by Sergio Gomez
And if not for the sudden rustling in the trees. The commotion in the bushes to the side of his house pierced through the night sky. John picked up his shotgun and aimed it in the direction of where the noise was coming from.
“Listen, I don’t know who you are, or what you want, but there ain’t nothin’ here for you. This thing here will blow you to smithereens, and I ain’t got no reservations to use it, you hear me? Get on out of here before—“
The glowing red suddenly at the corner of his vision stopped him mid-sentence. He pivoted on the balls of his feet to face the road in front of his house, the four pairs of red eyes stared at him, he couldn’t make out what the eyes belonged to, and he wasn’t sure they belonged to anything. It was like candles suspended in the air. Ghosts or something was his initial thought.
More movement in the trees brought his focus back, but now he was too tongue tied to speak. Instead he licked his lips and gripped his shotgun until his knuckles turned white. He took aim, ready for whatever was behind the bushes, if anything at all.
He saw the eyes peering at him through the bushes, beady and glowing like those of a rat, yet more human in some way. The eyes moved so that they were looking down the barrel of the shotgun. Then, the most horrifying part, the creature behind the bushes opened its mouth to reveal teeth as white as pearls and sharp as daggers. There were an uncanny number of them, and everything seemed to be happening in slow-motion that he felt like he could have sat there and counted them all, but instead his instincts took over and he pulled the trigger. In the split second that it took for the gun to engage, for the shotgun shell to launch through the barrel, the shell to burst in the air and scatter into lethal pieces, the creature behind the bushes leapt out to attack.
John watched with some fascination as the shotgun blast obliterated the creature in mid-air. Its blood shot everywhere like a water balloon bursting. Its limbs flew through the air, then hit the lawn and rolled across it, streaking it red.
There was a yell from the road, a yell that vaguely sounded like a chimpanzee’s. John found control of his shaking body and turned to face them in time to see that one was running across the lawn, showing the same countless rows of teeth in its mouth, the teeth shining silver underneath the moonlight.
John pivoted on his heels while reloading the shotgun. The creature was only a few feet away from him. It jumped through the air, claws out, just as John pulled the trigger. Just like the first one, the shotgun blast tore it to pieces. Blood rained down on him, covering his face and the top of his overalls with thick blood.
He looked down the street, the red eyes were gone, no longer looking at him from the darkness like ghouls, no, the sound of the shotgun and the sight of the other two creatures exploding had scared them off. He was sure of it, but just the same he kept the shotgun ready. His ears listened for any sign of them.
After what felt like an eternity, John lowered the shotgun and put it on the ground. Adrenaline was coursing through him, reminiscent of the days when he would get into fistfights at school, only the feeling was a million times magnified. His legs were shaking so bad he fell down to his knees. The weight of his significant belly brought him forward, and he caught himself on rubbery arms.
The blood stuck to his face dripped down on to the grass. He looked at his hands, also covered in blood. This was nothing like the fistfights. Those were just teenagers trying to act cool and tough to show off to their friends and any girls who happened to be there. No, this had been about life and death. Those creatures would have killed him had he not shot them first.
He was so caught up in getting control of his body back and reeling through the events that had just occurred that he didn’t hear when the screen door behind him slammed open. He didn’t hear when his wife came out to see the aftermath; her husband on the grass on all fours, his shotgun inches away from his blood covered hands, the lawn shining red where the porch light reached, pieces of some unidentifiable creature that littered the front of their house like chunks of charcoal.
She fainted and collapsed backwards into the living room floor.
*
“…If that were the end of it, it’d be a good hero’s story.” John took a drink from his water bottle. “Got some Vodka in the bag if you’re interested.”
Alejandro wasn’t much of a drinker after his college days, except for the occasional beer with a buddy after work or at a Yankee’s game, he didn’t really touch the stuff. “I think I’ll pass.”
John nodded in approval. “I was sober for twenty-one years. Not no more, though.”
He took a second to glance outside. “Not like there’s anyone out there left to judge me, anyway.”
He winked at Alejandro, and Alejandro grinned in return.
A silence fell on the room for a few seconds while they finished their food. When Charlie was done with his he sat cross-legged on the floor and put the empty bowl next to him. Like a Boy Scout sitting around the fire being told a tale, he was captivated by John’s story and eagerly awaited the next part.
“The next part might make you think differently of me, Mr. Ramos.” John was looking down at the ground when he broke the silence.
“That’s alright, tell it when you’re ready.”
John composed himself, then said “This is gonna be the hardest part to tell. Mr. Ramos.”
9
After he had found his wife fainted in the living room floor, he had taken her to the upstairs bedroom. There she had come to and he had given her a glass of water while he told her what happened. Once, while he told her about the demons she almost fainted again, but he grabbed her and shook her, rough as he had ever handled her in their years of marriage.
When he finished telling her the whole story he got into the shower. Once he returned the room was empty but he could hear Mary in the sewing room doing God knows what. Probably crying, but he was fast asleep before he had much time to think about it.
The following morning he awoke to the aroma of bacon and eggs and coffee in his nostrils. When he went down to the kitchen there was a plate full of food waiting for him and a note from his wife.
Out in the garden. Hope you enjoy breakfast
“Well, I’ll be damned,” John said.
This was the first time he hadn't woken up before her, usually he was up at the crack of dawn. He looked outside and saw the day was as golden as a cup of pear juice, the clock on the wall read 9:30am. And despite what happened last night, he actually felt refreshed and stronger this morning.
Maybe a shot of adrenaline had been good for his old bones.
He sat down to eat his breakfast. When he was almost done his wife came in with a basket full of oranges that were bright and juicy. She walked past him to the sink and put the basket underneath the faucet to rinse them out.
“How was breakfast?” She asked over the sound of the running water.
The precedent was set that neither one of them would talk about the oddities that had shown up last night. That’s what was said between the lines of that mundane question of ‘how was breakfast’. A question that would otherwise have been an act of common courtesy carried the weight of a silent agreement this morning.
John had the ball in his court now, he could turn to his wife and say, “Breakfast was great. The bacon was crispy and the eggs nice and fluffy, now what are we going to do about those monster showing up to our home tonight?” or he could have said what he actually said, which was, “Delicious. Thanks.”
She finished washing the oranges and put them in a blue bucket sitting on the counter. When she was done with that she grabbed the empty basket and headed out of the kitchen. She didn’t tell him where she was going, and he didn’t ask.
The silence between them continued all through the day, and when they did encounter each other in the house, they would just exchange a glance that told the other that they still didn’t want to talk about it. Which was fine by both of them, except for feeling like their spouse of thirty years was a strange
r, it was fine by both of them.
Now they sat at the table, eating in silence. Both wanting to bring it up, but both too scared to do so, as if not talking about it meant they wouldn’t show up, as if the one who did bring it up would hold the burden of conjuring them up, like a wizard summoning monsters.
“Let’s drive out of here,” John finally said, after several minutes of an agonizing silence that had been filled only by the sound of their fork and knives working to cut their steaks.
Mary buried her face in her hands and began to cry. “And go where Johnathon, we ain’t got no place to go.”
“We can go to town.” He suggested.
‘Town’ was what they called the mile long strips of stores thirty minutes outside of their ranch. It wasn’t much of a town, just a long sidewalk with establishments on either side like the hardware store or the grocery store, but it was as close to a town as it got outside of ten miles from their farm.
“We can’t go there, and you know it.” She lifted her head up and met his eyes with her own puffy eyes. “Them things showed up here already. Town is worse, and you know it.”
She was right. He had no way of knowing it for sure, but he knew she was right. If there was weird stuff happening on their farm, miles away from town, then that meant town was probably a pile of rubble by now.
They hadn’t been connected with anything going on outside of their farm for over a year now, not since the television channels stopped broadcasting and the radios stopped transmitting. But before then, he saw the major cities on the television and how bad of a shape they were in. Detroit was the first one to go, the fighting between civilians and military got so bad that the whole city had been burned down. Helicopter views from the news channels showed what remained in the aftermath; burned out husks of what used to be schools, libraries, community centers, houses. The image of a city long lost.
Next Seattle was lost to a bad storm that somehow only hit that city and surrounding areas, the work of an accurate God or a freak of nature, or if you were more of the conspiracy theory minded, the work of terrorists using weather-creating machines to specifically target Seattle. Either way, it was like their total rainfall fell on them at once and the streets were flooded in a half a day. Cars floated down the street, and people with single floor homes found themselves sloshing through their living rooms in a four foot deep pool. To make matters worse, lightning struck all major power lines and with the streets flooded there was no one to do maintenance to fix it, so by night the town was enshrouded in total darkness. Looting, robberies, fights out on the street for resources, all commenced before midnight, and the town too was lost to The Chaos.
Sitting here at the supper table, looking at his crying wife, he wondered just how many people were still alive. The thought that they may be the last survivors crossed his mind.
“So what John, do we stay here and fight them off with that shotgun of yours?” Mary asked, still hysterical.
“I got a machete in the shed, too.” He looked down at his hands, then as an afterthought added, “Told you to get yourself a gun, woman!”
“I ain’t want one, what I need a gun for when all I ever did was go to town and get groceries and clothes?”
He took in a deep breath to keep his cool. He wasn’t sure if he was mad at her arguing with him or at the situation. “We’ll stay the night. If they come back tonight we’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
Mary got up from the table to grab a paper towel to wipe her eyes with. “What if more of ‘em come than what came last night, huh? What then?”
The shotgun was powerful, it had a lot of spread, but he didn’t have a clue as to how many of those creatures there were. There could have been hundreds for all he knew. “I think I scared ‘em off tonight with the shotgun.”
She stopped dabbing her eyes and looked at him with eyes peeled back, it made her look older and ugly, like a skeleton, and John could barely look at her. “You mean that John, you mean that? Honestly, you do?”
John looked away, unsure if it was because of the unsightly expression or because he couldn’t stand to look at her when he told her a bold faced lie. “Yeah, Mary, I do.”
*
“…Biggest lie I ever told in my life.”
Alejandro could see how difficult it was getting for him to finish the story. He cleared his throat and tried to fill the sudden silence. “But you said what you needed to, to comfort her. It was your responsibility to do that.”
“I don’t know how true that is, Mr. Ramos, but thanks for being kind.”
Charlie was lying on the floor, his hands folded behind his head and his eyelids half closed.
“Got a blanket in my bag if you want to get bundled up.” John told him.
Charlie looked at Alejandro for his approval and got it, so he went over to where John’s bag was. While he did that John collected the bowls and Alejandro threw more paper into the pit where the fire was.
By the time the adults took their seats again, Charlie was lying down on the blanket with a shirt tucked underneath his head. An afternoon nap would soon claim him, and he’d miss the end of the story, but that was okay. No one would mind.
The end of the story wasn’t something a child should have heard, anyhow.
*
They returned that night, and if the group before was a small army, this one was an entire platoon. When John saw the sheer amount of monsters that were coming up the road, all plans of standing his ground and defending his home went out the window. It made the argument and the ensuing planning with his wife hours ago become unraveled and reveal itself as a waste of time.
He could just make out their beady red eyes through the darkness, at least fifty pairs of them, all marching straight down for his home. There was no mistake about it, they were coming for blood and all he had was a shotgun (which may as well have been a potato shooter) and a wife wielding a machete.
“Mary, Mary!” He yelled to her. She was upstairs getting hammered off red wine that he had no idea she kept hidden from him around the house until an hour ago. Not like it mattered, the last thing on John’s mind at this point was getting drunk—an alcoholic’s wish if it weren’t at the expense of rampaging monsters storming down to your home.
“Mary, get your butt down here, we have to get going!”
Hoping she had heard him and would listen, he let the screen door close behind him and then darted for the driveway where they kept the truck. The keys were in his breast pocket, and he fiddled for them with shaking fingers, then he jammed the key in the general direction of where the keyhole was, and missed. He looked over his shoulder, the red eyes were coming closer, and he could feel the floor vibrating underneath his boots.
He turned back to the truck, and with better focus stuck the key in the keyhole and got the truck unlocked. He jumped into the driver’s seat, and now it was going to be the same game of whether he could get his shaking hands to slide the key into the ignition. He looked over where the monsters were coming from, closer now, close enough for him to just make out the roundness of their faces in contrast with the dark. With a quick gesture more akin to someone stabbing something than turning on a car he thrust the key into the ignition, and he thought it must have been the power of the Lord above, because the key went right in and the truck rumbled to life when he turned it.
He reversed the truck out of the driveway and cut across the front lawn until he was at the front of the house. He looked to where the monsters were coming from for the third time—they’d be knocking on the front door any minute now—and right then and there was when he decided he’d only give his wife seconds.
He rolled the window down and shouted at the top of his lungs. “MARY! GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE!”
He told himself he’d wait for her. That’s what a good husband would do for a woman who stuck with him for thirty years. The one who, despite her father’s wishes for her to marry a doctor or a lawyer and get out of the farm life, had married him: a poor farmer
who had just enough to eat. A good husband would wait for the woman who helped keep his farm running, the one who made sure the house was always clean, spick and span, made sure he got all three meals throughout the day, the one who raised his five children (who all moved out to a major city after graduating college, and by now were long gone, R.I.P.), the one who kept his chickens fed (also long gone), ran the vegetable garden, and made his life complete.
He knew he should wait for her, wait until the end of time. Let the monsters come and kill him, at least he would die knowing he stuck by his wife until the bitter end. That’s what he knew, but what he did was a different story.
There were no signs of Mary coming, she probably had passed out drunk on the bed or passed out over the toilet on top of her own vomit like she had done on their wedding night. I should go get her, he thought, but that thought quickly went away when he felt the trembling underneath the truck get heavier.
They were on the lawn now, only a hundred feet of grass and inches of metal and plastic that made up the car door separated him from the monstrosities. The teeth of the one in the bushes, the thousand daggers sitting in a mouth as black as midnight, loomed in his mind’s eye as clear as if he was looking at a movie theater screen. And without a second’s hesitation, he slammed on the accelerator.
The truck launched from 0 to 60 in a matter of seconds, the engine whined from the strain. He had no idea where he was headed, but he knew the woods by his house were not an option, so he turned the wheel to avoid going into them as fast and as hard as he could. In its new direction the truck headed toward the monsters.
Good enough, he’d mow some of them down AND make his escape. If only things worked out so easy.
As the creatures saw the truck heading their way, their uniformity broke and they ran into a frenzy. There were screams, a mixture of battle cries and panicked shrieks. The truck slammed into several that couldn’t get out of the way of its path, smashed them and sent them flying every which way like bowling pins. The truck’s tires ran over and crushed some of the ones that even after being hit were still in its path, turning the ran over parts of the creatures into a messy pile of black and red mush.