The Haunted Country

by Jason White

  You have to get out of here, a voice says. Familiar, but the fog in my brain refuses to recognize it at first. Then it comes to me. It’s Grant’s voice. Clear and speaking into my right ear. Am I dreaming, hallucinating? I open my eyes and turn my head. Grant’s there, his expression grim. He’s pale with black bags under his eyes. He looks tired. He looks dead.

  When he speaks, his lips don’t move.

  You have to get Cindy and get out of here, he says. There’s only pain for you here. Only death.

  I remember the day Grant came back for us in that country house nearly overrun by the undead. I remember how he suggested that I put a bullet through Cindy’s head. That it would be better for her and greatly raise my chances of survival. Now, however, he’s all pro Cindy? I wonder what happened in the time we travelled to change his mind. Was it simply because we, or rather he, had found a way to control her hysterics? Or had he grown fond of her? Cindy did have that effect on people who were willing to get to know her a little.

  “Whe … Where is Cindy?” My voice is a harsh whisper. I sound like my father used to on a couple of hours of sleep after a few straight days of hard drinking. I remember leaving Cindy behind with Bill, but I don’t know how much time has elapsed since … since what? The last thing I remember is Grant getting shot. His dying. Then … nothing but pain and darkness. Looking for an answer I look to him again. Praying that he’ll tell me Cindy’s safe for now, but he’s gone.

  I turn my head to the left and right. He’s gone, yet I can still smell his scent, his body odor, the stale stench we grow during the winter without washing. Even that fades as the seconds pass, and I’m left guessing. Was it all a hallucination? My head hurts pretty bad; I think I got bashed in the skull with something hard and blunt, but I can’t remember exactly.

  Can concussions cause hallucinations? Ridiculously, I think that I’ll have to look that up on the Internet, and I laugh at myself, laugh into a room empty of all but furniture and two additional cots. One of the cots has a stain in the center of it. In the candlelight it looks black, but there’s a meaty scent coming from its direction. The smell of a butchery, of blood and death. Handcuffs hang loosely from its metal frame.

  Why would they handcuff me or anyone to this thing? It doesn’t look that big or heavy. I would look more than silly, but I bet that I could stand up and make a run for it. The only question is where? Where the hell would I go with my hands trapped at my sides, if not behind me while I drag this bloody thing around? I’d be an easy target.

  Question answered.

  Moans come from upstairs, the whimpering from somewhere I can’t tell. I lay my head back and breath in the horrible blood smell and close my eyes and think of better days. I think of my mom and dad and try to forget how they died. They weren’t the best parents a kid could ask for; they were always so concerned about the next drink, the next joint. Other than a little neglect, they were never abusive to Cindy or me, but sometimes they got into scraps with each other. I remember coming home from a friend’s one day to see them in the front of the house, kicking and punching at each other. Calling each other names. No blood was ever spilt, no real bruises, aside from a punch landing too hard on an arm or something. Nothing on the face. They would just take their frustrations out on each other until they grew tired of the bullshit and ended up either on opposite sides of our small house or in bed together.

  They usually only fought like that when they were dry.

  I remember Dale, his huge hulking body that always came over with his wife Merrick to play cards with Mom and Dad. Although they were both drunks, they tended to shy away from all drugs, aside from a few tokes off a joint. When the party wound down, usually after everyone got too loaded to concentrate on the cards and the foursome became a jabbering gossip-fest of old friends, Dale would sometimes tuck me back into bed if I had gotten out for a drink of water or to vacate the bladder. He’d always tell me stories, whatever I wanted, but our favorite were the scary stories. Stories about vampires, werewolves, and ghosts. Sometimes he’d tell my parents’ that everyone was being too loud and were keeping the kids up. Then he’d gather Cindy and me where we’d sit on the couch and put on old Universal horror movies. Under a cloud of cigarette and pot smoke we’d watch them until our eyelids finally grew heavy and we fell asleep.

  Dale was always good to us. My mother and father never really seemed to notice us, except when it was time to feed us, or if Cindy was having a temper tantrum, which was often. They would grow frustrated with this, but as with me, they never hurt her. If anything, they’d just give up and let me handle it.

  Until the rising of the undead, I thought I was doing a good job. Maybe I was, but the monsters that took over the world and stole away Cindy’s comfort wasn’t easy for her to handle.

  Where was she now? Was she still with Bill, safe and sound? Had the soldiers found her? Not knowing was killing me.

  I yank on my restraints. All that manages to do is hurt my wrists.

  I yank on them anyway. Again and again and again until I hear her voice.

  “That’s not going to do much.” It’s Eve. She stands at the bottom of the stairwell. A man walks before her, zipping up his pants and smiling as he leaves the house. Eve’s face is bruised, her left eye swollen shut. From what I can tell she wears only a blanket to cover herself. The front, where her fist clasps the blanket together, dips low enough that I can see a large portion of her breast.

  “They’re going to be coming soon,” she says, her voice full of hatred and pain. Full of anguish and what I think is regret. A tear wells in her good eye. Her lips tremble. She looks away from me, looks to the front door.

  “I should have listened to you and Grant,” she whispers.

  “Who’s coming?” I say.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Who’s coming?” I ask again.

  I hear the whimpering again. This time I can tell that it’s coming from upstairs. This time it sounds more like Cindy’s moans when she’s about to start crying, or if she’s having a nightmare, than it did before.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, and this time Eve answers.

  “These men are pigs,” she says, spitting the words. “They don’t care about restoring civilization. They’re just having fun.” Another moan wafts down from upstairs. My eyes search the room frantically, though for what I don’t know.

  “What’s going on, Eve?” I repeat.

  “This is just one house they use. They use it for … for their pleasures. When I saw them bring your sister, she recognized me and ran right at me, so I couldn’t help it. But maybe it’s better than what they were going to do.”

  “Cindy’s here!”

  A fat tear rolls down Eve’s cheek.

  “She’s upstairs, sleeping,” Eve says. “But she’s not in good shape, Charlie. They’ve been … using her. Just like they’ve been using me.” She reaches up and touches her cheek and swollen-shut eye.

  “They got out of me how she knew me, and how I knew you,” Eve continued. “So they let you two stay here, with me. But I don’t think that it’s out of any kindness in their part. I think they want you to hear what they’re doing to Cindy. Soon, they’ll be here again. They’ll be so happy to see you’re awake.”

  chapter nineteen

  I learn soon after that the men, these so-called soldiers, had found Bill, his wife and child and my sister hiding in his basement. Eve said that she wasn’t certain, but she heard that the big bearded man took down three of them before they shot him to death. Why they didn’t kill everyone in the room she could only speculate it was because they were all female. Women, no matter how old or young, were a valuable commodity these days.

  I tug at my restraints and clench my teeth, but it’s no use. My head spins and the nausea returns. Eve’s there beside me, brushing her fingers through my hair, telling me how sorry she is that everything had happened this way.

  “Stop touching me!” I say to her. “If it weren’t for you, none of
this would have happened. We’d be gone by now. We’d be safe.”

  She stands as though I had slapped her across the face. She even holds her cheek, and although she knows what I say is the truth, or at least partly true, her eyes fill with new tears. Not the apologetic tears of regret she cried a few seconds ago. No, this time her eyes fill with hatred, and they burn holes into my flesh.

  “Fuck you,” she says. “Fuck you and your retarded sister.”

  She’s gone, leaving me alone with the smells of blood and the sounds of my sister moaning in her sleep upstairs.

  How long has she been here? Hell, how long have I been here? It must be more than a day or two. It’s dark outside now, and I’m so tired. I just want to sleep. But I have to find a way to get out of here, and I just chased away the best possibility I ever had of that.

  “Eve?” I call out, though I know that it’s useless. I suspect she will come back. She’s too angry to do so now.

  Soon, they’ll be here again, Eve had said. Who are they?

  The sound of a diesel engine pulls up to the house. Headlights shine through the front window. When the engine turns off, I hear men talking and laughing. Their voices slur in drunken lust. Adding to the situation, Eve comes back downstairs. She gives me one look, a glare really, but one that softens when she hears the men’s voices.

  “They’re here.”. She wipes her eyes clear of the tears and fluffs at her hair. She puts on a fake smile as the men’s voices turn to booted feet stomping on a wooden porch, and the door slams open.

  From the darkness emerge four men. All of them wear expensive-looking long winter coats. I don’t doubt that they’re something expensive, like Calvin Klein. They peel off leather gloves from their hands. Their beards are trimmed. All but one has long blond or dirty blond hair. The fourth’s black greasy hair clings to his hairy cheeks. This man’s black eyes penetrate deep into my soul when he looks at me. He notices that I’m awake, my head thrust up from the cot so I can see what’s going on. He smiles a mouthful of crooked but white teeth. He looks like a demon. I can tell that he’s the leader of this merry band of murderers and rapists.

  “Ah, he’s awake,” the black-haired man says. He comes closer. I notice strands of grey in his hair and beard. His teeth are sharp and white.

  “Gentlemen,” Eve says. She bows as though she stands before royalty. “General Max, I didn’t know that so many of you would be coming tonight.”

  Max points at one of the other men who punches her in the stomach. She lets out a large “Ooof” of air and clutches at her abdomen, leans and slides down the stairwell wall with a grimace of pain painted onto her face.

  Anger riles through me, and I tug at my restraints. This amuses Max. When he speaks again it’s to Eve.

  “I don’t remember inviting you to talk, young lady.” His accent is something European, and I can’t place it. Yugoslavian maybe? Although he talks to her, he keeps his eyes on me. “Don’t worry. We’ll be giving you the attention you desire soon enough.”

  He lowers his hand and kneels down towards me. What is it with this man? His fascination with me? I grimace at my own thoughts, wondering about my being placed within this house amongst their captive women. Why didn’t I think of this before?

  “So,” he says to me. “You’ve come to us. How wonderful.”

  I don’t want to say anything to this man. The last thing I want is to provoke him, but the words come sliding out anyway. “Why are you keeping us here?”

  “Aw, that’s no way to speak to your new master,” Max says, his voice sympathetic. He comes closer, his black demon eyes like shadowy abysses of a skull. His breath smells of dog shit, and although I’ve just met the man I want to bury my foot in that mouth of crooked teeth.

  He laughs at me, perhaps at the glare in my eyes. “Oh boy,” he says, looking back at his men. “We’ve got ourselves a sparkplug here, I think.” When he looks back, his smile grows bigger, hungrier.

  “Good,” he says. “I like them feisty.”

  My heart sinks.

  I realize that my fears are simply intuition manifested. I know what’s going to happen here, and there’s not a thing I can do about it.

  General Max tilts his head sharply and says to his men, “Go get the other ladies. There’s a party to be had and it’s a full house now.” His smile widens, and to me he says in a lower voice, “Ours will be a little less social, I’m afraid. More private. I hope that you don’t mind.”

  “Fuck you,” I say, and I spit on his face. Mostly nothing comes out but tiny drops, but the meaning behind the gesture is not lost.

  Max wipes at his face, the smile gone. Replacing it is something even more horrifying. I’ve seen this kind of hunger directed at me only once before. The killer I had named Dahmer, the man who enjoyed chopping people up and sexually penetrating the parts.

  That same hunger is in this General’s eyes.

  Seconds later the room fills with weeping as the women he mentioned are pushed into the house. There’s three of them. Two are older women, at least in their fifties. The third can’t be more than eighteen years old.

  A party indeed.

  Thankfully, Cindy is not amongst them.

  My mind is a blank slate and I’d like to keep it that way, but consciousness pulls at me with the sound of weeping of children. A girl’s cries that break through any barrier I’ve built, and I hate her for it.

  The more conscious I become, the less the hate for the crying girl lasts. I can’t hate her because she’s been through the same thing. It finally came down to it, that I couldn’t protect her. The worst part of it is that she doesn’t understand what’s happened to her. And I couldn’t stop it. My own screams had made her crying worse, and I remember trying to muffle them, to scream into the fabric of the cloth my face was pressed against.

  The pain lasted forever. So did the screams. Screams of joy and pleasure. Screams of pain and humiliation. They are sounds that will never leave my head, and I can hear them even now, though the room is actually silent. They haunt this world between wakefulness and sleep and all I want is to slip back into blackness, oblivion, forget my existence, forget my failure.

  Fingers rake through my hair. It’s a pleasant feeling, my eyes shoot open and my head jerks away. It’s only Eve. I can’t summon the anger I felt for her earlier. I can’t remember why I was angry in the first place. She looks down on me with sympathy in her eyes, pain and suffering that I now know a little something of. I can understand why she walks around free when others are chained to their cots, as I now see I’m no longer alone in my living room dungeon. Two other women are chained to their own respective cots. They lay there moaning in their sleep, twitching at some nightmare.

  Eve is allowed to walk around because she walked into camp. Thinking that the people here were friendly, she probably came to them with smiles and greetings. She was also smart enough to buckle down when things got serious and she saw that Grant was right.

  “We have to get out of here,” Eve says. Sunlight halos her outline, the brightness of it hurts my eyes. I remember now why I hated her, why I felt such anger. I thought that she was at fault for all this. I know now that blaming her is ridiculous. It was her decision to come here, not Grant’s, not mine. It was Grant’s decision to come looking for her. Not mine. But, it was my decision to follow him. In truth, I’m actually angry at myself. I hate myself for making that decision because I knew even then that it was the wrong one to make. What led me here was pure and blind hope. An emotion that I vow right now I will never feel again.

  But here’s Eve, offering hope on a silver platter.

  “We have to escape,” she says. The look in her eye is pleading, her mouth slightly open and I can see the disease that is hope coursing through her very heart.

  I laugh. “How?” I say.

  She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a hoop with two keys on them. They look like handcuff keys.

  I can feel the sarcasm melt off my face. Here’s the ang
er and hatred again, the complete opposite emotion to the ones I should be feeling. I’ve already stated that I no longer want to hope, haven’t I? It’s too exhausting. Too disappointing.

  “We wait until dark,” she says. “While they’re drinking.”

  I sigh and nod my head.

  Why not go for it? What’s the worst that can happen?

  chapter twenty

  The day passes slowly. A guard came in sometime during the morning, telling the mistress of the house, that being Eve, that the girls and I were allowed one hand freed from our cots. We are given pots and toilet paper to do our business in, which all three of us try to avoid but cannot. We don’t talk to each other, the girls and I. When eye contact is made it is quickly destroyed with a glance to the floor. We lie down, sit up, and for reasons unknown to me, the three of us avoid each other.

  One of the girls has long, blond hair. She has big breasts, and I can see her dark nipples through the thin, white t-shirt they have given her to wear. Her legs are long and slender, tanned golden as the sunlight shining through the window. If you were to touch those legs, it would probably be the smoothest surface of anything you’ve ever touched before. I can’t tell if they’ve allowed her panties or not, but I doubt it. She keeps her shirt pulled as far down as it will go at all times.

  The other girl has short red hair and is pretty with a sprinkle of freckles across her cheeks and nose. She’s shorter than the blond, and mostly sits on her cot, staring at the floor. For some reason, she’s permitted to wear a pair of track pants with her t-shirt.

  It’s not until halfway through the afternoon, after a visit by Max, that we speak to one another. The talk comes with a hushed restraint, as though she thinks someone might overhear her. It’s the blond who speaks. The one who makes parts of me shift and grow hard no matter how much I don’t want my body to react that way. Not here in this place. Not now.