“Looks that way,” my head couldn’t have been lower. So many lives had to be taken. So many lives that I wished so badly I could save.
10.
Knowing we were on a full-scale seek and destroy mission, and confirming that the curse wouldn’t be lifted until each and every one of the possessed freezers was destroyed, I made Guy make me one and only one promise. Since we couldn’t spare the lives of those unfortunate servants, and since the most prominent of all was my own son and my son’s mother, I begged him that, in his plans, we wouldn’t go to my house until the very end. Maybe by then I’d be able to figure something out, come up with a way to save my family.
We both agreed we couldn’t waste time. The problem was, by the time we’d finished at Henderson’s house, the sun was coming up. Plus it took a while to plan and prepare for each house, taking special consideration for the target, who lived there, who might have been lurking around and when.
“We can’t just go right in there all willy nilly,” Guy said many times, and I happened to agree with him, especially after the incident with Henderson. Planning was paramount. OPSEC, or Operations Security, as Guy called it. So we went to work on the details of our next mission, which had to wait until the following night. We planned all day long, not just on the next house, but the next four. We had a pretty ambitious schedule and knew it would be a stretch to get them all in. But we had confidence in ourselves, and that counted more than anything.
That night, just as dusk surrendered to darkness, we emerged from our cave to the eeriest sight I’ve ever seen, and, as you know, I’ve seen some whoppers. It wasn’t a wasteland quite yet, but that was the inevitable end if things kept going. Streetlights toppled over across the road. Cars piled up two, three high. Broken glass everywhere. Houses on fire, missing windows and doors. Guy’s house hadn’t been immune from the devastation. Everything had been ransacked and broken and molested. It looked like a tornado had gone through, even dragging stuff onto the lawn.
“Good thing for my Bear Cave,” he winked.
“What’s going on out there?” I said without thinking. I didn’t need to think, and Guy didn’t need to answer. We stood there for what seemed the longest moment of my life, just listening and watching. A reddish glow on the horizon told of destruction both near and far. The air, breathable most of the time, would often shift with the wind, bringing a toxic mixture too nauseous for human lungs. We caught a whiff and that’s when the next target came into view. A 2010 Lexus. The driver: Glenda Wilkins.
With Glenda we were much smarter than with Henderson, and made sure that we had her in our sights way before the actual infiltration took place. I’m not saying it was any easier. Killing the middle-aged wife and mother of three wasn’t high on my list of priorities, but, as we saw, there would be no stopping her murderous rampaging, even after we destroyed her freezer. And we destroyed her freezer. Actually, like many we ended up encountering, it was another double unit—a refrigerator and freezer combined. The same type of unit in almost every household in America. I imagined for a second what if this actually happened? What if every house in the country had a possessed freezer, a portal directly to the eternal fires below, where the damned legions awaited their grisly banquets? It did more than make me shake in my Nikes. It fueled me. Just like I’m positive it fueled Guy, though he didn’t say much that night, the night we took out five neighborhood hellholes.
Upon the first signs of birds chirping and the light of dawn approaching, we crept back to Guy’s house. Regress, he called it, and made sure our way in was camouflaged as usual. He had a pretty ingenious design. The stairs leading to his subterranean lair were behind a hidden door that was so concealed I couldn’t see it from topside, even after I knew where to look.
When we got underground, in his soundproof, climate controlled, battery-powered safe room, I finally let out my emotions. Sure, I carried a great amount of grief over having to kill all those people. Those poor, innocent people. But the feeling I got from it all. Dodging the killers in a game of cat and mouse. Destroying the destroyers and bombing their hellish masters into oblivion. It was all so exhilarating I couldn’t help but hoot and holler. Guy, on the other hand, didn’t partake in my celebratory mood.
“Be quiet,” he had a small television set. Very old, but worked.
“How can you power that thing? The electricity’s out, isn’t it?”
“Same way I power the lights—solar, my friend. Been off the grid for fifteen years. Now be quiet.”
He turned up the volume on the TV, letting the talking heads take over. Two people at a news desk, obviously flustered, and not reading from the teleprompters, that much was obvious.
“We have reports coming in from all over the metro area. Raging groups of teens as well as adults, going berserk and committing the most heinous acts imaginable.”
“Sam, that’s correct. We have dozens of reports, phone calls, emails, texts and tweets about this, and you might have to call this what it is—an epidemic. An epidemic of murder, that’s the only way we can put it.”
“Sheila, I think you might have a point. From what we’re hearing, and from the video that keeps coming in, some of which you are seeing right now, all we can say is stay indoors. Stay home. Do not go outdoors, and do not answer the door if someone knocks.”
The reporters were right. The footage on the screen was heinous. Scenes of people being chased down in the streets, thrown into traffic, attacked by several crazed demon thugs at once. Big buildings burning. Cars exploding. It looked like a war. Then something happened next that proved to me it was a war. In the middle of the footage, the screen cut back to the studio, and right away things didn’t look normal. The man, Sam, was struggling with another man. Sheila, his co-anchor, screamed and hit the attacker with a notebook, but that had no effect. Then someone else jumped into the shot, accosting Sheila. Then another came to help bring her down while yet more ganged up on Sam. Their screams for help rattled my bones, and then the screen went blank.
“What the fuck was that!” Guy exploded, then changed the channel. Blank. He had a digital cable box, and flipped through every preset station. On each one it was fuzzy static, a black screen, or color bars and a high pitched tone.
“This is a whole lot worse than we thought,” I said. “But I can’t say I didn’t see this coming.”
“Fuck this!” he rolled his chair on their casters and flicked on a box that I later learned was a ham radio. Some adjustments and twists of a few knobs, and the dial lit up. Hallow static noises seemed to warm in tone, then became perfect English. A voice of a man. Sounded the same age as Guy. Sounded a lot like Guy, to be honest. Guy slid an old table microphone up to his mouth and pressed the button in its base.
“Birdclaw? That you? This is Bearhug.”
“Bearhug! This is Bird! Man, there’s armed combat everywhere. Crazy fuckers just going nuts. Killing friends and family. Eating them too, man. It’s fuckin’ freakshow material!”
“Roger that. And I gotta say that’s a roger over in these parts too. Total chaos. Mass murder in broad daylight.”
“Bear? How you holdin’ out over there?”
“Holding out,” Guy nodded at me. “More than holding out. We’re taking the fight to them, and I highly suggest you do the same.”
“What the fuck’re you talking about, Bear?”
“I’m talking about organizing hit teams. Arming yourselves and fighting back. Going out there and finding the freezers that have been turned into hell mouths and destroying them.”
“Bear,” Birdclaw laughed over the airwaves. “Are you shitting me? You think this has something to do with that cockamamie curse you keep yammering on and on about?”
I grabbed Guy’s mic. He objected at first, but when he saw how much of a roll I got on, he let me go.
“It’s not cockamamie! The fucking curse is real…and it’s spreading like wildfire! You guys, all of you, everybody on the radio, listen to me. You have guns, I know you do.
You’ve got to get some people together—people you know aren’t possessed—and go out and blow up as many freezers as you can. Do you hear me? You’ll know what to look for, you’ll hear them moaning and calling for food. They’re demonic, and we need to destroy them, destroy them all!”
My rant didn’t fall on deaf ears. Turns out much of the amateur radio crowd was in fact a lot like Guy. Preppers. Highly armed and intelligent. Maybe tainted a little by conspiratorial thinking, even borderline paranoid delusional. But, as they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. And in this case, a good percentage of the population was out to get us. The curse was disseminating. That much became clear the second we saw the news attacks. Through our radio contacts we were able to pinpoint exactly where and when the curse was going, and organized teams of civilians and dispatched them to eliminate the threats.
This was our lives over the course of the next few days. At night, we went on the hunt, going down the list of infected neighbors, and sometimes just freestyling it, since it was now clear there were so many other freezers. We were finding and destroying them at a pretty good clip. But, as the nights went on and we kept track of reports coming in, we realized the freezers were being turned evil faster than we could get rid of them. This ramped up my anxiety, because I knew each new freezer meant fewer chances of Brenton and Shannon coming out of this whole thing alive.
The only thing that flickered at least a tiny spark of hope was that we had so many friends out there, unifying, doing exactly what we were doing. The true, dauntless, resourceful, and tenacious nature of the human spirit started to shine through, night by night, one small step at a time, until it really did seem like we might get somewhere. We really might succeed in getting rid of this menace. That was all wishful thinking, though, and I knew it.
11.
Another shining example of the resolve of the human spirit came on one of those nights Guy and I were out on a sabotage run. It came from one of the unlikeliest of sources. I can tell you at the time it scared the shit out of me, and I thought we were screwed. However, it turned out to be one of the most fortuitous episodes in this whole sordid mess.
It happened at one of the houses in the neighborhood. I didn’t know the people who lived there. In fact the place looked abandoned. Of course, learning from previous experience, we knew that didn’t mean jack shit, so we split up and performed a top to bottom search, making damn good and sure no zombified freaks were waiting around to hack us up into meaty bits. Finding no one, we regrouped in the kitchen, where we discovered a strange sight—the refrigerator was gone.
It wasn’t demolished or damaged or otherwise harmed by people in the same frame of mind as the two of us. It was gone. Disappeared. There was an obvious empty space between the range and the sink, but instead of a fridge we found ourselves staring at dust bunnies.
“What happened?” Guy spun in a circle, checking every corner of the room. “Where the fuck is it?”
“Shhh!” my ears tuned into something faint yet distinct coming from the back of the house. By this point I’d grown accustomed to Guy’s .44 Magnum, or at least one of them. He had another one, and handled it quite well. We must have been a pretty imposing sight creeping down that hallway, but let me tell you, I could have been bowled over by a feather if something popped out at me right then.
Guy showed no such fear, and took the lead, striding to the last door down the long, dark corridor. With his elbow, he gave the wood a stiff blow, then shouted an order for whoever it was to open up. I wasn’t sure if this was the best tactic to take, but Guy didn’t wait around for a consensus. Upon hearing some scuffling behind the door, he reeled back and gave it a kick, sending wood shards flying. Fleeting movement beyond the dust and debris precipitated a shot from Guy’s gun. I knew it didn’t hit anything but the wall.
“Freeze!” Guy gave chase. “You murdering freak! Stop so I can send you back to Hell!”
I scrambled to keep behind my partner, a spry old fellow if there ever was one, and he in turn scrambled to keep pace with the elusive shadow. Into a different room we ran, and then another, this one a bathroom. There we got our first good look at our fugitive—a young man, probably not even twenty. Looked clean cut, healthy and normal besides a scratch on his upper arm down to his wrist. He looked normal, but we never could tell, really. And who was in the mood to take chances?
“You son of a bitch!” Guy pointed his gun as the kid jumped at the window, struggling with the latch, trembling, desperate to get out. “Thought you could sneak up on us, huh?”
He pulled the trigger, but I moved into him at the last second, not convinced we were doing the right thing. The gun went off, and in that little tiled space the noise felt like a concussion against my skull.
“Okay! Okay!” the kid threw up his jittery hands. His head he kept down, looking away, huddled in the corner of the shower stall. “Okay! Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”
At that, Guy paused. I was thinking what he was thinking. None of the fiendish servants to hell, none of the coldblooded, possessed characters we’d come across in nearly a week of making these hit-and-run excursions had acted anywhere near the way this kid was acting.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“D-d-don’t kill me,” he raised his head, and I knew he wasn’t turned. He had a frightened, disoriented look, like he didn’t know what the fuck was going on. His world had been turned upside down in the matter of days, and now, after surviving the initial wave, after successfully evading and avoiding the demented demon zombies, now he was about to meet his end at the hands of the so-called good guys. I knew all this in less than a second when I looked into his eyes, and I stopped Guy’s angry interrogation.
“He’s just a kid,” I crept closer, sensitive to the fact that he was a trembling mess. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
“No…no!” he screamed, and that elicited an instant response from Guy.
“Move away, Mitchell! I’m gonna shoot him!”
“No, wait!” I had to be firm otherwise Guy wouldn’t listen. “He’s not one of them. Look at him, dammit!” I spoke calmly to the kid. “Let him see your eyes, dude.”
The kid couldn’t stop shaking, but I saw in him an inner determination, a strength of courage that spurred him to take the challenge of confronting this scary man in the black body armor. Guy, when it was all said and done, was the one to be scared of in that house. That became plain and clear when the kid showed off his face. Young and innocent. Not a wrinkle or a blemish. And clean, sparkling baby blues. He didn’t have a trace of homicidal intent. Not a whisper of evil tendencies.
Guy wasn’t convinced.
“Look out, Mitchell!” he aimed his pistol and I got even firmer with him. The only thing he responded to was strength.
“Dammit, Guy! Would you turn it off Rambo mode and look at this kid! He’s as possessed as you and me! Pull your head out of your ass and put the gun down!”
Guy responded as I’d hoped, albeit a little confounded at my sudden power grab. I wouldn’t be denied. This kid was innocent, and I was determined to save at least one life in this nightmare.
I got the both of them to calm down enough so we could find out a little about the kid. Turned out his name was Becker, and he lived at that house with his mom and two sisters. After a whole lot of tears, we got out of him that his entire family had died, and it was his mom who’d killed everyone, even the neighbors and all of her friends. He described a scenario that sounded a lot like what had happened with my gramma—how she fooled everyone else into thinking she was normal, when, behind closed doors, she was a depraved, cannibalistic killer.
“It was unthinkable,” he was tearing up. “Just unthinkable. All I’ve done since I locked myself up in here is pray. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. All I did was pray to the Almighty that He might have the mercy to spare this world of His wrath.”
“Huh,” Guy huffed. “Pray all you like. I don’t think God�
�s got anything to do with this. Besides, it ain’t sittin’ around and prayin’ that’ll get us out of this,” he gestured at his gun. “It’s good old fashioned firepower, baby.”
“I beg to differ, sir,” Becker blew me away with his grace under pressure. “But this has everything to do with God. My mother was a demon, or at least she was being manipulated by demons, and the only thing that’ll stop a demon is the Word of God,” he lifted his right hand, and that’s when I realized he’d had a bible the whole time.
“Bullshit!” Guy looked at me for help. “Ask ol’ Mitchell, here. We been doin’ just fine takin’ those goddam freezers out with nothin’ but the help of some accurately placed charges and the balls to do it all. That’s what it takes. Gunpowder and balls, boy.”
“You’ve been doing a good job, you say,” Becker took a long gaze out the window, or what was left of the window. Outside, the sounds of car horns and people screaming and the shouts of killers echoed through the night. It sounded like we were no longer living in the real world, but a nightmarish conception of what the Earth would be like when, literally, all Hell had broken loose. No matter how bad it sounded, though, I knew things would only get worse. “Because it doesn’t look to me like you’ve stopped a thing. I pray to God to give us the strength—”
Freezer: The Complete Horror Series Page 19