Dark: A Horror Anthology

by Steve Wands

  Jim watched from the corner of the alley, wondering if Trevor had done similar things to his victims. He looked like he was enjoying it too – he’d probably enjoying doing those same things to Sara, right before he wrapped her in a plastic bag.

  Sara looked in the opposite direction, squinting to make sure nothing moved. She didn’t want to see what Trevor was doing – the wet crunches she heard were more than enough for her.

  But the sounds didn’t last much longer as Trevor made short work of the third corpse. He bent down and ripped a sleeve off the body at his feet and used it to clean the gore from his gun. Discarding it, Trevor wiped the sweat off his brow and gave a thumbs-up to Jim.

  Jim faked a smile and awkwardly returned the thumbs-up. Only then did he glance around to make sure nothing else stalked them. Sara turned and started towards Trevor, and Jim followed.

  They were one block from the store now – and no other walking dead in sight. Bodies were scattered throughout the streets and alleys, on porches and in cars. They rounded the corner into the parking lot of the store, slowing in case anything lurked there – but it was bare. Debris fluttered across the lot; only two cars sat in the farthest row out.

  Lights were still on inside; lottery signs lit up the front window. Trevor leaned against one of the cars, catching his breath and surveying the area as Sara and Jim caught up with him.

  “We each get a shopping cart,” he puffed. “We get as much as we can. Hell, if the power’s still on, then the freezers and coolers are still on…there might be some meat and stuff like that’s still good.”

  They nodded, all looking around in fear of being silently assaulted.

  “Let’s just sit tight a few minutes,” Jim said, clutching Sara’s arm. “See if anything’s moving around in there.”

  Trevor snorted. There could be a hundred of them packed in back of the store as far as they knew. But he decided not to question Jim. He noticed a big difference in the way Jim acted around him ever since he learned about Trevor’s past. He obviously didn’t trust Trevor anymore. But they had to work together to survive, which meant Trevor would have to make an effort to be as cooperative as possible.

  He still wrestled with why God had led him to Jim and Sara – and Tammy. Especially after everything that had happened in the weeks before he ran into them – but he didn’t want to think about any of that. All he knew is that God had a purpose in it all – something…anything.

  A few minutes passed and Trevor had enough. They were accomplishing nothing and wasting daylight.

  “It’s clear,” he said. “Let’s roll.”

  He looked at Jim before he moved. Sara was ready to go too, gripping her gun with both hands. She looked at her father and nodded.

  “All right,” Jim said, frowning.

  Sara led them again. Jim wanted to catch her and pull her behind him, but held back – she needed to do this. Their footsteps echoed loudly through the streets of Walker even though they tried to move silently.

  At the front doors, Sara stepped on the rubber pad. The doors whooshed open. Jim and Trevor followed her inside, and they all paused just inside. Everything was still lighted – the displays, the lottery booth, the soda machines – as if nothing had ever happened.

  The shopping carts were lined up by the door, and Trevor didn’t wait for the others – he grabbed a cart and darted to the nearest aisle. Sara did the same. Jim was more cautious, watching Sara closely and trying to keep up with her. By the time he had his cart, Sara and Trevor were on opposite sides of the store.

  Jim went for the center aisle, loading his cart with crackers and cookies and chips and pretzels. The cart filled up quickly, and he ran to the back of the store to see if any of the meat or dairy was still good.

  The scream pierced the air and terrified him – he was hoping he’d never hear it. Abandoning his cart, he sprinted in Sara’s direction. Rounding the end of the aisle, he wailed as he saw a man in an apron take bites of flesh out of Sara’s shoulder. Blood spurted onto the walls, the shelves, and the floor; Jim tackled the man at full speed, ripping him off of Sara and knocking over a peanut butter display.

  Jim was on top of him. The man’s right eye was gone, and his face was covered with blood. Bits of blood-soaked skin and muscle were still in the man’s mouth. Jim punched him in the face.

  He heard Trevor’s footsteps. Spinning around, he saw Trevor running to Sara’s still body. Jim kicked free of the biting man and raced to Sara, shoving Trevor aside.

  “Get away from her!” he yelled. The puddle of blood around her was enormous and growing. “Sara!” Jim wailed, hugging her limp body to him.

  “She’s dead,” Trevor said.

  “Shut the hell up!” Jim screamed, hugging Sara tighter.

  “If you’re not careful, she’ll -” Trevor started, but held his tongue. He reached down for Jim’s shoulder to pull him away from Sara’s dead body. She could come back at any time, and wouldn’t care whether it was her father or not – she would be hungry.

  As Trevor’s hand was touched Jim’s shirt, Sara’s eyes snapped open. Trevor couldn’t react fast enough – Sara grabbed his hand and bit off the first two fingers.

  Blood sprayed onto Jim’s face. Screaming, Trevor pushed away from them and clutched his hand tightly to his chest. The blood kept spurting.

  Jim stood up, watching in horror as Sara spat out the severed fingers and reached for him. He stumbled backwards, then heard a shotgun blast. The man who had attacked Sara flew back across the floor, his arm blown off by Trevor’s unsteady shot.

  “Run!” Trevor screamed, struggling to reload.

  Jim couldn’t move. Sara’s hand clutched his calf and squeezed, and he sprang back in terror. “Sara,” he breathed as she came for him, bloody mouth open.

  Her head exploded with another shotgun blast. Jim avoided most of the splatter, gasping at the mess that used to be his beautiful daughter.

  “You son of a -” Jim roared, turning to face Trevor just as he spun the shotgun around toward his own face.

  “Get food and get out,” Trevor said peacefully, and pulled the trigger.

  *

  The Law

  By Derek M. Koch

  Rain collected in the divots of Marc Temple’s black leather jacket. His dark hair hung in streaks across his forehead and into his vision as his tight eyes dared the body before him to rise. For good measure, his trigger finger flexed and another bullet lost itself in the rotting corpse’s head.

  The rain muffled the sound of the gunshot as well as the meager parking lot area lights’ illumination. Marc let the muzzle of the Baretta cool before tucking it underneath his jacket and into the back of his jeans. His eyes drifted from the dead thing to the parking lot itself. He moved the hair out of his face and scanned the area. Three cars. One his. One truck. Two dumpsters. A few shopping carts. No movement. The rain blanketed the shopping center’s lot. Still no movement.

  Marc scraped his car keys off the wet asphalt and unlocked his car door. He tried to brush the collecting water off his sleeves and shoulders before sliding inside; his wet shoes squished against the floorboards. Starting the engine first, Marc retrieved his cell phone from the glovebox. The cell’s screen was flashing, indicating a new voicemail.

  Not waiting long enough to let the engine warm up, Marc turned on the heat anyway and brought the phone to his ear. He let his eyes drift across the parking lot through the rain-riverred windshield while he listened to the message.

  “I know you told me not to call you once you started,” it began. Marc recognized the nasal sound of the man’s voice immediately. “But I wanted to tell you something important.”

  Marc’s jaw shifted as he ground his teeth. “I know you told me I shouldn’t have,” the voice continued, “but I called the police. I didn’t know – ”

  Marc dropped the cell phone on the passenger seat and turned on his headlights. Foggy beams of light slammed the dumpsters several feet in front of his car. Marc turned his
head and surveyed the parking lot. The same truck. The same shopping carts. Still no movement. The two other cars…

  Marc pushed the gear shift and slowly backed out of the parking space. He turned the steering wheel, sweeping the blurred streaks of light across the lot. He drifted as the haloed headlights came across one of the cars. Through the wet darkness, he could make out details he missed before – a broken window, jagged scraps of torn fabric draped across the car door, the rain mixing with something darker, trailing away from the car.

  And a dashboard police light hanging across the back of the driver’s seat.

  He reached behind, retrieved his Baretta and checked the ammunition – half a clip. Marc punched off the phone before shifting the car back into, “Park,” and getting out.

  He left the car door open as he inched his way toward the police car. The rain had let up just slightly. Marc moved toward the car alongside one of the fuzzy bright shafts of car headlight, his outstretched arm and gun carving a slice of shadow. He could see even more detail now – red mixed with the rain around the police car. Speckles of glass shimmered like tiny red rubies in the muted light of the parking lot. And blood.

  Marc shook his head. He had been hired to take care of two of these things. Animated corpses, zombies, undead, whatever the client wanted to call them – he was paid good money to deal with two of them. Two. He put one down in the alley on the other side of the closed grocery store. That one was easy; it had no idea it was being hunted. The second one took Marc Temple by surprise. Attacking from underneath his car and moving faster than Marc would have liked, it tried to knock his gun from his hand, but only succeeded in making him drop his keys before catching the first of two bullets in the brain.

  The brain was the key. For whatever reason, the zombie movies had it right. Those in Marc’s profession had even jokingly named it, “Romero’s Law,” after the director who made a number of the zombie films.

  Marc watched for movement, but saw none. No more than a few feet away from the police car, he stopped his approach and started to circle the vehicle, keeping a slight distance between himself and anywhere one of those things could be hiding.

  A thump. A scrape. Marc peered into the car, but saw nothing. The thumping noise again. The sound wasn’t coming from inside the car. The headlights of his own car were trying to reach him, but the moisture in the air and the police vehicle blocked them. The lights were shining directly at him, and that’s where the sound came from.

  With one hand, he brushed his hair out of his face, and with the other, he raised the gun. From the direction of his own car, another scraping sound, like wet wood on metal, sifted through the rain. Keeping the police car between himself and the source of the noise, Marc watched more intently, and saw movement.

  It wasn’t his car, but the dumpsters further behind it. Shadows gulped the light around them, and Marc could barely make out the figure – the partial figure – trying to pull itself out of the rusty green metal box.

  Marc moved quickly to his own car and reached underneath the driver’s seat. He pulled a flashlight and shot the beam at the dumpster. One half-hand had broken itself on the lip of the dumpster and the other hand had managed to wrap its rotten fingers around its edge. The top of the thing’s head bobbed up-and-down as it tried to pull its wet, worm-eaten weight out of the dumpster.

  Using the flashlight to mark his target, Marc took aim and waited for the head to raise high enough for him to get a good shot. It would only take one, but if there was an officer down, someone would eventually come looking for the missing policeman and he didn’t want to be here when they came around. He had to do this quick and get out of this town, preferably tonight.

  The flashlight’s beam caught the gleaming near-triangle of skull white surrounded by a scabbed scalp and runny clumps of hair. Muddy eyes that had fallen deep into the thing’s skull rolled loose as it finally brought its face to bear. Its features were slack and sanded away by decay. An ear – its left – hung limp, barely attached and resting on its shoulder.

  Marc didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger and the corpse’s head burst into wet confetti.

  As the loose body fell back into the confines of the dumpster, Marc heard more. He kept his flashlight and gun raised as he slowly advanced, straining his ears, ever listening for the inevitable sounds of police sirens. Through the rain, he heard it again. It wasn’t the expected sirens.

  What he heard instead was a groan. Getting louder. Human? Coming from the dumpster.

  Marc quickened his approach, his flashlight and gun barrel leading his eyes. He shot the flashlight beam into the dumpster, skimming over wet trash and garbage and two bodies. One was the creature he had already dispatched. The other was much more intact.

  But not much. Half of his shirt had been torn, revealing equally torn and gnawed flesh beneath. Two circular chunks had been chewed away from the pale man’s body – one from his neck and one from his arm. The flashlight reflected off the gold badge attached to the man’s bloody belt. When Marc moved the light to the man’s face, the light disappeared in another bite wound across the man’s left cheek. The light pooled in his shocked pale brown eyes. He squinted and slowly moved his uninjured arm to block the light from his face.

  Marc cast a quick look around, saw no further movement, and lowered his Baretta. “Can you stand?”

  A shiver ran through the officer’s body. “Maybe,” slipped from his lips as he struggled to put his weight underneath him.

  Marc took a few steps back. These walking dead didn’t normally speak, but he didn’t want to take any chances. He kept a finger wrapped around the trigger of his gun and watched as the police man – a plain clothes officer – slumped over the edge of the dumpster and worked to put his feet solidly beneath him on the wet asphalt. His wounds were fresh. The rain washed a sheet of blood across his pallid face.

  “You have a license for that weapon?” The man’s voice wobbled as much as his legs. An errant hand reached to the bite mark on his cheek.

  Marc watched the policeman carefully. His gun was lowered, but he kept his finger arced around the trigger nonetheless. “How long?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “How long since you were bitten?”

  “I don’t…” His hand slumped to his side. “What time is it now?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You have a gun?”

  “I did. I dropped it.” He looked to the dumpster. “In there.” He started to turn toward it.

  The Beretta raised a few inches. “Leave it. You’re going to need to listen to me, and I’m tired of getting rained on. Your car. Come on.”

  The officer hesitated until Marc raised the Beretta a few inches more. His hand trailing back to his chewed cheek, he slowly started back toward the police car. Marc glanced around the parking lot before following, watching, listening for more.

  Rain found its way through the car’s broken driver’s side window, soaking the seat pink. The headrest had been torn off, and spongy stuffing oozed through the rips and tears in the seat itself. The wounded policeman slumped as Marc slid into the dryer passenger’s seat. He kept the gun on the man as he pulled the door closed.

  “I’m going to tell you some things, and I need you listen. To really listen. I don’t want to hear, ‘That’s impossible,’ or, ‘You’re crazy.’”

  The policeman nodded.

  “And I really don’t want to hear, ‘Dead things don’t attack people.’”

  The policeman blinked.

  Marc inhaled. “I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version as we…” What was left of the man’s collar had finally reached its saturation point and now blood from the man’s neck wound was starting to drip down his chest. “You don’t have much time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re going to die. Soon.”

  “So take me to a hospital. Please…”

  Marc shook his head. “There’s nothing that can be done. And even if there was…” He gestu
red the Beretta at the man’s neck. “I couldn’t get you there in time. Did you call for back-up?”

  “What?”

  “Before you came here. Did you call for back-up?”

  The man hesitated. Marc’s eyes tensed, urging for an answer.

  “No. I should have, but…No. I didn’t. Artie called me on my way home, so I just thought I’d swing by.”

  Arthur Letzler was the name of the client.

  Marc cast another survey around the parking lot. Still nothing. Back to the policeman.

  “Family?”

  “No. An older brother in Tulsa, but…no…no one.” His voice was starting to waver. “I’m cold.”

  “Start the car and turn on the heat.”

  The police car’s heater rattled lukewarm air at first, but slowly started warming.

  “I’m going to die?”

  “Yes. If it makes you feel any better, it’s not your fault. If you’re the kind of person that needs to blame others, blame Letzler. He had no business calling you after he hired me.”

  “Hired you?”

  Marc chose his next words carefully. “I handle ‘special eliminations.’ I’m an exterminator.”

  “The thing in the dumpster?”

  “Right. Letzler only hired me for two, but it looks like a third got you. Did you see any more?”

  The policeman shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “When they bite you, you die. It might not happen right away, depending on the severity of the bite, but you will.” He paused. “What’s worse is that after you die, you eventually come back as one of them.”

  “Like in the movies?”

  “Just about.”

  The policeman sighed. Over that sigh, the sound of the car engine and heater, Marc thought he heard something else. Another gasp?

  “What are you going to do…to me?”

  The rain had started to come down hard again. Rain drops on the car’s roof peppered the warming air with soft thuds. It was getting harder to hear much more than the car and the officer’s own wet breathing.

  “I haven’t decided – ”