When There's No More Room in Hell 3

by Luke Duffy

At the bottom of the hill, and on flat, even ground, they stood just metres apart, studying one another in the fading light and cool air.

  The man's face was a mottled grey and brown and as thin as paper. The cheekbones were visible below the decayed skin with the remnants of deep festering sores revealing much of the skull's bone structure, leaving the rows of rear teeth visible through the gaps in the flesh.

  Its eyes sat shrivelled and dried in their sockets, but somehow they seemed completely focussed and not the usual gazing, unseeing eyes of the millions of dead that Steve had seen over the years.

  Its wispy, sun-bleached hair drifted upwards in a gust of wind, showing its bare cranium where a thin layer of skin had rotted away over the years.

  Steve studied the man, unsure of how to feel as he gazed into its saddened eyes. The corpse before him did not seem interested in attacking him or feasting on his flesh. It was almost as if the thing just wanted company, to be close to a living human being.

  For the first time in many years, Steve felt a pang of sorrow for one of the unfortunate creatures.

  The figure before him was not a monster.

  He had been a man once, with feelings and desires, ambitions of his own and opinions that he had felt strongly about. The man had experienced joy and unhappiness in life and, as Steve looked into his eyes, he saw that a deep sadness seemed to linger with him, even in death, shining through the lifeless eyes that stared back at him.

  The two of them remained silent as they watched one another, their eyes locked and a torrent of unspoken words passing between them.

  "What?" Steve finally asked; something inside him told him that the dead man would understand his words.

  "What do you want from me?"

  The eyes grew wide in the skeletal face and a grunt rasped from its ragged throat. It looked down at the rifle that Steve held in his hands.

  Its long spindly fingers stroked the air, reaching upwards until it was pointing, gesturing towards the weapon.

  The man grunted again and let out a huff as he raised his eyes to look back at Steve.

  Steve glanced down at his rifle and back at the reanimated body in front of him, unsure of what he wanted him to do. Then, the dead man let out a low, relinquishing moan and suddenly dropped to his knees in the long grass.

  Steve gasped as the man stared up at him, pleadingly. Again, the dead eyes fell on the weapon clutched in his hands and gave a clear and unmistakable nod.

  'He wants to die,' Steve thought to himself in astonishment.

  He realised that he had spoken the words aloud when the creatures eyes, recognising what he had said, locked with his and a confirmatory, sorrow-filled, grunt emitted from its mouth.

  He stepped back, shaking his head, and for the first time in twelve years, fighting with his feelings about whether he should pull the trigger. He had never hesitated before, but he had also never come across a reanimated body that behaved like this one.

  The man, still on his knees and staring back at him, nodded his head again and let out an encouraging wail, pleading with Steve to end his existence.

  Steve was being bombarded with a torrent of emotions, unsure of what to do as he began to look on the figure as a living man.

  He watched the grief-stricken eyes of the wretched figure as it stared back up at him, defiantly.

  Finally, the rifle jerked in his shoulder, a loud crack shattering the silence around them and the echo of the discharge resounding across the land, causing the birds in the trees to suddenly take flight and scatter into the sky.

  The round punched through the forehead of the man, shattering his skull and tearing through his brain. The neck snapped backwards with the force of the blast as the bone erupted from within.

  The man's face seemed to hang for a moment, looking back at Steve with a peaceful expression spreading across his decaying features.

  The body slumped and fell to the side into the long grass as the echo of the gunshot continued to ride out across the fields, towards the dead city in the distance.

  The man lay still, his long existence as one of the un-dead finally over, and his body now at peace.

  Steve looked down at him, a mixture of feelings rising up inside him, as he felt content to have carried out the man's wish for an end to his suffering, but on the other hand, ashamed that he had ended his existence when he was clearly not like the others that now roamed the earth.

  "I'm sorry, mate," Steve spoke over the body.

  He was about to turn away when he caught sight of something in the jacket pocket of the dead man.

  He reached down, removed the wallet and began thumbing through it.

  A picture of a little girl fell from one of the compartments, landing in the grass at his feet. He reached down and picked it up, then turned his attention to the pink driver's license that he pulled from the decaying leather wallet.

  He studied the card and the face of the man that smiled back at him.

  Steve laughed silently and grunted, noticing that the man had come from the same town as him and wondered whether they had ever met, maybe even said hello.

  He looked back at the beaming face of the little girl in the photograph as she sat with her arm around a dog, clearly happy with life as she posed for the camera.

  He turned it over and read the inscription on the back:

  'To my best friend, Andy,

  'You're the best,

  'Love, Molly. X'

  Steve nodded, understanding that the man had been grieving and wanted to end the wretched existence that he led.

  With a tear in his eye, he crouched down beside the lifeless body and placed the picture of Molly between his cold, emaciated fingers.

  "It's over now. You don’t have to suffer anymore," he said as he raised himself up to his feet.

  "Sleep well, Andy Moorcroft."

  Steve bowed his head for a moment, then turned and walked back up the hill.

  END

  www.severedpress.com

  Read on for a free sample of “Survival Instinct” A gripping new zombie series.

  1:

  Tobias

  Tobias trailed behind Lucas Jonas through the crowded park. It was hot, noisy, and smelled of hair gel and body odour. The camera bag he carried started to slide again, so he pulled the heavy thing higher up on his shoulder and pushed through a particularly tight knot of people.

  The press of bodies was starting to get to him. He hated crowds. Even though he stood taller than almost everyone did, with the average person reaching only up to his nose, having so many crammed around him was unsettling. Tobias wasn’t a loner. He had a good group of friends, but anyplace that had more than ten people made him uneasy. Here, there were hundreds, thousands even.

  He was beginning to think that living in the city wasn’t such a great life choice after all. It wasn’t the first time he thought it either.

  “How much farther?” Tobias called up to Lucas.

  Lucas’s only response was a flick of his wrist at shoulder height. Tobias grumbled to himself. Working with big names like Lucas Jonas was always the worst. They never answered questions and they always insisted on the heaviest equipment. Tobias had packed a much smaller and lighter bag earlier, but then, when Mister Big Shot saw it, he insisted on the big stuff. Bigger was not better, but it looked more impressive. And looks were all these guys really cared about. And what kind of a name was Lucas Jonas anyway?

  Finally, they broke through the crowd next to the security fence. Tobias stopped to take a refreshing breath of air. Well, as refreshing as the air could be in a city park, standing next to a mass of sweating bodies in the hot, August sunshine. During his break, Tobias had briefly lost sight of Mr. Jonas, and when he spotted him again, Lucas was trying to make his way through the security point. Tobias sighed and made his way over. Lucas was arguing with a big, black security guard who had arms as thick as Tobias’s legs.

  “Do you know who I am?” Lucas stood on his tiptoes but still wasn’t even
eye-to-eye with the massive guard. “I’m Lucas fucking Jonas! See this pass?” The laminate he waved in front of the guard’s face moved so fast, Tobias was pretty sure the guard wouldn’t even have registered its colour. “It lets me go wherever I want in this whole damn shebang!”

  Lucas finally noticed Tobias standing next to him and yanked him over. He grabbed Tobias’s bag and opened a zipper, nearly spilling out the expensive contents.

  “See? Video camera equipment!” With his face red, he turned on Tobias, “Don’t just stand there like a lump, Toby, show the man your bloody pass!”

  He let go of Tobias’s arm with a slight shove. Tobias seethed about being called Toby, he thought it was something you’d call a dog, but pulled his pass up on the string around his neck. He handed it to the guard and let him look it over thoroughly.

  “Rough day today, Mackenzie?” The security guard asked in his rumbling voice as he looked at Tobias’s credentials.

  “Is it that obvious?” Tobias gave Lucas a somewhat smug look. Having met a lot of security guards while working for the Leighton Network occasionally had its perks.

  “You know this man?” Lucas looked from the guard to Tobias. “Then why the hell didn’t you say something sooner? God, amateurs.” He annoyingly pronounced it am-e-tures.

  The security guard stepped aside and let Lucas storm past, a cheeky grin revealing his pearly whites.

  “How’d you get paired up with him?” the guard asked as he watched Lucas go.

  “Bad luck I guess.” Tobias hiked his bag up once more. “So Bruce, me and some of the guys are going to The Foxers next Friday, you wanna come?” He liked The Foxers because it was never crowded. It was easy to breathe there, unlike the packed clubs. Unlike that crowd he had just passed through.

  “Sure thing, Mackenzie. He’s not coming, is he?” Security man Bruce jerked a thumb over his shoulder towards Lucas, his grin still lighting up his face.

  “If he is, then my life is over. I better get going before he calls my boss, demanding someone else.” With a sigh, Tobias Mackenzie started walking in the same direction Lucas had gone.

  Bruce’s booming voice followed after him, “Your boss would never be that mean to anyone else! Just you!”

  Tobias flipped Bruce the bird over his shoulder. The laughter resulting from this gesture echoed after him as he looked for Mr. Lucas Jonas. It would be some time before he heard such honest and completely carefree laughter again.

  As Tobias worked his way around the scaffolding and the usual equipment you’d expect to find piled up behind any stage, he finally spotted Mr. Jonas again. When Lucas spotted Tobias in turn, he rushed over and Tobias knew it couldn’t be good. His arm was grabbed and Lucas hauled him along quicker.

  Counting slowly to himself and taking deep breaths, Tobias allowed himself to be forcibly led. Goddamned TV personalities always seemed to be in a rush, he thought.

  Lucas stopped between the edge of the stage and the corral of buses the rock stars were in.

  “Here.” Lucas pointed between his feet.

  “What about here?” Tobias sighed. He couldn’t see anything particularly different or interesting about that spot of trampled earth.

  “I want you to film from here,” Mr. Jonas’s eyes rolled like it should have been obvious. “All the rockers have to pass by here to get on stage. It’ll be the perfect opportunity to get interviews with all of them and get some shots of the performances.”

  “You want everything filmed from one spot?”

  “Have you never seen my show? Of course you haven’t, you’re just an ingrate. My stuff is way beyond you.” Lucas waved Tobias off with a flip of his wrist and started looking around.

  Tobias was fairly certain that Lucas didn’t know what ‘ingrate’ meant, but that he was using it to insult him. He took another deep, steadying breath, and closed his eyes. “You realize, if we film here, we’ll a) be in the way, and b) be so close to the speakers, nothing you say will be heard over the music.”

  “What?” The speakers, sitting only a few paces away, suddenly came to Lucas’s attention.

  This was why Tobias hated filming at concerts. Especially the charity kind. The music caused problems for the sound, and the sight of the cameras caused the crowds to flip out more than usual. He would have loved to have been one of the other guys, the ones who just sat at the stationary cameras. They didn’t have to follow an idjit around, just point and shoot at what looked interesting. At least the money for this was good.

  “All right, we’ll free-roam it then,” Lucas said this like he was making some great sacrifice. “Get your camera out.”

  After unzipping his bag, Tobias lifted out the heavy piece of equipment. He placed it on the ground by his feet and began hooking everything up. He even had a waist and leg harness, like rock climbers used, to help him carry the large battery and various other bits and bobs. While he strapped this on, he watched Mr. Jonas out of the corner of his eye. The guy was ogling himself in a small mirror and picking at his no-doubt expensive teeth.

  “Here, can you put this on yourself?” Tobias held out a microphone attached to a battery pack that clipped onto the back of the user’s belt.

  Lucas once again rolled his eyes as he took it.

  Tobias finished setting up his own equipment, trying not to grind his teeth, and lifted the camera up onto his shoulder. He slung his now almost empty bag across his back. The last time he had let a camera bag out of his sight at one of these things, it disappeared forever.

  Once he was ready, they did a sound check. Tobias couldn’t hear anything Mr. Jonas said through the noise-cancelling headphones he wore. Apparently, Mr. Jonas had attached the microphone correctly, but had forgotten to turn it on. Somehow, Tobias got blamed for that.

  “All right, I want you to film everything from here on out, you got it? The editors can splice it together later.” Lucas looked down at himself and straightened his clothes once more. He tried to look like a reporter and a rocker at the same time. Tobias thought he just looked like a douchebag, but he might have been somewhat biased.

  Tobias was a jeans and T-shirt kind of guy. Currently, though, he wore beige cargoes. He had learned early on that the large pockets were very handy for work. He had never been one to care about his appearance too much and let his light, sandy hair grow out like a mop on his head. He had been told he sometimes reminded people of a surfer bum with his laid-back appearance, especially when he became tanned during the summer. He always thought he looked like a really tall teenager with softer features than the rest of the guys around him. It did seem to help him get girls though. They felt safe around him with his disarming looks.

  After counting down from five with his fingers, Tobias pressed the record button. Instantly, Lucas Jonas’s TV persona took over. Tobias never knew what to call it, but he had seen it hundreds of times. The people on the TV would shift from one personality to another as soon as a running camera was on them. The shift was so great with Mr. Jonas that it made him look like an entirely different person. Now Tobias could understand how this guy got to be so popular. He seemed a lot more approachable this way.

  Soon Tobias switched over into his own altered state; what he and his buddies called film mode. He trailed Mr. Jonas wherever he went and kept his mouth shut. If someone Mr. Jonas was interviewing asked Tobias a question, Lucas would answer for him, or Tobias would give a slight shake or nod of the camera if it were a yes or no question. His boss had told him that Mr. Jonas’s viewers liked that.

  Otherwise, Tobias was completely absent-minded. He went somewhere else in his head. Currently, it was to next Friday. He and the guys, which now probably included Bruce, were going to The Foxers. It was a favourite bar of theirs that they visited often. Tobias was looking forward to this visit more than normal, because Katie would probably be coming. One of Tobias’s friends had just started dating this chick who had a best friend, Katie, who came to almost all of the group gatherings. Katie was Tobias’s current dream gir
l. His dream girl changed often. This one was extremely smart and Tobias wasn’t used to girls who were smarter than he was. He was enjoying the difference, mostly because the last girl he dated was a complete airhead.

  * * *

  Tobias Mackenzie was filming a crowd reacting to the on-stage performer when Lucas started snapping his fingers in front of the lens. Tobias turned to face him, frowning slightly at the intrusion. There was no one around for Lucas to be interviewing.

  “What?” Despite his own small microphone that went straight to an earpiece Lucas had on, Tobias still had to shout to be heard over the music. Even with his large headphones on, the music was insanely loud.

  “What do you think is going on over there?” Lucas spoke into his own microphone and pointed across the sea of fans.

  Tobias’s eyes followed Lucas’s arm to see what he had seen. On the other side of the crowd, a pocket of people was moving at odds to the rest. The general populace was surging toward the stage, trying to reach its idols, but over on the far side, people seemed to be moving out in all directions, away from a central point.

  “I don’t know.” Tobias zoomed in with his camera for a better look. The distance was still too far to make out perfect detail, but he made out enough. He made out terrified faces trying to run from something in the centre of the ring.

  “What is it?” Lucas shook his arm.

  “I can’t tell, but they’re fleeing from something.” He lowered his camera. “It’s probably just a stink bomb or something.”

  “Or something. Let me see. Open that little viewer.” Lucas’s manicured hands reached for the camera.

  Tobias pulled it away from him though. He didn’t want him touching any of the expensive equipment. He flipped open the LCD view finder and turned it so that Lucas could see. The small screen filled with the crowd as Tobias pointed the camera back at the people. Some of them were now literally trying to climb over others to get away from whatever it was.

  “That is definitely something!” Lucas grinned with enthusiasm. He showed all his teeth, like a crocodile.