by Steve Wands
The hands claw at your leg. You feel cold, moist fingers wrap around your ankle.
This isn’t the worst part.
The air is ruptured by a blast, and the thing’s head explodes into every direction. Its lifeless body falls across your legs, finally inert, and you see the living man behind it lower his rifle. The three remaining shufflers turn towards the sound and are greeted by the living man’s friends, each with a weapon of their own. A baseball bat and a hatchet each resonate with a dull “thud,” and two more of the creatures fall, bathing you in tepid, congealed blood and half-rotten brain matter. The last creature moans, not comprehending, even as an axe embeds itself in its shoulder. A second chop and the thing’s head is completely separated from its body. It continues to chatter for a few moments until the bat cracks it open. You breath, realizing only now that you had stopped.
“Please,” you whisper. “Please.”
The men with the weapons pass damp towels, wiping themselves clean of putrid fluids and gore. Most of them refuse to meet your pleading eyes. Those that do see you do so with a look of pity.
“Here,” says the one with the rifle. He unzips the pack on his back and withdraws a bottle of water and a tin of potted meat, both of which he tosses to you. Too hungry to ignore it, you grab the tin and pop it open, ignoring the gel at the top of the can and devouring the meat beneath. The one with the rifle nods. “That’s it. Eat up. Just like fishing, right boys?
“Live is best.”
He turns his back to you, and his friends join him. As they walk away, the tin of meat tumbles from your hand into the dirt and you begin crawling after them, shouting, pleading, and finally cursing them. None of them spares you so much as a glance backward, and not even when you reach the end of your chain again and shout at the pinch about your ankle. Your dirt-caked fingers reach out for them, ending just at the lip of the circle in the ground. The living continue their walk away, vanishing into the shadows, while the bodies of the dead lie in your circle, not moving unless you again find the strength to heave them away.
This. This is the worst part.
*
Eight O’Clock Downstairs
By Derek M. Koch
7:43pm.
“Their kind is predictable, you see,” Todd said, pulling the black windbreaker’s zipper up to his neck. “They don’t deviate from their patterns. They don’t create new routines.” He pulled the hood over his wiry red hair and pulled its strings tight, sealing most of his head in a severe vinyl cocoon.
Cary listened and nodded, but his eyes were on the baseball bat he tightly held in his hands. His heart pounded as he listened to his older brother preach; his fingers gripped the crisp, smooth wood of the bat; his blood pulsed through his tightened knuckles and tensed fingertips.
Todd produced a pair of cracked leather gloves from the windbreaker’s pockets and slid them over his veined and wrinkled hands. “They won’t expect an interruption. They never plan for one.” The right glove’s fingers were missing, cut away so that Todd could easily touch the trigger of his well-oiled 9mm. He took the gun from the dining room table and checked the magazine. “They should be starting in fifteen minutes.”
Cary finally looked up. “Why don’t I get a gun?”
“You don’t need one. All you need to do is keep them from leaving the apartment, and for that, you only need that bat.” Todd slid the gun into a pocket and moved to the kitchen sink. Pulling a glass from the cupboard, he continued. “Don’t worry. The bat was blessed last month. On Easter.”
“Blessed. That’s good.” Cary rested the bat over his shoulder. His heart still pounded and he anxious sweat edged across his brow. After his brother filled his cup from the sink, Cary prepared his own glass of water and gulped it down in hungry swallows.
“Easy, Little Brother. Don’t choke before this business.” Todd clapped Cary on the bat-less shoulder. “We’ll drink more than water when this is finished.”
Cary nodded and set the glass down. “Okay,” he said, and followed Todd to the front door.
“Ten minutes now. We have just enough time to get downstairs.” The older sibling turned to face the younger. “Are you ready for this?”
Cary nodded.
“Are you sure? This is your first time, so if you’re not ready, I can do this alone.”
Cary shook his head. “No.”
“You just got of jail.” Todd hesitated. “I can do this on my own.”
“No, I’m good.” Cary brought the head of the bat down to his palm. “I’m ready.”
“Good.”
With that, Todd smiled and turned to leave so he and his brother could kill the cultists living in the downstairs apartment.
8:09pm.
Cary ran back to his brother’s apartment, clanging up the metal stairs. The baseball bat almost slipped from his hands as he yanked the door open.
8:22pm.
Cary finished throwing up in the sparse bathroom and pushed himself up from the toilet. He moved to the sink and jerked on the cold water. Cupping it to his face, the water splashed across his eyes and cheeks, but brought him little comfort.
8:30pm
Cary did his job well. After Todd kicked open the downstairs neighbors’ door and rushed into the unsuspecting living room, Cary took position in the open doorway. He cradled his bat, twitching but keeping his place. His brother instructed him to keep anyone from leaving, and that was what he was going to do.
Because the short hallway leading from the doorway yanked to the right, passing a bathroom before emptying into the living room, Cary could see little of what happened.
But he could hear. Todd screamed a lot, and his voice was drowned out by the gunshots. The people in the apartment screamed, too, but their voices (he could make out at least three different cultists’ voices) were more shocked and sad whereas Todd’s voice was loud and angry. The shots rang down the hallway, and when a middle-aged woman burst into view, her shoulder a bloody mess of fabric and flesh, Cary stood strong and barred her way. She slapped at his chest, but he pushed her back, knocking her across the throat with the length of the bat.
Todd appeared behind her and took her by the collar. His wild eyes flitted back and forth as he spun her around and pushed her into the living room and out of Cary’s view. The muzzle flash splashed over Todd’s face, highlighting the wicked grin stretched across his thin lips. Todd stepped out of view then, and more gunshots sounded.
Then all was quiet.
Cary waited for his brother for five minutes before running back upstairs alone.
8:41pm
Cary still waited for Todd. First, he paced around the small apartment, circling through the kitchen, living room and the short hallway connecting the two. When Todd didn’t let himself in through the locked front door (he assumed his brother would have a key to his own apartment), Cary laid down on the couch in the one-bedroom apartment.
9:22pm
The distant sound of police sirens jerked Cary awake. It was a sound he knew too well; it was one of the last sounds he heard before he was arrested seven months ago and locked away from the world and his brother. The bat lay on the floor next to the couch; Cary scooped it up and rushed to the door to listen.
The sirens were getting closer. Cary gripped the bat tighter, and his heart pounded faster.
9:24pm
When the sirens blared from the parking lot outside, Cary checked the deadbolt. Satisfied it was locked, he took his bat and ran to the only bedroom in the apartment.
Todd never let Cary into his bedroom. The one time Todd thought Cary had been snooping around while he was getting take-out, his brother beat him bad enough that he had to wear long-sleeved shirts for the rest of the month while the bruises faded. Todd didn’t believe Cary, despite his whining and pleading. He had never come into his brother’s room before. He never wanted to.
The room smelled.
Even now, with the police outside and pounding on the downstairs neighbor’s door, Car
y hesitated before reaching for the bedroom’s doorknob.
The rotten smell seeped through the small gap between the door and the floor, and rose like sick smoke to Cary’s nose. He flinched, like he flinched when Todd hit his shoulder with the spaghetti pot, but the police were outside, and Todd wasn’t here to protect him.
They would find Todd downstairs. Why hadn’t he come upstairs yet?
Cary hoped Todd wouldn’t catch him hiding in his bedroom.
He forced himself to twist the doorknob and push the door open.
9:28pm
Cary didn’t know Todd had a pet guinea pig, and from the looks of it, Todd may have forgotten about it, too. Its corpse, with its crusty, matted calico fur and oozing face, curled in a heap in one corner of its dirty and greasy glass aquarium. Cary avoided looking at it and started for the bed. The dirty sheets smelled like old grease, and suddenly Cary was grateful to have a much cleaner couch to sleep on while staying at his brother’s apartment
A handful of dirty pictures spilled from beneath a sagging pillow. Still worried his brother might catch him in his room, Cary wanted to leave, but the subject of the photographs caught his eye.
It was the woman who tried to get past him downstairs. From the looks of the photos, it didn’t look like she knew she was being photographed. Cary didn’t pick them up, but fanned them across the mattress. In some of the pictures, the woman was alone, jogging, shopping, taking out the trash. In two of them, it looked like Todd was outside the downstairs neighbors’ apartment window, taking pictures of the woman while she drank from a coffee mug or cooked something in her kitchen (which looked much cleaner than Todd’s). One of the pictures showed the woman holding hands with a man; black Magic Marker streaks scratching out the man’s face.
Cary turned to leave the room as quickly as he could, and noticed the shopping bag balled up on the floor. It was from the sporting goods store at the mall, and he picked it up and took it with him as he left.
9:32pm
Todd bought the bat four days ago, which was two days before he picked Cary up from jail. Cary stared at the receipt and cried as he listened to the police coming upstairs to Todd’s apartment.
*
On The Porch
By Matt R. Jones
When Gus sat down on the back porch next to me, I was three-fifths of the way through a bottle of Jack Daniels, and was, as a song once put it, comfortably numb. I gave him a glance and a nod, barely taking my eyes off the southern sky.
“Ain’t’cha surprised to see me?” he asked, sounding mildly offended.
I took a swig of the whiskey and wiped my mouth off with the back of my hand. I’d downed so much by now that I barely felt it burn on the way down. “After everything I’ve seen tonight, ain’t much going to surprise me, old pal,” I replied, handing the bottle to Gus out of habit.
“Thanks.” He tipped the bottle back and a few seconds later I heard the whiskey splashing onto the concrete.
“Now what’d you go and do that—“ I started to ask, turning towards Gus in annoyance. But after I’d gotten a good look at him, I saw that he hadn’t intentionally spilled the whiskey; he simply couldn’t help it in his current state. “Oh. Sorry.”
“S’okay. Got enough down to make it worth my while,” he said, holding the bottle out to me.
“No, you can keep it. It’s all right.”
“Suit yourself.” He tilted the bottle back again, and the scent of whiskey filled the warm night air as the amber liquid spilled all over Gus and the porch. He tossed the empty bottle into the overgrown grass of my backyard. “Ah, that hits the spot.”
“So,” I slowly said, grateful for the dullness the whiskey had brought to my senses. “What…brings you here?”
Gus snorted. “You probably wouldn’t understand.”
I pointed towards the southern sky, where strange lights flickered and swirled through the air like a madman’s aurora borealis, high above the damnable factory. “It has something to do with that, doesn’t it?”
He made an approving grunt. “Not bad. That’s part of it.” I could hear the sound of sirens howling in the distance, along with the occasional scream and muted explosion.
“The factories, too,” I murmured. “The ones the government built, after the Second Depression. It was all planned out years ago.”
“Hey, you’re a sharp one, y’know that?” Gus gave me a clap on the shoulder, just like he always had through the long years of our friendship, up until his death last year, when he’d been killed while at work in the local factory. His mutilated face still bore the marks of the horrible accident that had claimed his life. Or his old one, at least.
“Yeah. I guess.” I didn’t say anything about the kid that had warned me about all of this a few days ago, when he and his family and friends had skipped town in search of someplace safer. I fervently wished I’d gone with them.
Gus watched the sky with me as the night’s madness grew closer and more frantic. Finally, he asked, “Well … you about ready?”
I closed my eyes for a few moments. “This is the end, isn’t it?”
“Pretty much,” Gus replied. Then he put his hand on my shoulder again, gently this time, as his voice softened. “Look, I’ll make it quick, okay? For old times’ sake.”
“Thanks,” I whispered.
“No problem.”
He was true to his word. Unfortunately, he hadn’t told me what came after I died.
*
A World Most Broken
By Steve Wands
Standing in the living room for what could easily be the hundredth time today, Grady stared at his family. He waived a hand in front of his sister’s unblinking eyes, shook his father’s broad, sagging shoulders and screamed into his mother’s face. They all seemed frozen in time, watching the television—but the television was made of some strange substance and displayed jittery images of what was just outside the bay window, like a cheap security monitor. His father’s mouth was wide open and his hand was stuck midway from a bowl of popcorn to his gaping maw. Inside his mouth, dripping from his gums, was rain. Inside his mouth was grey and cloudy and raining, but the rain didn’t accumulate and pour out; it was a continuous rain, as if his mouth were a window to a storm. His mother’s skin color continually and slowly changed from color to color–the creepiest being pale yellow. He noticed nothing odd about his sister other than that she hadn’t moved in days, at least he thought it had been days.
Grady thought he had lost his mind. He had walked all over town and even attempted to drive on one occasion, but the world wasn’t making any sense and when he attempted to start his car it only made odd noises—noises that no car had ever made. He thought he was dreaming but he couldn’t figure out a way to test that theory. He couldn’t wake himself up and he hadn’t been able to sleep. He hadn’t seen anyone, aside from himself, that appeared normal or even functioning.
On his initial venture outside his family’s home, he noticed a helicopter stuck in the air with the propeller blades still spinning. They were spinning slowly but moving nonetheless, this would be typical of all things he came across with varying degrees of additional oddities. The fire hydrant down the block, for instance, had become transparent, and the water inside was red. It looked more like blood than water. A couple walking their dog was stuck in mid motion to the sidewalk. The dog’s fur was still soft and would move if you were to pet it. The sky seemed to be moving, though night hadn’t fallen since the world broke.
Grady peeked through his neighbors’ windows; they were all frozen in time, some of them caught with their pants down, some in mid argument. The whole scene was mind-blowing and Grady subjected himself to it over and over in hopes to find something that made sense. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular really, just anything would do. He tried the phone, to no avail, and even picked it up when it rang.
He could hear howling outside in the distance, long drawn out howls, unnatural howls—more like sirens. The sky grew d
arker. Grady wondered if the sun was going to set—it had been a long time since he remembered seeing night. The last night he remembered was before the world had gone all mad. He went out for another walk. He walked further than he had done previously. His early ventures had been accompanied by feelings of anxiety and timidity, but now his feelings were more of curiosity and bewilderment. The things he passed continued to blow his mind; for instance, he passed by a car accident. The car, a mid-sized sedan, had crumpled into a much larger SUV. The vehicles were in the middle of spinning off each other, fragments of the sedan’s windshield had broken off and clung to the air. The windshield itself had spider-web like cracks as a result of a young man’s head smashing into it. The man’s forehead had the early marks of lacerations and the tender redness of torn flesh developing. His face was squeezed into a multi-layered expression that looked as if he were shitting out a cactus. The sedan was otherwise empty but the SUV was full; a mother behind the wheel, the second row had two young boys and a baby girl—their expressions were of total fear. The mother’s face had a mix of concentration and terror. The baby girl was oblivious. Her open mouth seemed stuck in a laugh. She had two teeth starting to pierce her gums.
Even more disturbing than that were the gaps—pieces of the earth or sky, buildings, people, whatever, that were missing or replaced by some other sort of material or object. There was a section missing from the road—no debris, just a big gaping hole that looked like it had no end. From what Grady could put together there were no sounds either permitted or emitted. There were smaller instances of the gaps, too. Like his father’s mouthful of perpetual rain, or where the Pick Quick convenience store had some of its brick facade made of material that appeared to be flesh. He imagined those bricks being part of someone’s new anatomy, someone’s frozen, and useless, anatomy.