Piercing the Darkness: A Charity Horror Anthology for the Children's Literacy Initiative Page 11
And then my husband stepped out of the shadows—whole and beautiful—alive, taking Lila’s arm as she pulled the trigger. Nando screamed, high-pitched and terrifying, his blood exploding from his chest. That’s when I closed my eyes and jumped.
I shrieked as I sailed downward, realizing I might die, and then my hip, and already bruised shoulder, slammed against the ground. I looked up and Marko was standing over me, eyes cold, and a wicked smile curling on his lips. I wanted to ask him who really got killed on the night of the gas station robbery—who did Mama Lila really bury in that secluded grave? He pointed his old Magnum at me, shook his head, and then slipped the gun in his belt. Maybe he had pity on me, or maybe he thought I was already as good as dead.
I heard his boots sloshing through water when he left my side, the Escort speeding away and its brakes screeching when it turned down the drive.
I closed my eyes and darkness shrouded me. I’m not sure how long I’d lain there in the pouring rain, but I’d only broken a leg and sprained my shoulder; and there were worse things to deal with, because I lost everything that night—the love of my life, my double-crossing brother, and the loot I’d worked so hard to accumulate.
The rain hasn’t stopped since that day, and every now and then I see a vision—like a flash of lightning—like a dream in Marko’s looking glass. Spiked whiskey and wine and a gypsy curse are a potent blend. Mama Lila’s grift got me good.
— | — | —
HUSBAND OF KELLIE
T. T. ZUMA
A solitary figure, that of a frail young woman, stood with her head bent low in the snows of an old New Hampshire cornfield. Her exposed hands were sepia tinted and numb, and they trembled from a combination of the biting north winds and the weight of the cold steel resting in her arms. With glassy eyes, she once again read the inscription hastily painted onto the weathered oak board before her.
CRAIG COOK
HUSBAND OF KELLIE
1975 - 2013
The woman shuddered. Memories, blunt as rusty ice picks, punched themselves into her thoughts.
Her husband, smiling as he walked out the door, telling her not to worry, that with the new government protocols enacted to fight the epidemic, he was guaranteed to come home to her safely. Then hours later, when embracing him at their front door, she realized his return was due to instinct, and not any promises he had made her.
A motion below her feet pulled her back into the present. She blinked softly and focused on the ground. It was barely perceptible at first, but yes, there it was. The snow was breathing.
She took a cautionary step backward and paused. Even though it was expected, when the ground in front of her erupted, she screamed.
Two fists thrust up through the ground like twin volcanoes, creating a scattershot of debris that turned the surrounding snow black.
The young woman stood her ground and watched the resurrection in despair as a set of arms followed the fists. Moments later a head followed. Then, the rest of her husband rose up from his grave.
He stood before her, his eyes locked onto hers.
The young woman stared back. She was seeking recognition, but all she found in his eyes were hunger. She braced herself and then weakly raised the shotgun that had been nestled in her frozen hands. As the woman aimed, her arms trembled, and her thoughts once more flashed back to her husband’s explanation of the new protocols.
He spoke casually, telling her that the virus had mutated, that reanimation of the recent dead wasn’t instantaneous anymore. That it was now delayed for 36 hours. For those that lived outside the cities, the dead bodies were to be buried in a shallow grave without a coffin. He told her that it was plenty of time to bury the dead and then terminate reanimation. Then, he added somberly, that after the 36 hours had passed, someone from the Government or a relative must be present to insure termination. He assured her that the plague of walking dead would soon be over. Kellie saw herself nodding her head in agreement with him as he walked out the door wondering aloud how a family member could cope with doing something so hideous to someone they loved.
The young woman’s thoughts were chased away when she heard grunting. Concentrating on the sound, she was momentarily startled when she realized that he was calling her name.
Her husband began to shuffle awkwardly towards her with his arms outstretched, his eyes wide, and his mouth opened impossibly wide.
Kellie pulled the trigger.
With tears flowing, she lowered the shotgun and mouthed the words, “I love you, Craig.”
Then, Kellie turned slowly to face the east entrance of the cornfield. Gazing toward a large ash tree at the perimeter, she began to speak once more, “And I love you too, Da…”
A second shot echoed through the graveyard, penetrating Kellie’s heart and exiting through her back. Streaks of red accented the black and white palette of the gravesite. Kellie’s body slipped slowly to the ground as if she were a blanket covering and comforting her husband.
A man, middle-aged and dressed in hunters’ orange, lowered his high-powered rifle and leaned it against the ash tree. His shoulders sunk low to the ground and his chest tightened as he struggled to control the sobs racking his body.
Grabbing the tip of the rifle barrel and then dragging it along behind him, the man walked to his pickup truck, parked twenty feet farther down the road. The snow parted in whispers as he forced his boots ahead of him, the butt of his rifle leaving its own wake. Upon reaching the truck, he placed the rifle into the rack in the back seat and then picked up a shovel out of the bed.
Walking toward the gravesite, he remembered the phone call from his daughter three days ago.
Kellie had told him how Craig had come home early from an errand, bloodied, bitten, and incoherent. She didn’t think twice about attending to his wounds and risking infection. When it was apparent that he would soon die, she had kissed her husband one last time before he passed. Only after Craig had drawn his last breath did she call him, and then only to ask if he would finish this for her. Kellie spoke of her mother, about how much she loved her, and how she didn’t think her mother would understand what needed to be done.
As the man approached his daughter’s body, only one question now occupied his thoughts: How would he tell his wife what he had done?
How, she would ask, how could a father do something so terrible to his own daughter?
And then he wondered what his wife would say to him when he told her he would have to do it all over again, only 36 hours from now.
— | — | —
OBEDIENT FLIES
GREG F. GIFUNE
It was the blood that caught her attention. Sizzling and popping, melding to the fry pan as wafts of thick smoke billowed up, only to be sucked away by a fan over the back burners. Whatever remnants of life it had once sustained, now trapped in that smoke; filtered through the twirling blades before being released back into the open air outside her apartment. Dust to dust, born of nature only to be returned to it in a bizarre ritualistic manner. She poked at the slab of meat with a spatula. The heat was too high, the steak had already burned, and the blood—juice she had been taught to call it as a young girl—had all but evaporated.
With a frown she switched off the stove and dumped the entire pan into the adjacent sink, watching it spit and spatter like a still living thing until most of the smoke had gone. The smell—so distinctive and primitive—conjured feelings of prehistoric impulse, and she imagined life on an open plain, clad in furs and bones, huddled in caves amidst the tortured screams of nature, interrupted, reborn, mutated by the sudden emergence of Man. A disease, she thought, a destroyer…an arrogant corrupter of beauty and natural order.
From a duffel bag on the kitchen table she removed her camera, focused on the contents of the sink and fired off several clicks, photographing it from numerous angles. Inhaling the pungent aroma of charred flesh, she felt at one with her newest piece of art and allowed a slight smile to purse her lips. The losers at the ad age
ncies she’d once freelanced for had never understood—couldn’t even begin to comprehend—this work that was so dear to her.
Commercial photography had paid the bills, as insipid as it was, but had also allowed her to spend free time focusing on the artistic expression her camera allowed. As much a physical extension of herself as a painter’s brush, for Lydia, the camera was her tool, her eyes, her witness to the world in which she moved and lived and would eventually die. It was her soul, really, the prism through which a piece of her would live forever, if only within the pages of an ignored and insignificant portfolio few would ever see.
She put the camera away, ran cold water over the pan then dumped the meat into a tall wastebasket beneath the sink. It had never been her intention to eat it.
Before she’d stopped taking work, before Devon had moved in, before he’d gotten sick, Lydia would have spent the evening at The Spine, camera in one hand, a drink in the other. A club a few blocks from her apartment where local rock and roll wannabes played, often sharing the stage with self-appointed poets who smoked clove cigarettes and recited embarrassingly pretentious white-angst verse, it had provided her with a relatively safe place to hide and burn away the hours. But those days were over now. Life had changed, and frivolous diversions were no longer an option.
Devon was dying; they both knew it.
Dragging the camera along, she moved from the kitchen into the den, ignoring the windows fogged with condensation and the light snow swirling about, tripping through the beams of streetlights and draping the city in white. Transformation no longer held the fascination for her it once had. She leaned against the foot of the threadbare couch, focused on Devon and snapped off a few shots.
He smiled up at her, swaddled in moth-nibbled blankets, his head propped against two pillows stained with sweat. “Hey,” he said, his voice reduced to a raspy gurgle, always on the verge of erupting into the hacking cough they had both grown accustomed to. “Is it still snowing?”
Lydia nodded. “Didn’t think you’d care.”
He blinked some perspiration from his eyes and shifted his position a bit, downplaying the pain with a muffled grunt. “Wish we could go for a walk. I always loved walking in the snow.”
“Shameless romantic.”
“Yes,” he answered quietly, swallowing with difficulty.
Lydia put the camera down on a coffee table and sat on the arm of the couch. “It’s bad again, Dev. I’m going to have to pick up some work or they’re going to start shutting things off. They already disconnected the cable and the gas.”
Eyes wet, he looked away. His sunken features bathed in sweat, body wracked with uncontrollable bouts of shivers, convulsive coughing fits, and the terrible flesh wounds no longer wielded the power over her they had initially. Like all else around her, Devon was becoming art, teetering between reality and the subjective—something his weary expression signaled he had accepted somewhere along the line as well. “I’ll be dead soon,” he told her.
“I know.”
“Just another series in your portfolio.”
“Yes.”
He forced another smile. “I’m honored.”
Lydia remembered the first time she’d seen him. A gay club she frequented, a place where a woman could go and dance and observe without having to worry about anyone trying to pick her up. Visions of a strong and healthy Devon dancing atop a small platform near one of the bars in a turquoise g-string, his wiry body, tight and strong from hours of swimming at the nearby YMCA gyrating in time to the music. She remembered their first drink together, how she’d asked if she could photograph him, and how he’d giggled and blushed like a flattered school kid. Not at all what she’d expected from a man who earned his living shaking his ass.
“If you helped me,” he said, “I could go to the park.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“They’d find me in the morning. Covered in snow, peaceful. Then you’d be free of me. You could get on with your life.”
Lydia glared at him. “Don’t be an idiot, Dev.”
“I’ve heard freezing to death isn’t that bad. Only at first—that’s what they say—but then supposedly you get all warm and drowsy, and it’s just like drifting off to sleep.”
“Shhh.”
“You could photograph it,” he offered. “Think of it from that angle. The imagery, the—”
“Just rest now, you—”
“Besides, if they shut the heat off we’ll both freeze to death anyway.”
They realized Devon needed to be in a hospital, but it would only be a temporary solution, an impersonal and sterile rest stop, and Lydia couldn’t bring herself to do it. Deep down that wasn’t what Devon wanted either. Not really. Not anymore.
“Pain...” An exhaling rush masked as fragile laughter broke free of him.
Lydia gave an understanding nod. Even now, slowly fading away, it was not physical pain he was referring to, rather something more. The pain born of death, separation, longing, love and hate, that often-elusive feeling that the soul had been torn from the body and there wasn’t a goddamn thing that could be done to prevent it. Somewhere on the way to Heaven even Jesus had stumbled. Three times, the Bible said. A man—a human being—bearing the internal pain of a world gone mad in order to transcend it, to become something better, something pure and good. The crown of thorns, the bloodied and devastated palms and feet, the punctured side—all of it as real as anything else, yet still black window dressing—a simplified visual even a child could comprehend. But His agony—like theirs—had been something far more profound, with greater depth and meaning than what could be experienced merely through the flesh. Lydia’s camera—the things it recorded—had never been intended absolutes, only gateways, like the allure of the ocean’s surface, tempting the beholder to explore it further, to venture beyond it, to see what may or may not lie beneath its simplistic exterior.
She looked at the empty audio rack where the stereo had resided until a few weeks prior, when she’d loaded it in her arms and carried it to the pawnshop on the corner. It had afforded them another month with heat, a few rolls of film, and a bit of food. Now silence ruled, interrupted only by the sounds of her clicking shutter, small talk, and Devon’s illness.
By the time she’d turned back to ask him if he needed anything, he’d fallen asleep.
In the ten years since she’d fled Potter’s Cove with four years worth of waitressing tips, a bag of clothes, the beginnings of a portfolio, and her camera, for what she perceived as the ambiguous safety of the metropolis, there had been other brief relationships but nothing of value. A small town girl who had embraced the city, Lydia soon learned that the city did not embrace one back. It existed instead as a living entity with its own needs and desires, its own will, its own wrath.
A welcome isolation followed, along with a sense of freedom she had not enjoyed in some time. Freedom to resume her portfolio, to pursue her art, her passion without the false hope and fleeting promises of perpetual strangers masked as friends or lovers occupying space and ripping away chunks of her she only realized were missing once they’d gone. Expending the energy to reconstruct herself from scraps like some urban scarecrow was pointless. Open wounds and bleeding hearts healed, but only to a point. That was, after all, what scars were for.
And then she found Devon, with his small but sinewy frame, shock of spiked, bleached blond hair and the greenest eyes she’d ever seen. They sat together in the center of her living room floor on throw pillows, surrounded by candles while a James Taylor CD played softly from the stereo speakers. They had left the club together just after closing, stopped at an all-night Chinese dive for noodles then settled at Lydia’s apartment. Devon had a few joints, and together with a bottle of cheap wine they got hammered there on the floor, talking about everything and anything, sometimes laughing, sometimes teetering on the verge of tears.
Lydia had photographed him that night; occasionally snapping a shot here or there as the night wore on and gr
adually became morning. Like Lydia, he had left home early and abruptly, already aware of his need to escape the restrictive confines of small town life. But for Devon, with little education and no job skills, he had turned to hustling, then dancing, then a combination of the two. Yet he still maintained a child-like demeanor—innocence almost—from the way his eyes blinked to his quiet laugh to his soft voice and unconscious mannerisms. He’d also been fascinated with her photography. It made most people uncomfortable, her constant need to lug the camera around, but Devon had thought it enchanting from the start, and so she opened up to him and discussed things she had never spoken about with anyone.
The decision for him to move in had been an easy one. He’d been staying with an older man, a regular patron of the club who had taken him in, but Devon had grown tired of the tradeoff and welcomed the chance to live with someone who wanted nothing more from him than loyalty and genuine friendship.
Once exposed and drawn deeper into the true essence of Lydia’s art, he’d asked, “How did it start? Where did it all begin?”
And it was then that she did something she never dreamed she could.
She showed him the portfolio.
Lydia slammed shut the door on those memories and found herself back in the present, moving toward her bedroom. She went to the closet, and from a shelf retrieved the lock box containing her portfolio. Once on the bed, she unlocked it with a key she wore around her neck on a delicate chain, flipped open the lid and stared down at the leather bound photo album.
There was no need to open it just yet. Arranged in chronological order, she knew each piece it contained by heart, down to the minutest detail. The early entries were Polaroid pictures she had taken with an instant camera, a gift from an out-of-town aunt she seldom saw but received gifts and cards from on holidays. A present for her thirteenth birthday, Lydia had at first been disinterested in the gift, but over time, experimenting now and then, she soon began to understand its potential.