by J. Thorn
John turned off the flashlight and crept toward the steps. The house sighed with the setting of the November sun, as aged boards protested the temperature change with cracks and pops. The stench of urine mingled with the greasy smell of heating oil. He shivered from the approaching chill of night, while climbing the first step toward the kitchen. The wooden plank sagged under his weight. John’s palm felt the ruddy surface of the textured wall, guiding the rest of his body upward. He felt his heart slamming against his rib cage, threatening to burst from his chest. John mumbled, trying to ignore the pulse in his temple.
The door to the kitchen stood wide open. From his position on the steps, John saw broken glass scattered on the ceramic-tile floor. The duffel bag on his shoulder swung with each movement, the contents poking into his ribs. He set the bag down on the top step and waited. He listened. Convinced of the emptiness, John stepped into the kitchen and out of his old life forever.
Chapter 5
The cold November sun sent weak rays onto the floor of the old house. The temperature dropped with ease. As his eyes adjusted to the lighting, John’s vision came into focus. The black cape from a vampire costume fanned out across the floor, with a pool of dark liquid shimmering under the partygoer’s chest. The hardy flies that survived the bitter day buzzed above the corpse. The woman dressed as the Bee Lady slumped in a kitchen chair next to the overturned table, her open eyes fixated on the motionless ceiling fan above. Mascara ran down her face and smudges of black lipstick caressed her chin. Three ragged holes of flesh desecrated the woman’s chest.
John stumbled and lunged for the sink. He heaved into the stainless-steel basin, but nothing left his body. He laughed in spite of himself, shaking his head in disbelief. Hints of winter seized the house, rattling the old windows inside their rotted, wooden frames.
He stepped over the Count and opened the refrigerator, his primal need for food overpowering his aversion to death. The lure of pork preceded a gentle, cool waft of treated air. The fridge bulb did not turn on, so John flicked on the flashlight and exposed the leftovers of a ham dinner on the second shelf. John shoved it into his mouth, savoring the salty burn. Without hesitation, he ripped open a two-liter bottle of soda and poured it down his throat. The stinging carbonation forced him to pause until his eyes stopped watering. He felt a surge of adrenaline enter his bloodstream. Without even pausing to close the icebox, John devoured the entire ham and attacked several hard-boiled eggs. His hunger subsided to intestinal pain while his body shook with the flood of calories and protein. John dove for the powder room adjacent to the kitchen and found it devoid of dead bodies.
John forced himself to ignore the dead bodies as he riffled through Reggie’s cabinets looking for anything of sustenance that would last without refrigeration. He grabbed a reusable shopping bag from Heinen’s and filled it with packaged goods. Rice cakes, peanut butter, crackers, and other dry items dropped into the sack. From the fridge, John grabbed another two-liter of soda. The silent dead called out with survivor’s guilt.
His satiated hunger released a secondary level of concern. John shivered in the unheated house and fought to keep his eyes open. He thought of Jana’s touch and his side of the bed, which brought flashes of incriminating cell-phone pictures into his head.
John looked around the room, trying not to focus on the decaying bodies of his friends. He cursed at the house, reckless, screaming into its black abyss. Only the November wind replied with another rattle of window panes.
Dead. They’re all dead.
He turned the flashlight on and walked from the kitchen to the dining room. He passed the beam over the oak crown molding that he helped Reggie put up a few months earlier. As the light moved down the wall, John saw dark splatters covering the light-beige walls. Elsewhere he saw various friends and acquaintances in grotesque positions, arms and legs twisted in severe angles as if dropped from the sky. The faces of others sunk in sickening pools of blood. He saw the Werewolf and the Headless Horseman in one corner. John moved into the living room and identified the red-headed Witch, the Pirate, and the French Maid. He knew their names of course, but preferred to think of them as characters in a movie.
I have to save the survivors.
John passed each of the dead, hoping not to find Reggie. He climbed the stairs to the second level, stepping over a body that lay crumpled on the landing. At the top of the steps he turned left toward the spare bedroom, where dresser drawers tumbled across an upturned mattress. Bullets had punched black holes in the wall and shattered windows overlooking South Belvoir Road. His head ached and he reached into his pockets for a phantom pack of cigarettes.
“She, drugged me, sent pics to my wife, and stole my smokes,” he said to himself.
John moved into the next spare bedroom. The rumpled bedding hid shapes under the blood-stained sheets. The odor of feces and death forced John to place his arm in front of his face. The beam from the flashlight hit the frozen faces of two beautiful, young people. They appeared to be naked under the sheet, but John had no desire to find out for certain. Both bodies wore a third eye punched through the middle of their foreheads.
He entered the master bedroom and saw a shape on the bed. He saw the silver and turquoise ring on the middle finger of a hand hanging above the floor. Dark, syrupy blood discolored the end of the pinky finger. John moved to the other side of the bed, knowing his best friend was gone like all the rest.
John flew down the stairs into the living room. He pulled the Venetian blinds to one side and peered out. Empty streets stared back at him. Not a single car or pedestrian passed while he observed the neighborhood. No games of soccer, no strollers, and nobody doing yard work. An empty street in Cleveland’s December would be expected, but not early November. Most people in the city savored every last day before the specter of winter moved in and banished the citizens to the confines of their dry, drafty homes.
The streetlights remained dark as night came to steal the waning rays of the late autumn sun. John sat at the window for an hour, trying to decide if he could wake himself from the nightmare. A lone pit bull stalked down South Belvoir Road, daring anyone to push him to the side.
John turned to the living room and walked toward the Scream, his mask still firmly in place. John searched the man’s pockets underneath the black cape and managed to find a cell phone. He turned it on and waited for the “No Service” message. John shut the phone off and shoved it into his pocket.
John heard a vehicle. He ran to the window, let the blind fall shut, and peered through the tiny opening between it and the window sill. Blinding bursts of white lit the desolated street and narrowed as the headlights formed two solid, penetrating shafts of light. The armored vehicle moved at a steady rate. John crouched down low and fixed his eyes as it slowed to a stop in front of Reggie’s house.
Chapter 6
Three soldiers, dressed in urban camouflage, jumped out of the APC, also known in the military as a “battle bus”. They swung their machine guns in swooping arcs, daring anyone to set foot in their path. Muffled voices filtered through the deteriorating leaded windows of Reggie’s living room. John watched with relief as the sergeant led the men to the house directly across the street and stopped two feet in front of the door. A flashlight mounted on top of his weapon passed over the living-room window and through the glass panes of the door. Without a word of warning, the soldier smashed it with the butt end of his weapon. Crackling glass fell in tiny shards onto a weathered, leather sofa. He reached through the hole and unlocked the door. John watched the trio of flashlight beams popping up throughout the first floor. After they entered, the beams jumped in each room, eventually rising from the second floor to the attic.
The wind rustled the leaves and pitched them down South Belvoir Road. John held his breath, waiting for action. The house across the street remained still, the darkness returning to snuff the flashlights. John shuffled his feet and put a hand on the middle of his back. He did not take his eyes off the house.
After what felt like hours, the three soldiers came out the front door of the house across the street. Without streetlamps, John saw just eerie silhouettes moving through the lowering November darkness. One of the soldiers stopped and faced the brick to the right of the front door. He made erratic motions with his arm, and the three men climbed back into the APC. The headlights once again cut through the late evening air and fell upon the stray pit bull. The dog barked at the APC while backing away from it. John saw the fear and confusion in its eyes, even from a distance. The driver inched the troop transport forward, a warning not heeded by the dog. It continued to bark until the APC ran it over. John sat back and took a deep breath as nicotine withdrawal reared its ugly head. He felt the burning itch to light up a cigarette and considered searching his dead friends’ bodies for one.
He moved across the living room toward the kitchen and walked down the steps to the mud-room landing. The side door to Reggie’s driveway sat ajar. The scent of moldy leaves drifted through the opening. John stepped over the broken glass of the screen door and crouched low against the side of the house.
As low as he could get on two feet, John sidled the length of the driveway, stopping behind the trunk of a bare maple hanging over the lawn. He looked up and down South Belvoir and saw no movement for blocks in each direction. Not a single light shone from any streetlamp or deserted window.
With the tools and supplies clanging in the duffel bag, John sprinted across South Belvoir and behind the overgrown bushes of the neighbor’s house. He held his breath and waited for the crack of a rifle or the accusing beam of a soldier’s flashlight to find him. His cheek brushed the coarse mortar crumbling from the old, red brick. John tasted fresh spray paint hanging in the night air. He craned his neck above the bush and examined the front door without revealing his entire body. Slow, red drops appeared on the brick to the right of the door. John reached out and let one of them fall into his palm. When he brought his hand back toward his face, he recognized the odor of spray paint. Using his sleeve as a damper on the powerful beam of the flashlight, John aimed it up toward the top of the door. A crude and shaky hand had sprayed a red circle on the brick, and a five-sided star filled the space inside. The hair on John’s neck rose as gooseflesh broke out on his arms.
Chapter 7
John stood and slung the duffel bag around his head and over his left shoulder to keep it from swinging into his legs. He walked through piles of leaves, kicking up the pungent odor of a dying autumn and forced out a brutal sneeze that rattled his sinus cavity. As he glanced back at Reggie’s house, he saw the pentagram inside the circle painted above and to the right of the front door. John flashed the beam toward Reggie’s neighbor to the left and saw the same thing. Reggie’s neighbor on the right owned a two-story colonial with white siding, and it gleamed like weathered bone in the darkness. John did not see the pentagram symbol anywhere on the front of that house. He walked onto the colonial’s front porch. Old, wooden planks bent under his feet and cracked as he moved toward the living-room window. A deserted, two-person swing squawked at him as the wind blew it in each direction. John’s survival instinct warned him at the same time his rational mind catalogued observations of the house. He cupped his hands around his eyes and peered through the living-room window. The furniture remained upright and it did not appear as though a struggle had ensued here as it had in Reggie’s house.
When the beam of the flashlight lit the face of the young man standing in the living room, John lurched back and held the porch railing. The boy, sixteen at most, wore shoulder-length hair that fell in greasy strands. A white shirt covered his torso, with spreading circles of darkness under his arms and neck. His blue jeans clung to his hips, and both knees poked through holes in the denim. Bare feet kept him fastened to the living-room floor.
At first, John mistook the boy for a Halloween zombie, like the mannequins people dress and put on their front lawn to scare kids, but this boy was definitely alive. Time passed in awkward, loping increments. John’s hand held the light on the boy’s face. The boy’s eyes reflected it back, giving him a feral quality. With synchronized movements, John stepped backward, toward the porch steps, as the boy advanced toward the front door. In one motion, John jumped from the top step and landed on the moist wood chips of the neighbor’s landscaping. He heard the tumbler of the front door and the hinges swing the door open. A deafening roar followed a flash of light. John threw himself to the ground as another blast rang his ears amidst the burning fragrance of gunpowder. He recognized the sound of the twelve-gauge shotgun from his time as a youth hunter in the Pennsylvania woods. Now someone else was doing the hunting, and John was his prey. John crawled through the hedgerow that separated the houses.
“Servants of the dark one suffer to the revelation!”
John heard the words spew from the boy’s mouth, but the ringing in his ears made it difficult for him to focus on them. He jumped up and ran down the driveway of the red house into the backyard. John glanced over his shoulder and saw the boy walking toward him. The young man did not run and he did not stray from his course. His bare feet sloughed forward over shards of broken glass, penetrating his skin like miniature daggers.
Another shotgun blast. John heard the individual pellets lodge in the side of the garage. Judging from the spray pattern, if the boy advanced another ten yards John would be dead. A six-foot cedar privacy fence ran the length of the property. John saw a chain-link fence on the other side, separating the white house and the red house. He lunged for the top pole and scrambled over it. John fell for longer than he expected and winced as the weight of the duffel bag slammed into his ribs. He stumbled to his side and fought to keep from losing his balance. An explosion rocked the fence to the right of his head.
John ran through the backyard of the property behind the red house and down the driveway to Winston Road. Intellectually, he knew that he could be running right into the raised barrel of another assassin, but his fight-or-flight instinct moved him as far from the deranged teenager as possible.
He stopped where the driveway met Winston and looked over his shoulder. He did not see the boy and heard no other shots except the ones still ringing in his ears. John heard a familiar growl and knew he had no time to stop and think. From the far northern end of Winston Road came another APC. John saw red pinpoints bouncing from tree to tree, moving off of parked cars and overturned garbage cans.
John sprinted down the middle of Winston Road where it split two blocks before reaching Mayfield. East and West Winston looped in a semicircle and met a block apart on Mayfield. He dodged to the right, onto East Winston. John glanced back at the beast bearing down on him and hoped the distance disguised his choice. Night fell hard and the dead street lights aided his escape. He ran toward the third house and dove into evergreen bushes next to the front door. John’s ankle throbbed and he felt the warm, sticky blood running down his side where the duffel bag had cut into his flesh. John saw the APC disappear around the bend on West Winston.
With images of the zombie teen from the last house flashing through his head, John stood and peered into the dark living-room window, concealing as much of his body as possible and hoping he had come upon a house devoid of corpses. Furniture was strewn around the place, resting in heaps of torn fabric and upholstery. He covered the flashlight with a sleeve and shone it upward toward the front door. The running, red paint of the circled pentagram crawled down the brick. John reached up and touched it. The paint felt tacky, but the chill of the Cleveland autumn may have slowed the drying.
John kept his back to the house as he sidestepped toward the rear. Around back, he found a door clinging to its hinges. He had stepped across the threshold when a wall of odor almost knocked him over. Motionless lumps lay spread across the kitchen floor. He jumped over one and bounded up the steps toward the second floor, with his ankle protesting the rapid movement. When he reached the second level the smell dissipated, allowing for a deep breath. John stuck his head in eac
h of the three empty bedrooms, and entered the one with the least amount of scattered furniture. A single bed stood in the corner and a chest of drawers tilted to one side, spilling spare sheets and blankets onto the carpeted floor. John shut the door and threw the lock into place. He tossed the duffel bag to the floor and sat on the floor as exhaustion pulled his thoughts askew. He laughed at his own desensitization of the carnage, surprised he was thinking about sleep amidst all of the death.
This must be what happens in war, he thought.
John’s eyelids fell and locked into place. His heartbeat slowed as his tense muscles relaxed. He climbed on top of the bed and yanked the spare blankets from the floor. With Bob the Builder and SpongeBob Squarepants as his protectors, John slid into a deep but fitful sleep.
Chapter 8
The rumble of another APC shook John out of his sleep. He held his breath as the sound faded into the distance. The morning sun crested over the trees and reflected spinning crystals off the frosted window. John’s nose felt like ice, but the rest of his body remained warm in the bed.
John’s ankle had swelled overnight, and only his shoe had prevented it from becoming the size of a volleyball. The sounds on the street jarred John from the concern over his ankle and snapped him back into the present. He was hungry.
John grabbed some canned corn and an opener from the duffel bag. As he tipped the opened can to his mouth, the slimy corn left a salty taste in his mouth, and silenced his stomach.