Gary's Children (Shingles Book 2)

by Rick Gualtieri

  All the while, Mr. Chunks looked up at him with that mix of curiosity and contempt that only a cat can truly master.

  He and the feline stared at each other for several seconds until Chunks let out a bored meow and went back to his perch near the front window.

  “I’m not crazy!”

  If Chunks had an opinion on the matter, he kept it to himself.

  That was fine for Gary. The last thing he needed was for his fucking cat to start talking to him, too. “You’re not going to, right?”

  Chunks’s response was to yawn and go back to seeing if there were objects of greater interest out on the front lawn.

  Gary said a silent curse at the cat then looked down at himself. His hands were shaking, but it was only the tip of the iceberg as inside he felt like every door to every deep dark passage in his mind was coming unhinged.

  Though he wasn’t a heavy drinker, he kept a few bottles around for those occasions when a nice buzz was preferable to facing the world sober. He found a half-full fifth of Old Grand-Dad in the back of one of the cupboards, grabbed a disposable plastic cup, and poured himself a shot.

  He wasn’t sure what it would do, but in almost every TV show he watched, a stressful day called for a tumbler of whiskey. And if this day didn’t count as such, then he had no fucking idea what would. He took a sip, winced, then swallowed the pungent brew down.

  Each time he turned back toward the living room, his eyes would open wide with the certainty that he wouldn’t be alone, but so far, so good. No dead kids asking for Cookie Crisp and no phantom flushes from the bathroom.

  He took another sip and felt more in control. Maybe his friends in college had been right all along. Alcohol did make everything better.

  Gary had stepped to the edge of his kitchen when more movement caught his eye, but this time, he didn’t panic. It was just his answering machine blinking to let him know there was a message.

  No surprise there.

  He’d been expecting a call after the way he’d freaked out at work. Now, the only question was whether he was being asked to resign, outright fired, or they were coming up with some pathetic excuse about why his job had been outsourced to a guy three thousand miles away wearing a turban.

  Bracing himself, he hit play.

  “I’m praying for you, Gary,” his mother told him from the tinny little speaker, conveying far more contempt and pity than the shitty answering device should have been capable of. That was it. One sentence, then a click as the line went dead.

  Whatever good the booze had done was immediately lost as his stress levels spiked in ways that he knew only one cure for.

  The dead girl’s words echoed in the back of his mind. Yes, you will. But he drowned her out with another big swallow of the bitter hooch. Say what you will about the folks from Kentucky, but they sure as shit knew how to kill brain cells.

  Gary stepped into his bedroom, sat down, and booted up the laptop. Images of ghostly children floated in his vision every time he blinked his eyes, but he continued onward, trusting in the power of porn to exorcise his personal demons. There were few ailments a good set of tits couldn’t cure, and he was hoping the specters of unborn kids weren’t the exception.

  He unbuckled his belt just as the friendly login leading to F*ck-Axis and points beyond appeared on the screen, beckoning him to enter and enjoy the many wonders within.

  This is more like it.

  He unleashed the beast, so to speak, then grabbed hold of the Jacklight sitting next to his laptop and...

  Gary pushed away from the desk and stood up, dick still flopping in the wind. All thoughts of a good wank emptied from his mind as he stared in horror at the tube of rubber and aircraft-grade aluminum still in his hand.

  “How the fuck did you get here?”

  Last he’d seen it, it had been in his briefcase. He’d quickly stuffed it away following his terrified histrionics at work, then tossed it into the back seat of his car. The thing was, when he’d run from the scene of the accident, he’d left his briefcase behind, forgotten in his panic.

  Grabbing his shit had seemed like the least important thing in the world as that little girl stood decomposing on the sidewalk. But the Jacklight in his palm said otherwise.

  Hell, even if he had brought it home with him, this was the first time he’d stepped into his bedroom since getting back to his apartment. How the fuck had it gotten there ahead of him?

  A chill ran down his spine as he considered everything that had happened since he’d stepped in the door, ending with what his mother had said to him—both condescending and condemning in only five words.

  Had the crazy bitch somehow cursed him?

  It wasn’t like he hadn’t heard her Bible-belting rhetoric before. Hell, if anything, most of his dishes, plates, silverware, his laptop, and even his fucking cat would be cursed in God’s name by now if that were the case.

  No. His mom was full of shit. That much he knew. Unless God was one serious asshole, the only real power she possessed was making Gary’s self-esteem disappear faster than a carton of smokes.

  He continued to look down at the Jacklight, the slit in the rubber staring back at him like some accusing cyclopean eye.

  I should’ve asked Pop what his return policy was.

  The thought of Pop and his collection of grimy curios brought other recent memories to the forefront of Gary’s mind, memories that were only now starting to make gruesome sense.

  The soaped up windows.

  Pop’s strange chuckle after telling him the Jacklight was special.

  “What antique shop? There’s no store next to...”

  Next to what? He hadn’t let Laura finish, being in the middle of his own tirade. What did she mean by...?

  “Daddy?”

  For a moment, Gary stood there frozen, hoping against hope that he’d swallowed enough liquor to simply be hallucinating, but knowing even he wasn’t that much of a lightweight.

  Don’t turn around. Don’t turn around.

  Gary turned around and immediately wished he’d listened to his own goddamned advice for once in his life.

  A toddler, just barely old enough to stand, stood in the doorway to his bedroom. It looked back at him with lifeless watery eyes and held out its arms as if it wanted to be picked up.

  If that were all, then perhaps Gary’s sanity could have been salvaged. After all, a ghost baby was still just a baby, while he was a grown man.

  But the toddler wasn’t alone, not even remotely.

  Dozens of children, far more than his small apartment should have been capable of holding, were lined up behind the first. They ranged from infants to late teens, boys and girls, redheads, blondes, brunettes, and one who was bald. They were dressed in a wide variety of clothes from trendy to threadbare.

  But what they all had in common was their damp, pale skin and their dead, unblinking eyes—eyes that stared unwaveringly at Gary.

  “Go away,” he cried, raising his hands to his mouth. Gary let out a scream as the feel of wet lips caressed his cheek. He almost fainted before looking down and realized he was still holding the damned Jacklight in his hands. He gave his head a quick shake and looked up again, praying his apartment was once more empty, but the children remained where they were. “You’re not real!”

  “You would have been so proud of me when I hit the winning home run,” one of them said in a bubbling voice that sounded more drowned than alive. Gary couldn’t tell which, though, as none had moved their lips.

  “If you hadn’t flushed me, I would have been homecoming queen.”

  “Stop it,” Garry pleaded.

  “I wasn’t very good at math, but you would have tutored me.”

  “You and mommy would have read me bedtime stories every night.”

  “I was scared when the doctors told me how sick I was, but you and Mom would have encouraged me to stay strong.”

  “No more, please.”

  “I would’ve won the science fair in second grade, but
I wound up in a napkin instead.”

  Gary’s nerve broke. “STOP IT!” He swung the heavy Jacklight at the toddler in front of him, watching as it passed through the child’s head, the feel of it like swinging his hand through an ice-cold fogbank.

  “You would have told me about the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, but I’m still in there,” a dead-eyed child with a gap-toothed grin said, raising its hand and pointing to the sex toy still clenched in Gary’s fist.

  “I’m in there, too,” a sad-faced little girl wearing a tiara said.

  “Me, too.”

  “No!” Gary cried.

  “I’m in there as well.”

  “It’s cold and dark in there.”

  “Why do you keep us locked up in that place?”

  “Why, Daddy, why?”

  “NO!” Gary pushed forward, swinging his arms and trying to dispel the seemingly endless army of children who’d appeared.

  But all he did was push through their semi-corporeal bodies, feeling nothing but a cold that quickly chilled him to the bone.

  He continued onward, knowing that if he didn’t, he’d soon be consumed by their voices.

  “Daddy?”

  “Why...”

  “Didn’t...”

  “You...”

  “Let...”

  “Us...”

  “Be...”

  “Born?”

  The drowned voices, the icy cold they left behind, it became too much. Gary fell to his knees, his legs numb, and a thin coat of frost covering the Jacklight’s metal frame. “Please, no more. No more. LEAVE ME ALO...”

  Gary looked up and realized he was kneeling next to his couch in the living room, his empty living room.

  The only other occupant, living or otherwise, was Chunks who—assuming he’d seen and heard the same things Gary had—was apparently far less than impressed. He blinked at Gary, yawned, then decided sleeping was more interesting than dealing with his master’s problems.

  Gary let out a sigh of relief, but it was short-lived. He knew deep down that it could start up again at any time. Whatever door had been opened didn’t seem to be closing anytime soon. No. It just kept opening wider.

  How long before the children—his children—stopped being little more than smoke and mist? How long before he tried sleeping at night only to feel cold little fingers caressing his cheek, nudging his shoulder, or wrapping themselves around his throat?

  Gary stood and looked down at the Jacklight in his hands. He knew how these things worked, had seen enough horror movies to know that simply throwing it away wouldn’t fix anything. It would find its way back to him. Hell, it already had.

  No. He needed to make this right, and the children had given him the not-so-subtle hint on how to do that.

  He stepped into the kitchen before realizing his dick was still hanging out, meaning that he’d probably cock-slapped a few of the ghost kids in his panic. It was small comfort. He quickly zipped up and began ripping open cabinets, searching for what he needed.

  Goddamn, where is it?

  That was the problem with modern convenience. Tried and true methods of doing things were quickly shunted to the back shelf to rot, forgotten. But Gary didn’t dare turn on his laptop. No, the temptation would be too great. He was too weak...too stressed. If that happened, they would come back. He knew it in his bones. They’d be back eventually, even if he didn’t take action, but opening his laptop would be like ringing the porn equivalent of the dinner bell.

  There! In the back of one of the cabinets, beneath several cans of SpaghettiOs and an ancient box of Mr. Grass soup mix. Gary pulled out the phone book, blew the dust off it, and began to flip through the Yellow pages for the one place that could possibly end this nightmare.

  8

  NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN

  Gary stood in his parking spot looking confused for several seconds before he remembered that he’d abandoned his car several blocks away.

  It had probably already been towed and was waiting in the police impound lot. He couldn’t risk going to get it. Knowing his luck, the attendant on duty would be an attractive woman, which would, no doubt, lead to an undead lecture detailing how he should knock her up—as if that were an available option with every female he met. Stupid fucking ghost kids!

  That would be a very bad place for him to lose his cool, not that there were many spots in the public eye where one could safely scream about seeing ghosts.

  Fortunately, his phone had been in his pocket when he’d run from the scene of the fender bender. He unlocked it—after incorrectly keying in his password three times—opened the Uber app, put in his destination, and requested a car to pick him up as soon as possible.

  Dear God, please send a male driver...an ugly one, just to be on the safe side.

  And there he stood, waiting with Jacklight in hand for his driver, checking his watch roughly every fifteen seconds only to be dismayed that time was apparently intent on moving slowly this day.

  There came a meow from somewhere behind him, and Gary spun to find that, in his panic, he’d left the front door wide open. Mr. Chunks now sat in the doorway, staring out at him and the freedom of the yard as if he couldn’t have given two shits about either.

  Gary took one step back toward his place, meaning to lock it up, but then stopped dead in his tracks. Chunks wasn’t alone.

  A red-faced child of maybe ten stood behind the feline. Thick snot was running out of his nose and the empty sockets where his eyes should have been. He reached up and wiped it away with a tissue, which did little to make him look better. “Mommy insisted we get rid of Chunks because I was allergic. Or she would have if I hadn’t ended up being encrusted on your bed sheets.”

  Gary looked wide-eyed between his cat and the child, feeling the thin veneer of sanity he’d managed to hang onto crack like an eggshell.

  “Are you going to sit there and take that?” he screamed at Chunks. “He wants to get rid of you! Turn around and claw the shit out of that little bastard.” Chunks decided to lick his crotch instead, being extra thorough about it. “Go on, get him! Defend your home, you stupid fucking cat!”

  All around, Gary could see blinds fluttering as neighbors looked out their windows at the man who’d apparently gone nuts and decided to verbally berate his cat.

  It would have been pretty fucking hilarious had it not been him.

  Thankfully, at that moment, a car pulled in and parked across his spot and the one next to it.

  Gary walked toward it, his gaze on the ground so as to ignore the bizarre spectacle of his cat licking his balls while a dead child stood sneezing behind it.

  He glanced up at the car, and his heart was bolstered as he saw the stern face of an overweight, middle-aged woman sitting behind the wheel. Gary could have dropped to his knees and rejoiced. She was like five miles of bad road given human form.

  The driver rolled down the window and glared at Gary with her beady eyes. “You called?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Then hop the fuck in. GPS says it’ll take us about twenty minutes to get to the Midtown Family Planning Center at this time of day.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It was another ten minutes before Gary’s shot nerves finally started to calm down. In that time, his driver smoked four cigarettes and farted at least twice, doing her best to make the already ripe vehicle as unbearable as possible.

  “Quiet fella, ain’t you?” his surly driver asked, the over-caked mascara and eyeliner on her face staring back at him from the rearview mirror.

  He shrugged, glancing down at the Jacklight to make sure it was still with him. “T-there’s been a lot on my mind lately.”

  “Really? Deep thinker, eh? You know, I always considered myself a bit of an intellectual, too.” She blew out a puff of smoke. “Not much for schooling, but then they say Albert Ein-whatever the fuck his name is was a dropout, too.”

  Gary wasn’t really listening. Instead, he was looking out the window as they came upon a familiar i
ntersection. He pressed up against the glass as Titty City Bang Bang rolled into view. Oh, if only he hadn’t been such a massive wuss and gone there instead of...

  “What the hell?!”

  “It’s true,” the driver said. “Card-carrying Mensa member. I do their puzzles every week. Only get tripped up on the big words.”

  Whatever the fuck she was saying was lost as Gary stared slack-jawed at the boarded up shop next to the adult store. An old, busted sign hanging above the doorway advertised it as the former home of Carlos’s Baked Goods. But that was impossible. The place couldn’t have been sold to another tenant and then abandoned so quickly. Yet, there was nothing about the derelict bake shop that suggested it had once been home to Pop’s Stuff.

  “No way.”

  “That’s surprising,” the saggy-jowled woman said, continuing her one-sided conversation. “Would have thought a fine fella like you would have someone waiting at home. Figured maybe you were meeting a girlfriend or wife at that place we’re headed.”

  “Huh?” He turned in his seat, his mind a thousand miles away. “No, I don’t.”

  “Say, I don’t have to take any more fares today. How about I wait for you to finish whatever business you got and then maybe you and me can go get shitfaced?”

  Though Gary was still in shock at seeing an old bakery where he’d shopped only a few days before, the woman’s question began to seep through to his consciousness. His eyes opened wide in fear as the understanding of her intent brought with it the realization of what that meant for him.

  “I would have been conceived right here in this backseat,” a gruff voice said from Gary’s left.

  He didn’t want to look, wanted to do anything but that, but it was as if his head had a mind all its own as he turned to gaze at a passenger who would almost certainly not be paying his share of the fare.

  A stocky teen wearing an arrogant grin stared back at him. He had copious acne and a face that looked like it had been beaten with the ugly stick.

  “Please...”

  “Ooh,” his driver purred. “Like it when they beg. I see you’re a true gentleman.”