Freezer: The Complete Horror Series

by J. Joseph Wright

  “Oh my god. I had no idea.”

  “I did,” Guy took another gun from the shelf, this one a .44 Magnum, and went through the same routine as with the first. Meticulous and obsessive. He wanted to be certain his firearms were ready. “That’s why I followed you.”

  “You what?”

  “You think it’s just a coincidence I live right next to you? Shit, man, we share a fence. I’ve been there from the very beginning. Ever since it took my brother I’ve been following this curse. I tracked Wayne Webster to Idaho. Almost got him and his damned freezer then, but the fuckin’ cops got him first.”

  As he spoke, Guy checked and double checked at least five different guns. Two pistols, two rifles, and a double barrel shotgun.

  “This whole thing would’ve never happened. Would’ve ended way back then if I’d just been a few minutes earlier. But no. Damn police got him, confiscated the freezer, and then you know what those bumbling fools did? Can you believe there was a big clusterfuck in the paperwork and they put the damn thing in a police auction? Sold it to your grandmother, can you believe that? Well, I guess you can, can’t you?”

  “Let me get this straight,” my head was still spinning. “You’ve been following this curse for over two decades? And you followed it here? To me?”

  He nodded, munching on a snack of packaged crackers and cheese. Then he rifled through the file cabinet and threw another folder at me. This one was all on me and my family. What really freaked me out was there were shots of us on our camping trip.

  “What the fuck!” I threw the stuff right back at him. “What have you been doing? Have you been stalking us?”

  “Had to,” he said without batting a lash. “I needed to make sure you weren’t under the control of the curse. You taking your family all the way out to the woods like that…it didn’t look good. Then when I saw how you were acting, how you were treating your boy. I knew there was no way you were a killer,” he hit his own forehead. “But goddam that Neil Charles! Goddam kid did a lotta damage…took a lotta lives. It’s just a good thing you and that cop got to him when you did. Good job, man.”

  “Yeah, right,” my anger at Guy turned to anger at myself. “Not good enough. That tainted pizza sausage. My son…he…”

  “I know,” Guy offered a grim frown. “Your son ate some of it, and now he and your wife are possessed. And then they forced you to put on a barbeque for the neighborhood, and that’s where the shit hit the fan.”

  I looked at him, wondering where his crystal ball was hidden. He just tapped his temple.

  “Like I said, I’ve been watching. I was there that night, actually. Didn’t eat any of your evil hamburgers, though. I don’t eat civilian food anymore,” he tapped one of the stacks of boxes. “Been eating these for a few weeks now. Getting ready.”

  I read the labels on one of the boxes and realized what they were. MREs, or meals ready to eat. Military food. Freeze dried spaghetti and packaged beef stew and a dozen other boxed entrees. The cases were full of them, and the room was full of the cases.

  “Getting ready for what, exactly?” I asked a stupid question.

  “For the apocalypse, man. Some people talk about the zombie apocalypse, but I know that’s just a liberal buzzword. Ain’t no such thing as just zombies. I know that. I’ve known that for a long time now. And I’ve known there wasn’t gonna be no zombie apocalypse…it’s a demon zombie apocalypse,” he pushed aside some boxes in order to get to a closet. When he opened it my jaw just about dropped off. Every type of gun I could think of. And not just guns, but clubs and knives and swords of all kinds from samurai to civil war musket bayonets. Women love their walk-in closets for their clothes and shoes. Guy had one for weaponry, and, as I would find out later, he had enough to take out a small town.

  He watched my reaction. Then he showed me the really deadly stuff. I’m not an expert. All I’ll tell you is that there were a lot of explosives in there. So much it made me dizzy.

  “W-where did you get this?” I stuttered.

  “I used to be a tunnel rat in the Nam. Spent six straight months chasin’ Charlie with my dick in the dirt. Learned how to make a bomb out of a potato and a nine volt battery,” then he came over and put an arm around me, handing me a pistol. It was heavy in my hands. “Eddy Mitchell. We’re gonna be our own two-man hit squad. I’ve got it all worked out. I have a plan to put an end to this, and you’re gonna help me.”

  8.

  I can’t find the words to describe my skepticism about Guy’s vigilante plan. I mean, the freezer had control of the police. That was huge. If the police were all evil servants, then where would it end? I tried to explain that to Guy. Tried to tell him how much trouble we were in. But he only looked at me as I spoke, and didn’t react or move until it was his turn.

  “I know,” he said. “I know your son’s in charge. And I know what he did. He created an army. All those people at your little barbeque, they ate the voodoo burgers and then turned into goddam demon zombies.”

  “That’s not the worst of it,” I added to an already dire forecast. “I’m pretty sure each one of those people went back and created their own cursed freezers. There’s no telling how far it’s gone, or how far it will go,” all of a sudden my thoughts turned to Brenton, and an oppressive guilt weighed my head down.

  “Hey, man,” his gruff voice smoothed a little. I could tell it wasn’t normal for him to show a tender side. “Don’t let it get to you. That’s the worst thing you can do right now. I’m gonna need ya’, and when I do, you need to be tough, not a marshmallow. Know what I mean?”

  “Need me?” my mood had hit an all-time low. “Need me for what? To help dig your grave? Because that’s about all we can do,” I pointed at his closet arsenal. “Even with that, I don’t think we can stop this from spreading…and even if we could, I wouldn’t even begin to know where to start.”

  “Way ahead of you, man,” he slid over and revealed what was on the desk. His computer. An old piece of shit if there ever was one, but he had some pretty fancy looking software on screen. It looked to me like police files, or maybe FBI documents, I wasn’t sure, and he never told me. What he did tell me was everything I could ever want to know about each and every person at the satanic barbeque. Names. Addresses. Dates of birth and Social Security numbers. Property tax assessments and house blueprints and even satellite close-ups of the yards. He showed me some video from his smartphone, taken surreptitiously at the block party, and told me he had identified all the neighbors who were there that night and ate the tainted burgers.

  In the middle of all this new information, I started to think once again about my son, and the terrible things he was doing that very moment. My guilt had never been so palpable, almost like I could taste it in my throat, an acidic, gaseous tormentor reminding me of my sins. And when Guy got to the final name, the final set of pictures and house plans, I saw Brenton and Shannon and myself. That’s when it really hit home. Then another feeling overcame me. The drive for self-preservation. But not just for me. For Shannon and Brenton too. I also thought about the poor souls who’d been roped into this, the ones who were acting as servants. They didn’t ask for this, and I wanted desperately, somehow, to come up with a way to save as many lives as possible. But, looking around again, and seeing what this self-professed survivalist had in his arsenal, I could tell he was out for something other than a peaceful solution.

  Finally I had to ask, my head still swimming with dreadful thoughts, what was his master plan?

  “Survival, man,” he went on to cleaning yet another pistol. “And the only way we can survive this thing is to take out all the demon freezers. Starting with this one,” he typed a command on the keyboard and a shot from space zoomed into a house on our block. “It’s just one house down. Henderson. He’s retired and lives alone so I thought we’d begin there. It’s just him, so it should be easy,” he patted me on the back. “It’s just a damn good thing you’re not one of them. I would’ve hated to have to kill you. But t
he biggest thing was I needed some help. To think, I was going to try this on my own. Now that I have you, this should be a snap.”

  “Wait a minute,” my guilty conscience got the best of me. “What about the possessed servants? We can’t kill them. They’re innocent victims in all this too.”

  “They may be victims,” he clenched his jaw. He still looked sinewy for a man his age. “But they’re not innocent. We can’t take a chance with these…things. And they are things, you know. They’re not human anymore.”

  “That’s not true. I’m telling you they’re still in there. I know because I was one of them at one time.”

  “And you’re one lucky bastard too!” he flipped closed the chamber on his .44. “The exception to the rule. No, we gotta either kill or be killed.”

  I wouldn’t listen to a word he said about wanting to kill the servants. We went around and around for a while, and for a second I even thought we’d come to blows when I told him I refused to help if it meant we were going to slay everyone in sight.

  “Destroy their freezer,” I said. “Their curse will be lifted and we’ll save their lives.

  “Okay! Fine!” he got up and grabbed a belt that was hanging from the end of a sword. “Here!”

  The belt held a stun gun, a pretty high powered one if I knew my stun guns, which I didn’t. I know them now, though, and I can tell you it was powerful. Just not powerful enough.

  9.

  I was nervous as hell when, after waiting for the cover of night, we went outside to pull off our surreptitious sabotage mission. It was to be a hit-and-run, so to speak. We’d sneak into the house when we were sure old man Henderson wasn’t there and I’d hover around and keep watch while Guy wired the freezer with explosives, then we’d pull back and he’d fire the detonator. Badda bing, badda boom! and Henderson would be released from his torment.

  Sounded easy enough. But, as I found out, what you have planned on paper and what actually goes down in real life are two woefully different things.

  When we got to Henderson’s house, I thought we’d have no problem. It looked deserted. No lights inside, and no car in the driveway. Old man Henderson drove a yellow Caddy. I saw him in it all the time, and its absence gave me a considerable amount of relief. All we had to do was slink inside, blast the fridge, and move on. I didn’t want to think about all the other places Guy wanted to hit that night. I just focused on the task at hand, and was glad our first assignment would be relatively easy.

  Acknowledging the lack of Cadillac in the driveway with a nod, Guy approached with extreme caution, sticking to the rhododendrons, using his night vision goggles to scan the perimeter. Henderson owned one of the bigger houses on the block, though the entire structure was one level, with a basement accessible only from the outside. Guy motioned to me and clicked his tongue, then, with three deceptively quick crab steps, he was at the back door. I followed, but much more clumsily, and he made sure to express his dissatisfaction while he picked the lock with a pocket knife. Turns out he didn’t need to pick it, though. The door pushed open as soon as he applied pressure, and at that he recoiled to the left, gesturing at me to go right. On either side of the door, we peered in slowly. Nobody. No noise. Nothing.

  “Hurry!” he whispered harshly, and led me into the house, making a beeline for the kitchen, where we knew we’d find a door to Hell disguised as a refrigerator/freezer.

  “Wait!” I pushed in front of him. “I’ve had experience with these things!”

  Slowly, cautiously, I approached the fridge, but the closer I got, the less demon-infested, blood-caked, and gluttonous it looked. No shaking. No popping. No churning with the awful and ravenous cries from a million insatiable demons. No gore sopping from the sides, on the floor, or anywhere for that matter. The place was immaculate, and it just didn’t add up.

  “What the fuck’re you waiting for, man?” he shoved me aside and flung open the freezer. Nothing. Just glass shelves and a whole lot of Lean Cuisine. He did the same with the refrigerator part, and we found the same thing. Just a regular fridge. Too many cans of Ensure, but normal nonetheless.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  “I know!”

  “But this guy was at the barbeque.”

  “I know!”

  “I thought you said he ate the evil burger.”

  “I did! He did…I know he did. I’ve got the pictures to prove it, goddammit!”

  “Then where’s his…wait a minute,” I had an idea, and without saying anything more, led Guy out the backdoor, along the house, to the entrance to the cellar.

  The memories flooded at me the second I smelled that musty basement air. I was taken back in time—eight years—and teleported to Bliss, Idaho, to my gramma’s old farmhouse. And what I saw when Guy flicked on the light made me insane with hauntings of my past. On a wooden worktable, old and wobbly, was a stain so big and red, I almost couldn’t tell where my memory ended and where reality began. It reminded me so much of the first time I’d seen this kind of thing, the moment my life would take its turn down a path of dark destiny. My fateful crux. That moment I saw Gramma chowing down on a fresh human liver, I never knew it would all come to this. Eight years later, hundreds of miles away, in the basement of a complete stranger, witnessing the same gruesome signs of brutality and violence.

  Guy held his nose and mouth at the same time, but that didn’t stop the puke from gushing like a fountain. I was just glad he turned away from me, otherwise I would have spewed too. In a terrible way, though, I was used to this, to what we were seeing, and I hate having to describe it. I never wanted to see this again, and now here I was, knee deep in it, almost literally. The floor was soaked in blood around the worktable, bits and pieces of viscera, shards of bone, clumps of hair. The more I looked around, the more body parts I saw, hanging from hooks, swinging and dripping just like at Gramma’s. Then, the final act, the one last detail that would bring it all home and transform me into that fourteen-year-old boy in his cannibalistic grandmother’s cellar—the freezer started howling, crackling, quaking.

  Guy saw it and his eyes got huge. All that bravado. All that manly man shit about crawling around on his cock in the Nam went bye bye when he got a load of that thing carrying on the way it did. No doubt in my mind what we had, but I was feeling a bit like Guy at that point, having the terror of my childhood replaying in my mind, bringing me back to that scared shitless kid. Then Guy snapped out of it, and dug into his pack.

  “Just you wait, motherfucker!” he said to the freezer. It popped and crackled at his taunts, rocking hard on its base.

  He scurried close and stuck three, inch-long segments of grey, sticky putty to the front, top, and side. Plastic explosives. Wiring them to a central timer, he punched a button and a red light flashed on.

  “Come on! Come on!”

  We both sprinted up the steps and threw ourselves on the lawn. He held up the remote detonator in his left hand, and I covered my head and waited. Nothing happened. Then I looked up and saw why. Guy was in the struggle of his life, with an old man on his back, smothering his face. It was Henderson, draping over Guy like a cougar, suffocating the life out of him. All I could see were Guy’s eyes, bulging and flickering wildly. I realized he was telling me to use the Taser, so I aimed the stun gun and hit the trigger. Off snapped the barbs, and Henderson struggled against the voltage. Sparks and snaps. The old man let go of Guy, rolling sideways on the grass. He pulled at the barbs. I thought he was going to get them out, so I screamed at Guy.

  “Hurry!”

  He gathered the remote trigger and pressed the button. The detonation was almost instantaneous. The concrete foundation absorbed most of the shockwave, but I still felt a good jolt in the ground. Guy and Henderson must have felt it too. They both hit the dirt, but then Guy got right back up, snatching the Taser from me and keeping it trained on the old man. The stungun went dead. Lost its charge, I guess. It didn’t seem to matter. Henderson was motionless. Gasping for breath, we looked at each
other and shrugged.

  “It worked,” I said. “We eliminated his freezer, and he’s back to normal.

  “If you’re so sure, then go and check,” he pushed me.

  “Hold on…hold on,” I inched closer. Three steps, and Henderson sprang to his feet and let out the most god-awful hissing, growling sound. He had his spindly fingers around my throat before I could even blink, and I felt woozy in a matter of seconds.

  Then Pop! and it was over. Henderson’s head jerked back and to the left and his hooks for hands let loose so I could take in air again. My joy at being able to breathe and the euphoria of having my life saved was tempered by the sight of old man Henderson laying there, a bullet hole between his eyes.

  “Good shot, I guess,” was all I could say.

  “Go to the range every Saturday,” Guy kept the gun aimed straight as if Henderson was still standing. “I guess your little hypothesis was incorrect. Looks like we’re gonna have to kill these zombie bastards after all.”