The screams outside continued. She had been able to recognize a few of them. Some were undoubtedly coming from the Patterson kid next door –Josh, a twelve year old kid that Jessica had once babysat. Her mother’s scream was audible too. What the hell is going on?
No longer thinking about Will Farrell, she hugged her knees and started quivering. Josh Patterson’s wailing echoed on. He was being fucking tortured.
“Now he’s dead, honey.” A muffled voice said from behind the window.
“Go away.”
“Shut up!”
She recognized the voice.
“Go away, Rick! I’ve had enough of you.”
There was a laugh.
Jessica crawled across the floor and entered the hallway. It was a dark corridor about fifteen feet long, emptying into the living room.
Rick had beaten her several times before. She found herself wishing that she could turn back time to that prom night when she ditched Russ Allen. He wasn’t a bad guy; he just wasn’t attractive enough at the time. So she left with Rick and ended up with two black eyes.
As Jessica progressed down the hallway the area around her changed. The walls seemed to lose their coloring and the ceiling slowly moved upward. The carpet beneath her disappeared and was replaced with a gold wooden floor. And she was in her high school gym. Everyone was in a tuxedo or a dress, dancing to Justin Bieber. Banners and streamers were displayed on the walls. Her classmates were everywhere, smiling, dancing and having a good time.
Then she saw herself. She was standing in the corner of the room next to Russ Allen. He was drinking a paper cup full of punch and talking to a friend, while she stood at his side.
This was when it happened.
“Don’t do it,” Jessica whimpered.
She watched herself step away while Russ was distracted.
“Don’t do it!” Tears stormed out of her cheeks as she darted toward herself in the middle of the gym. When she reached herself nothing happened. She flew through her as if she wasn’t there.
“Don’t go to him!” she shouted. “Stay with Russ!”
The image of her didn’t listen. She crept over to Rick.
“No!” She fell to her knees and sobbed into her hands. By this time her face was a deep red and her arms were trembling.
“Do you not want to be with me, bitch?” A voice said.
When she looked back up the living room had reformed around her, and all of the lights were on now. The white carpet below was gritty and dirty as usual. There was no sofa, no nothing. Everything was as it should have been. But Rick was standing above her with a baseball bat.
“You don’t appreciate me, bitch!” He took a step toward her. “I ought to bash your fucking face in!”
Jessica fell backward, crying. “Please, just leave me alone.”
Rick walked over to the kitchen and picked up a bottle of whiskey from the counter. Jessica broke for the front door, but when she got there it wouldn’t open. She rattled the lock and pulled the door knob, but nothing would move.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Rick shouted.
“Don’t hit me!”
He chucked the bottle of whiskey at the wall. It exploded upon impact and the liquid ran down the white sheetrock.
“Please!”
“Shut up, bitch!” He raised the bat in the air. Jessica fell to the ground and put herself into a fetal position, crying.
“Please, don’t.” Her pleas began to lose enthusiasm.
“I heard you! You don’t want to be with me! You want to be with that douche bag!”
“No, Rick! I love you!” She pulled her head out of the fetal position just to look at his eyes, which were not drunken and angry as she would have expected.
He smiled at her. “Gotchya.”
“What?”
The room shifted back to darkness.
The front door suddenly flew off the hinges, spraying splinters into the air. Rick stood there motionless, and smiling. His eyes were dark red, and his skin was mostly gray. Splotches of black covered his once golden chest and arms. He grinned, revealing morbid black teeth dripping with saliva.
“I’ve come back for you, honey.”
The horrid odor of decomposition inflated her lungs and forcefully left through a violent cough. Some of it had crept down into her stomach, making the liquid inside boil.
“I want us to be together forever,” Rick hissed.
Jessica’s eyes made brief contact with the door on her right, which lead to the garage. There was a key rack just to the left of it. The keys to the Mustang were waiting for her.
“Want to take my car for a ride, bitch?” Rick read her mind. “I know everything you know.”
Jessica’s trembling legs took a step backward and collapsed. Her hip hit the floor and the rickety house shook around her.
Rick walked forward. “We can be together, Jessica.”
She shook her head and scurried to the door like a rodent on her hands and knees. Rick marched over and placed his hand firmly on the doorknob. A stream of saliva drizzled out of his mouth and landed between her eyes. She cringed, but didn’t move.
“What are you?” she whimpered.
“I am me, but better. I’ve never felt so strong.” He squeezed the doorknob and gave it a light tug. The wood around it splintered. He pulled again. It ripped out of the door. He held it in his hand, showing her.
“Stupid ass,” Jessica muttered. She pushed the door open easily and tumbled down the wooden steps into the garage. Everything around her was dark. The front of the Mustang was barely visible. But she could see enough to grab a screw driver from the counter. Rick flipped on the single dim light bulb in the middle of the ceiling and smiled as he walked down the stairs.
“You’re pissing me off honey. I might just decide to eat your flesh.”
“Back the fuck off.” She brought the screwdriver up to the side of the Mustang.
“You wouldn’t fuck with my car,” he growled and took another step forward.
“Dumbass.” She jabbed it into the red paint and slid it across the door. The screech that followed was irritating, but to her it was beautiful.
“Stop!” he screamed.
“Get me the keys to this car or it happens again.”
“I’m not going to let you go bitch!”
She felt like he was inside of her, looking through her mind.
“You think I’m stupid don’t you?” he said.
“I’ve been with you long enough to figure that one out.”
Rick took a step forward. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Jessica opened the passenger side door. She knew she couldn’t start it, but there was a garage door opener somewhere inside.
“Bitch!” Rick flew through the air as if he had been sprung from a trampoline and landed on the hood of the car. Jessica dove inside and locked the door behind her. With the ceiling light on, she fumbled through the glove box for the opener.
“I’m going to rip your fucking flesh away!” He punched a hole in the windshield and glass rained down on her as she found it. She pushed the little red button and the garage door began to rise. Rick stood still for a moment, just smiling at her as she ran out. Jessica actually thought she could out smart him. She always thought that. Through their entire relationship she had been playing Little Missy Smart’n Bitchy. He had hit her, yes. She deserved it sometimes, but not this time. This time it was going to be something else.
Jessica opened her mouth to scream as she ran but her voice locked up. Her trembling legs moved as fast as they ever had in her life. She reached the curb and fell over when Rick tackled her from behind.
“You’ve pissed me off for the last time, bitch!” He turned her over so she was facing him. “I’m going to eat you alive.”
Her voice unlocked, and she screamed until there was a shrill burning in the pit of
her throat. Rick slowly lowered his teeth…
18
The inside of the Hum
vee was silent except for Lisa’s sobs onto Russ’s shoulder. There was the general feeling of sorrow in the air, not only for Lisa, but for everything that had happened that day. Donahue had seen more than he wanted to in the last twelve hour period, as had Lt. Brown. Kids with their heads twisted backward, a massive blood bath in the middle of Washington Avenue and the walking dead. A tear leaked out of Donahue’s left eye and traveled down his cheek.
Lt. Brown noticed it from the rearview mirror, but didn’t say anything. He, himself, felt like breaking down. He had seen men die in horrific nature before, but nothing was like this. People were being eaten alive by other people, right in the middle of the street, meat and skin being ripped away from their bones.
“Why do I see things sometimes?” Donahue broke the silence.
Lt. Brown made eye contact with him through the mirror. Donahue’s eyes were scared and innocent. He would have expected a sheriff to be stronger, but in a place like this it was understandable. It was quiet, and everyone’s mind was full of kitty cats and puppy dogs and biblical hymns about Jesus loving everyone. No one there had experienced an ounce of hell. The first taste was always the worst.
Brown was about to answer him but as he approached Central Avenue he slammed the breaks and shut off the headlights. Donahue peeked through the space between the two front seats and groaned at what he saw. Lisa turned around and muttered an obscenity and then fell wearily back onto Russ’s shoulder.
They were everywhere. There was a Conoco station on the left side of the intersection and a Subway on the right. The lights were out inside both buildings and the walking dead inhabited the parking lots. There were three or four cars in the middle of the intersection, and there was a group of old men hiding behind them –most of them armed with shotguns.
“Should we help them?” Russ asked.
Lt. Brown shook his head. “They don’t have a chance.”
“They’ve gotta be stupid,” Lisa muttered.
They were.
The gunshots started and stopped in less than a minute. The creatures jumped over the vehicles effortlessly and swarmed the poor old men. Their screams echoed through the black air as their blood hit the pavement. Donahue closed his eyes when it happened. Brown put the vehicle into reverse and gunned it until he found a side street.
“Where are we going?” Lisa whimpered.
“I don’t know,” said Brown. “We aren’t going that way, though. Getting to the highway is going to be a bitch.” He put the car into drive and took a right on Parkridge. Small homes, most of them in bad need of a paint job surrounded them.
“They’re going to send backup, right?” Donahue asked.
Brown looked at him again in the rearview mirror and didn’t say anything. Alan felt like crying.
“How are we going to get out of here?” he asked.
“The only exit is at the highway,” Brown answered.
“What about the side streets. Central goes all the way down to–”
“There is a massive electric fencing unit around the entire town,” Brown explained. “The only gate is at the highway. We’re not going to be able to jump the fence without getting fried.”
Alan looked out his window and then to his feet after seeing that the street was lined with bloody skeletons.
“This alien is causing all of this?” he asked.
Brown nodded. “He spreads a bacteria or something. They didn’t really tell me. It does this to people, and if you’re bitten or scratched you become one of them.”
“Unless they rip your head off,” Lisa muttered, seeing Justin’s head fly out the window again. She clutched Russ tightly. She was safe as long as he was near.
“Yeah, something like that.”
“What about these hallucinations?” Russ asked.
“The alien is telepathic. It can mess with your head and really get inside you to find something that bothers you. These creatures can do it too. They know everything you do.”
Russ sighed and stared out the window. The next few minutes were silent again until there was a scream coming from one of the houses. Russ recognized it as Jessica Welch’s new place. She moved there after high school with her drunk ass boyfriend. Brown brought the vehicle to a stop and reached for his desert eagle.
Russ almost wanted to move on and let her rot. Lisa sat up with her back leaning on the dash and looked out the window. She was still quivering.
“I think there’s only one,” Brown said. He hopped out of the vehicle and crouched by the grille.
A young woman dressed in a white night gown ran out the door screaming. Just as she reached the curb, the attacker literally flew out the door and tackled her from behind. Brown took careful aim and placed a bullet straight through the head of the walking corpse. Its skull exploded in a mist of dark red.
* * * * *
She could taste his blood. None of it got in her mouth but it was so close to her she could taste it, and the pit of her stomach began to protest. It wasn’t only the smell, it was the horrific image in front of her. Rick’s gray, slimy head was nonexistent from the nose up. The grotesque image gave her enough strength to throw the dead body off of her and sit up on her knees. There was a man, a soldier, standing next to a Hummer saying something to her. She couldn’t make out any of his words. Her ears were ringing from the blast.
“I can’t hear you,” she said. Even her own voice was completely muffled. Then her stomach rumbled once again. The smell still lingered in her nostrils, and she could taste it. Her stomach felt it’s presence as if she had just eaten some of his body.
Jessica looked down at herself, trying to ease her stomach for a brief moment. Her white night gown was dripping with blood. She looked up at the man again. He was motioning for her to get in the Hummer.
Jessica nodded at him and got to her feet, but as she did this her stomach didn’t cooperate. The man watched on as Jessica fell back to the ground and knelt over, holding her stomach. She gagged once, twice, then on the third everything came out.
He helped her up and then escorted her to the back door of the vehicle, where she joined Sheriff Donahue in the back seat.
Lisa Kelly was sitting on the lap of Russ Allen in the front seat. Both of their expressions were blank, as if the end of the world had come and gone and they were used to the idea of everyone being dead.
Russ turned to her and gave her a brief nod. She recognized the sheriff as well, who was trying to ask her something but all she heard was a hum being overtaken by a ringing sensation.
“I can’t hear,” she said. Her voice was a little clearer to herself this time.
The man from outside entered the driver seat, but he hadn’t started the vehicle. The rest of the occupants seemed to be in deep conversation about something and Jessica was completely left out. She saw Lisa cling a little to Russ in the front seat and found herself thinking about her dreamish experience.
Rick is dead, she thought to herself. I can start over again. His lifeless body outside the window made her smile a bit and she felt as if a great weight had suddenly been lifted from her back, but when she saw Russ in the front seat the weight returned. She could never look at him in the eye without telling him what she had done the previous night.
“Russ, I took your subwoofers.”
He looked back to her and raised a critical eyebrow.
“What the fuck, Jessica?” he said. It sounded mumbled but she could make it out.
“I’m sorry.”
He sat up in his seat, pushing Lisa to the dash. She grunted at him. The indifferent, blank look on her face was now replaced with one of melancholy. Her eyes were watering and her lip had begun to quiver.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Russ shrugged his shoulders and returned his attention to Lisa, who had begun to shudder as if a sudden chill had washed over her. She looked sick.
“Do you know of anywhere that would be safe?” The man in the front seat turned around and asked her. “This isn’t going to be a very good spot.
They heard the gunfire and probably know we’re here.”
Jessica took a moment to think about it and then said, “The church.”
Donahue turned to her and wondered to himself why he hadn’t thought of it first. There were electronically locked doors, which were heavy and crafted out of thick wood. He didn’t know what kind of wood, but they were tough, and there was a basement with another electronically sealed door.
“Good idea,” he said.
“What’s there?” Brown asked from the front seat.
Lisa had stopped whimpering and was now paying attention to the conversation. She leaned back against the dash board.
“Electronic locks, really tough doors, and a basement that’s electronically sealed.”
“Those locks have to be really strong, or it’s not going to work. These things can rip down just about anything. Back on Washington Avenue I saw one turn over a Hummer by itself,” Brown said.
“The locks are pretty strong. I don’t know if they are that strong, but it’s definitely the best we got in this town,” Donahue said.
“Where is it at?”
“About a mile away, not far.”
As they drove toward the church Jessica couldn’t keep her eyes off of Russ and Lisa. They weren’t really cuddling or kissing or anything like most couples. It seemed that they were both trying to avoid it. But Lisa looked infatuated with him, and at the same time horribly sick and stricken with grief. Her body quivered off and on, and Russ looked a bit awkward holding her on his lap. But at the same time there was a sparkle in his eye, and Jessica could tell that he felt for her.
* * * * *
The smell of Jessica’s perfume had always attracted Russ. It left him with the memory of having her close to him, chest to chest, dancing. It had been a magical smell to him, and at the same time a horrific one. The odor reminded him of being ditched and being alone and desiring to be with her again.
The perfume’s fragrance wasn’t quite as strong now, but he could smell it on her nevertheless. It no longer attracted him. There was now something morbid about it. The last time he had picked up that scent, he saw Jessica standing behind Lisa, holding a knife in her back. The smell brought back the horrifying dream.
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