digested and then spit back out.
He glanced down at the medical examiner hovering over Grady’s remains.
“What do you think, Russell?” Gutierrez said.
Russell glanced up with eyes as lifeless as the body he examined. “Unofficially…asphyxiation. But I won’t know anything for sure until we get him on the table.”
“Asphyxiation from what?”
“Have a look,” Russell said, prying open Grady’s mouth with his gloved fingers.
“…the hell is that?” Gutierrez asked, already sure that he didn’t want to know.
“Three severed fingers from his right hand,” Russell said. “As far as I can tell…this guy tried to eat himself.”
GODS AND DEVILS
Why can’t I open my eyes? Vega thought. I’m not dreaming.
Am I?
A single stab of pain shot through his arm to the marrow, followed by a rush of warmth. Then the rest of his body began to tingle. This was no dream. He’d been injected with something. He knew the feeling from back in Academy training; induced consciousness, only to be used in emergencies.
Next he felt an electrical impulse probing his brain, forcing his eyelids to flutter open.
His vision was blurry, but he recognized the porcelain, impossibly perfect features of Sona staring down at him. He took note that her right ear was missing, as well as some artificial flesh from her forehead.
A stronger electrical pulse now, coursing through his body, forcing his muscles to seize up for an agonizing moment. This better be a goddamn emergency, he thought.
He sat up with a groan and wiped temperature-regulating gel from his face. His eyes widened when he noticed the lower half of Sona was missing; it looked as if she’d been torn in two.
“Sona, what…?”
Upon closer inspection, he could see that a large section of her throat had been torn open—rendering her unable to speak.
Vega stared at her, wondering what might have caused such damage. Sona was a female droid, but she was built like a tank, complete with a dura-alloy chassis. She worked with quiet efficiency to disconnect him from the stasis field. As he rose to his feet, Vega grabbed the edges of the sleep pod for balance; his legs felt like they were made of pudding. Yet even hunched over, his six-foot five frame towered over the half-android.
He surveyed the stasis chamber. Everything appeared normal. Five hundred gleaming sleep pods, stacked ten rows tall, surrounded him. They were shaped like large silver eggs, containing humanity’s last hope. Inside these pods were thirty-six crewmembers and four hundred and sixty-three passengers.
A nerve-grating sound caught his attention and he turned to see an awful sight. Sona was crawling across the floor using her remaining appendages; wet, mechanical entrails dragged behind. He watched with disgust as she pulled herself toward the control console and manually jacked herself into the ship’s mainframe. This was immediately followed by a series of chirps and screeching feedback as she tapped into the computer’s audio circuitry in order to communicate.
“…skritch…Captain…skritch…Vega.”
“Yes, Sona. I can hear you. What the hell’s going on?”
Sona made more audio adjustments, and the next time she spoke her voice had been equalized to sound more or less human.
“An HH slipped through screening. It’s on board and has taken a passenger. It attempted to terminate me, but didn’t factor in my reserve systems.”
Vega felt as if an invisible fist had slugged him in the gut. It was the worst possible news—the worst goddamned scenario.
“Have you woken any other crew members?”
Sona’s mouth moved silently, followed by a delayed voice piped through the ship’s system. “No, sir. According to Directive 222A, the Captain is first to be—”
“Okay, Okay—good. Let’s keep it that way. “You have my gear?
Sona gestured toward a nearby hover-cart, which contained standard issue battle armor and a loaded disrupter.
Vega reached for the sleek-looking weapon and felt the cool metal in his hand; it weighed heavy in his grip.
“There is something else, sir. Something you need to know.”
He adjusted the setting on the disrupter “I know, Sona. And I’m sorry…”
Sona’s face exploded from a direct shot to the head. A delayed high-pitched screech emanated from the ship’s computer a moment later—then stopped abruptly.
Vega
set the weapon—still humming from the discharge—back on the cart and began to put on his armor. He would deal with Sona’s remains and alter the ship’s records later. There was a more pressing matter at hand.
****
Vega moved stealthily up several flights of stairs toward the Crew Deck. The ship’s security system had logged some recent movement in the Mess Hall. The turbolift wasn’t an option; the noise would give him away. He would need the advantage of surprise if he was to have any hope of taking down an HH in close quarters.
As he crept toward the main entrance to the Crew Deck, he double-checked his weapon. At its highest setting, the disrupter emitted a lethal blast of concentrated microwave and UV radiation. But that was cold comfort; the creature’s speed, strength, and ferocity gave it an enormous edge.
He moved as quietly as possible through the silent Mess Hall. The hundred or so empty chairs gave the large room an eerie quality. Memories of his crewmates eating there flashed in his mind and he longed for their company. Vega had never been good at being alone and the sense of isolation he felt now was almost unbearable.
He forced thoughts of his crew away and continued toward the entertainment area of the Mess Hall. It was both absurd and perverse to imagine a HH needing entertainment, and yet, it made sense that he might find it here. After all, what else would it do once the eating had been taken care of? There was nothing to do on the ship but eat, shit and sleep.
Vega scanned the area, his weapon held in firing position.
Nothing.
He spun in all directions, prepared to annihilate anything that moved, when something caught his eye.
As he looked closer he noticed brightly colored images moving on a holo-screen. It was an episode of the popular cartoon Gloop and Gloopy. The sound was muted, though, and the room was as still as a mausoleum.
Tentatively, he moved closer, his jaw clenched so tightly his teeth began to ache. The tunic beneath his battle armor was drenched in sweat, his heart felt as if it were about to burst through his chest plate.