by Tim Waggoner
Lizzie played on the swing set along with three other girls. They swung with all the energy they could muster, trying to see which of them could soar the highest. They laughed and giggled as they swung, egging each other on to ever-greater exertions. Compared to the tire swing, their equipment seemed almost mundane—cords fashioned from muscles and sinew wrapped around lengths of bone. Still nasty, but at least the damned things resembled actual swings.
Despite the macabre nature of the playground, David was relieved to see his children, and he was even more relieved to see that neither appeared to have been injured. Many of their playmates hadn’t fared as well. David saw kids with bite marks on their flesh, which was bad enough, but a number were missing body parts—fingers, eyes, ears, hands, arms, feet, legs… All of them appeared oblivious, not only to the grotesque nature of their surroundings, but also to their own mutilation. From the way they were acting, this could’ve been just another day on the playground, when it was great to be young, alive and full of energy.
David started toward the swing set, partially because Lizzie was his youngest, not to mention his little girl, but mostly because it was closer than the tire swing. But he only managed to take a couple steps before the naked, bearded, crotchless man walked over to intercept him.
“You need to stay back, sir.”
The man was slender, but his muscles were defined, as if he worked out. Not to excess—he wasn’t a bodybuilder by any means—but he definitely took care of himself. With the exception of his genitals, that is. He seemed to have misplaced them somewhere along the way.
The man spoke in a firm but nonthreatening tone, and David had the impression that he was used to giving orders and having them obeyed. David wondered if he was a cop, but then he realized that he knew the man. Maybe he hadn’t recognized him at first due to his foggy brain, or maybe he’d been distracted by the man’s nakedness—not to mention dicklessness. But David was now sure who he was.
“You’re the principal,” he said. He struggled to recall the man’s name, but it wouldn’t come.
“That’s right,” the man said. “These children are in my care, and it’s my job to preserve them.”
David caught the word choice: preserve, not protect.
“I’m the father of two of those children, and I’ve come to get them.”
The principal looked at him for a moment, as if puzzled by this statement. “Do you have any proof?” he finally said.
Now it was David’s turn to be puzzled. “Of what?”
“Of parentage,” the principal said.
Another of the adults came over to join the principal, a stout, middle-aged woman whose blouse and skirt were both a touch too small and looked as if they might burst their seams any moment.
“And of custody too, don’t forget that,” she said. She looked at David. “We have strict policies about who we release our children to.”
David didn’t recognize her, but he figured her for one of the school staff, most likely a teacher, from her officious and condescending attitude.
“My children,” he said. “Not yours.”
“That remains to be seen,” the principal said. “Do you have any identification?”
David barked out a laugh. “I could ask the same of you! Doesn’t look like you have your wallet on you, unless you’re carrying it somewhere the sun doesn’t shine.” He almost added that the man had a bonus hole for hiding his personal effects, but before he could speak again, he noticed that the other adults had turned in their direction. They were watching him with dark, suspicious gazes, and while they remained where they were, he sensed that if he said or did the wrong thing, they’d be on him like a pack of rabid wolves.
The woman scowled at David, but the principal remained calm.
“Identification?” he said.
David sighed and reached for his wallet, only to find his back pocket empty. He checked his other pockets and found them in a similar state. He glanced over his shoulder at Simon.
The youth raised his hands. “Don’t look at me! Picking pockets isn’t my style.”
David had a vague memory of checking for his wallet earlier, and coming up empty then too. He turned back to the principal. “I don’t need ID. My kids will recognize me.”
The woman’s scowl deepened. “What are their names?”
David opened his mouth to tell her, but he hesitated. He knew their names as well as his own, better even. But even though he’d been thinking about his children only moments ago, their names refused to come to him now. It was as if his brain were an old engine, corroded and clogged with gunk, and it had seized up. Of all the awful things that had happened since he’d first found himself walking down the street with Simon, this—forgetting the names of his son and daughter—was the worst. It was like he’d lost a vital part of himself. Worse, it felt like a betrayal. His children needed him, and he couldn’t even remember their goddamned—
“Lizzie and…Steve. Croft. That’s their last name. Croft.”
Behind him, he heard the sound of Simon slowly clapping.
“That was impressive! What are you going to do for your next trick?”
David ignored him and kept his gaze focused on the principal. “Let me go to them.”
The woman gestured toward the playground. “All the children are perfectly happy here. Why would you want to take them away?”
“They’re mine,” David said and then, because he didn’t like the way that sounded, he added. “They belong with me.”
“They belong here.” The principal no longer sounded so calm, and he bared his teeth on here.
Out of the corner of his eye, David saw the other adults take a couple steps toward them. He didn’t take his gaze off the principal or the woman, though. He had the feeling they might attack if he did.
“Why? So you can preserve them?” David asked. “What the hell does that even mean?”
Simon spoke again. “Do the words free range ring any bells?”
It took David a moment to get it. “You’re keeping them here so you can eat them!”
“You don’t have to sound so disapproving,” the woman said. “It’s not as if we’re keeping them penned up in a tiny space in some dark, filthy corner of a barn. They get to play outside in the fresh air.”
“All that exercise is good for them,” the principal added. “Builds up a nice flavor in the muscles.”
The man looked toward the children and his stomach gurgled with hunger. David wanted to grab hold of the son of a bitch’s head and jam it into the gap between his legs, but then his own gut cramped painfully. Dear Christ, was the thought of eating children actually making him hungry too? What kind of a monster had he become?
He’d dealt with the hunger before, though, and he could do it again—especially for Steve and Lizzie. He repeated their names in his mind, both as a shield against the hunger, but also to fix them more strongly in his memory. He never wanted to forget them again.
Steve and Lizzie, Steve and Lizzie, Steve and Lizzie…
He took a step forward, intending to walk around the principal and the teacher, but they moved to block his way, lips drawn back to expose their teeth like a pair of feral animals. David felt an urge to bare his own teeth, but instead he raised his arm and waved it in the air.
“Lizzie!” he called out. “Lizzie, it’s me! It’s—”
Before he could say Daddy, the principal rammed a fist into David’s gut. The air gusted out of his lungs, and if he’d had anything left in his stomach to vomit, it would’ve come up. The blow doubled him over, but it didn’t hurt as bad as it should have, considering the amount of force the principal had put into it. The pain was a distant, dull ache, unpleasant but hardly crippling. He kept his gaze fastened on Lizzie, hoping she’d heard him and, more importantly, recognized his voice. She continued to swing, but she turned to look at him, a puzzled expression on her face. And was there a hint of recognition mixed in with her confusion? He wanted to think so.
He tried to straighten, but the principal clamped a hand on the back of his neck and held him down.
The teacher crouched next to David until her doughy face was even with his. “We were going to take one of the children tonight, but now that you’re here, I think there’s going to be a substitution on the menu.” She licked her wormy lips and grinned. “You.”
“We’ll make sure to leave a few morsels for the children,” the principal said. “They’ll all get a taste of you—including your kids.”
David met the teacher’s gaze. “Hungry?”
“Ever so,” the teacher said, practically purring the words.
“Then why wait?”
In order to maintain his grip on David’s neck, the principal had to stand right next to him, which meant that David had a clear shot at the man’s crotch. He jammed his hand into the opening between the principal’s legs, and shoved with all his strength. He felt a slight resistance, as if the man had grown a thin layer of tissue—like a hymen, he thought—to seal off his wound. But David kept pushing, and his fingers shredded the flesh like paper. Blood gushed around his hand and fell in thick rivulets to the ground.
“Popped your cherry, motherfucker,” David growled. He grabbed a handful of something slick and rubbery, and pulled. Glistening loops of bowel came free, along with a fresh gout of blood, and the principal howled, more in fury than pain, David thought. He released his grip on David’s neck, and David turned back to look at the teacher.
“Chew on this, bitch!”
He jammed the bloody mess he held into the woman’s face. For a half second she seemed startled, then with a nearly orgasmic moan, she pulled the bowel out of David’s hand, shoved it into her mouth and began chewing on it.
“Stop that!” the principal shouted. “We had an agreement: no feeding on each other. Only on the children!” He grabbed hold of the intestine protruding from the ragged, bloody wound where his genitals had once been, and tried to yank it away from the teacher. But she was determined not to lose the sweet treat fate had presented her with, and she grabbed hold of the coiled flesh tube with both hands and held fast.
David’s stomach cramped at the smell of blood and bowel, but he forced himself to ignore it. He stood and started toward the swings, dismissing the principal and teacher from his mind. He didn’t care in the slightest which of them would prevail. They could both die as far as he was concerned. All he cared about was retrieving his children and getting the fuck out of there as swiftly as possible.
But before he could get more than a few feet, all activity on the playground ceased. The children—Lizzie and Steve included—stopped what they were doing and trained their gazes on the principal and the teacher. Nostrils flared as they scented the air, and a dark gleam came into their eyes. They smell the blood, David thought. He smelled it too, and the scent was nearly overwhelming. Hot, sweet and metallic, it called to something deep inside him, a part of his mind that was no more sophisticated than that of an insect. A part that existed only to eat, fuck and, above all, survive. His hand was slick with the principal’s blood, and he raised it to his face and inhaled deeply. He wanted to put his fingers in his mouth and lick the gore from them as if it were the greasy residue left over from a piece of fried chicken. But as much as he wanted to taste it—God, how he did!—he wanted one thing more: to be with his children.
He started forward again, and as if his movement was a cue, the children abandoned their play equipment and raced toward the principal, hands outstretched, fingers hooked into claws, mouths wide and teeth bared. They came silently—no shouts of excitement or growls of hunger—moving with the liquid speed and single-minded intensity of ravenous insects. It was like a switch had been flicked inside their heads, David thought, turned from human to animal.
The adults that had been watching over the children were determined not to miss out on this unexpected repast. They ran toward the principal, and it became a race to see who would get there first. The principal, still engaged in his intestinal tug-of-war with the teacher—a tableau which struck David as a Dali-esque version of the spaghetti-sharing scene in Lady and the Tramp—didn’t notice the attention his condition had attracted until it was too late. He shrieked as the first of the adults fell upon him, followed closely by the children. They piled upon him, tearing at his flesh with their teeth and hands, and his screams didn’t last long.
David tried to snatch hold of his children as they ran past. Lizzie was out of reach, but Steve came close enough for him to make a grab for the boy. His son snarled and lunged at David, sinking his teeth into the meaty part of his father’s hand, between thumb and forefinger. Blood welled, and with it came pain, although the sensation was distant and faint, more like the memory of pain than the actual thing. Still, David was startled, and out of reflex he jerked his hand away from Steve, tearing his flesh further and leaving a small hunk of it in his boy’s mouth. Steve turned away and, mouth slick with his father’s blood, he continued toward the principal, chewing furiously as he ran.
“You know, I really want to make a joke about biting the hand that feeds you,” Simon said, the youth suddenly standing next to him, “but you’ve got bigger problems to worry about than the trauma of seeing your little darlings turn cannibal.”
David ignored him, just as he ignored the blood dripping from his wounded hand. Watching Steve and Lizzie claw and scratch everyone around them, each other included, as they fought the crowd to get a piece of the kill was the worst thing he’d experienced since finding himself trapped in this distorted reality. Maybe it would’ve been better if they had died when…when whatever had happened, happened. To see them like this—feral, savage, inhuman—was too much to bear. Simon’s words barely registered with him, but a moment later, when he heard the roaring of a powerful engine, he realized the youth had been trying in his own mocking way to warn him.
He turned toward the sound, grateful to have a reason to avert his gaze from the sight of his children’s blood-slick faces. A vehicle tore around the side of the building, a massive pickup truck encased in gleaming ebon metal like the carapace of some monstrous beetle. Metal spikes protruded from its tires, churning the ground and sending up showers of soil in its wake. Fire blasted from its tail pipe, filling the air with the gut-churning stink of sulfur, and the headlights shone beams of baleful yellow light the same shade as the pus sky overhead. The windows were tinted, but David could see three pairs of glowing crimson eyes through the dark glass, and he knew what kind of creatures were inside the vehicle.
“Demons!” he shouted. “Look ou—”
He broke off as the pickup accelerated toward him. He threw himself to the side as the truck came at him, moving so fast it was little more than a blur. The front bumper clipped one of his feet as it passed, but he scarcely felt the impact, although he thought he heard the sound of something crunch over the roar of the engine. He hit the ground and rolled onto his side in time to witness the pickup slam into the writhing knot of cannibals—his kids included—as they worked to pick the last shreds of meat from the principal’s bones. Bodies went flying, but others were crushed beneath the truck’s tires or caught beneath the vehicle.
The driver hit the brakes, put the pickup in Park and stepped out, leaving the engine running. Two others got out on the passenger side. They were demons, all right. Crimson-eyed, sharp-toothed, ivory-fleshed and hairless. One was slightly smaller than the other two, and David had the impression it was female. They all carried weapons fashioned from lengths of bone lashed together with strips of tendon. One male wielded an axe, the head formed from a sharpened chunk of shoulder blade. The other carried a machete made from a femur, and the female carried a long bone-and-meat weapon that resembled a shotgun. They let out inhuman cries of joy and stepped forward to begin their slaughter. Edged weapons sank into flesh with meaty thunks, and the shotgun exploded loud as a bomb blast.
David couldn’t see Steve or Lizzie, couldn’t tell if they were alive, injured or dead. But des
pite the horrible things he’d watched them do, they were his children, and regardless of whether they were sane or not—or, for that matter, if they were even fully human anymore—they were his, and he wasn’t going to abandon them.
He started to get to his feet and was surprised when he looked up and saw Simon standing there. The boy offered his hand, a grim smile on his face, and after only a second’s hesitation, David clasped it with his uninjured hand and allowed the youth to help him up. He nodded Simon his thanks and, hobbling on his broken foot, he started toward the demons.
Chapter Eight
Kate watched in horror as the children—who’d been milling around on the playground with slow, shuffling steps—suddenly sprang to life after David tore the entrails from the naked zombie that had once been Connor Asbury, principal of Briarwood Elementary. The scene was hideous enough in itself, but seeing her niece and nephew join in the feeding frenzy along with the other boys and girls, some of whom she’d recognized from her time as a teacher here, was so awful that a wave of dizziness swept over her, and for a moment she thought she might pass out. But Marie took hold of her hand and gave it a hard squeeze, and the physical contact, along with the pressure of Marie’s grip, helped her retain consciousness.
The two women crouched at the edge of the woods bordering the playground, no more than a dozen yards from the main action. It was a clear night, the moon almost full, and they had more than enough illumination to see by. The underbrush concealed them from the zombies while providing them with an excellent view of what was happening—although considering what was taking place, Kate might’ve been happier if they hadn’t been able to see quite so much.
Marie seemed unfazed by the sight of child zombies competing with adults as they fought to devour Connor. Marie was fascinated by their behavior, but she wasn’t disturbed by it. She made Kate think of a naturalist in the wild, observing a pride of lions stripping the flesh from a zebra. She could almost hear Marie narrating the video on Animal Planet. In an English accent, of course. For some reason, TV naturalists always seemed to be British or Australian.