Dead Things (18 page)

Something in the dark answers him. Glass breaks in the gloom. It reverberates against the dark walls, masking the location. Van senses it is close.

**

Jolene Heston was never curious in life. She never sought to enrich herself by opening a book, nor had she sought education. She went to college simply to earn her “MRS,” and she did so when she married an M.D. Learning was a chore, and knowledge a bore. Independent thought held no joy.

She was content to drift, blown by the whims of her husband and peers. Truly a zombie in life…making it all the more surprising that she discovered the rotted cellar doors buried beneath the rubble of the back porch.

Miraculously, she had broken away from the attack. There were two creatures, drawn out of the woods, probably by the kids, their loud clothes and their loud conversation. She had told her husband that those kids would be the death of them.

They attacked from the right of the path. First the female, dark and wiry. She came from behind a tree, attacking Dr. Heston as he talked to his wife. Jolene saw it coming. She tried to warn him, but her words froze in her throat. He saw the panic in her face, turning just in time to present his throat to its gaping jaws. He squeezed his wife’s hand for the last time.

The second creature followed the first closely. He was taller, somewhat less sinewy. The first’s husband, Jolene thought. So much for “until death do we part.”

She turned to run. It caught her by the hair, biting deep into her shoulder. She pulled free. She escaped…but not with her life. The bite was massive. She cried herself to her death, cradled in a bow of a tree watching her husband being savaged below. She “turned” with a jolt, her once tan body seizing, the throws of a grand mal. It shook her from her roost, and she soon began the short journey to the house.

Something in the recesses of Jolene Heston’s mind drove her to the rear of the house, something less than primal instinct but more than just a buried memory. Something out of habit, something familiar, like the search for a soothing swim or a pina colada at the patio bar, may be even a quickie in the shed with their 20-year old gardener, Juan. But she found neither a poolside lounge nor a boy to shag, and instead she crawled beneath the fallen porch.

Her lithe body slipped easily between the timbers, and she chewed and clawed her way through the decayed cellar doors like an anxious grub.

Ms. Heston’s hunger was insatiable.

The shelves were full of canned goods…apples, pears, and various preserves. These, though, were not to her liking. She wanted something more, something indescribable. Frustrated, she angrily attacked the jars. As she prepared to destroy a jar of beans, she heard footsteps from above. Cradling the preserves under her arm, she followed the footfalls until the heavens had revealed their bounty.

Chomping on Jessica’s kicking legs was difficult, yet proved to be worth the challenge. Like a giant lamprey, she fervently filled her mouth with great chunks of flesh. Yet as quickly as the legs had appeared, they were gone.

But Jolene does not long despair. Manna has fallen from the sky yet again.

She lurks just ten feet from Van. She is ravenous.

Wright does not need to examine the wounds. She knows exactly what happened to Jessica. She orders Van to stay in the center of the circle of light.

Van reads between the lines. He knows he’s not alone. “I don’t want to be down here anymore!” he calls. He twists about in vain, attempting to find the would-be assailant.

What-Was-Jolene pounces on him from the shadows, driving her nails into his back and shoulders. She is draped on him, angling for a bite, angling for his precious jugular.

Van screams, whirling like a dervish. The centrifugal force catches the thing off guard, and Jolene loses her grasp, biting at air. Van stumbles, lumbering in a clumsy circle. The monster’s grasp tightens again. It burbles into his ear. He punches upward with a flat hand, the heel connecting sharply with the creature’s chin. Jolene’s mouth hammers shut with an alligator snap. She struggles, but his hand holds her head in place just inches above his own. She rakes his cheeks with polished nails.

Van stares upwards, his frightened eyes making contact with Wright’s. They plead for help as he holds the creature above him like a sacrifice.

This time she strikes home. Jolene’s head pops backwards, her skull caving as the slug slams her frontal lobe. The bullet pancakes and shatters, bits of steel driving through the monster’s cerebellum, its medulla. The shrapnel spreads and shreds the grey matter, liquefying axons, dendrites, and filling synapses with debris. The shards burst forth from the rear of her head, stirring brain matter in their wake. Chunks of skull and everything that allowed Jolene to ever love, reason, laugh, and, ultimately, cannibalize, sputter forth, raining with a heavy splat.

The talons that ripped at Van go limp. Jolene slips from his back with a thud. Van falls to his knees, looks over his shoulder at the carnage behind him.

Wright is worried about contagion. “Van,” she implores, “don’t touch that stuff!”

Blood and black rot cover the floor, the shelves, and, essentially, everything Van can see. He looks at her incredulously. “Are you fucking kidding me? What makes you think I’d want to?”

Burt watches everything unfold from his balcony-like seat. Despite Jessica’s whimpering, Kari’s barked orders, Van’s calls below, and his own retching, he cannot drown out a voice in his head. It nags him, repeating a mantra, over and over.

Chapter Sixteen: Everyday is Halloween

Van is not badly hurt. Jessica is. Yet, by the way he carries on, and the manner in which she doesn’t, one would assume the opposite to be true.

Jolene missed Jessica’s artery. She will not bleed to death. That’s the only good news. But she cannot walk. She already has a fever.

Anne sits by Jessica’s side in the bedroom upstairs reading Harry Potter to her, and wiping her brow. The others stew, waiting to hear Wright’s plan.

But Wright does not have one. She sits alone, debating alternatives, shunning their attention, even Ian’s.

A discouraged Burt stands at the open window of the master bedroom. He needs fresh air, but there is little of that. He watches the creatures below him. Twenty or so mill about now, their focus alternating between him and Ian, who stands at his side.

That is, except one.

Its eye sockets are vacant ragged holes, and it blindly bumps and claws at its peers. The smell of the living drives it mad, as it meanders about in circles.

“It’s like Goddamn Halloween out there,” Burt mutters.

They hear Burt’s voice, and it agitates them. The blind one brushes against one of its brethren. It lunges. Its nails take hold of the other’s shoulder and forehead, and its head cocks like a serpent ready to strike. Its thin lips pull back to expose a crater of broken teeth. Its empty eyes seem to stare at Ian for half a second before…it propels it skeletal head forward, slamming its jaws into the sunken flesh. Although sightless, it works quickly, tearing away at the nape of the neck.

Before its victim can register the attack, it strikes again. This time the blow is slower, less ferocious, but it still manages to sever the creature’s dried jugular. The blind attacker quickly looses itself, sliding off its ancient victim’s back.

“Son of a bitch,” Burt murmurs, the blind demon spitting chunks of dead flesh. “Must not be to its liking.”

Ian nods to the pasture outside the window. He’s open to a conversation, so he bridges the divide. “How’s this like Halloween?”

Burt raises an eyebrow. Slowly he pieces together the question’s import. “Not like Halloween now. Now we give reverence to saints. It reminds me of Halloween
before
.”

Before. Then. Used to. Previously. All temporal expressions describing another time, life before the dead walked. The terms no longer require context. Descriptions of antecedent events, almost universally, are assumed to have occurred before the New Order, unless further clarification is provided. Like “before lunch,” “prior to church,” etcetera. Ease-of-use may have driven the simplification, but Burt suspects something else. He suspects that fear played a significant role. It’s as though the mere utterance of that period, of that time when things were right, might doom the speaker to fate worse than death…

It was the Druids who first started celebrating something akin to Halloween. They celebrated with feasts to honor the dead. Samhain, they called it. It signified the end of summer, marked the beginning of the Celtic New Year. The Romans had a version themselves, called Feralia.

Pope Boniface IV supplanted the pagan holidays, creating a Christian alternative. All Hallows’ Eve or Hallow E’en. Halloween was celebrated to honor the saints in heaven.

But the Christian holiday took hold in name only. Rather than burying Druidic traditions, components were cherry picked and incorporated. For instance: the Celts believed the dead returned to roam the streets at night during Samhain. Peasants dressed as ghouls to conceal their identities from these evil souls. Gifts and treats were left to pacify the spirits. Perhaps they would bless the givers with bountiful crops during the next harvest. Trick-or-treating evolved from there.

“On Halloween, we used to dress like that, like demons and devils and stuff,” Burt says. “We didn’t have monsters, none in the literal sense, anyway.”

So, it was a continuation of tradition?

Burt nods. He recalls the Halloween of his youth. It was the only time of the year kids could embrace death and those dark things they didn’t fully understand. “For some reason, it was a kick to be scared for just one day each year. We got a thrill out of it.”

Ghost stories, haunted houses, monster and slasher films. A whole industry was born to feed, and capitalize on, the evolutionary need for a good scare. Human evolution was shaped by horror. Our ancestors lived in constant fear: predators, war, and disease. Civilization mitigated these horrors.

But the human body was still wired for fear, wired to be in a state of constant danger. When human beings first conceptualized themselves as something more than take-out for prehistoric cats, canines, and bears, a biological void was created. And mankind sought to fill that void artificially, the spectacle of Halloween being a method. In the 21
^st
century, we still needed an adrenaline rush. We wanted to feel our spines tingle. We needed the hairs on our necks to stand at attention.

“But it was only fun, because it was pretend,” Burt says. “It was temporary.” Context is important; we only enjoy our fight or flight response if we know the trigger is fake. Horror movies were enjoyed in the company of others. Scary stories entertained in the safety of the home. And Halloween came, predictably, only once per year.

“Not like now,” Burt sighs. He surveys the monsters below him. “Now every day’s like Halloween.”

Burt opens his mouth in the shape of an O and exhales. The window steams with his breath. He draws a smiley face with his index finger, first the long bow of the mouth, then two finger-point eyes. This does not cheer either of them.

Ian musters a nod, but he remains anchored to something Burt said about it being natural to be scared. He considers he’s not a freak for being fearful. He’s not a curiosity for secretly enjoying the thrill of fear. In the midst of all this death, he feels alive for the first time.