by Alan Spencer
“Damn it.”
He decided to let Edith sleep longer. She deserved a respite from this nightmare. He spent his time eyeing the inscriptions on the markers, names, and dates, and final commiserations. It messed with his mind to spend so long in a place of mourning.
Craig suddenly laughed, escaping the sense of impending doom with levity. I guess I’m not missing work since I’m unemployed. I don’t have to call in sick either.
Someone would look for him soon. One person being his mother. She would call after his doctor’s visit and ask how it went. Surely, she’d left a message and was concerned when he didn’t call back. She was taking a sudden interest in his life after the court hearing, after Willis’s assault. And his rent was due in two days. Carl Kenning would batter down his door for those five hundred dollars. He didn’t attend his appointment with Dr. Richard Herbert either. The police would be dragged into it, and thank God, he thought, they would get to the bottom of his disappearance.
But how would they find him? He had no clue as to where he’d been kidnapped, so how would they? He had no real concept of where in the city he could be. The machine required electricity, so he couldn’t be in the woods—or could he? There were abandoned buildings downtown, namely the burnt-out warehouses and the Carlton Hotel that went out of business. The property was two-years’ condemned and unused. Or Dr. Krone could own private property under a false name. All of it was speculation. But why would Dr. Krone bury his father in someone else’s grave? That would indicate the man was being sought, and if that was true, so was Dr. Krone. The victims were from the sanitarium. The Krones were murderers. But being in hiding and on the run, how could they invent such a bizarre machine?
Edith was still asleep. The sleeping-child expression made him jealous. He needed rest. No, I can’t. It’s not safe for both of us to let our guards down.
He rested his head against the wall, the cold marble soothing. He looked for the pack of cigarettes, but they had vanished.
They must’ve gone poof when she conked out.
Were the cigarettes they smoked a figment of their imagination? He could tear apart his brain to discover the answer, and he’d still be confused.
Slow steps sounded from outside, faded and from afar.
Edith shot up from her sleep, triggered awake. “Uh!—where is he?”
“It’s okay, he’s still outside.”
“Final warning, come out and visit with me, or you’ll be sorry.”
They huddled close together, depending on each other for comfort, and he was surprised and relieved when Edith hugged him. “Forgive me for earlier. I didn’t mean to freak out at you. He really scares me.”
“Ditto.”
“I guess I have to draw you out then. But first, let’s have some fun.”
Nothing happened. Five minutes passed, and his promises weren’t delivered.
“He’s full of shit,” Edith muttered, throwing the corridor a middle finger. “He won’t come in.”
Uproarious laughter, a mad scientist’s cackling, pierced the halls. “Now it’s time!”
The bending of rails, the crack of marble, the splitting of concrete, the shifting of dust, a crunching noise, breaking wood, the twisting and removal of screws reverberated from all sides of them. The bronze markers rattled, shifting against concrete.
“What is he doing?” Edith unleashed the question in a shout. “You’re not supposed to come in here. You’re not supposed to come in here!”
“He’s playing with us,” Craig said, raising his voice above the strange cacophony. “If you have a magic trick up your sleeve to make yourself go somewhere else, now’s the time to do it.”
“And what about you?”
“I’ll stand my ground.”
“Big man,” she scoffed. “I wish you the best with that.”
The grave markers dropped onto the floor with a broong sound. Steel caskets fired out of their slots as if spring ejected, dozens at once. Edith clung to him, her nails digging into his body.
Coffins littered the ground, the wood splintering down their length from the impact, dust rising into a brown smog, causing them to choke, and cough, and be blind.
Edith called out between fits of choking, “Do you see him coming?”
He squinted and covered his eyes with his hands. “I don’t know. It hurts to look.”
He stepped around the coffins, haphazardly tripping over them, struggling to form an escape route. Both of them going rigid, the columns of lights above them burnt out in a collective blackout, explosions of the fixtures repeating about the entirety of the mausoleum. Light by light, the way went dark. Crashes, the smashing and rendering of wood, the muffled punch and splinter of grain, their time to escape was now. A stench followed the ruckus—embalming fluid, putrefying organs, gangrene flesh, the wet leather smell of death, and the odd scent of mildew and coffin padding. Sheets and planks of wood and pieces rattled against the floor. The labored breathing surrounding them was a collective song—coughs from collapsed windpipes, whistles from throats riddled with holes, and pained moans issued with eerie acoustics.
Craig couldn’t see anything except their profiles rise from their broken coffins. Then he heard the plop of feet against the floor, the click of exposed metatarsals and fancy shoes increasing in numbers.
He’s brought the dead back to life.
Jesus Christ.
“What do we do now?” he cried out when he lost his grip on Edith’s arm. She slipped free from his protective hold. “Where are you? Goddamn it, where are you?”
An arc of blue-and-white flames climbed upwards and spread into the shape of a corpse. The flesh was pure black, the skeleton caramelized beneath. The clothing had fossilized into the flesh. The rest of the hallway was lit up by the light of the burning corpse. Easily a hundred corpses stood in place, clogging up any avenue of escape.
They were trapped.
Craig grabbed Edith, finally spotting her, and they backed into the wall. Edith gasped, “I imagined a lighter in my hand, and I lit one on fire.”
They faced the horde, and the horde acted accordingly. Arms outstretched—the very act tearing sinew, and muscle, and breaking bone—and the ripe malodorous death stench corroded the air. Drips pounded the floor. Jellies splashed. Organs slithered from their cavities or hung in place. Bodies whose legs failed, the corpses crawled on the floor, their teeth clacking, their flesh slipping, and breaking, and contorting to express their eagerness to attack them.
Edith belted out a war cry, her voice cracking under the stress, “Stay the hell away from us!”
The corpse stood in place, burning. It couldn’t understand what was happening to its body, so it stood confused and immobilized. Craig urged her to think of a plan, anything to survive. “We don’t have much time. You have to think of something.”
Edith squeezed her eyes, grunted, and thought so hard a stream of blood flowed out her nose. She couldn’t pull it off. She was stunned, shaking off the pain in her head. Edith touched the blood that crossed her lips in abhorrence. “This is it. My tricks are used up.”
Craig breathed in and thought hard. He suddenly calmed down. Focused. A hand of bone clutched his collar. Craig choked on what smelled like sunbaked raw meat. Blood stained and seeped through his shirt, fetid juices touching his skin. He thought harder. Focused again. Pictured it in his hands. Imagined every detail. Two more hands, this time newer dead flesh, choked him. Tighter still, he couldn’t breathe. Hands clutched his legs. Then his ankles. His right hand. One tore the buttons from his shirt one by one. Plick, plick, plick.
Edith’s next scream was muffled by a smothering hand, “Naw—gaack!”
Craig’s hair was pulled.
He focused even harder.
Teeth clamped on his shoulder and bit in.
And then it happened.
His father’s Browning pump-action shotgun materialized in his hands. He swung the stock into the dead man’s jaw, breaking the porcelain-like bone into ma
ny shards.
“Help me, Craig!”
A group was dragging Edith into one of the wall slots. She kicked and thrashed, but she was viciously outnumbered. She’d been clawed and chewed up, her flesh glazed in red, the muscle tissue beneath raw and gleaming against the firelight. The meat of her arms was concave hollows in the shape of bites. White bone protruded where her wrists connected to the hands. Her ear-grinding fits and screeches faded, and she was gone.
“Let her go!”
Ba-boom!
Two of the corpses split in half, the bullets tearing through their soft, dead flesh, their torsos and legs landing in separate piles. He turned to the left, sizing up the threat, and pulled the trigger. Ba-boom! Ba-boom!
This is impossible.
He cleared a short path, shoving and kicking to where Edith had been taken, but he was thrown backwards, seized by the shoulders and legs, and brought down. He crashed against the marble. Craig fired upwards and regretted it. Blood and flesh splattered him in loads of macabre flotsam and jetsam, their fluids ice cold.
Craig refused to allow the dead to overtake him. Crawling to his feet, battering through them, he shoved himself through them to another hall. Three more shots, his ears ringing—the actual firing of a gun was three times louder than what one heard in movies—Craig arrived at a new hall. His clothes were in shreds, the skin beneath clawed and parted in sections. The pain kept his instincts finely tuned. He fired randomly and three heads went up filled to the brim with loose gray matter. Craig accidentally planted a foot into the stomach cavity of a woman in a purple dress, and it sank ankle-deep inside her belly. He tipped forward but didn’t fall. He was unable to free his foot, somehow losing his weapon. The gun was kicked down the hall, useless to him, as more of the dead advanced closer to him.
Craig kicked upwards with all his force, and the foot was driven up into the corpse woman’s sternum, and ripped through the skin and breaking marrow-less bones, he uprooted his foot. He vaulted into the crowd. He used his shoulder as a battering ram. His elbow cracked faces, mere hollow bones breaking up into pottery pieces. His fists were soaked in black blood after punching a mandible loose with a solid blow. A nose was shattered and revealed maggots embedded in the sinus cavity.
The line wouldn’t end. He couldn’t fight them all. The hundreds had changed into thousands and gaining new numbers.
But that’s impossible. There weren’t that many coffins!
He raised his voice above the din of the dead to demand, “Dr. Krone, what do you want from me? What’s the point of this fucked-up shit?”
The doorway out of the mausoleum was wide open. The dead filed in from the cemetery for miles out, their outlines dominating the horizon. The sky was thick with the lingering cloud of human decay, the night sky being impossibly black. There was no escape. Edith was lucky to be finished off so soon.
Three lunged on top of him from behind. Tackled, he was pinned to the floor by new hands. A blackened hand covered his mouth. The taste of soil and blood sullied his tongue. He couldn’t breathe. So much rotten flesh surrounded and consumed him. His shirt was torn from his body in all directions, and next, it would be his flesh. Teeth clicked to render strips of flesh, small in bites, but many were feeding at once. Blood spilled from fresh wounds. He was paralyzed. He’d be a pile of bones soon enough. The mastication of a city pounded throughout the corridor.
Just when he thought he understood something about Dr. Krone’s work, everything changed. There was no way to hide like Edith had believed. No code existed to break the lock of his mind. Only death and suffering existed here, and his torment was overdue.
He closed his eyes in a last-ditch effort, and Craig imagined he was somewhere else.
First Date
“Naaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” he howled, abating the razor impressions of fingers and teeth gnawing into his flesh. Suddenly his clothing wasn’t shredded. He wore a green polo top and blue jeans. The attackers were gone and so were the dead, though blood seeped through the shirt and the wounds were still gaping and fresh.
“What’s wrong with you?” Katie asked from the passenger seat of the car. Her face was turned up to his, curious. She didn’t notice he was bleeding. It was invisible to her. “I’m sorry I called you so late. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Craig remembered this moment, even while breathing in and out to battle the agony of his nerves. Katie was younger, about twenty-one, he imagined. She was stood up by Brice Adams that night. Brice was Craig’s roommate at the time. He was supposed to meet Katie at Odyssey Cinema 30 to catch a chick flick, for a first date. Katie had called Craig in an emergency. She was dropped off at the theater by a friend, and she was stranded, and not being able to reach anyone on a Friday night, she got a hold of Craig. He arrived to pick her up, and it was only nine at night. He offered to take her to eat at a Japanese restaurant. Craig knew she loved sushi, and he consoled her ruined evening by saying, “Might as well make the most of this night. Call it a friendly date. Brice is a jackass. He’s only my roommate because I can’t afford rent right now. When I change jobs, I’ll kick his ass the hell out.”
Katie was still in date mode in this moment. She was grateful for his kindness, and Katie was beautiful. Her hair was curled at the ends, fresh from the salon. She wore a moderate amount of makeup, but it was the glow about her that interested him the most. Alive. Happy. Energetic. They were qualities he wished he owned and wanted to soak up. They had hit it off that night. Sushi. Dancing on retro disco night at Shakes. They stayed out until four in the morning and made out in the car before saying good night.
That was the beginning of their relationship, and he wanted so badly to enjoy it. The loss hurt him as much as his bleeding wounds. He couldn’t shake the dead playing with his body, touching him, violating him, devouring him. His polo shirt was sodden through, and Craig had no choice but to pull the car over.
“You’re so sweet to pick me up like this,” she reiterated. Katie still had no idea he was bleeding. They’d just finished sushi before he entered the memory. “Craig, you’re a nice guy. My dating life sucks. Let’s do something else tonight. Do you like to dance?”
“Yes,” he said, refusing to lose this moment, speaking through gritted teeth. He touched her cheek with his palm just as he did when he was twenty-two. “I like you. You’re nice, Katie.”
He winced. The blood dripped from his shirt onto the steering column. It stained the seat too, colored his jeans, and now, Katie’s cheek.
Craig gave in. He needed comfort, and he kissed her on the mouth softly. “I love you, Katie. I can’t stop missing you. It’s not fair you’re gone. I’m sorry it ended the way it did. I think about it every day. I made so many mistakes.”
Katie pushed him off. “What are you saying?—are you some kind of weirdo?”
The memory was gone as he knew it. Katie eyed him, infuriated. The blood on her demonized her. She still didn’t wipe it off, oblivious to it.
Craig continued talking, despite her confusion. “I’m sorry for how you died, for whatever that counts for…”
Katie changed blink-fast. She was a blip, the transformation ending with a series of demeaning laughs. “Being sorry doesn’t count for much, Craig. It doesn’t count for shit.”
She vanished in a split second, and then Dr. Krone seized his neck. “Whatever that bitch told you in the mausoleum, you can’t fight me. You’re not strong enough. You have no concept of what your brain is capable of!”
Craig drove again, slamming the gas, gasping for breath, the doctor’s hands wrapped so tight around his throat the doctor could break his neck. He clutched the wheel and battled to steady it as the man smothered his life.
“Yes, you can see within me. But I see much, much deeper inside of you, Mr. Horsy.”
“Graaah!” he gasped, white-and-purple blotches filling his vision. Pinpricks stabbed at his head and body. Desperate to avoid death, Craig swung the vehicle off the road, swerving hard to the right.
&nb
sp; The car barreled down a short hill, bouncing twice, the shocks bending, the back bumper ripped off. They were seconds from crashing into the trunk of a hulking tree. Gaining speed, Dr. Krone relaxed in the backseat and announced without an inkling of fear, “Now let’s proceed with the treatment!”
Half-Time
There was simply no escaping Dr. Krone. Craig barely had any concept of how to retaliate or survive, and even Edith’s suggestions couldn’t save him. He was eaten alive by the dead—hordes upon hordes of them. Then Katie watched him bleed in the car without any regard to his health. And now he was here at Willis’s sports bar Half-Time, the blink and change of scene occurring seconds before the car slammed into the trees.
Dr. Krone showed no signs of slowing down the treatment. Treatment. That was the word he kept using. What did the man have to gain from this? Not even Edith knew the answer to that question.
His wounds had miraculously scabbed over. The shape of teeth and jagged marks were caked brown, as if aged. Forced to move on from the observation, he looked on at Half-Time, a bustling pub. Dart boards, pool tables, a twelve-piece arcade room, foosball, and eleven screens playing professional sports and independent events like logging championships and lady football kept the place hopping. The blink delivered him onto a stool, sitting at the bar. The KU versus K-State basketball game was in its second half. Random cheers and fists slammed onto the counters, the game tied and would stay that way up until the final seconds.
He sipped on the frosty mug of ale. It tasted real and exactly the way it did when he assaulted Willis. A wave of nausea crept up his esophagus. He hadn’t eaten in hours or days, he wasn’t certain exactly how long it had been, but he was ravenous with hunger. Dr. Krone had strapped him in that machine for longer than twenty-four hours, he was certain. Maybe days. The thought made him dizzy and weak.
Craig peered at the exit, combing his mind for what could possibly happen. It didn’t take long to realize what Dr. Krone had planned, and in moments, he’d learn just how wrong he was.