“Pray to God, pray to God…fuck!” Guy got in Becker’s face. I had to separate the two, as Becker didn’t back down a bit. Little guy had some fight in him. “I told you…ain’t no amount of prayin’s gonna get us outta this shithole. Guns. Explosives. Bullets. That’s what’s gonna do it. And a lot of ‘em.”
Becker shook his head, his eyes watery and glistening.
“I’ll pray for your soul, sir. Just like I pray for the souls of those who are committing these terrible acts.”
“Oh, son of a bitch,” Guy turned away in disgust. “Useless. This guy’s useless.”
“Hold on, Guy,” I told him. I didn’t want to give up on the boy. Another set of hands and eyes would prove invaluable. So I lowered my voice a bit, and tried to speak peacefully. “Becker, it’s obvious you have a lot of faith, and that’s great. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I know there’s nothing wrong with it,” he said indignantly. “But I’ll tell you something that is wrong. That’s a person who denies God’s hand in all of this, and also denies the role God’s love and forgiveness is going to have in the final deliverance.”
“God’s love?” Guy grew even more agitated. I placed myself between them again. Guy pushed me but I held my ground. “What the fuck do you think you are? Some kind of priest or something?”
“As a matter of fact, I’m entering the seminary in October. Or at least I was going to, before…this.”
“Oh for chrimeny’s sake! Do you hear that, Mitchell? We got ourselves a regular Pope!” he pushed his face closer to Becker. “You listen here. We don’t have time for your little Godspell. We got a job to do, and it entails using one of these,” he held up his gigantic handgun. “Do you think you can handle that?”
“I don’t need that,” Becker locked stares with the man, then held up his bible. “This is the only weapon I need.”
“Fuck this!” Guy stomped out. I think he really meant to leave Becker there all alone and defenseless. I caught up with him and reminded him that we couldn’t just leave the boy there, no matter how much of a burden he might have meant for us. After some considerable debate, which got quite heated, I talked him into taking Becker in, and we all three went back to the underground hideout.
When we got there, Guy went straight for the radio. I was anxious to hear from the different crews in the area. It became our nightly ritual, connecting with the others who were fighting the same fight as we were. Only on this night, things had changed. The good news was we seemed to be holding our own, if not gaining ground. Armed resistance groups had formed all over the place, numbering more than two dozen. The bad news hit me like a ton of bricks. The evil freezers were turning up missing. They weren’t being destroyed, but relocated. Nobody knew where, when or how, but they knew the freezers were being moved.
“Just like at Becker’s house,” Guy said. I knew what he was going to say next. I’d been dreading it all along. “That just bumped up our timeline, Mitchell. We’ve got to go to your house next. That’s all there is to it.”
12.
This was the night I’d been dreading. I’d put the idea of going after my own flesh and blood out of my mind. I had this crazy fantasy that if we could get rid of the other freezers, then we’d get to my house last and destroy my own unit without having to harm either Brenton or Shannon. Of course this fantasy had been formed before we knew nonlethal means of subduing our targets just didn’t work. Even so, I still held onto the totally unrealistic idea that I could spare my loved ones. Brenton and Shannon had to survive, and I would put my own life on the line, even sacrifice myself in order to ensure that was going to happen.
We skirted behind a garden shed, following the fence line, hunched along hedges, all while making sure to stay out of sight from cars on the street, which, to our dismay, turned out to be police cruiser after police cruiser. And as we got to my house, more cops there were, until we had to end our advance for fear of being seen. We retreated to a nice, big juniper bush across the street and watched the strangest scene unfold.
There were so many cops I couldn’t count them. Uniformed and plain-clothes. Then a U-Haul drove up—one of the really big ones—and it backed into my driveway. I saw Monroe, driving the moving rig, and his arrival marked the beginning of a beehive of activity.
All kinds of people started milling about, not just cops, either. They came running from different houses, got together in groups, then ran back to the houses. Then a few minutes later, they came out carrying their refrigerators like pallbearers. They moved quickly, like time was wasting, and for the most part the cops watched and kept silent vigil over everything. Then came the strangest part.
My house sat on the corner, so we had a pretty good view of my front porch and even garage from where we were. That vantage point allowed us to see my front door swing open and Brenton march out like the king of the world. He was wearing the suit we bought for him that last Easter. The one Shannon’s mother went so gaga over. Such a bizarre juxtaposition, to be honest. That tiny, cute three-piece and those ruddy little cheeks on such an innocent face. But those eyes. They weren’t innocent, and they swept across the road, surveying the progress as his followers loaded the moving van with various fridges.
“There he is!” Guy said almost too loud. “There’s Brenton!”
“I know my own son, Guy.”
“Yeah, well so do I,” he aimed his gun, staring down the sights. “And I know what he is. He’s the leader, man. Kill the leader, and they won’t know what the fuck to do.”
“That’s my SON!” my reaction was swift and decisive. Really, I can’t believe I had it in me, the sheer violence with which I shoved Guy to the ground. It all just boiled up inside of me, the sense of protection, the need to defend my son, even if he was in fact a demonic mastermind.
“Are you fuckin’ crazy?” Guy got up quickly and brushed himself off. “Didn’t you hear a word I said? That…thing isn’t your kid anymore. It’s a demon, a killer, and not only that, he’s the boss. I’m telling you, if we off him, then there’ll be chaos. We’ll be able to finish this, Mitchell. Maybe for good.”
“And I’m telling you that’s bullshit, Guy. Listen to me, my son is in there. He’s still there, just like I was. I know it. We can’t kill him…we can’t. And it doesn’t matter if we kill him. The demons don’t care. I’ve seen it myself. They’ll just create another leader, or maybe a group of leaders…it doesn’t matter.”
“If it doesn’t matter, then I’m doing it,” Guy got back into sniper position. I sprang at him but this time he was ready for me, and, with his powerful leg, shoved me aside. I took hold of his ankle and we engaged in a skirmish right there in the bushes. As I held him at bay, barely, I pleaded with Becker to help me. He just sat there with the gravest expression and crossed himself.
“I can only pray for your child’s soul, Mr. Mitchell,” he crossed himself again.
By then, Guy had me completely off of him, and, out of breath and strength, I could only watch as he repositioned himself, shifting his weight to get the perfect shot. My gut tightened and I closed my eyes, but that didn’t help, because all I could see in my mind was Brenton’s tiny little body in my driveway. Lifeless. Gone. I went into a sort of shutdown at that moment, the moment of my son’s death.
But it wasn’t the moment of Brenton’s death. Just when I thought Guy was going to squeeze the trigger, a hand reached through the juniper branches and seized the gun. Before I realized what happened, the gun went off, but Guy had been thrown off balance by this new development, and the bullet missed high. Brenton was still alive. He and the police surrounding him looked our direction. I gathered myself enough to glimpse our attacker. Shannon’s beautiful face stared at me with a slight hint of something I wanted to believe was love. She had Guy pinned down, her feminine frame exuding both grace and strength. I wanted to say something to her, thinking she would maybe spare us our lives, but what happened next made a scary and bizarre situation even scarier and more bi
zarre. Brenton. I saw him move with uncanny speed, faster than any living creature I’d ever seen, jumping and twirling and sprinting over cop cars, coming straight at me.
At that very instant, it seemed like about a hundred cops all converged on our position, moving fast, but not nearly as fast as Brenton.
“Hold it!” he ordered the cops to stand down, and they did, lowering their weapons to their sides. Then Brenton turned to me with almost a joyous smile. “Hi, Daddy. I knew you’d decide to join us again. Now you can see what I’ve done!”
With a glance he had the cops flying into action again. They seized me and Becker, but Guy wouldn’t be taken so easily. Using a lot more agility than I thought he had in him, he skirted away, shooting two possessed police down in the process. Several of them went after him as he made his escape, but stopped cold and turned and nodded at Brenton’s silent command. The demon ESP was strong, and Brenton’s henchmen obeyed like trained attack dogs eager to please their master.
13.
Becker and I found ourselves in the back of a police vehicle. At one time long ago they called them paddy wagons. A bus with steel mesh over the windows and a Plexiglas separation between the driver seat and the back. They didn’t bother to lock us in shackles. They must have known, just like I knew, there was no real escape. Just like there was no escape for the dozens of dead bodies that had been piled in with us. I could tell Becker wanted to lose his lunch. I did too. The stench of decay and coagulated blood and body parts burrowed into our skin, our hair, our clothes.
“Just don’t look at it,” was the only advice I had for him. After all my experience with this horror, after all these years, that was the extent of my wisdom.
At the sound of my voice, in the mound of human remains, something moved. I wanted to think it was just my warped imagination, but when Becker reacted to it, I knew we had to do something. Together we broke my own advice and started digging in the bloody mess, searching frantically for a survivor. And a survivor we found. Coughing. Spitting. Covered in entrails. He took one look at the both of us and collapsed after we dug him from the avalanche of death.
It took us a few minutes to get him to full consciousness again, while the bus rolled east down Sunset Highway, toward Portland. We got him cleaned up the best we could and then propped him in a seat furthest away from the dead people. He seemed to appreciate that. After a few more minutes of assessing his circumstances, checking out both me and Becker, and gazing fearfully out the windows at the devastated landscape, he squeaked out his first words.
“You-you guys aren’t here to kill me?” his petrified stare traveled back and forth between the two of us. “Or try to turn me into one of you by making me eat that rotten meat?”
“No,” Becker took the lead. “We’re like you.”
“Huh, if you’re like me then you’re screwed,” he took another long, mournful look at the communities along the highway. All smoke and fire and violence in the streets. “We’re all screwed.”
“So you know about the possessed meat,” I said. “And the freezers.”
“Of course I do,” he laughed sarcastically, and that’s when I took a good look at what he was wearing. It was hard to tell. His clothes were soaked in human bodily fluids. But when I saw the nametag, the light bulb went off.
“You’re a cop?”
He looked at me quickly, then stared at the floor.
“This is my first year on the force. A rook. I thought I was headed for a lifetime career. The job that would allow me to buy a house, marry my girlfriend, have kids, be somebody. But now, this,” he gestured to the outside world. In the distance, in the haze of violence, a helicopter circled slowly.
“But how?” Becker asked the question I was burning to ask. “How can all this happen? How can the police—all the police be doing this?”
“I was there,” he shivered. “I saw the whole thing from the start. I saw Detective Monroe murder the chief, then take his body and put it in the freezer in the lounge. Then he started making people eat it…eat that horrible shit, man. I didn’t eat it. I couldn’t. Puked it up the second I tried. They thought I was turned, you know? They thought I was one of them. But I wasn’t. And I wanted to do something about what was going on. It was so evil. So goddam evil. I mean, cops started going out and killing people. Ordinary, innocent citizens. Then Monroe ordered that the meat be sent to all the different precincts and departments in the metro area. It didn’t take long, only a few days, until every cop in the region was either a possessed maniac or dead.”
I wanted to dismiss his story. At any other time and under any other circumstances I wouldn’t have believed a word he said. But I’d lived what he lived. I knew what he knew. I’d pretended to eat the tainted meat also, and had to put up a front of evil just like he did.
He sniffled once, then twice. His chin quivered and he spoke over his sobs.
“They made me do things. Terrible things.”
“It’s all right,” Becker tried to console him. “God forgives.”
“Yeah?” the kid made eye contact, and I mean kid because he looked younger than Becker. “Will God forgive me? I don’t think so. Not for what I did.”
“You had no choice,” Becker was undaunted despite the clear and obvious stomach-turning statement. “You did what you had to do to survive and there’s no shame in that.”
“Yes there is! I didn’t have to do it! I could’ve killed them instead! They would have murdered me instantly, but at least I could’ve gotten a couple of them, taken them with me…no I’m a coward!” he buried his head in his hands.
“God has a plan,” Becker wouldn’t be deterred from his message. “And maybe it wasn’t a part of His plan to have you die yet.”
“Yeah,” he kept his face hidden. “For what?”
“Maybe to help us,” Becker looked at me.
My soul purpose at that point in time was to find out all I could about what was happening. Though he didn’t really want to talk much, I made the young cadet, whom we learned was named Kyle, tell me why the freezers were being moved. Like I said, he got stubborn. He didn’t want to talk, but with a little coaxing, convincing him we were going to try to do something about it, he opened up.
He said Brenton was in charge of everything, and he had the police working as his personal thug squads, keeping a pulse on the demonic takeover of the entire Portland Metro area. The possessed freezers were turning up everywhere, and so were devil people, as he called them. And the cops ruled the turf, he said, evil cops, all turned by eating the rotten meat.
Kyle told us Brenton had ordered all the evil freezers to one location—Marine Terminal 4 at the Port of Portland. From what he could gather, it seemed there was a rumble in the demon ranks, something about vigilante strike groups destroying the hellmouths. That had Brenton a little scared it seemed, and he wanted to gather all the remaining freezers in one location so they could be guarded. That last part was just Kyle’s guess. He confessed he really didn’t know why they were all being taken to the port.
Our small bus was a part of a larger caravan, and we all rolled into the port one after the other, joining an even larger convoy coming south. Moving truck after moving truck. A line over a mile long. And when we got to the gates of the terminal, my whole body wanted to shut down.
The dock buzzed with activity. People coming and going. Vehicles backing in. Forklifts carrying freezer after freezer. Groups ganging up to unload the U-Hauls. Cranes lifting large metal boxes from the deck of a gigantic cargo ship, with two other massive seagoing vessels tied up next to it. The operation went like clockwork, and that drove even more dread through my bones as I ruminated over what Brenton could possible be up to.
14.
The bus rolled into a gigantic warehouse, the biggest building I’d ever been in, and almost the entire floor space, probably a million square feet, was lined with rows upon rows of freezers and refrigerators. I’m telling you there were hundreds of them, if not thousands. And more were comi
ng, both from the giant cargo ship and from the trucks outside.
I thought this must have been what it felt like to be a lobster in one of those tanks. Knowing you’re doomed. Wondering which shadowy figure behind the glass was going to devour you. None of us could talk at first. Then, when the bus stopped and it looked like we were going to be taken out, Becker spoke up in a thin, constricted voice.
“W-what are they doing?”
I didn’t want to say it out loud. My mouth just started going, and I couldn’t stop it.
“They’re collecting the freezers so they can ship them all over the world. It’s gonna be a global epidemic within weeks. Days maybe, depending on how fast they can get these things out.”
Freezer: The Complete Horror Series Page 20