by Steve Wands
Hell Comes for the Hurried
By Steve Wands
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SMASHWORDS EDITION
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Published by:
Steve Wands on Smashwords
Hell Comes for the Hurried
Copyright © 2010 by Steve Wands
Cover Design and Layout by Apparatus Revolution
http://www.staydeadrev.com
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Dedications
Dedicated to my son, Jacob, who has helped me to see the world in a different light.
Thanks
Thanks to my wife, Carmela, for proofreading.
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Hell Comes for the Hurried
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I’m supposed to be thankful today. Thankful for the wonderful bounty before me, thankful for the air that stings my lungs with its bitter, sinister cold, and thankful for all that I have. Well, all I have is regret and a heart that refuses to give up the ghost, a belly nowhere near full of charred rabbit meat and cold moonshine. I have the vague memory of a world that was chewed to the marrow. I have the memory of my family. And, I have a picture of them, which I guess I’m thankful for. It’s the only picture I have left of my wife and our son–though it’s so tattered I can barely make out their faces anymore. It’s as if they are ghosts caught on film. But am I thankful? —No. Not till I’m dead. Sure, I could’ve easily checked myself out countless times in the years that’ve passed. No, I’m not a religious person, though I do believe in God, and I most certainly believe in hell. I believe my family is waiting for me. Waiting where all the good-hearted dead go, were I hope I can go, and I don’t think suicide will get me there.
So I sit here among these people I’ve traveled with, their names don’t matter to me, and to be honest, neither do they. We still look out for each other though. It’s just that I’ve grown cold, beyond numb–I barely even speak nowadays. There is nothing to say, and small talk is bullshit. I’d rather keep my thoughts to my self. Some of the folks I travel with like to tell stories or talk about the glory days of a world half-remembered. I like to find the dead things and make them deader. I pretend that every one of them is the one that took my family away. It’s the only time I feel anything other than nothing and regret. And once I finish off this moonshine I’ll be ready to do just that.
The last swig bit me like a viper and hissed all the way down. I got to my feet, grabbed my club and headed away from the fire and out from underneath the bridge. I admired the sight once I got to the top. It was early evening and the sun was setting behind the river. The destruction was breathtaking. It was a bombed out skeleton of a city–a modern day dinosaur with its broken bones reaching for the sky. I stood across the river taking it all in. We were heading there tomorrow, on the big old road to nowhere through the city and beyond. We’d probably set up camp in the ruin one of the buildings–a library would be nice, or a museum. I could bury myself in a book, or make a display for the human race at the museum. Either way would be a fine way to kill time before time kills me.
I heard her following me but I hoped she’d leave after a bit, but of course she didn’t. I wasn’t that lucky. She was damn near feral, completely animalistic and why we saved her I still don’t know. She was part of a “fuck hut” we came across months ago down by Jamesburg off the old highway. The girl was barely into double digits by the looks of her. She was filthy and had no idea how to interact with others, not that any of us really did, but she made it extremely uncomfortable. Who knows how many times she’d been raped–it was all she knew. She looked at you as if you were going to, and was confused when you did nothing. At times it was almost as if she wanted to be fucked, as if that were the only way she could have contact with another person. If I had a heart it would break, but it didn’t. Her movement and posture resembled an ape more than it did of man. I turned to look at her as she hid behind a pile of rubble. She grunted at me and I shooed her away. She scampered off, heading back to the group. Good riddance.
I walked for a few minutes, heading toward the road which eventually took me to the bridge. Both of which were cluttered with broken down vehicles, many of which were weathered and rusted. Come tomorrow, getting across would be interesting. I wondered if we even could. Something stirred on the bridge. I heard a noise, and stared right in its direction. From the shadows emerged one of the dead. Its eyes gone long ago, its skin wrapped like tight leather around its bones. It looked like a mummy whittled out of wood. I stepped closer to it, my club at my side. It met me part of the way. I stood staring at it, staring into its eyeless holes looking for something to hate. It came at me, stiffly and weakly. I let it grab hold only to push it away. I let it do it again, and again. How the hell did these things turn the world into a nightmare? The thought gave me rage and I used it to swing my club at the deader. I knocked it to the ground, its leathered hide scraping on the pavement. I put my foot to its head and slowly pressed down, it gave no fight and if it did I didn’t notice. I stomped full-force on the deaders head, heard a very satisfying crunch and looked at the dark ooze coming from its ears. It looked like oil. I raised my foot to stomp it once again, and once again I was satisfied with the noise I made–it was music, and violence was the instrument. I was so focused on what I was doing that I didn’t notice the other creatures that crept out from the shadows of the bridge. Three more, and they were just as slow as the dead bastard who finally found rest under my foot. One of them had been disemboweled long ago, staggering forward with an empty hole where her stomach should’ve been. I could see the upper crest of her pelvis and the base of her spine. The rest was covered by skin that hung in clumps like rows of jerky. None of them had clothes, one barely had any hair, not that it mattered what they looked like. Nothing mattered, really. I hoped they would kill me but I knew they wouldn’t be able to. Even against three of them it was easy work. I had my fun of course then quickly put them down.
I was beginning to sober up and that was a bad thing, a very bad thing.
It was on my second jar of moonshine that I returned to near oblivion. I was almost drunk enough to enjoy the stories being told within earshot of where I stood on wobbly legs. I heard one part of a story that involved Mick Jagger and it only made me think of my dead friends on the bridge. It almost made me chuckle–the thought of Mick and The Stones being responsible for the death of death. I smiled, briefly, and it felt unnatural and dirty on my face. I wiped it off and took a swig from my jar.
The river moved fast and
rough. It looked almost green. I could see a few people from the group down near the river talking amongst themselves–it could’ve been an argument the way they were moving, but I stopped paying attention, and moved closer to the fire. The fire smelled terrible, like hot piss on burnt rubber, but I took it in all the same.
A memory came to me then, one of fire–a fire that didn’t smell of piss and rubber. It was a Thanksgiving years ago, our first Thanksgiving as a new family, just the three of us. I fought and fought for us to be by ourselves. I was sick of sharing the day with her family, and for once I wanted to just be by ourselves. The fire then smelled great and it heated most of the house. Our son was crawling around like a maniac and we kept chasing after him–but I must say I had a hard time crawling after him. I was heavier then, and my knees hated me for it. It was the best Thanksgiving I had as an adult. I wish I could go back to that day, back to a day on the couch with a giant heap of mashed potatoes, a cold beer, a beautiful woman at my side and my curious little creation roaming the floors in search of brightly colored toys to put in his mouth.
It’s funny the things you think of when you’re trying to get some shut-eye. And when I say funny, I mean odd. I was just thinking about the rain forest. I pictured it beginning to flourish once again. I saw vivid colors and giant trees, crazy looking little bugs, and noisy birds. The earth, the real earth, must be rejoicing as we continue to struggle for survival. I thought of the future I use to picture, flying cars and teleportation systems, robots named “Rosie” and all that good stuff. It’s crazy how quickly things can change. How one can go from a bright future to no future at all. I thought of dinosaurs, and then I felt like one. Somehow I slept.
I dreamt of walking through the city, the bridge was cleared and we joined a parade. People were celebrating again, the sun was shining, and people were talking and laughing. A man tried to sell me ice cream but I didn’t have any money. He smiled and handed it to me anyway. Then he gave me a wink. I could hear children laughing but I didn’t see any. Then it began to rain, no it poured. It was muddy and hot, and everyone ran off. I was left in the middle of the street with my ice cream, which turned into eyeballs. The people around me all turned into deaders. They began clapping. My vision blurred and the world began to spin out of control. Then I woke to the touch of someone stroking my leg. It was the feral girl. I jumped up and pushed her away. She hissed at me, I kicked her and snarled back. The others looked at me, then to the girl, and then they went back to whatever the hell it was they were doing–which was really just killing time.
I sat back down, and the last thing I remember was the shifting of gravel underfoot. Then blackness. When I woke up my head pounded, and the world was upside down. The folks I traveled with were standing around me. They looked anxious, and they were looking at me. I hung suspended by my feet, and my hands were tied in back. All I could do was squirm–and not very much at that. They were all pretty quiet. From behind me I could hear the sharpening of metal–I knew what was coming. I smiled when I figured it out; it was my turn, at long fucking last. There was a bucket under my head. The sharpening stopped and then all was quiet. I could hear footsteps approaching from behind, then the swift sound of a cleaver slicing through the cold night air. The pussy swinging the cleaver didn’t have enough strength to cleave off my head in one swing. So, you could imagine the pain when it struck my throat. As much as I looked forward to this moment, I had no idea how much pain it would actually be. Nor did I think it would hurt a hundred times more when the bastard pulled it out to try again. Finally on the third stroke my head landed in the bucket, face down and bleeding stump up. My warm blood flowed from the wound, quickly cooling off–and there was a lot of it. I then watched them slice open my gut and disembowel me. Cleaving out every organ and letting them drop to the ground. The bucket wasn’t near big enough, and according to the reaction of the bastards doing it I didn’t smell too fresh on the inside. Am I thankful? —Yes. I’d certainly have preferred a cleaner death, something more serene, and quick. But, what’s done is done. I was just a bit confused as to why there was no heavenly light shining down upon me, or why I didn’t float off into the air–I was still here, watching them hack at my mortal remains. Their names are fuzzy, and as I’ve told you before, they don’t really matter, but I think the bastard that cleaved my head was named Vic. He’d told me before that he’d eaten human flesh. He sort of eventually became our group’s leader. He was a nice enough guy, and if I could’ve thanked him for choosing me to be the Thanksgiving bird, despite the fact that the bastard couldn’t do the job swiftly, I would have. I guess he somehow convinced the rest of the group that human meat was better than no meat. I guess they agreed.
They had turned pipes and branches into skewers which they covered in my meat. I wondered if anyone would eat my dick, and if they did I sure as shit didn’t want to watch, but I wanted to know. I was almost all bone as they continued to skewer large chunks from my body. The man with the cleaver started making a stack for himself, cutting from my thighs, probably the choicest of cuts, my legs were in great shape from all the walking I’ve done over the years–probably the best they’d ever been in. I used to be a couch potato with a desk job and a bad appetite, now I was a slender stack of meat on Thanksgiving Day. Once someone had a full skewer they walked it over to the fire. I could hear the sizzle of my skin, but I couldn’t smell it–why I don’t know. I watched them eating my body. I wish I could tell you it disgusted me, but it didn’t. I didn’t care. The feral girl grabbed a skewer of me and headed to the fire in her hunched over stagger of a walk.
A woman, I think her name was Emma, grabbed the bucket that held my head. She pulled my head from the bucket by my blood-soaked tendrils of hair and raised it to her eye level. She looked at my face–which, to my surprise was moving its jaw and flitting its eyes. Those were my eyes, and they were moving without me behind them. I always thought if you removed the head from the body there would be no coming back. I couldn’t tell if my body still writhed, but my head sure did. It was strange, I must’ve cut the heads off hundreds of deaders and never once did I stop to pick up the head and say hello to it. Nor did I ever see a headless corpse walking around. You’d figure that after so many years these things would start to make sense, but no, they didn’t. None of it made any damn sense. Not ever. My current situation didn’t make a lick of sense either, but it was happening anyway, or not happening in my case. The woman started talking to my head, but I didn’t quite catch what she was saying. Then she walked my head over to the fire and tossed it in. My face, my identity to the world, was tossed like rubbish into the fire. It was one of the few things that reminded me of who I was, the other…the other was the photograph, which lay in a puddle of my innards and blood and torn clothes. I walked over to it and knelt down. I tried to pick it up, but I couldn’t. I wanted to wipe away my blood to see the faded image of my wife, Lynne, and my son, Marley, and I couldn’t even do that. All of this was to see them again, and what I got to see was the butchering of my body and the feasting of my flesh. God, if there is such a thing, had forsaken me.
I left. I walked away and I didn’t turn back in the slightest. I returned to the bridge and what I saw made me laugh; the deaders were coming. They must’ve smelled my blood and innards, and like flies to shit they came for it. There were more than I had seen in a long time. I guess the city wasn’t as empty as we thought. There had to be hundreds, all of them shriveled like raisins. Still they were able to stagger, still able to feast. I wished them a Happy Thanksgiving as they passed through me. As they stumbled off the bridge and down toward camp, I could hear shouts, then a few shots but I knew firearms were few and ammunition was sparse. The shots stopped and the shouts turned into panicked screams. I walked over to the edge of the bridge and watched. They were completely surrounded by the swarm of deaders. The fools were so busy with feasting and clamoring about nonsense that they didn’t hear their slow approach, and the smell of the fire must’ve covered up their putrid
scent, which I couldn’t smell. I was thankful for that too, I guess.
The feral girl ran for the river and dove–she would most likely die of hypothermia. The others tried to fight, but it was like fighting the tide. For every deader dispatched a new one came to take its spot. They fought as they always had though, and valiantly, but it was pointless. A few more chose the river. I guess I would’ve chosen the river as well. I’d rather of died a death with my lungs full of icy sludge than have my flesh torn off in chunks by the rotted teeth of the deaders. The deaders overpowered the rest of my group, dragging their dying bodies to the ground. The tide came in. The tide always comes in. And there’s not a damned thing in hell you can do about it. I watched the tide go back out as quickly as it came in. The fire illuminated the leftover chunks of cooling gore. The cold stiff dirt was left a darker than rust shade of red. The folks I traveled with joined the ranks of the dead. I walked on.
The bridge was littered with the remains of vehicles. The kinds people would’ve killed for, the public type that people dreaded, and the kind that probably stalled out and caused this mess. They were rusted and weathered, cold and dead, and useless. Just like me. I wondered how long it would take for the bridge to collapse without man there to keep it up. From the looks of it, I didn’t think very long. The longer I walked, the more I felt a part of this world. It was dead, I was dead. The only things I saw were dead, in one way or another, and the people still left were only biding time till they eventually died.
After the bridge I entered the city. It was once called Titan City, but I couldn’t find any sign that stated such. I remember the day of the bombings–Titan City was among the first to fall. It seemed like forever ago. I used to visit every once and a while. Daytrips, a show, an anniversary dinner here and there, and I remember when we took Marley to the museum for the first time. He loved it. We all did. I wondered if it still stood? I doubt it–many of the buildings were leveled, the ones still standing looked as if a good gust of wind would knock them over.