Freezer: The Complete Horror Series

by J. Joseph Wright

  “Fuck!” she threw the gun in the van. Then she ordered us to fucking get the fuck in. She had to catch that son of a bitch. So we busted ass and piled in just as Mom peeled out in the dirt.

  After that, the chase was on. Only, it wasn’t much of a chase. That Honda was no match for the Harley, especially on such rough terrain. We bounced around something fierce. And the freezer, it about busted through the roof every time we caught air. The whole time Mom was beating the shit out of her vehicle, the biker kept putting distance between us, until his taillights became little dots in the night. Then, they disappeared.

  I thought Mom would go ballistic at that point. Instead, she slowed way down, evened her breath, and proceeded to take some wet wipes from her glove compartment and give herself a thorough cleansing. She told us to do the same, and we did, wiping off our faces, our hands, even our stained clothes. We did our best to clean up as she drove, calmly and coolly, until she hit the highway. There she stopped and studied both directions intently. She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath and looked like she was summoning some inner voice, listening, letting it guide her. She even rolled down the window and smelled the night air. It was quiet and still on that old stretch of road, but somehow she got a sense, or a feeling, or a message from some other place. Whatever the case, she opened her eyes again, and became a determined machine once more, fully confident of which way she should go. Right. On the desolate, lonely highway, she went right.

  And her decision was correct. To my amazement, and to the clear astonishment of Shannon and Brent, we soon came upon a twinkling splash of colorful light, twirling in the horizon just beyond our sight. Brent knew what it was immediately.

  “The cops!” he shouted, and Mom told him curtly to shut his mouth. She didn’t waver. She didn’t slow down. It was straight ahead sailing, and nothing would hold her back. The closer we got to the flashing lights, the more evident it was that Brent had been correct. It was a cop. A lone State Police cruiser on the side of the road. It didn’t take long to see what he was doing. He had someone pulled over. A motorcycle.

  “Dammit!” Mom slammed the steering wheel when it was more than obvious who it was. The Suicide King. He’d made it to the police. Now it was over. I was sure of it. The biker probably told the cop the entire story, and there was already a statewide APB out for a blue Honda with a homicidal maniac soccer mom at the wheel. I couldn’t believe Mom kept driving, right past the trooper. She growled at us to stay calm. No sudden movements, and no screaming for help. Brent sobbed. Shannon glared. I slumped in the seat and tried to make it look like I was asleep while still holding my head at just the right angle to get a good look. I was stunned at what I saw, and Brent took the words out of my mouth.

  “That’s Ratchet!” he shouted. We went by kind of fast, and I didn’t see much, but I did catch Ratchet’s twitching, convulsing face. It was unmistakable. He gestured wildly with his arms, most likely engaged in a heated retelling of the terrible events. From what I glimpsed of the cop’s surly face, I could tell he didn’t believe a word Ratchet had to say. When Ratchet looked up and saw us pass, he went ballistic. I couldn’t tell what he was saying, and probably, because of his speech impediment, neither could the cop. But he made it plain and clear the source of his extreme distress came from the minivan going by them at that moment. Even though he seemed only mildly interested in what the little jittery man had to tell him, the cop turned and cased us with a cagey stare, watching with that look only a cop can give.

  I sat up a bit and kept an eye on that officer in the mirror, half expecting him to jump in his cruiser and give chase. I’d seen that look before. Cops give you that look just before they’re about to give you shit. But this guy didn’t move. He just stood there while Ratchet went crazy. Mom kept driving. The two men on the roadside got smaller and smaller in the mirror. Soon all I saw were the flashing lights. Then I didn’t even see them anymore. I shuddered in disbelief, and wasn’t too sure if this was good or bad, Mom rescuing us from the Suicide Kings. Part of me knew the truth. It wasn’t good. And later, I came to wish those bikers had shot us and ended it right then. That would have been heaven compared to what happened next.

  7.

  The freeway seemed endless, and so did the high desert. A few cars went by in that desolate stretch of Eastern Oregon. Somewhere along the line we’d crossed the state line, traversing the Blue Mountains in a long, steady climb. My grogginess was matched only by the aching rumble in my stomach, preventing me from dozing off. I was starved, no way around it. Even in the midst of such carnage, even surrounded by blood and body parts, my teenage appetite took on a life of its own, and informed me under no uncertain terms it meant to be fed. I felt like that damn freezer. Insatiable.

  It got so bad that I forgot all about the guts and the blood and the extreme disgust that I’d just experienced. It was a drive for survival, so primal and deep-seated I became mere slave to its influence. So much so, that my logical mind became irrelevant. My stomach became my master.

  “Mom,” I muttered at first. She pretended not to hear, so I spoke up. “Mom!” and she let her eyes travel to where I was seated. Then they wandered back to the road. “Mom, I’m hungry.”

  “Me too,” Brent wagged his tongue and held his midsection.

  “Fucking starving,” Shannon stared out the window.

  At that, Mom hit the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road.

  “Oh, my,” her gigantic smile took me back to the good old days—actually it was just last week—when she was a normal mom. Loving. Kind. Protecting. Cared about kids. “What have I been thinking?” she unstrapped her seatbelt and popped open the door. “Growing children need food, and lots of it, don’t they?” she rushed around and ripped into the back of the van. My first reaction—elation at her finally becoming normal again—was dashed to the rocks at what she did next. With the large, sharp filet knife, she rolled over the remaining leftovers of the last biker, a torso with part of an upper leg still attached, and began slicing off steaks from the thigh, slapping them over the backseat rest. She didn’t seem to hear our shrieks and cries of disgust. All she did was hum a sweet, motherly tune.

  “There,” she wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. “Now eat up,” her smile grew even more motherly. Then she cocked her head at our reluctance. “Oh, now,” she chided. “Don’t be that way. Don’t tell me you don’t like it…sometimes you have to try it first. I bet you didn’t even try it, did you?”

  “Mom,” I spoke for the terrified trio. “We’re not gonna eat that.”

  “What do you mean?” she picked up a filet. Flapping skin. Sopping red meat. “It’s delicious…and so good for you,” she slid the macabre morsel into her mouth. “Now come on, eat.”

  She held a piece up to Brent’s mouth. He crushed his lips together and turned away. Then Mom did the same to Shannon, and the girl only glared at her. One more try with me, and I shook my head at her.

  “Eat!” the possessed, evil look returned to her eyes, and I was frightened into taking the hunk of fleshy muscle and fat. It quivered like red Jell-O, and so did my stomach. No way was I putting that in my mouth. But Mom was insistent, and I didn’t want to provoke the devil out of her.

  So I put the nasty human meat to my lips. Sour, coppery odors riddled my sense of smell. Convulsions overtook my entire gastrointestinal system. A revolt was going on inside me, and, like two negative sides of a magnet, I and that slice of biker thigh separated instantly when I chucked it across the van. It hit with a thud against the side of the freezer and left a blood-clotted smear as it slid to the floor.

  I thought Mom was going to freak on me. With that demented look on her face, I pictured her jamming the hunk of biker beef into my mouth, and then my memory went even further, to the time when she had to literally force me to eat anything green. Her determined scowl. My indignant sneer. A standoff ensued, or so it seemed. Somehow, someway Mom always won, and that’s what I thought would happen this time. On
ly it didn’t. Instead, she just shrugged after taking a good, hard look at me. Her evil demeanor lifted, and a warm, kindhearted smile replaced the madness which had just prevailed.

  “Okay, then,” she let her sights meander to the hunk of meat on the floor, then picked it up and flipped open the freezer. It yawned like a diesel engine when she tossed it in, but not until she snuck a few nibbles for herself. Then she feasted on the lingering bits and pieces while stuffing and loading the freezer some more. “Suit yourself. But you don’t know what you’re missing.”

  Her enthusiasm bordered on the surreal. So did her jolly attitude. Much different than when we’d first encountered her. She must have somehow realized the benefits of keeping us alive, or maybe she was just getting into her work. Either way, her attitude became downright bubbly, a turn of events that seemed to scare Brent and Shannon even more. I know it really creeped me out. And what she said creeped me out even more.

  “I tell you, a good mom’s work is never done. You three…you’ll come to understand…you’ll see why I have to do this,” she sliced a hip down to the bone, separating the sinew and fat, gabbing like she was at the salon or something, no care in the world, not at all acknowledging she had a human femur in her hand. Then it was in the freezer, and she went to work cutting up more. “You’ll all see why the freezer needs to be fed. It’s all about the body count…don’t you see? Don’t you get it? I’m feeding an army. A large and powerful army. And soon that army will grow to be the most powerful force ever. And I’m helping it grow stronger, bigger, until the day it rises to take over the world. What a wonderful day that will be.”

  As she spoke, Brent kept giving me this look. At first I tried to blow it off, maybe if I ignored him, he’d stop. But the more Mom went on and on about her duty to the freezer, and just what was lurking down there, eager for nourishment, the more Brent started to twitch and squirm. Mom seemed not to notice. Her focus was entirely engrossed in her work, and in savoring every bite.

  “Mmm,” she hummed and closed her eyes. While Brent squirmed and Shannon’s face contorted into an expression of disgust and while my insides felt like they were going to explode, Mom showed the outward signs of a person tasting her favorite dessert. “Ambrosia,” she gritted her red stained teeth and I threw up a little in my throat. “You guys sure you don’t want some?” she held it toward us, and we all recoiled. “Fine. More for me I guess. Doesn’t make much sense, though. You said you were hungry. No sense at all.”

  As she continued stuffing the rest of the hapless victim into the large metal box, which never stopped groaning, she continued her gruesome tale. “We’re going to complete the circle. You and I, Eddy,” she gave me a glance.

  “What?” I said, still dealing with the bile taste in my mouth.

  “You know what I’m saying,” she smiled. “This job, feeding the freezer, it’s never-ending. And when I’m gone, it’ll be your turn to take up the mantle, so to speak. Carry the torch. Follow in the line. Remember? Whoever owns the freezer is duty-bound to care for and feed it. No matter what, it has to continue. Forever and ever and—”

  “Fuck this!” Brent flung open the sliding door and spilled out onto the asphalt. Shannon and only sat there, stupefied. “Come on!” Brent yelped at us and then sprinted into the night.

  “Goddam kid!” Mom sprinted after him, but stopped after only two paces, then strode firmly back to the minivan and got in, started it, and aimed the front end onto the gravelly shoulder. Brent had gone off road, so that’s what Mom did too, steering through a thick stand of sage and flicking on the brights. That’s when Brent’s lanky form came into view. I begged Mom to stop, and I heard Shannon screaming something incomprehensible, but the die had been cast. Brent’s fate had been sealed. He dodged and weaved a few times like a wide receiver, but that only delayed the inevitable. Mom seemed to know which way he was going, and cranked the wheel to the left just when Brent veered that direction. I closed my eyes when he hit the front grill. A sickening thump, and an even more sickening bump, and Brent stopped screaming.

  I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I described my state at that particularly horrendous moment as catatonic. All the death, all the dismemberment, all the horrors I’d experienced over the last few days, I somehow had been able to compartmentalize into a small part of my subconscious, tuck away into an area of my mind where I could attribute it to a dream. A nightmare from which I knew soon I would awake and find a normal world where my gramma and my mom both hadn’t transformed into bloodthirsty killers. But, at that moment, when I heard Brent’s cries snuffed out, replaced by the awful sound of shattering bone, my brain sort of malfunctioned. I turned off. Completely. I could witness the deaths of old friends of friends, even not-so-well-known neighbors or people from a town I’d hardly ever visited. I even could take seeing Gramma impaled on that garden tool. But not my friend, someone with whom I’d shared intimate thoughts and details of my life. Hell, we used to get high together. That really threw me for a loop, and shocked me into a coma.

  Shannon, it seemed, had no such problems.

  “You bitch!” she flew out the door and sprinted to Brent as he lay lifeless in the ditch. “You fucking bitch!”

  I didn’t want to move, and thought I couldn’t move. What Shannon said next had me flying back there, though, with a glimmer of hope in my mind.

  “He’s still breathing!” she screamed. “Come on, Brent. Come on…don’t die…don’t die!”

  Mom pushed me aside to get at Brent’s broken up body. His left arm was all askew, and so was his right knee. Like the worst sports injuries you can think of—torn ACLs and ripped rotator cuffs—it was ugly. But, unbelievably, and like Shannon had declared, his chest was indeed rising and falling, and I heard a muffled gurgling in his frothy nasal passages.

  “What are you doing!” Shannon shouted as Mom took Brent by a twisted arm and started dragging him to the van.

  “Feeding him to the freezer, what do you think?” Mom was all business.

  “But he’s still alive!”

  Mom stopped in midstride and skewed her neck, taking a look at Brent, watching his slow, labored respiration with more than a little disinterest.

  “See?” Shannon ran to Brent’s side. “He’s alive! You can’t do this! You can’t feed him to the freezer alive!”

  “Okay,” Mom agreed, and I sighed in grateful relief. Then, just like that, my relief switched to despair when Mom lifted her foot and stomped hard on Brent’s neck. That was that. No more Brent. This time, it was for good, and we all knew it. No one more than Shannon, who literally threw herself on top of Brent, screaming that if Mom took him, Mom would have to take her, too.

  “Fine,” Mom was more than willing to oblige, and, with her demonic strength, dragged them both.

  “No!” I erupted into complete frenzy, and had a bout of superhuman strength myself as I yanked Shannon from the death pile and lifted her straight to her own two feet. She was sobbing and inconsolable, but I tried to comfort her anyway.

  “Don’t cry,” I whispered. “We’ll get out of this. We will.”

  “Oh, yeah? How!” she shouted into my ear so loud it started ringing. Mom shot us a suspicious glance, so I shushed Shannon the best I could. Didn’t want Mom to know about my plan, what little of it there was. Any sort of deviant thought or behavior I just knew she would have taken for insurrection, and most assuredly would have crushed on the spot. She did notice our looks, though, and saw especially the way Shannon glared.

  “What?” she shrugged, almost apologetically.

  “What do you mean, ‘what’?” Shannon shed her mournful demeanor and went right back to the hard shell she’d been pushing to the surface the whole trip. “You just killed my fucking boyfriend, that’s what!”

  “Honey, I had no choice,” Mom’s tone dripped with sarcastic sweetness. “He was being a very, very bad boy,” then she trained her narrow stare on me. “And bad boys need to be punished, right Eddy.”

  I swallowed an
d nodded.

  8.

  DING! DING! DING!

  Miles and miles further down the highway, a sensor started warning us we were about to run out of gas. Mom had been ignoring it. Then, when the incessant alarm became too much to bear, she cursed out the window. I don’t want to repeat what she said, but it was about God and it wasn’t pretty. She didn’t want one single thing getting in the way of her killing spree, and a stop for gas represented a major pain in the ass, apparently.

  I was hoping we’d just run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. That way maybe the murder rampage would be cut short. Then I could buy some time to formulate my plan, one which had been swirling in my brain for a while. A white light on the horizon plunged my hope into a quagmire of anxiety. A gas station. A minimart, to be exact. Open twenty four hours. And when I saw it was basically deserted except for one guy standing behind the counter, my anxiety shifted into overdrive. Another victim. This one was completely innocent, not like those bikers. This one, like Brent, didn’t deserve to die. Mom, though, couldn’t have been any more indifferent.