The going is painfully slow, literally and figuratively, as I make my way across the train yard. I’m panting hard, which makes it difficult to hear if any of Them are nearby and I’m very aware of how much noise my stumbling footsteps make on the gravel.
I haven’t been wounded like this since I escaped the hospital, since I found my way by sheer dumb luck to the museum.
As a stronghold, it had seemed like a good idea.
It was, by nature, a solid structure equipped with great security. It was spacious, heated and, at least in the wing where we made our home, climate controlled, which meant the gas couldn’t get in.
I wasn’t sure how I’d ended up there. After Julia . . . after she died I’d been a broken man. The people at the museum made me feel welcome. They were a collection of tattered half-families, grizzled loners, and terrified children. But they had ample supplies and they relied on each other. They gave me an area to sleep in and food. They treated my wounds and gave me company. They also gave me a sense a security, which I never thought I’d feel again at that point. I still woke up crying out in fear each night but at least once I was awake, I knew I was safe.
It was at the museum that I heard the most varied theories about the gas. One woman, Caroline, had been a lab-tech at a water treatment plant and was a keen scientist. She had read an article about a radical new treatment in development for amputees that proposed to use stem cells to regrow entire limbs. Caroline was convinced that gas was something to do with that.
Another of the survivors there, Paul, was determined that the gas somehow reactivated what he called ‘recombinant DNA,’ which he explained as being all the junk in our genes from the various stages of our evolution that just isn’t active anymore.
Of course some people thought aliens were to blame, or that it was some kind of terrorist attack, but none of them were as impassioned as Caroline. She was almost manic about it. One of the other women, Janine, told me that Caroline had lost two kids to the gas and they’d killed her husband once it turned them and that it had made her kind of obsessed.
Perhaps that’s why we found her one night, smothering the children in their sleep.
The resultant gunfire had broken one of the sturdy windows and the gas, pressed against the glass like some perverted watcher, was free to come rolling in.
The rest of that night had been a nightmare of chaos and panic as we fled from the orange fog. I remember catching a glimpse of Paul, screaming as the gas overwhelmed him. He staggered forward, trying to reach for help as a series of sickening crunches sounded from inside him, each one signalling the change of his joints to a new, inhuman position. A violent convulsion threw him to the ground as his legs bent to new shapes. His face turned to me, the skin writhing like a stormy ocean and blood pooled from his mouth as his teeth fell out.
I shake myself out of the memory. I’m not sure if it’s the tiredness, the events of last night or the blood loss that’s making it hard to focus on the present, but if I don’t stay sharp I’ll end up dead.
I come back to reality just in time as I hear one of Them close by, crunching across the gravel. As I freeze in place, crouched against one of the dormant rusting carriages, it stalks into view.
It walks on four legs, the knees of the rear two inverted to make balance easier. Its fore-limbs are more like arms and it carries its weight on worn, flat knuckles in a gorilla-like gait. Where the head would be on any normal quadruped, there is instead another spinal column, curving upwards from the shoulders like a grotesque centaur. This second torso is all but a skeleton, thinly held together by bright red ropes of tendon and muscle. The grisly skull at the summit of the monster is only partially formed and, through the gaps in its cranium, I can see something fleshy beating like a heart.
It turns towards me before I can make a move to hide and I thank god that it has no eyes. Instead it seems to be seeking me out by hearing, tilting its gruesome head to one side. I try not to breathe but it seems to hear me anyway, shuffling slowly closer on two feet and a hand while the other hand crawls its way across the metal wall of the train car.
If I stay here it will find me. If I move it might hear me. No choice.
Moving as slowly and carefully as I can, my heart hammering so loud I’m sure the creature will hear it, I lower myself to the ground. I don’t want to take my eyes off it but I have no choice as I’m forced to turn my head to fit under the carriage. I can smell the stink of the creature, old blood and stale piss, looming over me as I painstakingly slide under the metal frame, desperate not to make a noise on the gravel . . .
The sky is much darker by the time I painfully crawl from my hiding place. I’m not sure if it’s later than I thought or if the clouds are gathering. Either way, it’s not a good sign. I have to make it out of the trainyard and across the highway before I reach even the closest buildings and there’s no guarantee any of them will be suitable. Or empty.
By the time I leave the trainyard it’s becoming clear I’m not going to make it inside before dark.
The streetlights over the highway have come on (this part of the city evidently still has power) which means dusk can’t be far away. I’m exhausted. I need to get somewhere, anywhere, I can rest. I don’t know when I last ate, I don’t know how much blood I’ve lost but I know for sure that limping along like this as quietly as I can is sapping what little energy I have.
Even if I could make it to the buildings, it’s a painstaking process making sure they’re clear and finding a defensible room. I start to get angry. If it hadn’t been for that stupid ladder, if I had prepared the escape route better, if I hadn’t fallen. I grit my teeth against the parade of torturous ifs circling in my mind. They won’t help me now. I need to get out of the open, by any means necessary.
That’s when I hear something that makes my blood freeze.
A horrible pattering. Hundreds of hands smacking against the floor. In an instant I’m taken back to the dark corridors of the hospital, the night Julia died.
The power had gone out only a few minutes after the gas rolled in. I’m sure hospitals are supposed to have back-up generators and things like that but they didn’t kick in and I was left in the darkness with the screaming.
I’d managed to get away from Julia by shoving a stretcher in front of the door to her room and running as fast as I could. I’d fled blind through the corridors, trying to find my way out but the place was a maze and it was even worse in the dark.
Julia wasn’t the only one who’d been changed by the fog. The hospital was a nightmare of frenzied monstrosities. There was blood on the walls. Bodies, beaten and mutilated, were scattered around. I tried not to look at them. Some had tooth marks in their skin. Others were in pieces.
Something awful was happening in paediatrics. I made the mistake of glimpsing in through the glass panel in the door. Most of the corridor was taken up by a large mass, a dark slope with a human torso at its peak, its bald head just a few inches below the tiles of the ceiling.
A flash of light from outside, maybe from a passing car, gave me a glimpse of the abomination.
The lower slopes of the thing writhed, glistening. Hundreds of worms coiled and tangled, slowly slithering over and around each other. Not worms, I realised in a moment of appalling understanding, but guts. The intestines of the thing had spilled and multiplied and now they spread out like questing roots from a macabre tree, slick with blood and mucous.
I watched, cemented in place by horror, as the thing dragged the unconscious body of an orderly, loops of serpentine digestive tract wrapped around his legs. As he disappeared into the mass, the thing let out a long, low, damp moan and a shudder of pleasure.
When I heard the pitter-pattering of dozens of agile hands, I knew she’d come for me. There must have been hundreds of people in the hospital when the gas rolled over it and dozens of those must have been changed by it. The chances of her tracking me down, singling me out of a crowd that size, should have been tiny. I knew she’d find me anywa
y. I knew it was me she wanted.
I turned from the glass and saw her charging, spider-like down the corridor towards me.
I hobble as fast as I can onto the bus and fold the doors shut behind me.
Dragging myself into the aisle, I duck below the seats and hold my breath, praying that whatever it is, the thing didn’t see me. I know it’s close; the rapid pat-pat-pat of its feet had been loud before I’d slid behind the bus—hopefully out of sight.
I hold my pistol close, cradling it against my chest. For a moment, I feel like breaking down in tears. The running, the hiding, the constant fear and tension, I just can’t take it anymore. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. I’m supposed to be with Julia, painting a bedroom blue or pink and getting into arguments at 3AM about whose turn it is to comfort the crying baby. Instead I’m in a constant nightmare where every single thing is twisted and cruel. There’s no comfort. There’s no hope.
The thing slams itself against the window of the bus and makes me jump.
Four hands with long fingers press against the glass, a pair either side of an emaciated face. I can’t tell if it was a man or a woman before it changed. Its eyes have melted away, their jelly staining the withered, hollow cheeks below. It opens its mouth slowly and impossibly wide, its jaw unhinging to dangle in front of its throat. From between two rows of healthy looking human teeth, a tongue the size of my hand emerges. It hits the glass with a muffled wet thud. At the centre of this pock-marked muscle, a single eye flicks open. The tiny pupil fixes on me, practically vibrating with hatred.
The tongue retracts, the jaw crunches back into place and the creature begins beating its fists against the windows and screaming bloody murder.
Suddenly, impossibly, I’m filled with the will to live. It’s probably a purely biological reaction to danger. Fight or flight or whatever. Adrenaline pumping into my body. Raw chemistry demanding that I survive this. But it works.
I raise my gun to the monster. As soon as it breaks through, I’ll shoot it in the head and get the hell away from here. There’s no guarantee that will work on this thing; there may not even be a brain inside that skull but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
It’s then that I realise the thing outside the window isn’t my biggest problem.
It’s the gas.
The gas is pouring between the buildings like a tidal wave and it’s finally got me trapped.
Panicking, I forget my gun and fumble in my go-bag for the mask. My frantic heartbeat drowns out the pounding on the windows. I pull the gasmask free from the go-bag’s other contents and the bottom drops out of my stomach.
The filter is broken. Part of it falls away as I lift the mask up. I must have broken it when I fell from the rooftop.
I look back to the windows, now webbed with cracks from the beating they’ve taken. Any second now the creature will smash them and the gas will pour in. There’s nothing I can do.
The gas knows it too. It spreads around the bus slowly, like an octopus around a bottle with a fish trapped inside. I can sense its smug satisfaction. It’s waited all this time for me. It knew I’d never escape.
The glass shatters and the gas oozes its way in, crawling over the seats towards me. I shuffle backwards as far as I can, frantic to keep out of its reach but I know it’s no good. All I can do is take one last breath of non-lethal air and hold it as long as possible.
I can’t see or hear the creature anymore. The unwelcome embrace of the orange fog has become my whole world. My lungs burn as I try to keep it from entering me—another hopeless act of defiance—but I can’t hold my breath forever.
The first deep gasp brings searing pain almost instantly.
My throat slams shut like a trap, preventing me from screaming but the gas is already inside. My bones feel like they’re melting. My skin bubbles as I start to fit, limbs in spasm.
In my last moments, I think of Julia.
I think of the smell of her hair and how it came out in bloody clumps.
I think of the feel of her skin, her fingers around my throat, choking the life out of me.
I think of her big brown eyes. I remember how one of them was knocked from its socket as I caved in her skull with a fire extinguisher.
I have nothing left. Not my memories. Not my own body.
As the pain reaches a point beyond anything I’ve ever known, I feel a hand pushing at my chest.
Pushing from the inside.
Some say Jim Horlock was forged from mankind’s fascination with darkness and that his sole purpose is to terrify and tantalise. They postulate that he is an anthropomorphized entity, bound in human flesh and driven only to spread fear. Others say that is ridiculous and that he’s a 29-year-old writer from Wales, a graduate of the University of Glamorgan, and possibly a little too obsessed with things that go bump in the night. Seriously, he has a Facebook page. You can look it up.
Jim’s stories have appeared in To Hull And Back Anthology 2016, Tales from the Boiler Room and the soon-to-be-released Eclectically Heroic Anthology.
Twitter — @HorlockWarlock
Facebook
HOME AGAIN
By Adrian Ludens
They weren’t even friends.
Adam didn’t know why he’d agreed to ride along with Carson. Three hours of baking in a rust bucket with someone he barely knew had amounted to an interminable road trip indeed. But to hear Carson telling anyone who would listen—and even those who didn’t—Adam and he were all but blood brothers.
“We’ve known each other almost our whole lives,” Carson would invariably explain. “We grew up right across the street from each other!”
Adam wondered how Carson always managed to overlook the fact that he’d moved away at the end of First Grade. And Carson’s family had left town a few years later. They’d reunited by happenstance in another city a decade later, and saw each other once or twice in passing, but Adam didn’t think that qualified as knowing someone almost their whole life. Not that he was spiteful enough to call Carson on it. He’d concluded that the other man didn’t have many friends.
Adam seldom returned to Springdale, though the town was often in his thoughts. He daydreamed about his grandparents and the farm he’d spent so much time exploring. He often wondered what had become of his classmates. He thought about the Frosty Treat, the old rodeo grounds on the edge of town, and the stand of trees behind his parents’ trailer where he’d played with his diecast cars.
Carson brought up the idea of a road trip to their hometown via messages on Facebook. He badgered and bullied Adam until he finally relented, telling Carson he’d pay for half of the gas and buy dinner at Norm’s Bar as long as Carson did all the driving.
They left at 7:00 A.M. on a Saturday and expected to arrive at noon.
And they weren’t even friends.
Stop talking. Stop talking! STOP TALKING!
Carson didn’t receive Adam’s mental transmissions. Instead, he prattled on, reciting a constant litany of memories and anecdotes about Springdale. Any time Adam tried to introduce a new topic Carson ignored him.
“I remember riding our bikes over to the new water tower and having races around it. Did you ever race your bike around the water tower? Or were you too poor to have one? A bike, I mean.” Carson turned his florid face toward Adam, as if eye contact would somehow help him hear clearly. “I’d always stop at Casey’s for a Slushy on the way back. Remember Casey’s? Had the plastic red sign made to look like bricks? It was right across from CR, the factory that went out of business. Did you ever—?”
“Yeah, yeah! Of course.” Adam didn’t even know what he had agreed with, but Carson guffawed and slapped the dash with one meaty hand.
“I figured! We coulda hung out more but you were too much of a mama’s boy!”
Adam closed his eyes against the sun’s glare shining furiously off the hood of Carson’s old compact. He settled back, pretending to doze.
A pterodactyl screech of metal wiped all thought f
rom Adam’s brain and for a painful moment, it seemed as if his stomach and lungs had forcibly interchanged themselves within his body.
He jolted against his seat belt—
“. . . awake?”
Adam took stock of himself and finding no apparent injuries heaved a sigh of relief. “What happened?”
“You were asleep, slacker.” Carson punched his shoulder and then pointed a stubby finger at the windshield. “Look at that.”
Carson had parked his car in front of a boxy two-story house. The exterior was a repulsive color Adam thought of as guacamole green. Weeds had overtaken the lawn. A gravel-scarred plastic Big Wheel sat on the driveway.
“My God! It looks just like I remember it.” Carson threw open his car door and began to squirm from behind the wheel. “It hasn’t changed at all!”
Adam grunted a vague assent and exited the vehicle. He gazed up at Carson’s childhood home. Behind him, he knew, would be the Frosty Treat, now vacant and used for storage. He wanted to find the lot where he’d once lived in a mobile home with his folks, but for now his companion was dictating their actions. He shoved his hands in his pockets and shuffled along behind Carson, who bounded to the front door of his childhood dwelling with agility Adam hadn’t expected.
“Door’s open,” Carson announced. He leaned into the darkness and called, “Hello? Anybody home?”
Adam stood back, enjoying the nostalgic smell of burning corncobs. He thought that practice had been outlawed in recent years, but realized people in small towns often did as they chose. A breeze caressed his skin as he watched an old man atop a riding mower navigate around a flowerbed in the yard next door. Man and machine wavered in the heat but Adam shivered for a reason he couldn’t pinpoint.
He returned his attention to the stoop but his eyes found only a rectangle of darkness. Had Carson gone into the house? “Hey, Carson.”
Though he hadn’t shouted his companion’s name Adam felt as if he had. Then he realized what had been bothering him, what had elicited the shiver.
Hinnom Magazine Issue 003 Page 4