Even though this auditory spectacle frightened me into severe shock, I had to suppress each and every bad thought, every notion of repugnance. Brenton heard every thought that crossed my mind. To tell the truth, the child seemed endowed with the most evil power I’d seen in a servant so far, and I had no idea what the limits of his supernatural abilities were, so I played dumb and obedient. But it was so damn hard to keep a straight face in the presence of so much chaotic murder all around us.
Brenton was inhaling the death in the air. Absorbing all the pain and suffering being inflicted. After a while, I was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t going to just stand there and soak it in the whole time and not take any lives himself. Funny thing was, as soon as my mind wandered to those questions, he clapped his hands.
“Good idea!” he said to no one in particular, though I knew he was answering me. “Let’s go!”
He ordered us to drive him to Washington Square, a large mall not too far from our house. Shannon drove the Subaru and never said a word, so I mimicked her, took on her solemn silence, copied her surly stare. It was a most difficult thing, only thinking impure thoughts as we pulled into the top floor of the parking structure. I had no other choice. One false move, one slip of the mind and my family would tear me limb from limb
Brenton stood in the backseat, staring out the windows like a hawk. Casing the joint. Looking for the weak spots in the security camera views. Just when it looked like the perfect conditions, he got out of the Subaru and hurried to what seemed a designated mark, like he’d practiced this before. It was the best of timing, or maybe he knew someone would happen upon him at that very moment, because two ladies came waddling up the lot, gabbing and giggling about what they had in their shopping bags. Brenton fell to the ground and started writhing and crying. He was so convincing that for a brief second I thought it was the real Brenton. Maybe he was taking back his body. That silly fantasy shattered into pieces at what he did next.
“Oh my goodness! Little boy? Are you all right?” the first woman uttered her last words. Before she could say another thing, Brenton leapt up and attached his teeth to her jugular. She attempted to scream, but it only came out as blood-clogged whimpering. The other woman didn’t seem to comprehend what was happening, and went rigid and silent. The only thing she moved was her mouth, and that gaped like a guppy, open and closed, open and closed. A second later, she was on the concrete next to her mangled friend, with Brenton standing on her chest and pulling out her entrails. How he managed to eviscerate her so quickly and efficiently I still can’t explain. He moved so fast. Scary fast. But I couldn’t flinch. I couldn’t waver. I couldn’t let on for a second my disgust. I could only behave as Shannon behaved—a mindless worker, performing the gruesome task of gathering up the mutilated bodies and stuffing them into the Subaru’s hatchback. Several times that evening this went down, the same trap set by a supposed child in distress. The same immoral act perpetrated upon victim after victim, and all the while I held back from marveling at Brenton’s cleverness, his cunning, and his prowess at killing. And when we had the car packed with dead meat, we drove back to our quiet little suburban neighborhood. Only on this night it wasn’t so quiet.
5.
Our street was a warzone. At the time I couldn’t be worried for the people I saw sprinting for their lives or feel one ounce of hate for the wild-eyed ones wielding the knives and shotguns, blasting and slicing and hacking whatever moved. I couldn’t fear for the groaning, crawling kid who had obviously just wrecked his car into a tree, with his girlfriend scraping at his chest, her fiery glare glowing like two little embers in the dark. I couldn’t wonder how, in this day and age, things could have gotten this bad. How could there be no police to stop all this? But there were police. I saw at least two cop cars, both parked cockeyed, one on the sidewalk, and one all the way up on someone’s lawn. There was an ambulance too. But the back end was wide open, the stretcher hanging out. Where the EMTs were was a mystery. Probably they’d met the same fate as the police.
These all had to be fleeting thoughts, not more than a millisecond, and then I had to go back to pretending that the devastation and the carnage was a thing of beauty. A wondrous sight to behold, as Brenton put it, for this all meant the quickening of the plan, the accelerating of the rise of the demons and their dominion on Earth. Of course this all shook me to my core. Fear beyond description. And, of course, I couldn’t dwell on any of it.
Seeing all that destruction, knowing how fast and how far it was spreading, you can imagine my desperation. I was facing a total and complete takeover of the City of Beaverton, and was about to witness it spread up and down I-5. Portland. Seattle. Vancouver, BC. San Francisco. Los Angeles. San Diego. From there it would infect the world, creeping east along the land routes, utilizing the shipping routes in the Pacific. I could see it all, in one quick terrifying flash of lucidity that I had to shove aside the second it came to me. The whole world, ruled by thousands, maybe millions of possessed freezers. A world of carnage and lawless slaughter on a scale even I couldn’t comprehend. A planet of those who kill and those who are killed. And from there, who knew what would happen? It was a horrible notion, and I was living a nightmare that only seemed to have one future: the total demonic domination of mankind. And it was all my fault. Imagine the guilt.
Considering all this, now imagine my intense exhilaration at the sound of police sirens. Not just one or two, but dozens. From up thirteenth. From the freeway. From Allen Boulevard. From Lombard Avenue. All sides were covered. Squad cars screeched to a halt left and right, coming up our driveway, rolling onto our lawn. It looked like a SWAT takedown, and my immediate joy came bursting forth at the sight of twenty-five cops jumping out of their cruisers and sprinting toward us.
“Officers! Please!” I threw up my hands and begged, placing myself between the cops and my family. “They’re not themselves! My son…he’s possessed by a demon, or demons, and so is my girlfriend! Please don’t hurt them…they-they need help!”
I gestured to the car, leaking blood out the back door. Inside the front seat Brenton and Shannon both stared daggers at me.
The police all stopped running and they too stared at me with the most confused but at the same time intimidating looks. I didn’t know what was going on, but deep down inside I was getting a horrible feeling. The glances exchanged between the cops and my boy were genuinely skin-crawling. Like some sort of mental conversation. My own imagination couldn’t wrap itself around what was in front of me. Or maybe the power of denial was so strong it stopped me from even going there. No way could it be true. No way could the entire Beaverton Police Department be a gang of ruthless Hell zombies. And the closer I studied their eyes, and saw the foul intent, the more defensive I became against reality.
I wouldn’t accept it. Not for an instant. And I kept blubbering for them, for anyone to listen. Someone had to understand. That’s what I was screaming when I saw Monroe. He jumped out of his unmarked car before he had it in park. Three big strides and he had me, twirled me around and tripped me to the ground. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by loaded pistols. Then I saw Brenton. The possessed cops made way as he advanced.
“So,” he said out loud. “You’re not one of us after all. You fooled me, Daddy. And I don’t like to be fooled! Kill HIM!”
With a swish of his hand, he stood back and the cops closed in, every one of them cocking their pistols and taking aim at my heart. I clenched my eyes and wished for it all to end quickly, trying to not think about my lifeless corpse being hacked to pieces and fed to the multitudes of the netherworld. Also I tried not to think about what the world was going to become. Maybe this was for the best. Maybe to die now would be better than scraping by, looking over my shoulder, guarding my thoughts and watching my son, my own flesh and blood, rise to be a leader of demons. My mind was set. I was going to die, and nothing could stop it now.
“Wait!” Shannon pushed her way to the front of the police phalanx. Her burning glare pierced
me worse than any bullet could. She bent down and I felt her strength as she singlehandedly lifted me to my feet. “I’ll kill him!”
Her hands were steel clamps around my windpipe. My instinctual drive for self-preservation kicked in, and I fought against her. But she was too strong. Too fast. Too deadly. I was out before I hit the ground again.
6.
I woke up dead. At least I thought I was dead. The stench of death was all around me. I couldn’t move. Soft tissue and sharp bone and sopping blood made my stomach boil over. That’s when I knew I had to be alive. But why? How? Somehow Shannon hadn’t killed me. Didn’t matter much anyway when I figured out where they’d put me—in a pile of stiffs, stacked up like cordwood in the dining room. There were so many bodies they spilled out into the mudroom, and I was wedged between a woman with a wide, dead stare and some guy with his throat slashed.
Only a few feet from me, Shannon worked my butcher’s knife like a pro, slicing and dividing the human remains into workable pieces. Each steak, each bit of flesh had one and only one destination—our wretched, groaning, moaning, voracious freezer. I tried not to look directly at her while my mind raced with solutions. How could I squeeze free and slip away before she got to me? Where was Brenton? Then Shannon slammed the knife into the cutting board and stared directly at the pile of dead meat. I couldn’t tell, but I think she was looking at me. I wanted to kick myself for thinking so openly and freely. She must have picked up on that. But not only did she not seem to notice me, she even left the room. And that’s when I realized Brenton was in the living room, watching cartoons. I found that truly bizarre. Here was this demon-infested kid, transformed not only into a killer, but a leader of killers, and he still had the childish need to watch SpongeBob. Crazy.
With both of them out of eyeshot, I saw my chance to get the fuck out of there. So that’s what I did. Clearing my mind, I acted on impulse, being sure not to think about what I was doing.
Pushing the bodies off of me, I slid to the floor as quiet as a mouse. I didn’t want to wait around to see if Shannon was coming right back or not, besides, I didn’t have time to wait. I only had time to crawl out the back door and scurry on hands and knees to the tall grass. Good thing I was a terrible landscaper. The weeds gave me enough cover, camouflaging my escape through the cedar fence joining our property to the neighbor’s.
I was still crawling when I heard footsteps. I rolled over just in time to see a crowbar smash against the concrete. A man with flaring nostrils and raging eyes grimaced at me, then brought the crowbar up for another try at my skull. On instinct, I flailed with my feet, and got him in the nuts. He fell to his knees and dropped the metal bar. I jumped at it, and he jumped too, snatching at nothing just after I’d taken the weapon into my possession. He glared at me with that same ugly hatred I’d seen from all the other cursed assassins, and I knew there was only one way out of this. With a swift swing, I cracked the guy in the cheek with the crowbar, and he went down.
I had a hell of a time dragging the guy inside. It was a necessity, though. For one thing, I didn’t want anyone seeing. For another, I didn’t have the heart to kill him. My idea was to get him inside then destroy his freezer. In my head it worked out. With his freezer destroyed, he wouldn’t be inflicted with the curse anymore.
So that’s exactly what I did. One solid blow after the other, I beat the shit out of that thing, smashing the metal sheeting all over the place. Then I pulled it from the wall and beat at the back, crunching the cooling tubes and wrecking the compressor. A light whirring turned to clicking, then grinding. My pulse raced at the sound. The possessed appliance was dying, or so I thought.
As I pounded and punished the man’s freezer, I heard him waking up. My desire to control the situation had me standing over him as he rubbed his head and blinked up at me. He saw the crowbar in my hand, then glanced over at the damage I’d done.
“What the hell’re you doing to my fridge!” he didn’t seem scared or at all concerned about my aggressive stance. “What’s gotten into you!”
“I’m destroying it,” I was steady and firm. “So you won’t be able to feed the mouth to Hell anymore!”
“What? That’s not a mouth to Hell!”
“Fuck if it’s not!” I kept my eyes on him and walked sideways two steps until I was next to his refrigerator. I reached with the crowbar and opened the freezer door. When I saw all the Ziploc bags packed with vegetables and fruits, I can’t tell you how stupid I felt.
“You mean you’re not one of those murderers?”
“Hell no!” he chuckled, then winced at the obvious pain from his head wound. “I thought you were one of those goddam things.”
I got closer to him, slowly, so he wouldn’t notice. Just to be sure, I examined him, paying particular attention to his eyes, his facial features. The cursed ones had a special way about them. A look they all seemed to have in common. I saw it in my gramma and my mom. I saw it in Neil Charles and all of the other poor souls who ate the tainted meat. I even saw it in myself. But I didn’t see it in this man. What I saw was someone in his sixties but still fairly fit and agile. He looked like he did pushups every day and watched what he ate.
He shook his head, and I could tell he was still a little loopy from me hitting him, but he didn’t say anything, probably because he wanted to look tough. He didn’t need to try. Tough exuded through his pores, even at his semi-ripe age.
He kept laughing like the whole thing was a joke. I got the feeling he was mostly happy because I wasn’t one of the possessed. Then blinked and squinted at me, until he stopped laughing altogether and dug in his vest, got his glasses, and threw them on.
“You! You’re Eddy Mitchell,” he inched closer and scrutinized me from head to toe, making a long stop at my face. Then he set his sights across the street where it sounded like a window had just broken. “It’s not safe up here, come on!”
7.
“Eddy Mitchell. Eddy fuckin’ Mitchell!” the man shook my hand with an iron grip and told me his name was Guy. “Who would have thought I’d have The Eddy Mitchell in the Bear Cave.”
“So you’ve heard of me?” I spoke, but my mind was elsewhere, particularly on the stacks and stacks of junk Guy had packed into his safe room, a space hidden cleverly beneath his house. The ‘Bear Cave,’ as he called it. I was beginning to think he was a hoarder. There were so many boxes of odds and ends the place looked like a rat maze.
“Heard of you?” he ejected the clip from a handgun and inspected it. “Ever heard of Roswell? The JFK assassination? The 911 truth movement?”
“Yeah, why?” he got my attention with that.
“You’re right up there with all of them, man. You’re a legend. The only one to be possessed by the evil freezer curse and walk away to tell the story.”
“You know about the freezer curse? You believe in it?” I moved closer to him quickly and he slid the cartridge back into his gun. That made me stop, but I was still burning to know.
“Man, I don’t just believe. I know,” he noticed he had the gun pointed at me and turned the barrel away. “Sorry. Habit.”
“What do you mean you know? What do you know?”
“Man, I’ve been following this curse for a long, long time,” he looked at a calendar. “Twenty-two years, seven months, nine days and,” he lifted his cuff and exposed a monster of a watch. “Three hours, seven minutes and fifteen seconds. But who’s counting?”
“What? Twenty-two years?” I couldn’t believe my ears.
“You think this curse goes back just to your grandmother?” he bit into a rather dry-looking cracker.
“No, of course not,” I searched my memory. “It started with Wayne Webster.”
“Ha! Show’s what you know! Even the legendary Eddy Mitchell doesn’t know.”
“Know what?”
“The truth! The history behind the cursed freezers. Wayne Webster. You. Your grandmother and mother. You’re all just the latest torchbearers. This curse goes back decades, e
ven centuries.”
“Wait a minute. Freezers have only been around since the forties. How can it go back centuries?”
“Before freezers there were iceboxes. Before iceboxes, people used underground cellars, holes dug in the earth to stabilize the temperature. One time a farmer in Ohio was using one of these cellars, and he dug too far, at least that’s what local legend says. He dug into some sort of chasm, an unholy hole that led to the pits of the earth, where Satan himself resides.”
My head spun at this new revelation, but still I harbored a good amount of skepticism over Guy’s claims. He must have picked up on my suspicion. Flipping through a file cabinet, he tossed a folder at me. I caught it and instantly thumbed through. Newspaper clippings and website printouts and even handwritten accounts. The pictures were the worst. Terrible scenes of debauchery and murder dating back to when cameras were a novelty.
Freezer: The Complete Horror Series Page 17