“Hi, Daddy!” he shouted with glee. His red eyes sparkled with evil, and he brandished a hatchet, the one I kept near the woodstove. “That sure was good pizza. Do you wanna bite?”
My name is Eddy Mitchell, and my boy’s an ax murderer…
Part IV
MY BOY’S FREEZER
1.
My name is Eddy Mitchell, and my boy’s an ax murderer.
I have to tell you, I never saw this coming. I thought I’d beaten the curse. I really did. I thought that damned freezer in the pizza place was destroyed. The whole freakin’ restaurant was destroyed, blown to bits, along with all the crazed servants, indentured to the whims of the demon realm. The natural gas explosion was heard and seen ten miles away.
Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would come to this. My boy. My wonderful five-year-old boy. Brenton, the personification of sweetness and light. Never an unkind word to anyone or anything. Never harmed a hair on a fly’s head. Thoughtful, kind, wonderful little Brenton. I was always so afraid he’d get caught up in this terrible curse, but, with my limited imagination, I was only worried about me hurting him. How narrow-minded. How shortsighted. I never thought he’d turn into a bloodthirsty beast.
“Why don’t you sit down, Daddy?” his teeth were painted red, only they weren’t teeth, not his at least. He had one missing in the front. Had. Not anymore. Now they were a full set of fangs, sharp and deadly, making my little boy into a monster.
I had no ability to move. I swear my heart wasn’t beating, and my brain swirled with the terrible reality in front of me. Blood. Everywhere blood. My stomach turned and I had to brace myself on the back of a chair. The presence of blood was bad enough, it was where it came from that had me so sick to my head and stomach. Shannon. My love. My life. She was my anchor, someone I could never exist without. I planned on spending eternity with this soul, and now she was on the floor, sprawled under the table awkwardly, and not breathing. Brenton had clearly done her in. How, I didn’t want to know. All I knew was that it was messy and the boy seemed to either not notice or not care. All he cared about was getting flesh into the freezer.
A slither and a gulp and the hungry mouth to Hell swallowed the morsel. A part of Shannon. It made me dizzy with hot sweats. My lover, the mother of my child was being dissected and fed to the minions of the underworld…by her own son. I had no power over my body at that point, the blackness and tingly feeling of unconsciousness taking me over and tossing me to the gory floor.
“Daddy? What’s the matter?” Brenton smiled again. I’ll never forget his demented grin. Then he laughed and pointed the small ax I used to cut kindling at Shannon. “You’re just like Mommy. Can’t take the sight of a little blood.”
“How-how could you…” I somehow managed to say. “How could you hurt your own mommy?”
He laughed again. Deep and guttural. A voice that wasn’t his.
“I didn’t hurt Mommy,” he went back to tossing chunks into our freezer. It rumbled and crackled like a ravenous monster, accepting each morsel with malicious glee. “She fell down when she saw what I’d done.”
“Done to who, Br—” I cut myself off when I spotted a little shoe. Adidas. Size seven. “Germ,” I said, and Brenton closed his eyes slowly. “You killed your friend, Brenton? How could you?”
“It wasn’t my fault, Daddy,” he explained rather calmly, while tossing meat like a lion trainer. “It’s the freezer. It has to eat, Daddy. You should know that.”
Then I noticed Shannon’s lifeless body twitch. First her hands, then legs. Then she coughed so loud it made Brenton quit doing his job.
“There, see?” he said, then resumed the feeding. “She’s okay, Daddy.”
I came back to my senses at the sight of Shannon’s miraculous return to the living. I felt my heart in my chest and a warm flow in my veins. I had my Shannon back, and my only mission in life at that moment was to help make her comfortable. Together we sat on the kitchen floor, stained red from head to toe, catching our breath. She glanced at Brenton and then made eye contact with me. She never looked so terrified in her life, and if you’ve read anything about my mom and my gramma, then you know I’ve seen her scared a time or two. This time it was different. This time she told me with a look how desperate she was, and I felt the same thing. This was our son. He was just a little kid. This wasn’t his fault.
But he wasn’t just a little kid.
I thought he was going to turn the hatchet on me and Shannon, but right then the doorbell rang, its two-toned chime sending bumps over my skin. Someone called out in the hall. A heavy Spanish accent. A woman calling for Germ. Brenton put his finger to his lips, telling us to be quiet, and, to my amazement, he moved like a blur, faster than I’d ever moved, and Mom or Gramma for that matter. Out of everyone I’d seen that had been taken over by the evil freezer, this tiny tike had the most serious motor. One instant he was in the kitchen, and the next he was in the hall. As soon as he sprang out of sight, we heard him crying.
“Ay bebito! Que? Que es la—AAAAAA!”
We couldn’t see what was happening, but we didn’t need to. A sturdy, Plunk! on the floor told us he’d taken her down without any hesitation, or without any problem. Then he came around the corner, dragging a large Latina woman by the ankle. Germ’s mom, Bonita. We’d met before. She was nice, and she treated the kids so well. Brenton loved her, but now he was slicing her up like a side of beef, and the sight of it made me numb all over. How could I stop this? What could I do to end this terrible curse?
“You can’t stop it, Daddy,” he stared me down, blood spatters all over his little chubby cheeks. At that moment when I realized the power this boy had been given. He read my mind easily, and that was terrifying. What he did next, though, was even more terrifying.
2.
Brenton carved a hefty chunk from Bonita’s thigh, a bright red flank steak, and shoved it into the freezer. The appliance churned and whirred like an ice cream machine, chunking on the bones, mincing through the soft tissue. After a few seconds, Brenton opened the freezer again, just a crack, and out oozed this pasty substance, pinkish and sickeningly familiar. Upon closer inspection, it looked a lot like that shit in the white tubs back at Pep R Onni’s—the contaminated meat labeled Pizza Sausage.
“You guys didn’t get to try some of that yummy pizza,” he plunked a couple lumps of the gooey stuff onto the table in front of each of us. I could tell Shannon was gagging. So was I. Brenton ignored our revulsion. “Here you go…try this,” his stare got menacing. “Eat it!” he brandished the little ax to show he meant to feed us by force if necessary. Then he seemed to notice Shannon’s disgust. “Mommy? You go first, okay? Eat this and then we can play. But if you don’t eat it, well, then I guess we can’t play anymore.”
I knew just what Brenton had in mind. He wanted to create more servants who burned for the slaughter, who didn’t sleep or rest or stop thinking about killing. Shannon knew it too. I could see it in her eyes. She told me with a glance that she loved me, that she was terribly, terribly sorry. She also told me how disgusting it was, the nauseatingly flaccid substance, as she peeled off a little chunk and drew it close to her lips.
“Go ahead, Mommy,” Brenton frothed at the mouth, and Shannon’s lips quivered. She looked at me again, then at Brenton, then, in one big chomp, took a mouthful and chewed and chewed. She gulped hard, and then seized up immediately, trembling and taking in stilted breaths. Her chair rocked and I reached to keep her upright, but recoiled when she flashed a threatening stare my way. I could see the change in her come on so fast. It made me weak with anxiety. Now both my Shannon and my Brenton have been turned to evil.
“Your turn, Daddy,” the boy couldn’t have been more insistent, shoving the pile of putrid meat toward me. I hadn’t really looked at it closely until that moment, and when I did, I saw the same quivering, slithering stuff that I’d seen in the pizza place. It seemed alive, full of little worms, and smelled worse than a festering pile of rot. I wanted to
jet out of there, sprint from the house and keep running to some safe place where I could think of some way out of this. But I knew it would be a fool’s effort. Brenton had the speed of a cheetah, and the strength of a gorilla. And now there was Shannon, both of them staring me down.
“Stop trying to think of a way out of this, Daddy,” Brenton’s impatience was showing through. “It’s no use. I can hear every thought you have. You can’t escape. You will serve the freezer…you will serve me!”
At my hesitation, Shannon scraped a handful of the goo and forced my mouth open. The twisting tendons and spinning sinew tasted bitter on my tongue. I felt the stuff trying to force its way down my throat, but I resisted, shoving it instead into the side of my jaw, dispersing it just right so it didn’t look like I was hiding anything. Then I pretended to chew, but didn’t think about pretending. In my mind, I pictured me actually chewing it up and swallowing, willing myself to believe I was doing something I really wasn’t doing. All the while, I didn’t let anything go past my tonsils.
As soon as it looked like the tainted meat had gone down, I convulsed just like I’d seen Shannon do, twitching my skull and rolling my eyes and making the table shake with a violent seizure. Then, after a few seconds of that, I erased every vestige of desperate thought, every innocent and wholesome idea in my head, replacing them with the most hateful, murderous notions I could come up with. I flooded my brain with images of death and dismemberment, like a film reel of a serial killer’s life, trying to make Brenton and Shannon believe I was one of them.
It worked. Brenton smiled his demented little smile and nodded. Then he nodded to Shannon, and right away she started in with the processing of Bonita’s body. Brenton gave me a questioning glance when I hesitated, and that kick-started me into action. With cold, calculating precision, the three of us separated the poor woman into small pieces and fed them, one by one, into our family freezer. I struggled to not think about what was coming next, knowing full well my mind was an open book. I didn’t need to worry about it long, though. When we’d finished, Brenton wiped his hands on the little dress slacks he still had on from his birthday party and announced his dreadful intentions.
“Now we’re gonna have a real party!”
3.
After what the neighborhood had just went through, a party was the last thing I expected the locals would go for. I mean, when I think about it now, it seemed so surreal. One of the biggest restaurants in town, a mecca for kids and their families, had just gone up in smoke only a few hours earlier. That alone would have been enough to send a shockwave of grief throughout the community. Add to that the week of murder and dismemberment that preceded, and I was ready to think everybody living within a ten mile radius was going to board up their doors and windows and abandon their houses.
Boy was I wrong.
After Shannon, Brenton, and I cleaned up, changed, and made ourselves presentable, we rolled my big gas barbeque out to the front lawn. I started grilling up the tainted freezer meat, sending the succulent scent of charbroiled burgers up and down the street. At the same time, Shannon and Brenton went door to door, knocking and leaving little flyers that we’d made up, inviting anyone and everyone out to a block party. Free food was quite an enticement, and the chance for everyone to get out of their homes and talk about what had just happened at Pep R Onni’s Pizza Pie Palace was a powerful tonic. People showed up in droves.
I tried to count how many people were there, but I didn’t want to think too much, for fear of Brenton seeing into my mind. It scared the shit out of me, what we were doing. Feeding the neighborhood meat from the freezer—the very idea shook me to the core. But I couldn’t show it. Couldn’t show anything. I had to smile and nod and look appropriately contrite when people came up to me and asked me how I was doing.
“I’m doing fine,” I’d tell them. “I’m just a lucky man to have such a great family…and such great neighbors,” and then I’d hand them a burger. Over and over this happened, and Shannon offered condiments as Brenton distributed sodas. At first the atmosphere buzzed. Neighbors were glad to have an excuse to talk, and some were louder than others. But as the food dispersed, and as people sat to eat, I noticed a profound change in the atmosphere. Subdued. Pensive. Almost tense. I saw the look in people’s faces change from happy to hungry, from caring and kind to watchful and jumpy. Growling and teeth gnashing replaced chatter and giggles. Wide open glares replaced warm, glowing expressions.
Then I saw a most welcome sight. Detective Marty Monroe of the Beaverton Police Department. My mind raced with rescue scenarios. Monroe, all banged up and bandaged, would come to save the day once again, me by his side, purging the world of the hellish curse once and for all. As soon as I thought it, Brenton flashed his sights my direction and almost looked like he was going to burn me where I stood. Instantly I removed that thought from my head and focused instead on picturing Monroe dead, his arms and legs cut off, and the freezer feasting on his flesh. Brenton’s wicked frown morphed to a wicked smile and he watched Monroe approach me at the grill.
“You just got out of a fight for your life and now you’re throwing a party for the whole street?”
“Sure,” I nodded. “Why not? It’s a great way to burn off some steam.”
“I guess,” he glanced at some of the neighbors. They looked back sullenly. “Seems they’ve already blown their steam. Anyway, you said you’d come in and give us a statement.”
“I will, I will,” I stalled, trying to keep Monroe from getting his hands on a burger. It was a tricky thing, because I couldn’t consciously think about it or else Brenton would be onto me in a heartbeat. So I kept my gaze averted and tried not to make it too obvious I was giving Monroe the cold shoulder. It looked like my little avoidance routine worked. Monroe was about ready to leave when Brenton snatched a burger patty from me. With a plate and a bun, he scurried up to the detective.
“Do you wanna burger?” he had to squint in the setting sun. He looked so innocent, so sweet. He was impossible to refuse, and Monroe melted at his offer.
“Why sure, little fella,” he took the burger and with one bite chomped half of it down. After he swallowed I saw the change in him. It was like the flip of a switch, and Monroe went from cheerful to heavy and deliberate. Even his chewing slowed from a happy, lively speed to slow and steady and, well, a little bit mean, like he was angry at what he was eating.
Now the dastardly transformation was complete. Everyone on the block had eaten from the tainted meat. And the entire mood of the party fell cold and silent. People stood, all of them in a group. No one said a word. It made my skin crawl. A bunch of people had just ate possessed meat, and now they were waiting there, just staring, with these weird looks on their faces like they had no real thoughts of their own. Or maybe they were being given thoughts, or listening to something inside their minds. Then I noticed Brenton. He had his hands raised like some sort of messiah. Only he was more like the antichrist, and this was his flock of believers, his followers into the ends of the Earth, and into the depths of Hell.
I had no way to know what was being said, or thought, by Brenton. It was clear he was telling them something. They never wavered, keeping direct eye contact the whole time, and nodded and smiled every once in a while to show they understood. I understood too. I wasn’t plugged into their satanic ESP, but I didn’t need to be in order to decipher their orders. Kill. Take lives. Collect bodies and bring them to the freezer so they could be fed to the rulers of the underworld. Never had I read nonverbal language so clearly. The vacant stares. The stiff and clenched gritted teeth. At any moment I expected the slaughter to begin.
But it didn’t. No crazed, mad dashes in pursuit of blood. Everyone remained calm, cool, pacified. Even Monroe. He just bowed and smiled. Then, the second strangest thing about that night happened. Everyone, to a man and woman, came up to Brenton and touched him. Nothing more than a light pat on the head or shoulder, and that was that. From there, they all turned and went back to their ho
uses. Walking slowly and silently. I couldn’t believe how quiet everyone was. As I would learn later, it was just the calm before the storm.
4.
I thought I was prepared for what would come next, but nothing, no movie or TV show, not even what I went through in my life, could prepare a person for that kind of experience. No words can give it justice. No written phrases can capture the pandemonium that broke out that night in my neighborhood. I’ll never forget the screams. I think of all the experiences in my life, all the death I’d witnessed, all the torment in those last few seconds of existence from each and every hapless victim of the cursed freezer. You might say I’d seen it all. I would have said that, and, before that night, that terrible, terrible night, I would have been wrong.
The horror was indescribable. Screams of agony. Cries for mercy. Calls for help. All mixed with the other awful sounds. Cars crashing. Windows shattering. Gun blasts here, there, everywhere.
I heard the strident wails of emergency vehicles speeding past the house. There would be a commotion, sometimes the sounds of a great collision, and then silence, except for the shouting. Then another siren or two would scream past, and then the process would start all over again. Never did it seem, when help came, that anything got any better. In fact, all it did was get worse. Minute after minute. Hour after hour.
Freezer: The Complete Horror Series Page 16