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 Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 1:21 pm
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Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 7:27 pm
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Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 9:25 pm
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Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2007 10:49 am
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Fashionably late.
Chapter two.
Consequences.
Janet walked lightly around one of the housing districts of the city, breaking into the long abandoned abodes of the dead or fled. The pants that had once been taut across her toned thigh and calf muscles now hung limp against her almost skeletal frame. Her cheekbones stuck out so far that it looked painful and her eyes looked to be popping out of her paper-thin eyelids. Despite all this, however, she tried to keep in good spirits.
“My babies must be starving,” She said with what smile her tight skin could muster. Her children had left weeks ago. Since then she had been keeping herself alive on whatever she could find. An empty chip bag blew in the wind; Janet gave chase. She snatched it out of the air, turned it inside out and began to lick feverishly at it.
“Kids, come and eat!” She called out to the empty city. “Here’s yours, Cody,” She said and resumed licking the package. “and Aaron,” She started tearing at it with her teeth; it made a screeching noise as her teeth scraped against it. “Here’s Mandy’s!” She said and tried to swallow the rest of the bag whole. It caught in her throat and closed the airway. She started hacking violently, but to no avail. She died there in the middle of the street.
Meanwhile, her three children were enjoying a light meal of beef jerky with the traveling caravan that they had left with. The group of roughly thirty people traveled by car, stopping in each town to salvage what food they could. The three teenagers had learned quickly that when circumstances warrant, the group wasn’t above cannibalism. That, however, was a fairly rare occurrence. So far, it had only happened twice; both times when the group hadn’t had food for days. Aaron and Mandy had declined the meal; Cody had eaten the share offered to him with no apparent difficulty. He spent the entire evening trying desperately not to throw up. He wandered away from the campsite and retched until nothing came up as soon as everyone else was asleep.
“You know, before you three came along we didn’t have this many flats. I’m beginning to suspect sabotage,” Daniel said as he walked up to where the three were sitting. A friendship had formed between him and Aaron almost immediately after the three joined the group, despite the circumstances. Mandy had made a loose acquaintanceship with a girl named Susan and Cody tried to blend into the background.
Aaron laughed half-heartedly.
“You guys are having lunch already?” Daniel asked, looking at the beef jerky in their hands. The group ate breakfast and dinner together and, when there was enough food to permit it, a lunch ration to eat at their discretion.
“Mhmm” Aaron hummed through his nose. Cody shrugged and Mandy didn’t react at all.
“Damn, you’re gonna be hungry by supper time.” He warned.
“We’ll live,” Aaron said and took a defiant bite.
The crowd around the tire changers stepped back and one of them grabbed the jack, it was time to move out. Daniel silently walked back to the car he rode in and the trio took their place in theirs. Mandy sat in the passenger’s seat, next to a woman who spent every hour of every drive talking about her life as if it hadn’t changed at all. Cody and Aaron sat on either side of a car seat containing an infant with an eternal case of diarrhea. None of them were sure who had it worse.
A three-hour drive brought the caravan to their next destination. They parked in the first cluster of homes and scattered to the houses, looking for any scraps of edible material left behind by the previous owners.
Cody’s shoe destroyed the window of a large brick house, and, after pulling it back onto his foot, he climbed inside. The first thing that he noticed about the interior was that it was barren. The family had probably sold their furniture in an attempt to keep themselves fed. Cody exited the room and found himself in a narrow hallway. The light in the room at the other end of it was turned on. In the other room Cody found a glossy wooden table, a potted plant sitting on an end table next to another window and a little girl who appeared to be asleep. Cody rushed over to her to try and wake her up, but found her skin cold and her limbs stiff. Judging by the complete lack of decomposition, she couldn’t have been dead more than just a few hours before they got there.
He let the surge of unidentified emotion die down before standing back up to check the rest of the house. The room with the girl had three doors leading away from it, one was open and it was too dark to see anything beyond. Cody opened the door closest to the hallway. The sound of something eating something else filled his ears and he fumbled for the light switch, hoping it was near. The light revealed a small brown and white dog snacking happily away on the parents of the girl. The mother was badly decomposed and had her entrails strewn across the sheets and on the floor beside the bed. The dog was busy with the muscles of the father’s upper forearm and only glanced at Cody.
“Hey, guy. You’re not gonna bite are you?” Cody asked the dog as he stepped closer to it, holding out his hand with the fingers splayed outward, careful to keep out of snapping distance. He had seen enough corpses to be more worried about the dog than the parents; when they had first joined the caravan they had been instructed to capture anything living and bring back anything fresh.
The dog stopped eating and looked up at Cody as if it hadn’t been eating its master. It licked its lips once and sat down on the bed, its tail began to wag. Cody attempted to pick it up, still wary that it might bite; it cooperated.
“Hey, I found a dog!” Cody called back at the broken window. Someone else who was just coming out of their house empty handed shouted back.
“Alive?”
“Yeah,” He called back and held the animal up to the window.
“Hold on!” The woman shouted back and leapt down from the window that she was halfway out of. She half-ran over and Cody handed the dog down to her.
“Wait here, there’s more.” He said and moved back from the window. The woman held the dog at her side and it looked around complacently until it heard a dragging sound from inside the room, at which point it began to bark. Cody put the girl’s feet through the window and heard the woman gasp before he felt her grab them. The dog barked at them on the lawn as they jointly lowered her and took her to the de-facto leader of the caravan for appraisal. Any corpses fresh enough were stored in a cooler reserved for human remains. The cooler was kept shut with duct tape until it was the only food left.
The leader of the group didn’t fit the archetype. He was a fairly thin, young man that often hesitated before telling anyone to do anything. His leadership hinged completely on the fact that he had been the owner of the first car during the caravan’s formation.
“Oh he’s a cute one isn’t he.” Nathan, the leader, said as he picked up the dog. He held it close to his face, which the dog began to lick.
“Um, what should we do with her?” Cody asked; him and the woman were still holding the girl.
Nathan sighed. “I’ll put her in the cooler. You should probably search the rest of that house.” Cody and the woman set the girl down on the grass and Cody turned back towards the house. He heard Nathan open his trunk and the plastic sound of the cooler hitting the pavement, followed by a metallic clank as the machete stored with it fell to the ground. He flinched at the window when the machete cut cleanly through the girl’s knee and buried itself partially in the soil beneath the grass.
Cody briefly considered telling them about the other corpses, but a second look at them told him better. The mother was by far too decomposed and the father looked non-to-fresh either. Besides, they wouldn’t be able to fit all of him in the cooler with his daughter, and it aggravated Cody to partially waste something; he was more comfortable letting it all spoil.
The open door led to a kitchen with the stove missing. There was a square mark on the wall where it used to be. Beyond the kitchen lay a door leading to a basement, a door leading to a pantry, and a door leading to the back yard. A quick glance in the latter two revealed them to be desolate. Cody went back to the third door in the room that the girl had been in and found an expansive bathroom. It seemed empty, only for the large amount of space in it, none of the furniture therein was removable. Sitting almost upright in the bathtub was a boy who was in an even worse condition than his mother. His eyelids were sunken and shriveled and his teeth were clearly visible. One of his arms was lying next to him in the tub and the other was wrapped loosely around his shriveled knees. He had obviously died before anyone else in the house and Cody couldn’t help but wonder what had gone on in the house.
A quick search of the medicine cabinet and the area underneath the sink turned up no edibles. Cody was about to leave when he noticed something behind the boy’s back. He gingerly pushed the corpse out of the way; it collapsed forward.
“Sorry kid,” Cody said, and grabbed the item that he had noticed. It was a small back of potato chips and a tiny container of orange juice carelessly taped together. A note of crayon on construction paper read “For Mommy” in a child’s careless handwriting. Cody looked from the note to the boy and the corpse turned its head to look at him. Cody jumped backwards in surprise before realizing that it was the weight of the body slowly turning the head as it pushed it forward. Fear induced adrenalin hastened his steps as he took the boy’s present to the window and leapt down from it. Nathan was putting the girl’s hand in the cooler and shutting it as he walked over to him.
“You alright?” The woman who had helped him with the girl’s body asked.
“Yeah,” Cody paused, “I found these,” he handed the chips and juice to Nathan, who looked at them absently before tearing off the tape, throwing the chips into a separate cooler and holding the juice out to Cody.
“You want this?” They had never had problems with a lack of drink. Cody shook his head; Nathan popped the top and downed it himself.
“I need a flashlight, there’s still a basement to check.” Cody said as Nathan threw the empty juice bottle aside.
“I’ll get it. We found someone’s stash over there, you should help.” Nathan said as he lifted the cooler containing the remnants of the girl back into the trunk of his car.
“Alright,” Cody said and walked over to the house with the most activity around it. It was a small house that looked like it only had a few rooms in it, the color of the paint reminded Cody of dirt. “How much is it?”
“Just some canned stuff. Enough to keep us fed for a few more days.” The woman at the end of the line passing the cans out replied. Cody had noticed her before and she wasn’t looking well.
“Need my help?”
“Yeah, take these over there.” She shoved a flimsy box full of cans into his arms and pointed at a brown car with the trunk open and containing several similar boxes. With one hand keeping the bottom of the box from giving out and the other keeping the box itself from toppling he did as he was told.
In total the cans took up the entirety of the first trunk and most of the remaining space in the back of a van that was already holding an odd assortment of scavenged food.
The crack of the dog’s neck finished off the day of work, and the thump of its limp body hitting the plastic inside of a cooler solidified this. After a dinner of some canned corn they had much more food than they had started out with that morning, it was a good day.
Jack sat in his home, just finishing a book he found to be particularly entertaining. The entire thing had been odd but the ending had just knocked his socks off. A dull snap as his hand clamped on the cover, quickly closing the book, and Jack reflected on the last sentence.
“Everything we did, meaningless.” He said under his breath, smiled and looked up at the ceiling. He had never been a very philosophical person but he this situation demanded thought of that sort. For there he sat, well fed, comfortable, and happy, while the rest of the world starved to death; they struggling for life while he contemplated death, even if only in passing. He didn’t think he would ever take his own life, no matter how bad things got, but that didn’t stop him from taking it under consideration. He just couldn’t think of what he would do with the rest of his life.
The book made a soft noise as it hit the couch and the floor creaked quietly under the carpet as Jack stood up. The soft clicking the heels of his shoes made on the linoleum area in front of the door signaled his departure from the apartment.
Outside, the bodies of the tenants littered the lawns. The leathered bodies of a child and it’s parents lay huddled together right next to the apartment door, several chunks and limbs were missing, likely the victims of cannibals. Jack took only as much notice of them as was required to step over them. He crossed the street, to a big house once owned by a paranoid Asian man. There was a safe room hidden a few feet from the front door of this house; that was Jack’s destination. For inside there was a store of dried or otherwise preserved food that was sure to last Jack at least another two weeks ate the rate he was consuming it. He made sure to re hide the entrance every time he left, in the hopes that no one would take anything from it. It had also contained a shotgun and two boxes of bullets, both of which were back at his apartment.
The door to his apartment opened, Jack stepped in and walked into the kitchen. A generous meal comprised of dried fruit and ramen noodles sat in Jack’s lap as he sat and stared at the wall. A television had once occupied the empty space, but vandals had claimed it while Jack was away several days ago. He hadn’t had any use for it, every channel he would have watched, including all the news broadcasts, had stopped on the morning it was taken. Still, however, he had been filled with an amorphous anger at the thought that someone had the gall to come into his home, snoop around like they owned the place, and then take his things. He knew that in the times he found himself he couldn’t really expect anyone to respect personal boundaries, but that didn’t stifle the anger at all.
Jack washed the bowl he had used for the noodles and put it into the cabinet above the sink. The thieves had also taken all of the dishes that they hadn’t broken; save for a single plastic bowl that had been filthy at the time and a fork that had somehow found it’s way underneath the couch.
Engines revved and Jack ran outside without thinking. The thought of seeing someone alive filled him with anticipation at the prospect of having some reason to leave all this behind. It pained him to stay in the same room day after day now that he didn’t have to work. His only solace was his trips to the library, where he couldn’t stay for long since someone might find the food stores, an event that would likely bring about his death.
Two men sat on motorcycles, one with a handgun in his belt that other sporting a baseball bat. They were already looking at him long before he got close. They, along with three riderless motorcycles were parked in front of the Asian’s house. One of the riders not seen before came out of the door holding some of the preserved food.
“Hey! Put that back!” Jack shouted at them as he ran. He got within about five feet of them when the parked man on the left pulled out a previously unseen, double-barreled shotgun and leveled to Jack’s face. He would likely have run into it and cut his lip or some minor injury like that had the trigger not been pulled. Just above the chin his head split into a V shape, thicker on the left side than the right. Flecks of bone and blood sprayed out several feet behind him and he hit the sidewalk with a wet thud, almost instantly covering the ground around him with a coat of blood. After loading up the rest of their prize, the men paid Jack’s cold corpse just as much attention as it took to kick him out of the way before driving off.
Simon stood near the back of a large gathering of people, all facing the same way. Some of them, like Simon, were there only for the promise of food, while others had come for the sermon. In the middle of a hastily constructed, wooden podium, a man with graying brown hair addressed the crowd. In one hand he held a beaten up, artificial leather bound bible and in the other he held the crowd.
Even those who didn’t believe paid attention to what he said, he could somehow tell who hadn’t and often awarded them less to eat. Those that did believe watched him with a starry fascination in their eyes, the look of people who knew something down to the very cores of their being, and just wanted to hear someone else say it.
The preacher had been prattling on for nearly an hour at this point, and the hot noon sun was causing everyone to sweat. Simon wondered why he held these things outside.
“And now, brothers and sisters, let us pray over this bounty we are about to receive.” His head bent low and everyone else’s followed. The light sunburn gave a small protest of pain as Simon’s neck stretched forward and down. “Lord bless this meal that we are about to receive-“ The prayer was drawn out repetitively for at least a minute; by the end of it Simon’s neck was burning. He let it return to a relaxed position with a small sigh of relief and tenderly put his similarly sunburnt hand on the spot. An alarming amount of heat rose from it.
“Here you go, God bless.” The preacher said as he handed the first person in the line his portion. He said the same thing, or some variant thereof, to everyone as he handed them out. The food he gave out were things most people had given up for lost, fresh fruit, cheese, milk, and perishables of the like. No one knew where he got them and no answers were given to questions asked.
Simon gladly received the apple and orange given to him and walked away from the rest of the group, tearing into the apple. Both fruits were gone by the time he made it home, and he was still famished. He drank cold water from his sink to fill up the rest of his stomach before immersing himself into cold water from his tub’s faucet to cool the sunburn. The power had gone out several days ago and he thanked the preacher’s god that he still had running water.
Andrew wouldn’t stop crying or asking where his sister was. He had been fine with her absence for the first few days, but now he missed her and was dead set on finding out where she was. Roberta wouldn’t have minded and had expected this, except she needed to make their dinner soon and she couldn’t even open the freezer while he was in the room.
“Mom! Where’s Alyssa?”
“She isn’t here!” Roberta said, distraught. She had come to accept what she had done to her daughter, but made a promise to herself that even if it killed her she wouldn’t do it to her son.
“But where is she?” He whined.
“She!” Roberta stopped herself; she was thinking up another lie but had almost let slip where she actually was. “She was taken by a very bad person.”
“Why?” Andrew asked through tears.
“I- I don’t know.”
“I miss her!” He cried, barley comprehensible through the tears.
“Oh, I know, honey,” She hugged him and he cried into her shoulder. She was crying soon enough as well.
The last of Alyssa ran out the next day and Roberta restarted the process of scouring the neighborhood for food. There was none last time she checked and there was none now. Two days passed and Andrew’s complaints shifted from missing his sister to how hungry he was. Another three days and the same feelings that resulted in her daughter’s death filled Roberta’s head. She thought about how good the flesh had smelled on the skillet when she looked at her son and all but slapped herself to stop that line of thought. Finally she, without any explanation to him, grabbed her son by the hand and dragged him out of the house. Someone else had to be in the town somewhere, someone who would stop her if she tried anything.
They walked throughout the towns empty streets, seeing nothing but corpses. Andrew kept asking where they were going and wouldn’t stop crying.
“Mom!”
“Shut up!” She yelled at him after struggling with trying to remain silent. She was going to say more, but his crying got worse and he refused resume walking. He was just sitting there on his knees letting his tears run down his cheeks without a hint of self-consciousness while she was trying to save his life. It was only when she thought about whom she was trying to save him from that she stopped trying to force him to move. She sat down beside him and let him cry. He stopped awhile later and sat silently for about thirty seconds.
“-o uhm?” He asked hoarsely.
“What?”
“Can we go home?” He asked. Roberta looked at the sun setting and said that they could. She reaffirmed the promise to herself that she wouldn’t hurt him.
As she lay, trying to sleep that night, her stomach kept her awake. Sleep finally came and she dreamed of killing and eating her son. She saw every detail with crystal clarity and felt unpleasant dream emotions that the English language can’t even begin to describe. She finally woke up, her arms were sore and her hands were stuck to the blankets with something. It had not been a dream; she peeled her blood soaked hands off the bedding and looked at them. The dark substance coating them was crusty and dry. A handgun she had kept in the drawer of the nightstand was slowly removed; the barrel touched her temple coldly.
Andrew woke in the night to the sound of a gunshot. He looked around the dark room trying to figure out what it was that had brought him out of his pleasant dreams. He looked around the dark room and imagined specters with skeletal facial features floating just beyond the realm of his sight. Waiting for him to move before springing into his world and carrying him off to wherever it was they had come from. They were so real in his mind that he could practically feel them. Fear at his own mental creations overtook him and leapt out of bed to run to his mom.
He stopped dead in his tracks when he made it to the hallway and looked into the living room. A trail of some dark material connected the door from his mom’s room to the open doorway leading outside. He followed it warily, completely forgetting about the mental ghosts. He made sure not to step on it, and soon saw the dog it had come from. It’s ribs stuck up from the bloodied lump of its body at odd angles; the tool used to destroy it, a shovel, lay beside it. The same dark material of the trail culminated about the form in a large, flecked circle.
“Mommy!” Andrew screamed shrilly and ran back to her door, not caring if he stepped in the blood. He tried the knob but it was locked from the inside. He beat on the door but no one answered. When he realized that there was no way he could get in, he ran back to his room, leapt in the bed and threw the covers over his head. His terrified sobs filled the room for several minutes until they gave way to the slow, steady breathing of sleep.
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Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2007 5:38 pm
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Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2007 7:58 pm
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Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2007 9:53 am
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Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2007 10:27 am
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Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2007 11:15 am
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Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2007 12:12 pm
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Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2007 1:53 pm
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Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 8:45 pm
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Chapter three... I'd like to take this opportunity to test a theory of mine. That theory being that people's ideas of what someone's physical characteristics should be is inherently linked to their personality. So, if anyone reading this would be so kind, would you mind posting your mental pictures of the characters that I have (probably deliberately) not put much into in the way of description? You don't have to do them all, I just want to see different people's mental images. It's interesting.
Chapter three
Retribution.
The last thing anyone had expected was for the next city the caravan visited to be populated. They weren’t, by any means, thriving, but the city still had life. Bone thin men women and children went about their daily lives as if there were nothing the matter. The lead car, the one Nathan drove, didn’t stop so neither did anyone else.
Aaron stared out his window at the people, very few of which stared back. A group of skeletal people wearing enormous looking clothes that had once fit them walked quickly past the cars as they stopped at a crosswalk. No one looked at anyone else, rather staring straight ahead or at the ground, maintaining the social order to the last.
A man whose cheekbones stuck out so far they looked to have been implanted stumbled and fell to the ground, the briefcase he had been carrying skittered across the sidewalk and was immediately picked up by someone else who ran off with it. It was hard to tell if he was still moving in the tent-like suit he wore but he still hadn’t stood back up by the time he passed out of view.
It took them a long time to make it through that city, the streets were still full of cars, but they finally made it out the other side on the same road and kept on their way.
Gore covered the usual religious gathering site in a shape that would vaguely resemble a triangle if seen aerially. With an axe in one hand a shotgun with spent shells in the other, Simon breathed heavily. Plan B had been smooth sailing. The majority had fled, of course, but that didn’t matter, all that mattered was that he had enough to last; three cadavers entire, and an arm. He didn’t know who’s.
Hair that, on this day, seemed a lighter shade than usual seemed to float above the shocked face of the pastor. He hadn’t fled and was looking from his bible to Simon, as if an answer could be found there. He had expected a general unpleasantness about his followers once they found out how low his food supply had run, but this outcome had eluded even his paranoid dreams. He watched silently as the dark barrel of the gun leveled with his face.
“Get down here!” Simon commanded. Adrenalin still poured through his system and he was sure that the pastor would hear a crack in his voice or notice his knees, which felt to be shaking badly. The patriarch of the short lived church complied, however, fear mounting in his eyes. It wasn’t the fear of god.
Giving as little warning as possible, Simon swung the axe into the other man, for he was just another man now, it severed the thick muscles connecting his shoulder to his neck and broke his collarbone with a sickeningly muffled crack. He wanted to end the screaming, but the implement was stuck fast, he might have been able to pull it out and swing again if the darkly robed other would just stop moving. Simon was going to let him die of blood loss, but the wound wasn’t letting out as much as he had expected and the preacher just wouldn’t shut up about it. Eventually the butt of the rifle finally ended the man, though more to Simon’s mercy or the pastor’s remains to be seen.
He dislodged the axe with some effort; it came free with a wet pulling noise and exposed half of his broken collarbone as it did so. The bodies, the arm, and the weapon went into the same flatbed pickup truck that the preacher had driven up in. The keys were nowhere to be found; still all fell into place for plan B. His cousin, sixteen at the time, had taught Simon how to hotwire cars, older ones at least, when he was eight. The pickup seemed ancient, there were no features designed to stop the procedure.
The rattling pickup pulled in front of some nameless, generic convenience store and Simon almost seemed to hop out onto the pavement, he left the engine running. Roach motels and rattraps were on the top of his shopping list, followed closely by flypaper, and bottled vitamins. A quick search turned up everything he needed, a little while longer and he had collected the secondary items, things he could sacrifice if any parts of plan B warranted it. Everything went into an old handheld shopping basket, the kind no one used any more, and he deftly dropped it into the back of the pickup, not really caring where it landed. Everything was plastic wrapped and sealed shut anyway. He got back into the pickup, started to back out into the street and a thought occurred to him. What if the river wasn’t as clean as he remembered? It might give him the shits or something. The bake came down, and he ran back inside. Even after killing four people and maiming one, the only thing worrying him right now was unconsidered variables.
He didn’t know what sort of medicine he might need once he was out there, so he shoved all of it in the store into another handheld basket and put that one next to the one he already had.
“Hey, Guy!” Someone shouted. Simon looked quickly in that direction, dropping the medicine. Luck never seemed to stay on his side for long. “Take me with you, guy.” The man said. He seemed distraught.
“Uh,” Simon said, mental weigh-ins of the circumstances ran through his head.
“Some crazy ******** at the handout…shot up the place. Take me with you, man.” His eyes darted from Simon to the idling pickup.
“Sure, Just let me make some room in the cab.” Realization had dawned on Simon around halfway through the man’s terrified speech.
“Oh thanks guy. You’re an alright dude, you kn- ah man C’mon!” The barrel of the secretly empty gun was pointed right at the stranger. “Can’t I get a ******** break today?” He whined.
“Just help me with something in the back here and I’ll let you go,” Simon lied.
The other guy didn’t answer, only looked down the street. Simon saw him look.
“Try it-“ Simon had meant to embellish the details of exactly where he would shoot him if he ran, had he had shells of course. However, what he already said seemed to stand just fine by itself. He was trying to remember how far back the axe had landed as he walked around to the back, keeping the gun on his newest victim.
“******** town’s full of crazies,” The stranger remarked to himself as
he slowly sidestepped towards the back of the pickup. Simon remarked at how amazing it was he hadn’t realized who he was yet. His mind’s eye found the memory of the axe’s landing and he figured it would be within easy reach once he got back far enough.
The stranger turned to run, he was fast. Simon, without thinking, gave chase. It didn’t last long. The butt of the gun collided with the back of the newcomer’s head; he fell to the ground clutching it. Simon commenced to ram the gun into his head, over and over again. His hands kept getting in the way, so it took longer than it otherwise would have. Drawing it back further than before, Simon slammed it down on the man’s hand the fingers broke audibly. The screams were starting to hurt his ears and he wished he would just go easily. The man’s skull began to concave and shards of bone started poking through the skin, yet he just wouldn’t die.
It couldn’t have taken thirty seconds for the entire struggle up to that point, but to Simon it felt like an eternity. That damned screaming was driving him crazy. Giving up on ramming the butt into his head, he started swinging the gun like a bat. He was letting his anger get the better of him and he missed often. The wood splintered against the cement and Simon began to stab. How could this person still be alive? The side of his head facing the sky was bloodied meat and all the bones from his shoulder up had to have been broken. Even being stabbed he wouldn’t stop screaming. It just got louder and wet with blood. The sound made Simon want to kill something, which fit the situation perfectly.
“SHUT THE ******** UP!” Simon screamed hoarsely at the man. His voice cracked throughout. He kicked him hard in the stomach and he turned over onto his back, showing just how misshapen his head had become. Simon screamed unintelligibly as he fell on the man. One knee pressed into his stomach and both hands gripped the gun barrel. He slammed it sideways into the bloodied face three times before pressing it into his throat and putting all of his weight on it. His own screams of anger and frustration were the only ones sounding through the empty parking lot as his victim’s windpipe collapsed. “I SAID SHUT THE ******** UP DIDN’T I?” Simon shouted as the man’s eyes rolled back into his head and his struggles to break free weakened. His life finally left him and Simon rolled over on the pavement, letting the ruined gun clatter to the ground next to him. He sighed almost silently to himself and heard the pickup’s engine quit. Plan B had it’s first, if not minor, setback.
Several minutes later, the axe was moved to the front seat to replace the useless shotgun, the medicine was in the back of the pickup, along with the new body, and the old truck was running again. Simon’s spirits had been dampened considerably by his encounter in the parking lot, but he was determined not to let that man’s stubbornness ruin his day.
The hardware store was Simon’s next stop, with only the ghost of a smile on his face he pulled in front of it. The blood was starting to dry and his shirt and the smell of it made him want to gag. He added another stop into his plan.
Nails, a bucket, a few planks of wood, and an odd assortment of tools that didn’t really fit anywhere in the plan but could be useful anyway came out of the store with him and he threw them into the back with little concern for where they landed. Just as he was getting into the truck a devastating thought occurred to him.
“How do I attach them to the road?” He quietly voiced the thought as he began to ponder it. After a few moments an answer came and he walked quickly back inside the store. He was hefting two huge bags of cement mix when he came back out. He put these in the front, on the floor of the passenger’s side.
On the way to what would have been his third stop, he stopped at a clothing shop and took anything he could find even remotely in his size with him. He felt as if he had to be quick about anything unplanned.
Guns, they were the last part of the plan. Not a lot of them, just a few. What he needed a lot of was ammunition. A smile spread across his face as he walked into the local gun store; someone had raided it already and emptied an entire display case of weapons. The shelf with all the ammunition on it looked virtually untouched, however. Lady luck seemed to be up for one last dance.
Forty minutes later the truck, rattling badly on the unpaved road, pulled in front of an abandoned house, about a hundred yards from a small river. It had two stories and a coat of white paint that had been peeling since he was a child. The windows and doors were long gone, and various animals typically labeled as pests were sure to be found in heavy numbers.
Later in the evening, Simon prepared a meal to the best of his ability from the arm, saving the whole bodies for a while. Part of his plan had been to find a propane grill, but he had forgotten and he had to make a fire from scratch. Fine by him, as long as he wasn’t going to starve just yet. The cement was drying, over the boards on the road, freshly bent nails angled up in both directions across both lanes. Simon made a mental not to at least try and hide the formation at some point, though for now it would serve to stop anyone whether they saw it in time or not.
He slept outside that night, preferring to let the current inhabitants of the house go undisturbed until he needed them.
Andrew sat on the curb and cried. His tears weren’t that of sadness but fear. He could feel the dog behind him in the yard, and his mom still wouldn’t unlock her door. With not even the beginnings of an idea of what he should do now, he just let the tears flow. Ten minutes later, he had already stopped crying, he got up and looked back at the dog. In the light it didn’t look so bad; not like some storybook monster any more, just a badly beaten, dead dog. The thought to bury it occurred to him.
Once he got close enough to pick up the shovel, the dog did indeed look bad. It was evident that whoever had beaten it hadn’t used the flat of the shovel to do it. The worst part by far, however, was how empty it looked. As if someone had been squatting over it plucking out organs and lumps of flesh at random. It, very vaguely, resembled an empty teddy bear that has been turned partially inside out. The smell of its blood was strong and he abandoned the idea of burying it in favor of going back to the curb. He felt like throwing up but his stomach was empty, which compounded the feeling.
He had sat for roughly ten seconds when a car came into view, followed by another, until the entire street was filled with them. Andrew stood up quickly, wondering what was going on. The nearest door to him opened, a smiling woman with pulled back black hair was behind it. She got out and walked over to him, a mix of happiness and concern painted her face as she kneeled down to meet him at eye level.
“Where’d you come from?” She asked. He pointed at the house across the yard and watched as the rest of the people started getting out of their cars. The situation he was in suddenly came back into his mind.
“My mom won’t unlock the door,” He said.
“Well I guess we’d better have a talk with her, huh?” The woman said after a brief pause. She began to stand up.
“She doesn’t answer.” He said with more than a hint of sadness in his voice.
The woman considered for a moment before answering. “You stay here, I’ll go check on her.” The woman said and stood up. He started walking after her. “Stay there,”
“I’m scared,” He answered, he didn’t like being around so many strangers without his mom.
“It’ll be fine,” The woman said and walked into the house, sparing the deceased animal on the walk a quizzical glance.
Andrew waited for the woman and his mom to come out as he looked around at the people. The attention of roughly half of them seemed to be focused on him and it was making him increasingly uncomfortable. He heard the sound of wood splintering from inside the house.
“Mom?!” He called and started for the doorway. The hand of one of the strangers closed around his upper arm and held him back. The one grabbing him offered no explanation as he struggled against them.
The woman came back out, but his mom didn’t. The person holding him let go and he ran to the woman, wanting to know where his mom is. She caught him to stop him from going into the house, though he hadn’t intended too just yet.
“Where is she?” He asked.
“She’s uh-“ The woman started to think of an excuse.
Andrew began to struggle against her hold. The door was open now and he wanted to see his mom.
“She can’t come with us.” The woman told him, He wasn’t listening.
“Mommy!” He kicked at and tried to hit the woman, but her hold on his arms was too firm.
“She can’t go with us,” The woman repeated more urgently.
Andrew just kept repeating various versions of the word mother as they pulled him further and further from his goal of the door. Once they had him what they judged was a sufficient distance from the house, the woman put him down and tried to calm him. He cried almost continuously but made no more attempts to get back to the house.
The rest of the group fanned out to the houses in the neighborhood, his included. By the time they finished he had stopped crying and willingly got into the back seat of a smelly car. Two older boys sat at his sides and they drove around the remainder of the town repeating the routine. He looked down at his feet and didn’t talk to anyone for the first half of the day. Around lunchtime, however, he temporarily forgot all about his mom when he was given food. Once he was finished with his helping he asked for more, being as polite about it as he could, but his request was refused. The explanation given was about rations, a word he didn’t know. He pleaded, his stomach felt even emptier after the meal, but they were unyielding.
“Give it up, kid.” One of the older boys said around a mouthful of food. “No one gets seconds.”
“But I’m hungry!” Andrew drew out the word hungry into a whine. The boy gave a barley visible shrug and went back to his plate. Andrew was on the verge of throwing a tantrum when the other of the two older boys called him over.
“Here,” He said and handed him his plate, which had about a dozen juice soaked beans it. “Just don’t expect any more.”
Andrew finished the contents of the second boy’s plate just as the first one got up, leaving his own paper plate and plastic spork on the ground. Andrew looked at them and dropped his own, half expecting someone to tell him to pick it up. No one did.
After lunch the group continued to look through houses, Andrew stayed in one of the cars with one of the doors open. No one asked him to help.
That night they slept in a local hotel. None of the doors would close just right after they had been beaten open, but Andrew was fine with that. It meant some of the moonlight in the trashed hallways got into the room he was sleeping in. In the bed with him was the woman he had first seen at his house. It reminded him of his mom and he was crying silently again as he fell asleep.
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Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 9:03 pm
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Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 9:35 am
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Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 10:47 am
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