Horror For Good - A Charitable Anthology

by Jack Ketchum

  Two of the creatures saw her and ran as fast as they could in her direction, screaming with punctured throats and rotting lungs. She blinked furiously, the tears blurring her view, and swung her axe heavily at the legs of the first one that reached her. They flew from its body, the rest of it thudding to the ground and starting to crawl towards her with its arms and bleeding stumps. The second one came at her. She swung, missing it, and it crashed into the side of the building, dazed. The one at her feet grabbed for her ankles, trying to take a bite and she rammed the heel of her shoe into its face over and over without looking away from the zombie in front of her. She swung her axe again and the zombie ducked, the weapon ricocheting off the wall and flying from her hands, skidding across the gravel. Lola jumped over the one still biting for her feet, its face smashed beyond recognition and she rolled across the ground in one fluid motion, rising with the axe in hand and sliced cleanly through the neck of the creature coming for her. She turned around. Piles of corpses lay scattered across the lot and the men each had three more to deal with. Lola ran for Paul, burying her axe into the skull of the one closest to him as he took the second one in the stomach and the third in the face. Lola couldn't get her axe out from where it was embedded in bone and when she finally wrenched it free, all three men were walking towards her, the rest of the zombies destroyed. She sensed a snarky comment from Conner and cut him off.

  "Should we go and find the rest of the groups? We can't deal with this many on our own." Paul nodded hard and Conner shook his head, spitting on the ground. Ian simply stood and looked at the piles of the dead at their feet. His arm went into spasm, then a leg, and he turned around just as the milky whiteness began to creep over brown irises and the blood from where he had been bitten seeped across his shirt hem from the hip.

  "No, no, no," he was whispering, though Lola wasn't sure if he even knew they were there anymore. She felt the weight of the axe in her hand, looking to the other two men who were watching Ian with horror. Ian started to convulse, his eyes becoming completely clouded and a string of spittle started to make its way down his chin. Just as the first uncontrollable taste for flesh became clear on his face and a snarl escaped his throat it was cut off, the sharp suddenness of Conner's axe connecting with his skull. Paul covered his face with his hand and Lola started to cry again.

  "Shut up you stupid bitch," Conner spat at her. "I'm sick of you. Let's get going."

  "We're walking back to the others?" she asked plaintively, failing to project an ounce of confidence into her voice.?"Of course we're fucking not. This place is nothing but corpses anyway, what's one more? They'd only tell us to grow some balls and get back to work." Lola cringed at his anger and noticed Paul nodding his head to the side.

  "If it had simply been Ian's death, then yeah, they would have. But there could be hundreds of these things and this is something that a larger group should be handling."

  "Whatever, pussies," Conner growled, pushing Lola out of the way and heading back to the supermarket doors. "Go back if you want. I've got zombies to kill." As he left, Lola felt an arm slip around her shoulder and looked into Paul's face.

  "I'll leave the decision up to you," he said, obviously trying to sound calm, though a hint of a tremble ran through his words. Lola wiped her eyes and smiled at him, focusing hard on the successful kills she had achieved and trying to get back to that state of terrified adrenaline.

  "We can't let him just go off alone. He's a jerk, yes, but he's part of our team. Without our help he'll be dead by the time anyone else can get over here."

  "You say that like it's a bad thing," Paul laughed, as they both began to follow Conner onto the street. The road was empty of life as Paul painted an 'x' on the side of the store. They checked the next house along, but that too was empty, of both Conner and the undead.

  "Maybe he went back anyway?" Paul offered, looking in the direction of Park Street.

  "Not that guy," Lola said bitterly, shaking her head. "Do you still have bullets?"

  "A full chamber. The zombies in the parking lot took me by surprise; I bent down to tie my shoe and when I looked up there was a dozen of the bastards closing in on me. Shall we look for Conner or just keep checking houses?"

  "Houses, I guess. Conner has his whistle if he needs help, though he's probably too stubborn to use it. We don't know where he is and we could spend the rest of the day looking." She squinted along the street, the houses still continuing far into the distance, and sighed, beckoning for Paul and smashing open the door of the next house. The morning wore away as they worked, finding no other zombies with the exception of a changed cat that leapt for Lola's throat as they entered someone's bedroom. Paul had shot it out of the air before it reached her. When they got to the end of the street, they crossed over and began to search the houses on the other side, starting with a quaint, white-washed little house with roses in the yard and a swing set next to them. Paul soothed her as she looked at them. They had found few corpses during their checks, most of the dead picked clean to bones already, but when you found the skeleton of a child it was still heartbreaking. The door was open, hanging off one hinge and the bottom floor was clear, clean, and neat.

  "It's almost like the house wasn't invaded," Lola said, confused.

  She left Paul looking for a basement and cautiously climbed the stairs. Then, she vomited. A pile of zombies lay in the hallway, eyes still open, arms still reaching out. They were truly dead, rotting, flies swarming around the pile of them that lay under an attic hatch. Paul ran at the sound of Lola's retching and nearly joined her as he took in the sight. Lola gestured to the hatch and Paul tentatively climbed the mound of death to pull it open. The ladder slid out and they started up. The attic was very large, boxes of miscellaneous items lay stacked atop each other as far as they could see, and the stench of death was coming from somewhere, not just the pile below them. They navigated through books and clothes and broken toys to the back of the attic. Lola looked around the room, her gaze stopping on the blocked off section of the attic with no door. Bricks lay haphazardly cemented from floor to ceiling, the occasional one knocked out and lying jaggedly broken. Paul walked over and wiggled a few more bricks free of the wall in a line, the hasty job making them unstable. He peered through and gasped.

  "Lola," he whispered. "Stay over there. You don't want to see this." Lola snorted, walking over and peering into the secret room. The light of the attic shone through the missing bricks and illuminated two adult skeletons and the half-eaten remains of several children. A little boy lay sleeping in the corner amid the carnage. Paul raised his pistol.

  "Wait!" Lola yelled, knocking his gun away. Paul looked at her with shock but still lowered it.

  "What is it?"

  "He's just a child..."

  "But he's one of them. He'd tear your eyes out as soon as he's free. What else can we do?"

  The child was stirring, woken by the shouts and the second he caught the scent of flowing blood he ran towards the light and stuck both hands out of the gap, reaching and snarling. Paul and Lola backed away and Lola looked into the milky eyes of the growling child, with splinters of his mother's bones implanted in his gums. Her mind flashed back to her husband, the kitchen, the running, through the gardens and down the main street, June slipping softly off her back and the deadly creature crawling towards her. The images flashed wildly, the creature eyeing both of them, not sure which to go for, June crying on the road and, finally, the memory of thrusting out her finger, desperately pointing towards her daughter as she backed away from them both, sealing June's fate, and her own.

  "Come back, Mama." A whispered plea with a strained voice as the zombie came eye to eye with her child. The scream, as it pinned her down and tore a chunk out of her leg, and the memory of continuing to back away as June watched. She didn't know the name of the young man who had come running down the road and impaled the creature, then tried to grab Lola away. June was still whimpering for her mother, bleeding, convulsing, the change coming swif
tly as her eyes began to cloud over. Last of all she remembered running, running with the young man to the safe house at the town hall, the zombie that had been her daughter running desperately and rage-filled down the road behind them, her tiny legs unable to keep up despite her lust for their blood. She snapped sharply back to reality and Paul had a hand on her shoulder, pity in his eyes as her own filled with tears and spilled over. Lola looked at him, then at the child whose hands were clawing single-mindedly through his brick prison, and finally nodded to Paul before turning around to climb down from the attic. She stood in the hall and sobbed as she heard the gunshots.

  When Paul appeared beside her, they didn't speak. It was well known that Lola had lost a child and she could almost feel her own guilt mirrored in Paul, almost palpable in the strained atmosphere of the room. Only Lola knew that she was still yet a mother. When they exited the house, Lola was still weeping and Paul offered to check the next house on his own, leaving her to stand in the street and think about her daughter. The initial cleansing of the zombies hadn't been too hard, the town hall was secure and the creatures crowded around it hungrily, making easy targets for the men and women who deployed bullets, shells, and burning oil from the top windows. After a couple of days when no more of the zombies were directly outside, teams were sent and eventually they secured the section of the town around the hall, which included Lola's house. She remembered returning home, starting to tidy, going to the kitchen to throw away the rotting food and seeing her little girl, still in her nightdress, curled up asleep on the floor.

  She had almost gone to wake her before she caught herself, forced to remember the situation as it was. In the end she had fetched a pair of handcuffs and grabbed the girl by the back of the head. She had snarled and twisted as she awoke, but zombie though she was, she was still just a small child and Lola had few problems holding her head immobile, getting her to the basement and handcuffing her to the pipe without injury. When Paul returned from the house, Lola was racked with deep sobs again and couldn't stop herself, though she tried. He put an arm around her.

  "This is ridiculous. Let's go back and find the other groups." Lola nodded and the two of them started back down towards Park Street, jogging as they cast their eyes around for trouble.

  The only time they stopped was when they found Conner's mutilated corpse in the middle of the road, but it amounted to no more than a quick glance and they ran on. When they exited the side street, the other groups were already waiting, two of them each missing a member, all of them with crimson streaks on their skin. The leader of the Seekers didn't ask questions about their losses, simply took the names of the dead to inform families and the twelve of them that remained headed back to the safe part of town.

  The next morning, Lola was cooking breakfast for herself when a knock sounded at the door. She wiped greasy hands on her skirt and went to answer it, smiling a little as she saw Paul standing there with a bunch of lilies.

  "A gift. I told my wife bout you so she got you these." Lola took them with a small laugh and gave him a quick hug. It was only after she had invited him in for coffee that her eyes flicked to the basement door and she realised that June could start rattling her handcuffs or thumping the floor any second. She took the lilies to the kitchen and put them in a vase on the table, then eyed up Paul.

  "What is it?" he asked. Lola took several deep breaths, fingernails tapping on the table.

  "I have something I want to show you." Her heart was quickening as she led him to the basement door and quietly unlocked it. She pointed Paul ahead of her and he walked carefully down into the darkness with Lola behind. She shut the door after them, silently locking it and coming to stand next to Paul at the bottom of the steps.

  "What's that sound?" Paul whispered, straining to hear the quiet breathing that came from the corner, the small whines that escaped with the breath. Lola felt for his arm and led him three paces forward into the dark. A chain clanked softly, a small sound of something moving across the stone floor.

  "I'll just turn the light on." Lola walked behind Paul, but there she stopped, grabbing him by the shoulders.

  She pushed. Paul's screams were immediate and bloodcurdling, and when he managed to break free and run towards the stairs, Lola grabbed him again and threw him back. The sound of cracking bones accompanied his terror, the sounds of gorging, of blood spattering hard onto the wall. As Paul's screams grew fainter, turning into whimpers, Lola placed a hand on the light switch with trembling fingers, then withdrew it and headed back to the stairs. The sounds of feasting continued, though the pained whines had faded away to nothing. As Lola put her foot on the bottom step, she turned around in the darkness.

  "Feel better, baby. I love you, June."

  —Laird Barron

  Laird Barron is the author of several books, including The Imago Sequence, Occultation, and The Croning. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in Upstate New York.

  —Shiva, Open Your Eye

  By Laird Barron

  The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.

  A man came to my door one afternoon, back when I lived on a rambling farm in Eastern Washington. He was sniffing around, poking into things best left...unpoked. A man with a flashlight, you might say. Of course, I knew who he was and what he was doing there long before he arrived with his hat in one hand and phony story in the other.

  Claimed he was a state property assessor, did the big genial man. Indeed, he was a massive fellow—thick, blunt fingers clutching corroborative documents and lumpy from all the abuse he had subjected them to in the military; he draped an ill-tailored tweed jacket and insufferable slacks over his ponderous frame. This had the effect of making him look like a man that should have been on a beach with a sun visor and a metal detector. The man wore a big smile under his griseous beard. This smile frightened people, which is exactly why he used it most of the time, and also, because it frightened people, he spoke slowly, in a big, heavy voice that sounded as if it emerged from a cast-iron barrel. He smelled of cologne and Three-In-One oil.

  I could have whispered to him that the cologne came from a fancy emerald-colored bottle his wife had purchased for him as a birthday present; that he carried the bottle in his travel bag and spritzed himself whenever he was on the road and in too great a hurry, or simply too hungover for a shower. He preferred scotch, did my strapping visitor. I could have mentioned several other notable items in this patent leather travel bag—a roll of electrical tape, brass knuckles, voltmeter, police issue handcuffs, a microrecorder, a pocket camera, disposable latex gloves, lockpicks, a carpet cutter, flashlight, an empty aspirin bottle, toothpaste, a half roll of antacid tablets, hemorrhoid suppositories and a stained road map of Washington state. The bag was far away on the front seat of his rented sedan, which he had carefully parked up the winding dirt driveway under a sprawling locust tree. Wisely, he had decided to reconnoiter the area before knocking on the door. The oil smell emanated from a lubricated and expertly maintained thirty-eight-caliber revolver stowed in his left-hand jacket pocket. The pistol had not been fired in three-and-a-half years. The man did not normally carry a gun on the job, but in my case, he had opted for discretion. It occurred to him that I might be dangerous.

  I could have told him all these things and that he was correct in his assumptions, but it did not amuse me to do so. Besides, despite his bulk he looked pretty fast and I was tired. Winter makes me lazy. It makes me torpid.

  But—

  Rap, rap! Against the peeling frame of the screen door. He did not strike the frame with anything approaching true force; nonetheless, he used a trifle more vigor than the occasion required. This was how he did things—whether conducting a sensitive inquiry, bracing a recalcitrant witness, or ordering the praw
ns at La Steakhouse. He was a water buffalo floundering into the middle of a situation, seizing command and dominating by virtue of his presence.

  I made him wait longer than was necessary—to the same degree as his assault on my door was designed to set the tone and mood—although not too long, because sometimes my anticipatory juices outwrestle my subtler nature. I was an old man and thus tended to move in a deliberate mode anyway. This saddened me; I was afraid he might not catch my little joke.

  But—

  I came to the door, blinking in the strong light as I regarded him through filtering mesh. Of course, I permitted a suitable quaver to surface when I asked after his business. That was when the big man smiled and rumbled a string of lies about being the land assessor and a few sundries that I never paid attention to, lost as I was in watching his mouth, his hands and the curious way his barrel chest lifted and fell under the crumpled suit.

  He gave me a name, something unimaginative gleaned from a shoebox, or like so. The identity on his State of Washington Private Investigator's License read Murphy Connell. He had been an investigator for eleven years; self employed, married with two children—a boy who played football at the University of Washington, and a girl that had transferred to Rhode Island to pursue a degree in graphic design—and owner of a Rottweiler named Hellestrae, after his favorite lineman. The identification was in his wallet, which filled an inner pocket of the bad coat, wedged in front of an ancient pack of Pall Malls. The big man had picked up the habit when he was stationed in the Philippines, but seldom smoked anymore. He kept them around because sure as a stud hound lifts its leg to piss, the minute he left home without a pack the craving would pounce on him hammer and tongs. He was not prone to self-analysis, this big man, yet it amused him after a wry sense that he had crushed an addiction only to be haunted by its vengeful ghost.