by Jon Fore
Rich did not pause, did not think, he simply struck at the hulking teen with the sickle. It came down at an angle, ripping open his throat and chest and cleaving the arm he had brought up in an attempt to defend himself just below the elbow. The teen crumpled immediately and began feeding a puddle of blood around him. Julia screamed sweetly before throwing a display case of Kershaw folding knives at him and making a break for the opening in the counter.
Rich barely got within reach of her as she leapt from the enclosure trying to flee his murderous intent. He brought the sickle down hard, catching her in the top of the head as she turned to run, impaling her like a macabre marionette. As she jerked and danced on the end of the sickle, Rich began to chuckle manically. Her brain-dying antics seemed to tickle him in a strange place, deep in his mind.
His heart flooded with euphoria, with a complete abandon of moral responsibility. In his head, he heard a voice that was not his, explaining that he could do this to anyone he wanted and release the tension and aggravation that had been building all day. This was the way of life now, it explained, and the avid executioner may find himself as favored acolyte.
He turned back to the store, the half-shelves not quite concealing the remaining patrons, two of whom were now also armed with tools of their own. The blood smell, the coppery tinge in the air had brought them to their own lust, and they began to stalk the others weaker than them.
This enraged Rich even further. This was his store, so these people were his to kill. Rich used his boot to remove Julia’s head from the end of the sickle and rushed up behind the closest one. He could not remember the old coot’s name but he did not care. The sickle cut through a shoulder and then neatly through the old man’s spine.
The man fell to his knees revealing a round woman, draped in a screaming moo-moo, holding a three-foot monkey wrench. Her face was a mask of bitter rage, and she rushed Rich as soon as she saw him. He brought the sickle up, catching her under her nose. Her face tore open and she fell backwards, her nostrils no longer attached to the puffy flesh of her makeup-caked face. Blood poured from the wound as she let go an angry yelp. The end of Rich’s sickle met her chest as her head struck the floor.
Rapturous joy flooded through him again, this time surging with an almost orgasmic strength. He had known the love of Jesus, sung about it in his small church, but it did not compare to this violence-spurred release. The warmth of the thick blood now sheeting his face and forearms, the dizzying knowledge that he was the superior killer and slayer of humans—his body shook with the pleasure of it all. He had to find more, others he could ruin to prove his worthiness to an entity he did not know but was sure watched his every murderous action.
Whimpering turned him around where he found a man coming toward him. He was limping from an open gash down the entire length of his leg, and his right eye was twisted and open, dead in the socket it had grown from. In his hand, he carried a sledge, the yellow plastic handle dripping blood, the heavy metal end adorned with a hairy piece of scalp. His clothing was blood-soaked and the leg he dragged left a smeared red trail behind him.
Rich, completely calm in his ecstasy, waited for the man to be close enough, for him to heave the maul over his shoulder. When he did, Rich reached out with the sickle and opened his throat just below the chin. The man’s head lolled back, and the weight of the sledge pulled him down and into a gushing fountain of crimson. He made a soft gurgling sound before the store went silent.
Rich slowly scanned the store, looking for others, someone else to strike at to prove his worth, but the shop was achingly vacant of the living. He could barely contain the elation swelling in his chest and ached to feel more. He wanted to scream his glee, draw others to him so he could kill them as well, amp his pleasure higher until he came to that moment of reward.
“Your path has just begun, Richard Bowman. Many others still wait…” a voice spoke in a stumbling Southern lilt. It was the voice of dry leaves rubbing, of rusted metal forced into motion, but it was still clear and powerful.
Rich turned to find the eternal force he had sought. Although the corpse-like body was an ashen gray, the clothing it wore almost rotted to thread, it was a thing of magnificent wonder…and the reward he sought for himself.
“Go, Richard… Find others… Bring them death in my name…” it drew out in a wicked wet hiss. “Take your trophies from these and prepare yourself for my coming…my judgment…”
“Yes,” was all Richard could form in his dark thoughts.
“There is one among them, Richard…one who shares his mind with another… Do not take him for he is my own prey…”
Richard placed the fat woman’s nose in the large pocket of his apron. “Yes,” Richards’s mouth formed from a mind no longer his own.
The thing who he now served turned and walked away, its long greasy hair trailing the floor behind him for some distance. “I take only the last…” it hissed as it eased into a bank of fog just now invading the store.
Richard collected the remaining trophies from the faces of those slain and left the store in search of further rapture. The street, chocked with hacked and mutilated corpses, ran dark with blood, pooling and scabbing in puddles randomly along its length. Distant shapes moved through the fog as shadows, shapes of inhumanity seeking the same reward as he.
Richard began to search them out, these vague shapes all about, just beyond his reach, killing any he found until another took him with a shotgun blast from behind.
Chapter 20
Kayla knew fear. Before last night, she had avoided with great dexterity the furry, black, kid-eating monster under her bed and always made sure her closet door remained closed to keep out whatever it was knocking around in there every night. It did not matter that she had never seen one of these childhood baddies—not seeing them did not make them less real—and so she remained vigilant and prepared.
Tonight, however, altered her perceptions of evil and her definition for the word monster. In a moment of clarity, she realized that monsters really do exist, but they are not furry, many-legged things creeping silently under the bed, they are people; not just certain people, but everyone. She also learned that her father had been keeping a gun in the house and her mother could still swing a cleaver even after Daddy shot her.
It had started with the screaming. Something far off began screaming just before lunch, and by the time school was over, almost everyone was in a terrible mood. There were arguments and even two fistfights on the bus, and the bus drive, fat Mr. Combs, broke them both up by smacking the offenders on the face—Bobby Daniels hard enough to bleed. That was enough to quiet the others, brooding and plotting events for after they were off the bus.
Luckily for Kayla, she was the only student who got off at her stop and one of the first to actually get off. This spared her torments and maybe even a beating from other unreasonably angry kids. Throughout the day, every few minutes, the scream would slice through the forest of the mountain and cut into her head, pushing her to an uneven edge, but she knew how to keep herself calm, her mom had taught her that.
When Kayla entered the kitchen, she could see her mother was having one of her off days. She sat at the kitchen table with a pack of Camels and a bottle of vodka. On her worst days, there would be no glass. Today, there was not even an ashtray, just a bottle, a pack of cigarettes, a disposable lighter, and countless snubbed butts smashed into the surface of the fine wood table Daddy had made for her.
“Mommy?”
“Leave me alone,” she hissed in a venomous tone.
Kayla, for the first time in her life, felt afraid of her own mother. The vodka and occasional pack of Camels aside, she had never been anything but a warm, tentative mother who was not afraid to tell stories of her own mistakes as a child, sometimes in jovial detail. Kayla was not used to this kind of tone, this kind of reaction from a mother who normally swept her up in a hug and tickled her to fits of laughter upon her return from school.
“Are you alright, Momm
y? You look sad,”
“Kayla, just leave Mommy alone.”
“Yes, Mommy. Can I make a snack?”
“Kayla! Go do your fucking homework!”
Kayla dropped her backpack with her jaw. She was no longer afraid of her mother but now feared her. She had never been like this, never been mean to anyone.
“Go!” her mother screamed again.
Kayla grabbed her backpack and ran for the stairs. Up her feet bounded and down the hall to her bedroom. She closed the door and for another first in her life, Kayla twisted the small latch and locked her door. She walked slowly backwards, staring at the door as if it was about to burst open. Kayla knew some things about people who drank too much vodka: sometimes they got mean or silly. Her mother had never been either. Even after drinking a lot, she was more half asleep than anything, always a dreamy smile on her face as though she floated in a hot bathtub.
Kayla sat on her bed and cried, not loudly, just tears and the occasional sniffing. She pulled her schoolwork out and tried to make sense of the math but failed. Her father would be home soon, and he would make everything better with Mommy, stop that thing from screaming every few minutes, and help her do these fractions. Even with tear-filled eyes, she managed to finish writing sentences for her spelling words. Daddy would be proud she had finished this with no help.
When he did come home, he stormed through the front door like a tornado, yelling about something or another. Mommy began to scream back at him in a hateful, bitter voice. Then there was a crash, a screech from outside, and more screaming, but this time one side of the argument was coming up the stairs. Kayla did not know why, but she suddenly had an urge to hide. Whatever was coming up the stairs and yelling back down was not her father.
She quickly squirmed under her bed, not even considering the hairy beastie that should have been there, and peaked through the slats in the wood footboard. Fear had become a raging monster all its own, tearing at her insides, pounding on her heart. Then the doorknob turned slightly and stopped at the lock. Dread washed over her; she had left the door locked and whatever was on the other side was going to be very mad at her.
The door suddenly burst inward as the frame broke into large pieces and scattered throughout her room. There in the hall light was her father, more outline than detail, standing like some large predator, a gun in his hand.
“Kayla sweetie, where are you?” Her father’s voice was sickly sweet, almost as if he was mocking her.
“What the hell was that, Dennis?” her mother screamed from the bottom of the stairs.
“None of your business bitch!” he shot back down the hall. “Kayla? Come out, sweetie. Daddy wants to take you out for dinner.”
“You broke the fucking door down?” her mother screeched. “I keep this house clean for you so you can come home and tear it up, is that it?”
Daddy turned slowly, the edge of Mommy’s housecoat just out of sight around the ruined door jam, and fired his gun down the hall. The explosion was so loud it hid Kayla’s short scream. Then her mother screamed, “You shot me, you limp-dick waste-of-a-man!”
Daddy fired the gun again; this time, Kayla did not scream, but her mother howled in pain, or maybe rage. Her father suddenly fell backwards into the room, Kayla’s mother straddling him on top. She was sheeted in blood where the gun had made large holes in her flesh. Mommy began to hit him repeatedly with the kitchen cleaver, hacking into his head and chest as the gun fired again.
Mommy bucked upwards and landed straddling Daddy’s legs. Mommy swung the cleaver again, burying it deeply in Daddy’s chest. He fired the gun, catching her in the face and blowing most of Mommy across the remains of the doorframe and hallway walls beyond. This time, Kayla screamed loud enough for anyone to hear.
Daddy turned his head a bit and rolled his eyes at her. His face was slashed in many places, and blood was running into his eyes. When he found her gripping the wood of the footboard, he tried desperately to bring the revolver over his head and aim at her. Before he could, he seemed to simply fall asleep, his breath a gurgling refusal of the blood invading his lungs.
Kayla squirmed her way from under the bed and discovered her mother was almost completely without a head. Her father, though, still seemed to be fighting for breath, trying to draw in and around the blade of the cleaver in his chest. Kayla knew she had to find help, had to call someone, and right now.
She rushed from her room and toward her parents’, slipping and almost falling in the blood cooling on the carpet. She ran as fast as she could and grabbed the phone from its cradle. She dialed in 911 and listened to the phone ring over and again. She almost gave up when someone finally picked up the phone.
“911, what’s your emergency.”
In the background, Kayla could hear screaming, shouting, and the sounds of things being broken.
“Mommy hurt Daddy!” Kayla cried desperately.
“Is that so… Well, it was probably your fault, kid.”
Kayla sat there, suddenly unsure what had happened in her bedroom.
“No, I didn’t do anything! It was Mommy and Daddy! They fought and now Mommy is dead and Daddy is bleeding!”
The other side of the phone suddenly filled with snickers and giggling from more than one voice, and Kayla realized the sounds in the background had suddenly gone quiet. “It was your fault, Kayla. You drove them to it, didn’t you?”
“No,” She whined, trying hard not to cry. The principal always said to stay calm in an emergency and dial 9-1-1 on the phone if something like this happened.
“Why should we come and help you when you’re the reason they hurt each other? Huh, kid?”
“Help me! Please!” she pleaded.
The snicker turned to laughter, the giggling to hysterics. Then a woman’s voice came on the line. “Kayla, do you want to help your daddy?”
Kayla began to sob as she spoke, “Yes, please!”
“Does your daddy or mommy have a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Alright, now listen carefully, Kayla…” The laughter had simmered down to snickering. “Go and get the gun, and what you want to do is give your daddy a lead injection; this will make him all better.”
“How? What’s an injection?”
“Well, Kayla, it’s like a shot you get at the doctor’s. Now go and get the gun, Kayla, put the end of it against your daddy’s ear, and pull on the trigger.”
“Huh?”
“Hurry, Kayla! There isn’t much time!” the voice demanded.
“You want me to shoot, Daddy?”
“It will make him all better, I promise. Don’t you believe me?”
Kayla could hear the barely contained laughter in the woman’s voice. “No! It will hurt him even worse.”
“Shoot him, you little slut!” the woman screamed, and those around her began to laugh louder than before.
Kayla slammed the phone down and started crying in earnest. She knew that a police station was just across the street from her school and she might be able to find some help there. Her father always said that if she needed help, she should find a police officer.
She ran down the steps, leapt through the open front door, and began to run towards school. She knew the way, she had ridden the bus five days a week for four years now, but it was a long distance. She knew only that she had to find help for her daddy, and fast.
As she went, she began to find more and more bodies on the street, the sidewalk, in the lawns of the upscale houses of her neighborhood, some even hanging from shattered windows either by the glass or by rope. Her parents were not the only ones that had fought, and they were not the only parents that had killed one or the other of themselves.
Her parents had always been good about keeping bad things away from Kayla, but occasional news updates or accident scenes or those pro-life billboards slipped past the defensive duo now lying dead in her bedroom. However, to see it everywhere at once, at just about every house, all the blood… Kayla’s fear swamped out her s
orrow and urgency to help her father.
Kayla made the shale stone pillars marking the entrance to the exclusive community in which she lived and turned down the wood-lined street towards her school. She could hear things moving in the trees, but the lack of streetlights made it impossible to see what they were. Even without the sight of them, Kayla knew they were cruel and evil things and she had to get away.
She pumped her legs hard, her breath coming in short gusts, her thighs burning painfully beneath her. Soon, she would have to stop, rest a bit. With all of this running, school was still far away. More things moved in the trees, seemingly towards her as she ran past, and she refused to stop until they were gone.
Light glimmered over the trees to her right. Kayla immediately knew that it was the sterile neon lights of the Sir Speedy Convenience drug store. It was near the middle of town, but also at the base of the hill. If she could cut through the trees, she could be there in just a few minutes, and there was a doctor guy behind the counter—maybe he could help her.
Disregarding the things hiding in the trees, Kayla made a sharp right-handed turn and spilled down the slope. It was hazardous and noisy going, but she could not let those tree things grab her, whatever they were, and so she continued at break-neck speed.
When she made the parking lot, she sprinted to the building and around the side towards the front. There she found Mr. Roy, still in his white lab coat, up on a ladder, nailing a person’s head upside down above the automatic doors. There were four others there as well, pinned unevenly to the stucco above the doors. Mr. Roy’s lab coat was red with blood, and he seemed to be humming softly to himself, as though what he was doing was normal. Kayla felt her mouth fill with wet and she backed around the side of the building before he saw her.
She let herself slide down to the cement sidewalk and vomited between her knees. A shot rang out, one much bigger than her daddy’s, and she raced to look around the corner again. Some woman was there in a torn flannel shirt and no pants, a shotgun trailing smoke as she walked toward the pharmacy. There, Mr. Roy lay torn almost completely in half and still squirming from his wounds.