D.O.A. Extreme Horror Anthology (9 page)

The voice said, “YOU CAN ALSO CALL ME PLAGUE!”

Choking back tears and nausea, Ash continued eating.

Clang
! A noise from the forward hold, that of Will’s head crushing against the roof, reverberated through the room. Knocking Ash from his stupor, the sound had a twofold effect. The first caused the neon face to shimmer then disappear. The second, and far more horrifying effect, instilled a full consciousness of what he’d done.“Aw, Jesus!” he gasped.

Ash dropped the half-eaten skull. It tumbled from his hand, still dripping moldering brain matter, to join the rest of the dead. He gagged, expelling the contents of his mouth and stomach against his chest and knees.

The rank, gamy taste mingled with the bitter foulness of burning stomach acid. The disgust at what he’d done overpowered Ash completely. Realizing he probably contracted the plague, he continued to dry heave long after his stomach was emptied.

Moaning loudly, he lay prone and helpless for a while, until a second booming
clang
forced him to his knees.

Something was coming from the forward hold.

“The King in Neon,” he groaned. The clanging continued.

Climbing to his feet, his suit dripping vomit, Ash took a deep breath and gagged for his trouble. Another
clang
became a stomping drumbeat as something huge entered the hold. His lamplight couldn’t reach far enough to illuminate the shape stalking towards him.

Retrieving and pulling on his hood, Ash turned away from the invader. He clicked the hood’s seals and experienced a rush of clean, metallic-tinged air. Staggering slightly, he turned his slow gait into a run before charging towards the ladders. The thing behind him sped up. It was right on his heels as he jumped at the rungs.

Grabbing rusty handholds, Ash headed up, the thing behind him lunging and cackling loudly. He escaped the last rung just moments before the ladder came loose from its supports, crashing to the deck below.

He continued his escape, charging through creaking doors and down dark passages in the hope he was heading towards the upper deck and freedom. Slick-pooled flooring and rust-rimmed walls flashed about him as he ran. Another rickety ladder followed before he found himself back inside the pilothouse.

Ash continued to run even though the thing from the hold, monster, hallucination, or plague incarnate, had stopped pursuing him, because his fear hadn’t. He ran from a terror consuming him from within.

Was the plague still active
? His thoughts were manic, his footsteps pounding across the first hatchway.

Without warning, it burst apart beneath him.

The plague-thing had been toying with him; biding its time till it heard him scurrying across the deck like a fleeing rat.

The explosion sent him tumbling through the air, up over the ship’s side.

Flying headlong, too winded to scream, he took a short, wistful look at his boat. Breathless tumbling followed, down through the icy waters.

Ash tried swimming, but the backpack’s weight, combined with a merciless cold leaching away all body heat, proved too powerful to overcome.

He stared down helplessly as the silty blackness consumed him. In a matter of seconds Ash reached the bottom.

Corpses, more plague victims abandoned to the sea when  Ash was only a child, waited for him upon the rocky seabed. White, naked and bloated with pestilence, they showed no mercy.

The Devil and Jim Rosenthal

C.M. Saunders

She was in labor for fourteen hours. I stayed with her the whole time. I held her hand and whispered a few well-chosen words of encouragement while I silently wept at the sight of so much agony and suffering reducing the woman I loved to a pitiful, exhausted, pain-filled wreck.

The miracle of childbirth. A woman thing. Men can only dream of the art of conception, the nine month long adventure as one life slowly grows inside another and the final, ultimate triumph. A celebration of life and living. A moment so bloated with emotion that many women are powerless to describe the event in any meaningful detail.

Unimaginable pain as the pelvis opens and the vagina splits, a rush of adrenaline aided by the ever-plentiful supply of gas and air, one last push—a little like having a shit I imagine—then overwhelming relief and joy as the pain subsides and you are presented with a screaming, shivering, gore-streaked and blood-soaked miniature person. The happiest moment of your life. So they say.

For me, though, it was the moment it all went wrong.

I had been looking forward to it so much, we both had. When I look back at all the planning involved, and then all the hard—yet very enjoyable—graft we had to put ourselves through, I didn’t anticipate such an outcome as this for even the briefest moment. I would have considered myself mad for even entertaining such bizarre, twisted thoughts. For this was the stuff of nightmares. It made
Rosemary’s Baby
look tame and unimaginative. The worst part is, nobody knows but me. Nobody can see, so nobody believes.

It isn’t a baby. It isn’t even human. If I told you what my darling wife had given birth to you would laugh. You would think I was joking and laugh until your sides hurt and tears ran down your cheeks. And even if I could prove to you that I wasn’t joking, then you’d think I was mad. The victim of a cruel, untimely nervous breakdown or something.

But I haven’t lost my marbles. They are all still rooted exactly where they should be. I can still function normally and effectively in every facet of my complicated life as if nothing had happened. The only area where I experience problems is...the baby. And that’s only because, despite what everyone else seems to think, it isn’t a baby at all. In fact it looks remarkably like a caricature of Jim Rosenthal, the ITV sports presenter.

Told you, you’d think I was joking. Or mad.

I first noticed that something was amiss the moment the thing thrust it’s vile deformed head out of my wife’s’ gaping vulva, brutally ripping and tearing apart the once so delicate folds of secret flesh. The head was huge, covered in blood and entirely out of proportion to the rest of its tiny body, probably even bigger than my own head, with oval, darting yellow eyes, a grotesquely pointed nose and large tapering ears, Mr. Spock style. As I watched dumbfounded, the thing announced its arrival by emitting an inhuman, high-pitched howl and a sleek black forked tongue flicked out of its toothless mouth to taste air for the first time.

I actually screamed. I remember that part vividly. I screamed and struggled to stop my bowels from opening right there in the delivery room. But everyone must have thought that I was screaming out of joy or sympathy. No chance. I was screaming because I was absolutely horrified by what I was seeing.

I remember turning my head and vomiting on the floor. One of the nurses present simply tussled my hair as if I were a ten year old boy and said, “Don’t worry about it. You’d be surprised by the amount of men who throw up in here. Some even faint. I’ll just get a mop.”

The stupid bitch! Could she not see? Couldn’t
any
of them see that something was terribly, horrifically wrong?   

I could feel myself slipping into shock and fought it desperately. My plight wasn’t helped by a young trainee midwife who kept screeching in false delight and chanting “It’s a little baby girl! It’s a little baby girl!” at the top of her irritating voice over and over again until all my fear and confusion was replaced by a searing rage. I wanted to fly at her and punch her in the face and head until she stopped shrieking. Or stopped breathing.   

It wasn’t a little baby girl. It was a fucking monstrosity.

Minutes later the chief midwife wrapped the howling, shivering baby-thing in a thick blanket—mercifully almost covering its head—and handed it to me with a smile. The look on her face told me I should be grateful. Trying desperately to hide my revulsion and swallowing back sour mouthfuls of bile and vomit, I smiled back weakly.

As it was our first child, and it had been a particularly fraught and gruesome delivery—not surprising when you take into account the size of the thing’s head—the hospital decided to keep both mother and child in for two or three days observation. Over the course of that time I found myself dreading the onset of visiting hours. I would be forced to sit and watch my beautiful wife nurse the baby-thing as its massive head lolled lazily on its frail shoulders and obscene sticky liquids oozed out of every orifice in its pale body. All the time we were surrounded by perfectly happy and normal new families. Laughing, joking, and immersed in their brand new lives.

I put on a brave face of course, but there was simply too much fear and loathing in me to hide all the time. Now and again the cracks in my armour would reveal, to some extent, my true feelings. My wife’s brow would crease; she would take my hand lovingly in hers, and ask me what was wrong. So I lied. What else could I do? I voiced non-existent political anxiety and feigned concerned about her health and the security of our financial future. Anything to keep her happy.

Sometimes it’s better to lie to protect the ones you love.

Then, they were home. Safe and sound.

Friends, family and neighbors came to visit, all saying what a lovely, pretty little thing she was. I watched closely for any grimace of disgust, any flicker of distaste, any indication at all that someone might be seeing what I saw. But there was none. It was just me. Only I could see the truth behind the disguise. I had never felt so alienated.

I looked on in helpless horror as the bond between my wife and the offspring deepened and their love blossomed. I was in emotional turmoil. Desperate to do the right thing, I unselfishly played the part of the devoted husband and doting father while I secretly struggled to come to terms with it all. My work began to suffer. Feverish nightmares haunted my restless nocturnal hours and I spent the days in a permanent state of disbelieving shock. Before too long a gigantic, ominous question-mark began hovering over my sanity like a vulture over a rotting carcass

The turning point came when I saw her breast-feeding for the first time. My stomach churned as I watched the baby-thing take my wife’s swollen nipple greedily into its mouth the same way a new lover would. It stared at me as it was doing it, as if laying down a challenge to a rival. I knew then that things could only get worse. The baby-thing, that devilish product of our divine love-making, would be driven between us like a wedge pushing us ever further apart and soon our relationship would totally disintegrate leaving me isolated in misery. I had to do something.

When the time came, it happened spontaneously. I didn’t plan a thing. I thought about accidentally killing it, but would anyone believe me?  I would be branded a baby-killer and child abuser and be hated by everyone with such a lethal passion that my life would be permanently under threat. Even if I did get away with it, I knew that my wife would never forgive me for allowing anything to happen to her precious devil-baby. There would always be a burrowing maggot of doubt in her mind.

She suspected that something was wrong for a long time. Like most women she was very perceptive. Women’s intuition and all that. So one night she confronted me. I told her that I had met someone else because it was either that or tell her the hideous truth. A girl from the office, I said. Our marriage was over; I was going to live with this young tart despite the baby.

My wife wept uncontrollably for what seemed like hours on end and shouted hurtful abuse at me for a while, and then I left never to return, with only the clothes I stood up in. Like I said, sometimes it’s better to lie to the ones you love.

That was an age ago. Don’t ask how long because I couldn’t tell you. I live on the streets now. One of the many thousands of city dwellers that exist around the fringes of society. I move around the hostels and soup kitchens like your average homeless person. Who knows? Maybe you’ve walked past me yourself. Maybe you were so kind as to throw me some change.

A few of the people I have met have asked me my life story—we all have a story to tell. But when I tell them mine they either laugh at me or simply shake their heads and walk away, muttering about worthless vagabonds and dangerous crazies.

I can only tell the truth. And, even though everybody else was blind to it, the truth is that my beautiful wife gave birth to a demonic Jim Rosenthal look-a-like. Yes, Jim Rosenthal. I mean, if it had been Des Lynam I wouldn’t have minded half so much. But that fucking Jim Rosenthal...

Cena

Chad McKee

Bradley saw the chords of muscle bulge in the dog’s neck as it struck, ripping its opponent’s flesh with its teeth, shredding skin with its paws. It was surreal, the strike, like something out of one of those brutal nature documentaries. He looked up—as much as he could, anyway—at those in the crowd. The chords in
their
necks were prominent as well, veins popping from the skin, eyes bugged as the action got more intense, bloodier.
Bloodlust
, he thought distantly. He’d heard the word before but never understood what it meant. Until now. Oh yes, he knew now.

The other dog appeared to be struggling, its strength flagging.
No
! Bradley cried silently. The dog must have felt his urgency because it picked itself up a bit, stopped losing ground for a moment, and made an attempt at an offense. Despite being the bigger of the two dogs, it was clearly the lesser trained. Almost from the beginning it was on the defensive, dodging attacks, retreating. Maybe Bradley had seen something of himself in that dog’s eyes. It didn’t want to be there. It would fight for survival, and only that. He saw a kindred spirit in that poor battered mutt.

A mistake. A terrible mistake.

The dog’s keeper kept Bradley’s head on the action—the invisible hand gripping his neck made sure of that. Bradley silently cursed himself, blinking away the sweat that dripped into his eyes. Irrelevant thoughts floating though his mind cast his captor as Ares, God of War, and himself as one of the Lotus Eaters, but he shook them away. This was more than a battle between a killer and a pacifist. It also involved the plight of a living conscientious objector, who had foolishly made his opinions known.