Mascara and Monsters: Book one (Mascara and Monsters Booke one 1), page 1
Mascara and Monsters
Book one
James Wallace
Copyright © 2023 James Wallace
All rights reserved.
ISBN:
ISBN-13:
DEDICATION
As always for Max and Bubbas. You are my light in a world of darkness.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
i
1
Jolene
2
2
Reyna
35
3
Mandy
63
4
Meg
97
5
Beth
130
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have to thank the people who have never let me down and continue to push me to write. Tanay Williams, as always, thanks doll. My Beta team Leslie Bryant, Kim Kelly, Kelly Stair, James Nydegger, Harley Nolan, and Kristen Beltz. And my mentor Mike Evans for always being there. My editor Uncle David keeps me honest and on track. Allen Gamboa for his strong meme game. And finally, Lomas Theon for coming up with the cool book title.
Jolene
Jolene sat on the dusty wood slatted attic floor, her head buried in her hands. Her dirty, disheveled, blonde hair hanging down around her tear streaked face. She sniffled, unsure if it was from her blubbering or the dusty attic with boxes stacked all around her. She sat dressed in nothing but her flannel pajama pants and Def Leppard rock and roll T-shirt. She didn't have time to grab anything else, not a sweater or even a bra. She had been in a deep sleep when a high pitched scream woke her up. She had rolled out of bed and ran toward her little sister's room thinking the worst. What she saw was nothing she had ever imagined; it filled her with horror and disgust. Casey, her ten-year-old sister was on her bed covered in blood as two people dug into her belly ripping out organs and intestines. Jolene took a small step into the room to identify the two grotesque things attacking her sister. They were her two moms, covered in her sister's gore as they shoved their gory prizes into their mouths and chewed quickly before swallowing.
Jolene tried to stop the scream creeping up in her tight throat, but it burst through like a dinner bell. Her moms turned together at the sound, and in moves faster than Jolene thought they could, attacked her. They tried to grab onto her, smearing her sister's blood all over her arms, making her slippery. Jolene yanked her arms free and ran into the hallway; just then, she looked down the stairs to see her front door burst open as more blood drenched crazy people flooded in. Jolene adjusted her path and ran down the hallway for the attic trap door. She leapt into the air and grabbed hold of the rope hanging down from the ceiling, her blood soaked and sweating hands threatened to slide off. She grasped as hard and as tight as her hands would allow. Using her weight, she pulled the trap door open allowing the stairs to slide down toward her; the rusty springs squealed in protest from lack of use.
Jolene scrambled up the stairs before they were fully extended. Once she reached the top, she bent down and pulled with all her weight, which wasn't much since she weighed only a hundred and twenty-five pounds. The stairs started coming up when her mom Kristen gripped onto the last stair and fought to pull it back down. Jolene knew she didn't have the strength to fight for long. She let go with one hand and grabbed a suitcase close by. She threw it down the stairs using the last of her failing adrenaline. The suitcase smashed into her mother’s elbow before bouncing up and hitting her in the face, knocking her off balance and slipping her hands off their purchase. The springs freed of any opposition and sprang upward slamming the stairs and trap door closed. Jolene snatched up some loose wood and jammed them into the hinges of the trap door and stairs to stop anyone or anything from opening them from below. Jolene collapsed back on the dusty floor and cupped her head in her hands, letting the tears fall freely.
When she finally stopped crying and sniffling she raised her head and took inventory of what was in the attic. Ten boxes of all sizes lined the far side of the attic. She knew they held only Thanksgiving and Christmas decorations. Nothing she could use in there. She continued her search nearby and found two boxes filled with board and card games. She smiled slightly remembering the Saturday nights of her youth when her sister and moms played games all night as they dined on snacks and hot chocolate. Those were good times; she shuddered at the thought they would never do that again as she fought another bout of tears welling up in her eyes.
Jolene pushed all happy thoughts aside; she had to find a way to survive. She opened the only suitcase left and found that all it had was two pairs of old pantyhose still in their plastic eggs. She popped them open and found a nude pair and a black pair. She made a snap decision and pulled off her flannel pajama pants. She wiggled into the nude pair and then pulled on the black pair over them flexing her leg muscles to make sure they didn't bunch up, before pulling her pants back on. At least she was a little warmer and her feet now had a barrier between them and the cold wood of the attic floor. She scurried around in the dim light looking around for anything else she could use. Finding nothing she moved to the one small window at the end of the attic.
She looked out the window and was taken back over what she saw. Her house was on top of a small hill in the middle of town. From what she could see, the city was engulfed in chaos. Fire enveloped city hall as emergency vehicles were surrounding the nearby high school's gym. The neighborhood around her seemed relatively empty. A couple of people aimlessly stumbled about. A loud crash pulled her attention back toward the trap door. It was vibrating from the efforts to get it open. She had to make a quick decision on how to escape before she was completely trapped.
Jolene turned back toward the window and grasped the frame trying to find a way to open it. The window wouldn't budge; it had been painted shut from the numerous renovations the house had gone through in its life. She picked up the suitcase and batted it against the window. Harder and harder she swung it trying to break it open. Finally, it shattered; the heavy suitcase pulled her hand down, slicing her arm on the shards of the glass still on the frame. She dropped the suitcase on the roof's edge as she pulled her arm back and examined the damage. The cut wasn't deep, only a scratch but it started to bleed. Jolene ran over to the supplies of decorations and went through the boxes throwing the items out, until she found the heavy velvet tree skirt. She wrapped it tightly around her arm and ran past the still shaking trap door. She knew it was going to give in to the abuse soon. She punched the remaining glass out of the window frame using the velvet skirt to protect her skin. Once the glass was free, she thrust both arms outside into the dark cold night. Her head and shoulders slipped through easily as the rest of her thin body followed behind. Just as she gained her footing on the roof, the trap door fell as it was yanked out of sight. A massively obese man's bald head appeared, his mouth and head smeared with blood, one of his eyes was milky white. He scanned the attic with his one good eye and stopped as he found Jolene on the roof. He opened his mouth exposing red broken teeth and let out a god-awful scream of rage and hunger. A waterfall of blood poured from his mouth as he climbed into the attic inhumanly fast for his massiveness. In an instant he was at the window thrusting his head and snapping teeth outside, tearing chunks of flesh from the broken pieces of glass still in the pane. Jolene moved by instinct, letting the adrenaline of fear take control of her as she scrambled across the steeply pitched roof to the rose covered trellis below. The fat man screamed in frustration as he tried to force his body through the small opening. He ignored the fact that he was peeling more skin and muscle from his shoulders as he continued to try to force his bulk out through the remaining glass of the window.
Jolene took in a quivering breath of fear as she dropped down onto the trellis in her stocking feet. Immediately, she winced in pain as a long thorn tore through the padding of her sole. She bit her bottom lip and tried to ignore the pain as she hurried down the trellis cutting her hands and feet on the wood and thorn infested roses. Above her she could hear the wall of the attic continue to fracture as more and more of those crazy blood covered things pushed against it to get at her. Before she took the last four steps to safety a body thundered past her crashing into the concrete patio. Jolene tried again to hold her scream in and again failed. She jumped the last couple of feet to the ground and ran to the front of her house. She was met with more of those things as they came pouring out of her house and the other houses on her block.
Jolene turned toward the sidewalk and took off running as fast as her bleeding damaged feet would allow her, into the night, a cast of rage filled cannibals close behind. Each time her feet hit the ground, she would involuntarily cry at the pain that shot up her legs. She turned to the high school and ran for all she was worth.
Jolene ignored the crippling pain and the tightness in her chest, pushing it to the back of her head as she ran for her life. She had been an all-star long distance runner in her senior year in track at high school, but since then she had become a smoker in college and gotten lazy. She was paying for it now, as she labored to run. She ran across the street and slid across the hood of old man Will Allen's eighty-four Camaro. She had coveted that car since the first time she saw him pull it out of his garage. He had been angry and then softened when she had slapped a bumper sticker on the back bumper stating the car was a Bitchin Camaro.
J
She kept running, changing her path again to come around to the side of the gym. She knew something that the kids and faculty at the school didn't. In her Sophomore year she befriended the female night janitor, Lisa, who let her use the school library late at night to study. One night, Lisa showed her a secret ladder that went up to the school's roof. Once on top, she could pull a piece of the ladder up so no one could follow her. She wasn’t sure she could make the climb while carrying the heavy medic pack and axe but knew they would be vital to her safety.
She dashed behind some bushes at the corner of the gym that led to the ladder. Once in sight of the ladder she threaded her arms through heavy packs handles and swung the pack on her back. She leapt from her run landing on the second rung of the ladder with her feet. Pain screamed from her left foot but another surge of adrenaline pumped through her veins pushing her through the pain. She never once looked back, too scared to see how close those things were. She powered herself up the ladder higher and higher till her head came up over the edge of the roof. She pushed herself harder till she thought she would have a heart attack from the tightness in her chest. Once her feet hit the roof, she swung the ax behind her using all her strength. The blade bit deep in the neck of a woman who had climbed up the stairs behind her; she was missing clumps of her long blonde hair. One of her almost detached eyes bounced up and down on her cheek. Jolene ignored the horror in front of her as anger exploded in her chest. She pulled the ax back pulling it free of the woman with a sickening sucking sound. She adjusted her grip on the handle and swung again, hitting about the same place on the woman’s neck. She had not been strong enough the first time to decapitate the woman, but her second hit severed the head, knocking the woman’s torso back, knocking her body and two others off the ladder and into the air, finally colliding with the ground far below. Jolene pulled the locking pin on the ladder and pulled back lifting the six feet of ladder up and away from the horrors on the ground.
Jolene swung around in a wide circle looking for more danger. Finding none, she allowed herself to relax for a second. Once she did that, all the adrenaline that had been driving her on drained out. She began to shake and felt the cold invade her t-shirt, freezing her skin. She moved like a drunken sailor home from a two day bender across the roof. She made it between two enormous commercial air conditioners before her knees started to shake uncontrollably and then gave out altogether. She caught herself with one hand on one of the ACs and slid the heavy pack off and collapsed to the tar roof. Her head slumped to her chest as her eyes unthinkingly shut pulling her down into a deep sleep. She dreamed of being chased by dogs and mighty wolves, as she ran through a field of glass shards.
Jolene woke with a jolt, as if she was a child and her moms were screaming at her to get her ass up. She scanned to her left and right frantically searching for danger, her hands tightening around the ax handle she still held. Nothing moved, but she could hear the screaming of the things below. Jolene thought about getting up and going to the edge of the roof to see what was happening below when she was painfully reminded of the damage to her feet as she began to rise. She flexed the soles of her feet and the left one screamed in pain, while the right was strangely numb. She leaned over and pulled the large medic pack closer to her. She unzipped it and rummaged inside. Her practiced fingers found the tools she would need to hopefully fix the damage to her feet. Jolene was in her second year at the school of medicine at Bryant University two towns over.
Jolene pulled her left foot up closer and twisted in pain as the muscles in her thigh quivered from the abuse she had laid on them while running to the school. Her left foot didn't look that bad, it just had a couple of small punctures. She used the shears from the bag to cut the nylon feet off exposing her foot completely. She probed the cuts and punctures with her fingers flinching when she hit a particularly bad spot. She was checking to see if any of the glass or thorns had broken off inside her foot. She stopped when she felt something under the skin by her big toe. She reached back into the bag and took out a scalpel and a pair of forceps. She rummaged around till she found a bottle of saline wash. She poured some over the punctures and then used the scalpel to lengthen the puncture wound. She slipped into a mode taught to her by an old grizzled medic she had been teamed with before she had gone away to school. He taught her to trust her training and focus on the injury, not the person, and to block everything else out. She ignored her pain as she inserted the forceps into the cut and clamped down on the offending object. She slid it out slowly, finding it to be a thorn about the size of the tip of her thumb. She looked it over and then placed it on a ripped package of gauze. Jolene reached back in the bag and took out the topical antibiotic cream and slathered her foot in it. Next, she removed a roll of gauze and wound it around her foot, taping the end securely around her ankle with the medical tape from inside the bag. She then wrapped an ace bandage around the gauze on her foot creating a pad to protect it.
Jolene pulled her right foot up and gasped at the damage. The skin was ripped in many places and caked in dirt and dried blood. She poured the saline solution over her foot and cleaned it gently, washing away the dirt and blood. She had numerous punctures with little shards of glittering glass sticking out of them. She busied herself picking the glass out of her foot, starting near the toes and then working her way down. She stopped at her heel when she found something hard. She pulled her foot closer and found a two inch cut. There was something in there, but it was sunk in deep. She took the scalpel and lengthened the cut to double its side. She winced at the fresh pain. She then stuck the forceps in but found nothing. She took the scalpel and cut across the cut turning it into a cross. The pain was much more intense and she had to stop as she found she was gasping hard fighting for every breath. She took in a couple of deep breaths and held the last one as long as she could. She let it out in a rush and found her head was clearer. She used her fingers to push the cut open and with the forceps explored the interior. They hit something and after a moment she got a hold of it. She pulled and gasped out loud as she pulled it out. New pain exploded from her heel as if the object had been a damn holding it back from the flood. She felt lightheaded as she kept pulling. Finally in a fresh flow of blood, a piece of glass two inches long and half an inch wide burst free.
Jolene put the glass and forceps down and breathed in deeply trying not to scream in fresh pain. She pressed the gauze against her heel and concentrated on the steps she needed to complete to take care of her damaged foot. She pulled the gauze away and poured more of the saline on her foot. She then smeared on the antibiotic cream thickly everywhere except her heel. She reached back in the bag and pulled out a tube of medical grade liquid surgical glue. She oozed the glue on the cut and pinched the incision closed. She held it there for two minutes till she was sure it had bonded and set. She then wrapped the foot in another roll of gauze after creating a pad using an Israeli bandage. After securing the gauze roll around her ankle she wrapped it all in another ace bandage. She then cleaned her hands with the last of the saline and finally bandaged the scrape on her arm from the window.
