Bleed On Me

by McKenzie, Shane

  Chris began his trek across the parking lot, leaving Spade behind before the guy could say anything else. When he heard the footsteps behind him, he knew Spade was coming along. Chris squeezed his hands, the palms throbbing with ache and dripping. I cut them on those nails, what, two weeks ago? They should have healed by now. He wondered if maybe the nails were rusted and he had an infection of some kind. Great, he thought. That’s just what I need.

  But he wasn’t completely sure he would escape this night with his life, so for now, he tried to ignore his injuries and focus on survival.

  “Paul? Is that you?” He sort of yell-whispered it, still not sure if the demons managed to escape the apartment, if maybe they were lurking the parking lot right now looking for him. No, not me. They only want Spade!

  “Fuck this. Let’s just go, man. We could already be fuckin’ gone.”

  “Then go. I’m not stopping you. In fact, if you left, I’d probably be better off since whatever the fuck those things are are obviously after you.” Chris winced again as his side ignited. “But if that’s Paul, he can take me to my mother’s house. I told you, I can’t run any more.”

  “Goddamn, man. Shit.” Though Spade continued to mutter curse words, he still followed.

  They weaved their way through the parked cars, and as they got closer, Chris could tell it was definitely Paul, but he looked drunk, lost or something. His head hung and he shambled forward.

  “Paul. It’s me, Chris. Where’s Todd? Did you guys see-”

  Paul lifted his head and his red eyes glowed like tail lights.

  They stopped in their tracks, Spade running into Chris’s back. Paul stepped toward them, into the cone of yellow light coming from the lightpole above him. His body was torn up, chewed, strips of ragged flesh hanging here and there along with the blood-stained tatters of his driver’s uniform. Black fluid stained his wounds.

  And then he smiled. Tilted his head back and cackled. The open wounds covering his body began to convulse, throb open and closed, and as Chris watched this, taking blind steps back, he saw the shark-like teeth forming there, followed by a sharp snapping sound as the new mouths chattered. Black tongues flicked out, tasted the air, and then Paul sprinted toward them.

  ***

  Todd couldn’t hear the monsters outside of the door anymore, but he still pictured them silently waiting for him out there, licking their chops and rubbing their claws together in anticipation. After staring at his side of the door for what felt like hours, he tiptoed over, pressed his eye to the peephole.

  Nothing there.

  He knew he could stay in the apartment forever, and it was a short sprint down the stairs and to the car. I can just make a run for it. But he couldn’t make his hand turn the doorknob. He checked and rechecked the peephole, licking his lips and breathing in short gasps.

  After wiping the sweat from his palms onto his pant legs, he took three big, deep breaths, then swung the door open.

  The hallway was empty, though he could hear commotion in the distance. He stepped out of the apartment, shot quick glances in both directions, but still found himself alone. A sigh exploded from his mouth, and he hurried toward the staircase, checking over his shoulder, ready to sprint if one of the demons turned the corner and came for him. With his head turned, he didn’t see the man coming up the stairs, and when he ran into him, a scream tore from this throat.

  “Careful, friend.” The man’s voice crackled out, like wet paper being crumpled. A strong stench rolled off him: rot and shit and blood.

  Todd almost warned the man, almost told him to run for his life, that nightmares made of flesh were running wild. But then the man grabbed Todd by the back of the head, squeezed his skull so hard he was sure it would shatter. The man leaned in and pressed his mouth against Todd’s, hard, teeth clicking, noses mashed together.

  Todd’s mind flooded with horror. He was no longer afraid of the monsters, no longer feared for his physical self. It was his soul he feared for now. Images of fire and lava and mutilated bodies and blood and viscera. Todd tried to scream, but it was shoved back down his throat by the man’s tongue.

  And as the images took over, as he felt them searing his brain, a feeling of freefall took him, and he spun into the darkness, into the endless sea of hell.

  ***

  Red dropped his former body to the ground and wiped the moisture from his mouth. He gave the face a final look and clicked his tongue. He’d grown partial to that face after all the years he’d been using it, though it hardly looked the same with all the bullet holes in it. Very uncomfortable to walk around with a face full of holes. Of course, he’d had hundreds of bodies before that, but this one was one of his favorites: tough-looking, intimidating. He glanced in the glass of the window beside him and chuckled at the soft, pink face he had now.

  The stomping of the others came at his back, and when he turned to face them, they stopped, chuckled with excitement.

  “You all know what to do. Our brothers are waiting, and they grow impatient.”

  They snarled and spat their approval, then scattered in all directions.

  “Have fun! It’s our time now!”

  But Red still needed the rest of the stash that little pipsqueak gangster took from him. He knew the dumb fuckers would take the drug, knew they would only release hell, but he didn’t see the little bastard’s body anywhere, and he sensed that the drugs were gone.

  The seeds.

  Wherever that fucker was, he had them with him. But Red wasn’t finished with his work, and he needed to distribute the seeds better, needed to scatter them so that their rise could spread quicker, vaster.

  But as Red mulled this over, still glaring at his former body, something in the air tickled his nose. He furrowed his brow, sniffed long and hard.

  No.

  It couldn’t be.

  He stuck his head into the open door from where his new body had stepped out from, took another long sniff. He could tell from the taste in his mouth that this body had been using cocaine, and he smacked his lips, enjoying the bitterness. Always liked that shit.

  As he smelled, he dropped to his hands and knees, crawled over the threshold, scraped his fingers across the encrusted, filth-covered floor, sniffing it like a drug dog. He pushed his face into mounds of dirty clothing, getting hints here and there, still not believing what his senses were telling him. His new skin burned, his nostrils throbbed.

  Red rose to his feet and faced the kitchen. A low growl emitted from his throat as he found the tools lying on the counter. He reached out to touch them, but let his hand hover just above them, then moved away toward the front door.

  They didn’t have as much time as he thought they did. He knew now that the little fuck drug dealer stealing the stash was no accident, was no random act of violence. Something was intervening here.

  Sitting on the TV stand just beside the door was a photograph. The tiny hints of memory that still swirled in his new body’s brain told him that this body loved this woman once. And the man in the photograph.

  Chris.

  Red’s eyes widened and he snapped the frame in half, shards of glass embedding into the flesh of his hands.

  But the smell. He continued to follow his nose, out of the apartment, down the stairs, and into the blood-soaked apartment below. The drug dealer’s place, the spot his brothers were allowed to rise and join him on the surface. His shoes squished into the carpet with each step as he moved into the bedroom.

  The smell nearly knocked him off his feet, and he stayed in the doorway, peering at the window where the woman lay sprawled across its frame.

  It’s him. But he won’t be able to stop us.

  ***

  As Paul came screaming toward them, Chris heard the shrieking of others in the complex. It came from all over, along with slamming doors, shattering wood, and monstrous roars. Chris knew his hypothesis about Spade’s apartment trapping the creatures within its walls was bullshit and that they were tearing the tenants of the
complex apart.

  Then that means that woman—

  Paul slammed against Spade, tackled him to the concrete and snarled. The tongues whipped about, slathering Spade with thick, phlegm-like mucus. The duffel bag flew from his grasp and rolled on the black asphalt.

  “Get the fuck off me…help me!”

  Spade reached up to shove Paul away, but the mouth on Paul’s shoulder opened wide, snapped shut over Spade’s hand. Blood sprayed and the tongues lapped it up.

  “Fuuuuck!” Spade pulled, baring his teeth and whimpering as he fought to release his hand.

  More screaming all around them, some men and women running through the parking lot, hellish creatures chasing them. Chris spotted George in the distance, a rope of intestine wrapped around a woman’s ankle, dangling her upside down as the rest of his viscera flailed like unmanned firehoses. He slammed her into the ground again and again, and as he pulled her toward his chest-jaws, bit into her torso, Chris turned his attention back to Spade, who continued to struggle and bleed.

  “Will you fucking help me!”

  Chris didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t just grab Paul and pull him off with all the mouths clicking their teeth, and for a second, he nearly just ran away. It’s all this fucking guy’s fault, he thought. And it wasn’t but maybe an hour ago that this son of a bitch had a gun to my head.

  The gun. The handle of the pistol stuck out from the waist of Spade’s jeans, and Chris made a dash for it, yanked his hand away when one of the tongues darted toward him, then quickly reached out and grabbed the gun.

  Paul’s head turned toward Chris, eyes glowing, mouths hissing.

  “Fucking shoot it!”

  Chris aimed and pulled the trigger, tossing Paul backward off of Spade. The shoulder mouth opened wide enough for Spade to pull free of the teeth, and he crawled away, cradling his bleeding hand.

  The bullet hole on Paul’s chest leaked black, but the demon was still on its feet, attention now fully on Chris.

  Chris pulled the trigger again, but the gun clicked empty. Without knowing what to do, Chris just kept pulling the trigger, and as Paul snickered, Chris threw the gun, turned and tried to run, but Paul tackled him from behind. Chris’s face smashed into the ground and his mouth filled with the taste of motor oil and concrete.

  Hot pain erupted in his arm when a mouth clamped down on his flesh, but then Paul’s weight was off him in an instant, and Chris wasted no time crawling away, then turning to see where his attacker had gone.

  Paul lay on his back, limbs flapping, mouths choking and flailing their tongues. A high-pitched squeal squeezed out from his throat, and he arched his back, roared as the jaws fell away from his body, chattered on the pavement like novelty teeth. The severed tongues whipped around like eels out of water.

  And then Paul went quiet. The chaos around them was constant as the other monsters continued their assault on the apartment complex’s residents.

  Chris stood, the pain in his shoulder ten times as bad as the one on his side. He stared at Paul’s body for a second, unable to comprehend what was happening, what any of this meant.

  Spade appeared at his side, still cradling his hand that looked like he’d stuck it into a meat grinder, his other hand clutching the duffel bag again. “It’s you, dawg. These motherfucker’s can’t touch you. What the…what the fuck are you, man?”

  “What am I?” Chris shook his head, grabbed at his shoulder. “I’m nothing! It…it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know exactly who you are.”

  Chris turned toward the voice, squinted as the figure stepped out of the shadows.

  “Todd?” But even as he saw his stepfather’s face, he knew something was off. It was the look in his eyes as he glared at Chris, the way he smiled. Even his walk was different.

  “No, not Todd. Not anymore. You can’t stop us. We’ll kill you before you have the chance.”

  “Who the fuck is this?” Spade said.

  “My stepdad. Or at least it was.”

  “Well go over there and bleed on his ass, like you did this nigga,” Spade said as he kicked Paul’s body.

  “Oh, Spade. It’s good to see you again. Last time I saw you, your friend put three bullets into my face.”

  “W-what? Hold up, you…?”

  “Those my drugs, Spade? You be a good little bitch and toss that bag over here. Either that or I get one of my brothers to pull you inside-out through your asshole.”

  Chris’s brow furrowed as he looked from Todd to Spade and back again.

  “R-Red? But how…ah shit, man, this is some bullshit…”

  Todd took a step toward Spade, then sniffed the air, stopped in his tracks. His attention turned back to Chris and he looked scared to move.

  “Get his ass, man. Get that motherfucker!” Spade’s eyes stretched wide, his hand flinging blood as he thrust it in Todd’s direction.

  But Chris couldn’t move, could only lock eyes with Todd. His body shook, and he clenched his hands into fists, then winced at the pain in his palms.

  “Fuck this,” he heard Spade say. And then there was a grinding pain in Chris’s shoulder wound.

  “Ahhh, what the fuck…”

  Spade held a rock between the forefinger and thumb of his good hand, painted with Chris’s blood. He sidearmed it at Todd, and as it spun through the air, Chris saw his stepdad’s eyes widen, a hint of fear pinching his face.

  The rock smacked Todd in the left eye, threw him backward off his feet. He made a sound like a rabid pig as his legs kicked and palms slapped the ground. Spirals of smoke curled into the air from his face, and he snarled and bared his teeth.

  “You see that shit? Let’s go, man. Come on!”

  Chris reached down to Paul’s body, crammed his hand into the pockets one by one until he found the set of keys. “This way!” He hit the unlock button, the headlights flashing twice and illuminating Todd’s smoking face.

  From all around them, creatures and monsters closed in. More of them, hundreds more. Just as Chris jumped into the driver’s seat, he saw a child hanging from a third story balcony from its elongated rib bones, his torso torn open, organs roiling, eyes shining bright.

  “Hurry up! Holy shit!” More came, the former residents of the complex now soldiers in the army of hell that had come to claim Spade, maybe the world. Their newly acquired wounds leaking black blood and transforming into hellish weaponry.

  Spade turned his head in all directions as the things came for them, then jumped into the driver’s seat, crawled over Chris into the passenger seat.

  “Ah…ow…shit! Goddamnit!” Chris clutched at his side and shoulder, then reached over and slammed the door.

  “Go, go, go! What the fuck, man? Why, why are there so many?”

  Chris plunged the key in, brought the beamer to life. When he reversed, the back bumper hit something, and Spade spun in his seat to look.

  “Ah, fuck. Fuck! Go, man, come on!”

  The back windshield shattered, and Chris turned in time to see intestines snaking their way into the vehicle. A woman slammed onto the hood, her bathrobe pulled open to reveal her sagging, elongated breasts, each one equipped with lamprey mouths. The circular jaws dripped black saliva onto the windshield as she crawled up the vehicle.

  Spade slapped at the intestines. “Hurry the fuck up!”

  Chris slammed his foot on the gas pedal, swung the car hard to the left. The front bumper smashed against more twisted, nefarious flesh, splashing ink over the windshield and blinding him. Lamprey Tits rolled off, and the driver’s side front tire ramped her body.

  Chris hit the windshield wipers as they sped away, dragging George’s body a few feet before the intestines lost their grip on the car and disappeared out of the vehicle.

  Chris squeezed the steering wheel tight as he kept his foot to the floor.

  ***

  The pain in his face was like an icy drill tunneling in and out of his eye, blinding him on the left side. He forced himself to his feet, wa
tched as the yellow car screeched away, took a sharp left turn and drifted off into the distance.

  “Get them.”

  The horde of his brothers screamed, roared, and stampeded toward the speeding car, some peeling themselves off the pavement. They would grow their numbers as they went, bring more of their kind to the surface, as many as they could. Their numbers would grow so he couldn’t stop them.

  Red smiled, though his face throbbed endlessly. They could get the drugs-the seeds-and at the same time destroy the only thing able to stop them. When the night was over, the world would be theirs. After an eternity of waiting.

  Another spark of memory told him that his former body was related to this Chris. Stepfather. The woman from the photo is Chris’s mother…famous. Rich. Tits. Fucking.

  Red guffawed, rubbed his hands together. His new body used to live in a large home, the woman’s home, and that is where Chris would go. His sanctuary, the only place he feels safe.

  His brother who had taken the body of Spade’s friend, the one who had shot his former body’s face, stood tall above Red, his innards like stilts. Red climbed the hardened intestine, straddled his brother’s back. The head lolled loosely on a rubbery neck, eyes glowing, rictus wide and sharp.

  “That way,” Red said, pointing down the street. He would meet their nemesis there, and a tidal wave of hell would engulf him. Drown him in evil.

  ***

  “Now what? W-where are we going?” Spade hopped in his seat, slapped the dashboard, checked over his shoulder and out his window repeatedly. “This is fucked up, man…this is so fucked up!”

  “Well what the fuck did you do? They’re after you, Spade. Don’t you see? Why did every fucking monster back there know you by name?” Chris could barely keep his grip on the steering wheel as his hands throbbed worse and worse, the pain in them now dwarfing his other wounds.

  “I don’t know, man. Like I told you…it was just business. I had to-”