At Least He's Not On Fire: A Tour of the Things That Escape My Head

by Philbrook, Chris

  The grocery store was mobbed, as I thought it would be. I parked on the edge of the parking lot and locked up the car. I slipped on my hunting vest, loaded it up with the shells Phil hooked me up with, and slung the shotgun over my shoulder. It was that moment that realized I needed to shorten the barrel and stock on the shotgun somehow. It was a little long and would be difficult to use in a building. I made a mental note to myself on that for later. I could clearly see other folks leaving the store carrying hunting rifles, so I wasn’t too worried about the “social norm” of carrying a 12 gauge. I did get the opportunity to watch some woman in a minivan fucking cream a dude walking in the parking lot though. She must’ve not seen him, cuz she just plowed through his ass and just drove on. The ass end of the minivan hopped up like it was on springs when she drove over him. A bunch of folks rushed over to help him right after, so I didn’t feel obligated to. I snagged a cart out of the corral and just like Johnny Shopper, I went in the automated door, and straight into retail hell.

  You ever been grocery shopping the week of Thanksgiving? Or right before Christmas, when all the soccer moms lose their fucking mind and fight over boxes of shitty stuffing mix and cranberry relish? Well imagine that, and then add an “end of the world” flavor to it. That’ll get you in the ballpark for the mood everyone had in the store that afternoon. I think it was about 5 or 5:30 at that point. Just starting to get dark-ish, and I can remember the temp getting low as the sun was setting.

  Anyway, the lines were packed, and people were literally running their carts around the store, up and down the aisles like with reckless abandon. There were kids hollering at the top of their lungs as their moms and dads shopped literally like there was no tomorrow. I can’t even imagine what a six year old would make of the situation. PTSD without a doubt for our children now. If there are any children left. Like all grocery stores, the majority of the canned goods are in the center of the store. Most of the folks were in those two aisles, so I decided to start on the fringe, and get other shit first. By the time I was done I had grabbed an entire shopping cart of food and supplies. Felt like I was pushing a pallet of bricks. I hit the pharmacy area hardcore and loaded up on bandages, ibuprofen, cold remedies, vitamins, melatonin, bacitracin, etc. You name it, I grabbed it. I wasn’t about to worry about running out of that stuff.

  For those of you who are curious, yes, I did grab several boxes of yellow, crème filled snack cakes. I didn’t want to risk wanting one and having to come back to get them. So I snagged a mess of frozen veggies and shit like that, and I eventually intimidated my way into the canned goods aisles. Six foot one with scary tattoos is > a soccer mom. I knew the school kept a lot of canned shit on hand, so I made sure to grab the stuff I knew they would likely have little or none of. Boyardee stuff obviously, and I grabbed a lot of tuna pouches, canned veggies and that righteously yummy canned brown bread you eat with beans. I also got the beans to go with it. Sneaky motherfucker that I am I slipped behind the deli counter when the clerks weren’t looking and grabbed a few whole, still sealed slabs of meat. One each of turkey, ham and bologna.

  Sooooo… my shamefulness comes back. The deli is kinda near the exit and it took about two seconds of deliberation before I decided I was going to walk the fuck out without paying. What were they going to do anyway? Every employee had either left already, or was gooch-deep in customers. The only shitty problem was that my groceries would not be bagged. Not a real problem. I’ll deal with that.

  Out the door I went, snagging two bunches of bananas on the way. Outside things had gotten much fucking worse. Our grocery store patron who had been creamed by the soccer mom in her minivan was not doing well at all. Actually he had died, and someone had thrown a heavy duty blanket over him. One of those gray, industrial blankets people steal out of the back of moving trucks. I gave the crowd around his body a wide berth and made it about fifty more feet before I heard them start screaming. I stopped dead in my tracks, turned around, and watched the crowd scatter like dandelion fluff in the wind. I have never seen such fat people move with such vigor before. One lady with a mega-fupa was literally tearing up pavement as she ran. I still laugh today thinking of her jiggling rolls as she nearly ate shit getting into her far too small compact car. It might’ve been the springs, but I swear to this day I heard her car cry out in pain when she got in it.

  Anyway, our poor accident victim had sat back up. From my angle at the time he was kind of facing away from me, and he still had the blanket covering his front side. He was blind basically with the blanket over his face. Morbid curiosity found me unslinging the shotgun, and approaching the dude. I racked up a round in the chamber and slowly circled him at about ten feet. You could just tell from his body language that he was fucked up. Plus he was making this rattling noise with his quasi-breathing that was just not normal. Well that’s not entirely true. Ever give someone CPR? Frequently when you’re giving real CPR air gets down into the stomach. When the air escapes it sometimes does this burpish-gurgle deal that’s kind of unsettling. It’s the death-rattle you read about. This dude was doing it, and he was moving around at the same time. Didn’t make sense. I knew what it really meant though.

  Just about when I got to his 10 o’clock the blanket slipped off his face, and I saw my first zombie. He was lit the fuck up. That accident had made him royally fucking nasty, and add to that all his color had drained away. His skin was this ashen white with a blue tinge. Dried blood crusted the edge of his mouth. He tried to stand up to come at me but both his legs were shattered. He kinda half fell over in my direction and face planted on the pavement. I remember laughing nervously when he started crawling at me because I saw his face had left a bloody wet mark where it had hit down.

  His eyes had totally glazed over and were almost whitish-grey. He wasn’t moaning like they do in the movies either. It makes a lot of sense now that I’ve seen so many real zombies. Moaning requires breathing, and these things do not breathe. Once he had finished his charming death-rattle, he was silent. That’s actually one of the things that keeps me up at night. If you don’t hear the shuffling of their feet, see them coming, or smell them coming, they are almost entirely silent.

  After I made the mental decision that this man was indeed a newly minted zombie I took a deep breath, drew a bead on his face, closed my eyes, and pulled the trigger. The Mossberg bucked hard, and I felt something hit the front of my pants. I opened my eyes and saw that his face was totally annihilated, and some of the splash had hit me in the legs. I panicked for a second, wondering if this shit was contagious. I took another deep breath and chilled myself out. Couldn’t worry too much about it right then. I racked up another shell in the shotgun, noticed the startling amount of people looking at me with shocked expressions, and walked back to my cart. You know there were at least ten guys in the parking lot at that moment with a gun just like me. Why didn’t they do anything? Was I the only one with balls? I suspect I have just watched too many horror movies.

  The crowds parted like I was mother-fucking Moses and they were the Red Sea. I’m a big dude, and frequently people see me and my tattoos and I get a wide berth anyway, but this was an adult-strength wide berth. 20 feet solid. That kinda felt good. I was getting a hardcore adrenaline rush the whole time and I’m not gonna lie, it felt kind of good.

  I scooped my groceries into the trunk of my car, topping it off. I grabbed the box of shotgun shells from the passenger seat of my car, loaded a replacement shell in for the one I just shot, and got in the car.

  Next stop: Friends and family.

  See you soon Mr. Journal.

  -Adrian

  Hell Hole

  I wrote Hell Hole as a submission to military horror anthology in early 2013. To be frank, I waited way too long to get started on it, and put in half the effort in half the time I should've. I wasn't surprised in the least that it was rejected by the publisher, and in a way, I was relieved. The publisher gave me honest criticism of the piece too, which I'm still thankful for. It real
ly does help to be told what you're doing wrong.

  This verson of Hell Hole saw significantly more editing and writing time. I've added over a thousand words to make it cleaner, and a little scarier, and I think now it would've had a chance to make the cut into that anthology. It's not my favorite piece by a long shot, but I'm happy to share it with you here so it at least sees the light of day somehow.

  Enjoy.

  Everything changed when that hole was found in the ground. At first people thought the world would end when nuclear missiles were shot across the big blue sky by the Russians, or the Americans. Didn't matter who shot first really. Han or Greedo, everyone would pay the price. Then they thought it would all come crashing down when the terrorists launched some kind of biological weapons attack. For a little while people thought the world would implode due to political strife, and economic failure, but in the end it all came down to a goddamn hole in the ground.

  At first the media and the scientists tried to keep all the names straight, right next to all the ugly details, but that was abandoned when the cities started to collapse into the earth below. There's just too much to do when skyscrapers are getting tipped over. Warrant Officer 2 Anton Michaels was there when that first hole was found. He saw what came from the bottom. What churned underneath.

  It happened about ten years ago, but no one gave a shit about calendars anymore. Well, the military did, and it seemed like everyone was either in the military, or working for the military now, so maybe people did give a shit about calendars.

  Anton was a fresh Special Forces 18B at the time, straight from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, his M4A1 in hand and attached to the 1st Special Forces Group. They were on an in-country training operation working with native Indonesian forces. With the Al-Qaeda activity in the island nation at an all time high, his group had been deployed for half a year every year for a very long time. Building the locals up to take down their internal threat was a high priority. Anton was overwhelmed by the heat and crushing humidity (it wasn't like this on the Peninsula), but seeing the deep jungle and bright blue ocean of the pacific islands was a true treat he relished. So what if he had bugs biting his balls, and more skin that was rash than not? He'd heal. He always did.

  That time they were out with Kopassus, the Indonesian Special Forces group with the shady past. To help heal some wounds to the trust between the training units, the leader of the Kopassus unit offered to take the Green Berets to a nearly lost temple deep in the jungle. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and the unit couldn't say no. There were too many political ramifications of offending the host country, and that's not what Green Berets did.

  "Candi, Candi!" the Indonesian military men said, pointing through the impenetrable jungle. Candi was their word for temple.

  "Temple? Yeah?" Anton had asked.

  "Temple, yes. Candi! Big Candi!" the young soldier said back to Anton. The little Indonesian man couldn't have been more than twenty, but you could never really know how old they were. It seemed like they just got smaller as they aged, not wrinklier. He imagined a nation of tiny Indonesians running underfoot.

  The Candi was small by Anton's judgment. They'd just visited the massive complex of Borobudur on the island of Java, and that was something. This little temple was no bigger than a two story house from the UP, but damn it did look old. Anton and his unit, led by their veteran team Captain followed the tiny Kopassus men down a hill into a depression between several hills in the rainforest. The leaf cover above was near total; the temple was only lit by tiny rays of sunlight that pierced holes in the leaves above like javelins sent from God. It was a surreal scene for Anton long before the hole became a part of the story.

  The Kopassus men showed the Green Berets around the ancient temple, chattering in their language faster than the Americans could keep up, happy and excited to be sharing something so old and so important from their past. The Americans were delighted as well, sharing relieved expressions and groans of sore muscles. The temple meant time to sit and rest.

  "Quite the place huh?" Sergeant Giancola asked as the two Green Berets took up security at the top of one of the small hills that formed the depression. The jungle here was empty of human threats, but they followed protocol anyway. Repetition in times of safety was important for building good habits in times of strife.

  "Yeah. Reminds me of a museum I never go to back at home," Anton had said back. The two men chuckled, and went back to comfortable silence.

  Ten minutes later one of the other men in the team came up the hill and tapped Anton on the shoulder. He was a hulking brute of a man with rippling muscles and a neck almost as wide as his shoulders. The guys on the team called him The Thing. "Go check the place out, I'll cover this. It's creepy as fuck. Really weird etchings in the stone. Gargoyles and shit."

  Anton had nodded, thanked The Thing, and trotted down the hill to do as he was told. As soon as he entered, he knew the Sergeant was right; the temple was as creepy as fuck. On all four corners of the two story, cone shaped building were carvings and faded paintings of creatures that had to have been dreamt of. Worms with teeth the size of a man's hand sprouted from the earth and ate tiny figures of men who were running away, wild and fearful. Frescos and carvings depicted winged beasts sweeping down from cloud filled skies riding bolts of lightning that split rocks and sundered men and women alike. It was a vengeful scene, filled with wrath and ruin. It was a prophecy, but no one in the temple that day knew that yet.

  "This ain't no Hindu temple," the team's Warrant Officer said with a strong Alabama accent. Anton wondered if he would even know what a real Hindu temple looked like. The WO answered the question immediately, "I've seen lots of Hindu temples in my time, and this ain't one, not by a long shot. This is like, satanic shit. Lovecraft shit. Ex-wife shit."

  The Americans laughed. The tiny Indonesians had no idea what he was talking about but laughed along with them. Once the laughter faded, the local soldiers tried to explain the temple to the two soldiers who spoke their language decently. One of the Green Berets tried to translate. It was hard to keep up with the little brown soldier's rattling.

  "Guy says that a long time ago, there was a deep hole where this temple is. Underneath where we are standing. Says it went down to uh, um, Hell or something. Caverns below maybe. Says all the local warriors rose up and defeated these creatures that came out of the hole in a war that lasted almost two years. He's saying that there were flying monsters, and big worm, or snake things. He said those were the real problem. They would um, eat the earth right out from under you. Swallow you whole."

  "Bullshit. They're pranking us," another soldier said with a grin. Soldiers appreciated a good joke at each other's expense. Sometimes it was the only way to smile in such a grim line of work.

  The Captain of the A-Team shrugged. "Maybe so boys, but this place had some bad juju. I can feel it in my bones."

  The interpreting soldier picked up the story as the local man continued. "Says the hole to 'Hell' was finally capped by this temple. Blessed by the local priests and all that jazz. Says that if the temple is ever destroyed, the things underneath it will come back, this time worse."

  One of the other soldiers had dug out his entrenching tool and was digging at the corner of the temple where the earth rose up to meet it. He was bound and determined to find the hole the building sat on.

  "Andrew cut the shit. This place is sacred," the Captain said quietly before the Kopassus men saw what he was doing. The Sergeant with the digging tool stopped and stood immediately, a sheepish grin on his face. "I'm going inside. Is that okay with these guys?"

  The interpreting Green Beret asked them, and after some consultation, the Indonesians felt it was okay. The Captain thanked them, and ducked his head low and headed into the stone arched entryway. It was clearly made for much shorter people than the American. It was only a minute before he started yelling for his men. "Holy shit guys, Carl, Anton, get in here!"

  The WO and Anton rushed into the breach
, weapons up with safeties off as the local soldiers all hid a laugh on their faces. Anton was sure it was nothing, a prank like his buddy had said, but all that changed when he saw the look of terror on his Captain's face. The experienced warrior was backed into the stone outer wall of the cramped temple's single inner room, and his eyes were locked on the floor of the building. Anton looked as the Warrant Officer went to the Captain.

  The center room of the temple was square, the same as the outside. The ceiling reached high into the upper levels of the odd, tiered cone roof, creating a room that was tall, yet oppressive. It felt like the weight of the world was crushing down from above. The floor of the room descended down multiple steep steps to a flat surface that was covered in human remains. Skeletons of men, women and children were piled nearly ten feet high, filling the sunken in floor and rising several feet higher than the floor the men stood on. The air was thick with dust, and hot, hard to breathe.

  Perched atop the pile of bones at the center of the room was a creature that defied logic and science. It was humanoid, with arms long and sinuous at the shoulder. Its legs were bent backwards, like a goat's or a wolf's, and erupting from its back was a pair of wings that extended out nearly the width of the entire room. All its skin was black as pitch, and its eyes were crimson flecked with bright, alien orange. But all its humanity was lost in its mouth. Fanged like a lamprey's, and hinged like a snake's, the jaw flexed up and down hungrily at the Americans. Anton's primitive brain somehow let him realize that on some of the bodies underfoot the creature were uniforms. Australian uniforms. The Aussies trained with these people.