Screaming to Get Out & Other Wailings of the Damned

by J. F. Gonzalez

  He didn’t even think of Karen. The only time he was tempted to find out what she was doing, if she’d raised the alarm due to his disappearance, was when he pulled the old laptop out to access information he forgot to save to the cloud before his move. After the file transfer, he Googled his former name and learned that she’d made a missing persons report in Pennsylvania on he and their son, and that there was a warrant out for his arrest. Yet with their new names, new locations, and slightly changed appearances—Nick had lost eighty pounds due to discovering body surfing and Craig had lost his chubbiness and traded it for a more muscular physique—there was little chance of them being found.

  A week after the brief research into his former life, he proposed to Beth after talking it over with Craig first. He was overjoyed when Craig gave his blessing. “I consider her my mom,” Craig said, smiling, his eyes getting a little misty. “She...she’s great, dad. She’s the mom I should have had. She’s the wife you should’ve had.”

  And Nick, knowing in his heart that this was true, could only fight to contain his own tears and hug his son close. Hard to believe that Craig was now almost seventeen years old. The shy, socially awkward boy was growing into a fine young man.

  He never learned what happened to his old friend and co-worker, Ken Atkins, because he worked hard at burying that part of his past. He did, however, pass on the knowledge of the search engine to a colleague at a mortgage company he worked with, who was going through a problem with his in-laws. Nick told him about a resource that might help him deal with his problem—try it, you’ll find something there that will help you. Just be sure to keep it on the low down. Clear your browser cache and history. Don’t tell anybody.

  Then one night he came home late from showing a home to a potential buyer.

  He pulled into the driveway and killed the engine, noting that Beth and Craig had already gone to bed, which was unusual. It was only ten o’clock on a Friday evening. Craig had football practice the following morning, so he had to rise early, but he wouldn’t have turned in this early. Nick got out of the car and walked up the front path to the double glass doors, unlocked the house, and let himself in.

  The house was dark.

  “Beth?” Nick called out. Curious, Nick set his briefcase down in the entry hall and stepped through the foyer into the living room.

  He stood in the living room entryway, letting his eyes get adjusted to the dark. The house seemed empty. “Beth? Craig?”

  There was a noise from the bedroom down the hall.

  Nick reached for a light, flipped it on and recoiled from the sight.

  The easy chair was toppled over. Books had been flung out of the bookcase, and there was broken glass and dishes on the floor. Pools of blood saturated the carpet. Nick gasped, heart lodged in his throat. A spike of fear rose through him, pulsing strongly.

  Karen stepped out of the hallway. She grinned at him. Her long hair hung in her bloodstained face. Her clothing was rumpled, bloodstained.

  The butcher knife she clutched in her right hand made shallow cuts in Karen’s leg as she jabbed at herself.

  “Karen! How...what...what are you doing?”

  “What do you think I’m doing, Nick? I just killed your girlfriend and your son and now I’m going to kill you!”

  “What?” The bottom dropped out of Nick’s world.

  Karen stepped toward Nick. “Thought you could outsmart me? Guess you forgot who had the career as a Network Security Specialist.”

  And as the implications became clear, and Karen moved in for the kill, Nick’s last coherent thought was that it wasn’t as simple as Karen planting some kind of IP tracking software on his computer. No. In the brief time he’d had his old laptop up and running, Karen had gained remote access to it and learned about the search engine. And she’d used it.

  Story Notes

  “Ricochet” was written to order in the summer and fall of 2011 for an anthology Ty Schwamberger was putting together with the provisional title Cadence in Decay. The stories were all to involve communications in some way (Skype, email, internet messaging, etc). Ty had assembled an impressive array of contributers: Ramsey Campbell, Gary Braunbeck, and Mike Oliveri are those I remember he was able to snag. The publisher was to be Mansion House, a British small press that specialized in producing limited signed hardcover editions, many of them hand bound.

  I had the idea for “Ricochet” before Ty hit me up for a contribution, so I had a great excuse to actually write the story. The promise of money will do that to a writer. The idea came to me one day at my old day job, during a lull in productivity. I was goofing around on the internet and was amazed at Google’s search engine capability. It seemed all one had to do was type in a simple question and Google would ferret out the answer. Of course, the more I thought about this, the more nefarious my thought process ran. It didn’t take long for a story to come out of it.

  One element that came out of the story quite naturally was the reversal of roles in spousal abuse that is depicted in the story. When spousal abuse is addressed in a piece of fiction, it is usually women that are the victims, usually because, unfortunately, they comprise the majority of domestic abuse victims. I read an article a decade or so back that touched on male victims of spousal abuse, primarily at the hands of girlfriends and wives. I know somebody who was a victim of such abuse from an ex-wife. It is something men will not talk about, and male victims face greater scrutiny, less resources to help them, and major legal obstacles.

  Unfortunately, Cadence in Decay never saw publication. The publisher ran into some financial trouble, and I think they folded not too long ago. That was a shame. It would have been a good anthology, and a nice credit for Ty.

  All was not lost, though. Another UK publisher came to the rescue and published the story in his magazine Splatterpunk. This is its first US publication, and its first book appearance.

  Mutant

  I WAS A kid when it happened.

  Summer of 1988. Guns n’ Roses was the hottest band in the country and Ronald Reagan had been president for as long as I could remember. The nights were hot and muggy, the days dripping with humidity. We were twelve and thirteen years old and that summer seemed to last forever. Because days have an uncanny knack for passing so slow when you’re a child, when you grow up, you wish they would be like that again...especially if you’re trapped in a dead end job like I am now.

  But this isn’t about nostalgia. This is about the summer that Cathy Harrelson, Robert Banks and I burned down old lady Simpson’s shed in Reamstown, Pennsylvania.

  Boy, did we get in a lot of trouble for that. I think my folks had me on probation until I was eighteen. Cathy Harrelson didn’t take punishment as well—she actually told the fire chief and the local police why we burned down Mrs. Simpson’s shed and they laughed at her. I remember when it happened; I felt Cathy’s shame as she came home with her parents. I was sitting on my front porch when their car pulled up (I wasn’t allowed to go beyond the front porch, part of my punishment for having taken part in the alleged arson) and I watched her walk into the house, with her parents herding her inside. She cast a look at me that seemed to say, I told them and they didn’t believe me. That look told me all I needed to know.

  Of course there were other kids in the neighborhood who told the police the same thing, and for a while the cops and all the grownups in the area insisted we were lying, that we were making this up to cover our butts. There was no way we could prove it—all the evidence had been destroyed in the fire. So we let it drop.

  But then I see what’s happening in town now, what will soon be happening all over the country, and I can only wonder.

  I began to suspect something was amiss this morning when I found a dried up mouse in my driveway. For the past two or three days I’d smelled something awful, like a dead animal, but I never saw one nearby. We live near a farm, so I chalked it up to the breeze blowing the stench of a dead woodchuck our way. The smell surely wasn’t from the mouse; it had ju
st suddenly showed up like that, already dead and dried up. To the casual observer it looked like road kill, victim of a neighborhood cat who left the animal somewhere to die, after which, it shriveled up and decayed into an empty shell of bones and fur-covered skin. But I'd seen something similar before, and when I saw it I drove my wife nuts looking for its killer. I looked around the house, inside and out, terrified that I would run right into it and it would engulf my face with its long legs and sink its fangs straight into the soft part of my neck, rendering me paralyzed while it drained me. My wife followed me around the house, annoyed at my behavior and my inability to explain what was going on. And I couldn’t explain. For one, I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Everything looked normal. The only form of wildlife I saw outside my house was a lone grasshopper sunning itself on the white picket fence in the backyard, and a garden spider perched in its web on the side of my house.

  I couldn’t explain. She wouldn’t believe me.

  How could she? Nobody believed us back then. They wouldn’t believe me even now that it’s making the news.

  Some bonehead journalist dubbed it the ‘vampire disease’ because of the mass quantities of fluid that is drained from the body. A stupid name for it, really, because it isn’t vampirism that’s killing these people. There’s no such thing as vampires.

  Well, in a sense there’s no such thing as vampires. At least the kind that are portrayed by Bela Lugosi or Peter Cushing or Brad Pitt.

  But there are...well, let’s just say that...

  Never mind.

  I’ll get to that in a minute.

  Let me start at the beginning.

  But in the meantime, an observation, and a word of advice:

  What makes the newspapers is just the stuff that skims the surface. Behind veiled words and official statements, there always lies something deeper. You will find that in any news source.

  So remember that when you see those stories about the wasting illness. There’s more to it then people simply getting sick and suddenly wasting away. They aren’t reporting the whole facts.

  Second thing: fire kills them. Even if you have to burn the house down to destroy them, do it. You never know if they’ve nested in your attic or basement, and if they have...well, that’s how they spread in the first place.

  The day Cathy, Robert and I burned down Mrs. Simpson’s house? Yeah, that was our purpose. We were trying to kill it. Robert had successfully lit the thing on fire; it had taken root in Mrs. Simpson's storage shed, more an outbuilding that was crudely constructed on the side of her house, and once it caught on fire, like any living thing, it went berserk in its death throes. That was what caused the place to go up like a tinderbox.

  We thought we’d killed it.

  We were wrong.

  We didn’t know we were dealing with more than one.

  IT WAS CATHY Harrelson who saw it first.

  “Mark! Davey! Come here, omigod! Hurry!”

  I’d never heard Cathy scream like that. She sounded terrified. Mark and Davey weren’t there when we burned the shed down, but they saw the thing that morning and told the police about it afterward. I had been throwing rocks in the little creek at the side of the Miller's barn when we heard Cathy scream, and we raced toward the sound of her voice, heading toward Mrs. Simpson’s place.

  Cathy was standing in the middle of a field where Mrs. Simpson’s property rested on. She looked terrified. Her brown hair blew in the warm, summer breeze, and her blue eyes were wide with shock. I was a year older than her, and Mark and I would be in eighth grade next semester at the local middle school, my final year of childhood innocence. “What is it?” I asked.

  Cathy pointed, and at first I thought she was going to cry. Mark’s face instantly transformed from annoyance to a shared sense of fear. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “I was...” Cathy was panting. “I was in Mrs. Simpson’s...I was going to go into Mrs. Simpson’s shed because...a few weeks ago she told me...she told me I could go in there and...look around for those old books she told me she kept in there so...so I thought I’d...I’d...”

  I knew what she was talking about. Cathy was a bookworm. Mrs. Simpson, who was the town librarian, had befriended her two years before and apparently told her she could help herself to the old books she kept boxed in her shed. But apparently something had really spooked her.

  “Well, what is it?” Mark asked. He started heading toward the shed.

  “No! Don’t go in there!” Cathy yelled.

  I turned toward her. “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re not going to go in, we’re just going to open the door and take a look inside.”

  Mark trotted over to the shed, and by the time I turned to follow him he had already opened the door. I caught his suddenly stunned face as I heard him say, “Holy fucking shit!”

  The way he said it ... the way he stood there in front of the shed, eyes riveted on something, yet so full of horror...that image will stay with me forever.

  Despite seeing Mark stand there like that, despite feeling my own sense of dread, I had to see for myself.

  I headed toward the shed.

  “Don’t!” Cathy said. “It’ll get you! It’ll—”

  I got to the shed and stood next to Mark. I saw what he saw.

  The shed door was standing wide open, letting the afternoon sunlight spill in the small eight-by-five room. The walls, floor and ceiling were of rough wood; tucked into the far left corner was a stack of boxes—the books Cathy was probably interested in poking through. I caught a glimpse of a rake and a shovel leaning against the far wall.

  Spanning the length of the shed was the largest spider web I’ve ever seen, and sitting in the middle of the web was the biggest spider I’d ever seen.

  Make a fist. That was the size of its body, minus the thorax; add in those eight spindly legs and you were looking at a spider roughly the size of a house cat.

  No shit. We're talking about a spider bigger than those Goliath Bird-Eating Tarantulas from South America that are as big as dinner plates.

  And it was sitting in Mrs. Simpson's shack, in a big-ass spider web that spanned the length of her shed.

  I stared at it, simultaneously fascinated and terrified by it. Part of me wanted to step inside and take a closer look, but I was too scared.

  "What is it?" Mark asked, his voice cracking.

  "It's a..." I began.

  "It's a spider," Cathy said, her voice a terrified whisper. "It's a spider, isn't it Jimmy?"

  "It has to be," I said.

  "Spiders aren't supposed to get that big," Mark said, his voice panicked. "Mr. Means talked about this in science last year. It has something to do with their lungs, that they can only get so big and past a certain size, they wouldn’t be able to breathe. This can't be real."

  The three of us were standing in the doorway. I was able to get a better look at the spider now that we spent some time looking at it. I pushed the door open a bit further, letting sunlight into the shack and saw that its body was strangely...mutated is the best word I can describe. Its body looked puffy and swollen and a splotchy grey; parts of it looked jagged and diseased-looking. Its eyes were large, the two main ones bulbous looking. Its legs, as thick as crab legs, looked strong and sported fine tufts of hair. The web was large and sprawling and I could make out little wrapped bundles scattered about. At first I assumed they were large insects, leftovers from some discarded meal. It wasn't until later the following day, when Cathy’s brother learned about it and performed an act of animal cruelty, that I learned what they were.

  We probably stared at that thing for five minutes in stunned silence. Finally, Mark stepped outside quickly and came back holding a stick.

  I looked at him in alarm. "What are you doing?"

  "I want to try something," he said. His tone and posture seemed to recover; he appeared braver now, almost his old self. He took a half step into the shack, holding the stick out in front of him. "As long as we don't get too close to it w
e'll be safe. I mean, it's just a spider, right?"

  I glanced at Cathy, who still looked petrified. I didn't know what to tell Mark. I shrugged, still feeling a little scared.

  Mark turned toward the spider and, holding the stick in front of him, he reached out and touched the tip of it to the far left center of the web.

  The spider moved so fast it startled me. I jumped back, bumped into Cathy, and screamed. I think all of us screamed when the spider made a lunge at the stick.

  It moved so goddamned fast.

  One minute it had been sitting in the center of the web. The next it was shooting toward the stick, and I mean the instant that piece of wood touched the web. It dove for that stick the way a cat pounces on a mouse or a bird.

  Mark yelled, dropped the stick and bolted out the door. The three of us ran, screaming our heads off, back up the street to Mark's house.

  Mark's older brother, Robert, was fiddling with his car, a '68 Camaro that he'd bought at the Manheim Auto Auction with money he'd made working a job this past school year. Robert was four years older than us and was the definition of cool to those of us just entering puberty. "What's up?" Robert looked annoyed as we ran up the driveway. He took one look at us and that look of annoyance changed instantly to alarm.

  The three of us babbled about the giant spider in Mrs. Simpson's shed.

  Robert stood up and placed a socket wrench on the worn bench in the garage. His jeans were grease-stained. "There's no such thing as a spider that big," he said, his voice sounding instantly reasonable to me, a scared thirteen-year-old. "You guys are letting your imagination get away with you."

  "I'm not kidding, the thing was this fucking big!" Mark said, holding his hands a few feet apart for emphasis. "You should have seen the way it lunged at the stick!"