Children of the Dead, page 1
Justin Duncan
Children of the Dead
Copyright © 2013 Justin Duncan
All rights reserved. Except for quoting brief passages in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means is forbidden without the express permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and settings are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, names, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgments
The completion of this book was slow, shambling, and inevitable, not unlike a few of my undead friends within. I started this story as a teenager, when I was the same age as some of my characters. Now, I am finishing it as an adult looking back on the world in which this story was born. In that world, teens didn’t each have a cell phone in their hands. The internet was a mess of dial-up screeching and downloading videos into postage-stamp windows. It was a different world and I have tried to straddle that line in presenting a story set in a small town of any year. I hope you get a shiver somewhere along these pages and above all, have some fun.
I would like to thank those who helped me finish off this beast: Carrie, Josh, Brandy, Yen, and Karen for reading those creaky old drafts. Thanks to Inanna for the wonderful editing and formatting work. Thank you, Gary. You were the first to believe in the project and you got me over the largest hurdles. Thank you, Martin Muir for allowing me the use of your fantastic artwork. I urge you to check out more of his art: http://www.redbubble.com/people/muirart. Lastly, to my family for the support and confidence you give me.
That’s it. You can turn the page.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to all the fans of horror that ever wanted to do it their own way.
Contents
1: Children of the Dead
Earl’s Last Ride
Mother’s Day
Small Town Life
Old Haunts
Time to Run
A Time to Hide
White Trash
2: Fortress of the Dead
Full House
Night Terrors
Fall
Ruin
Harmony in Death
Stroll
The Devil You Know
Siege
Last Chance to Exit
Family
1
Children of the Dead
Earl’s Last Ride
The dead trucker’s thoughts were fuzzy. In fact, he had really ceased to think at all. Only a short time before, Earl Barnes had been driving down SR 23 into Harmony, Georgia with an empty carrier smelling of equal parts chicken and hog. He was finishing up a western run to El Paso followed by a side trip to Juarez for some fun. There, the women were cheaper than the coke and Earl had a love of both. As long as he got the load in on time he could stretch out his return for a couple of extra days and indulge.
This was a Friday night and his 3rd straight behind the wheel. Earl admitted to himself that he was ready to be home and off the road. By God, he even missed his wife but couldn’t put his finger on why. The night drives were his favorite provided he kept a little something to snort at hand. That had run out sometime around dusk and Earl was crashing. The road repeatedly split in his field of vision as his lids drifted southward. Another 20 miles, just get there, asshole, he thought. He preferred to pass the long way around Atlanta and not get caught in that bullshit Friday night traffic. It added several dozen miles, but Earl preferred to keep moving. Sitting in traffic was a fool’s payout. He stayed north of the city, taking the narrow roads.
The CB gave nothing but static for nearly the last forty miles and his calls for a chat went unanswered. Prolly the goddamned CB’s finally had it, he thought lazily. That’s what I get for buying foreign shit from a shitty foreigner. His cab had never actually had a working stereo. Maybe he’d finally get that old Jap AM/FM fixed. The Citizen Band did just fine otherwise. Earl would have died in a sleepy, fiery crash long before without the constant crackling of distant calls from the tiny CB speaker. Truckers, after all, spit the most entertaining bullshit around.
Earl swerved a bit on a deep curve and almost sideswiped a four-door family-mobile that whipped around the corner. He wrestled the heavy Freightliner loosely back into the proper lane and instinctively flashed his middle finger in the direction of the road behind. The next curve tested his weary concentration, but he held the line smooth through the bend. Shaking off the sleep was getting tiresome.
Earl was not so drowsy as to miss the woman that ran out in front of his truck screaming. Even with all the truck’s weight, Earl felt the impact of her body against the front grill, then a bump as she passed under at least nine of his eighteen wheels. Earl locked up the big diesel rig, shuddering to a screeching stop one hundred and fifty feet away and smearing a trail of burnt rubber and blood into the pavement. By the grace of God, so he thought, the truck did not jackknife.
Earl’s heart pounded the front of his chest. He was wide awake now. His wife had always warned him about stressing himself too much. She said he just didn’t have the heart for a good scare, wouldn’t even let him read one of those Stephen King books. They scared the shit out of her, she said. His diligent wife could only guess what they would do to her poor Earl. She was an over-protective, controlling bitch, but Earl was starting to wonder if she had something there. He kept a careful hand to his thump of his old heart, but it refused to calm.
The woman’s face flashed behind Earl’s eyes. It was the shock probably, but he swore up and down she had been red with blood before he’d hit her. It didn’t matter anymore one way or the other. She was really bleeding now and it was his fault.
“Goddamn.” Expletive enough and all he could manage.
Earl peeled his sweating hands from the steering wheel and closed one on the door handle. He looked at the tiny, bobbing doll adorning his dashboard, a gift from a young whore down south. The doll returned only that blank look of plastic eyes over a wide grin. I don’t think they’re going to let me drive no more.
He cracked open the door of the truck and peered out. The woods on both sides of the road rustled in the wind. The cool night air blasted Earl in the eye, causing a squint. Earl yelped loudly and slammed the door shut. The stench of rotting meat was out there on the wind. He had smelled his share of rancid carcass through his job, but what blew into the cab was… ungodly.
Earl buried his nose in his shirt, delighting in the musky cologne and sweat mix that he found there. An accident, his mind corrected, it was an accident. She ran out in front of you. Besides, there was no way that she already smelled like that. It must be a deer or something left by the side of the road. It smelled like a hundred dead deer out there.
“All right, just get out there, ya pussy.”
Earl pulled his shirt over his nose, took a deep breath, and opened the door again. The stench was still there but less pronounced. Earl climbed down from the cab and walked the length of the trailer. It sat turned at an angle blocking the road behind, stretching from ditch to ditch. Over the wind he heard a moan, low and guttural. Oh God, is that her? How the hell is she still alive? The dread of what he was about to see gave him stomach convulsions. Had there been any dinner in there, he would have lost it.
He approached the end of the carrier, turned the corner, and stopped cold. The shirt fell from his mouth.
The woman’s remains lay under a mass of writhing human bodies. They clawed at the carcass and came away with sopping handfuls of her. Earl saw the woman’s arms and legs twitching, her fingers clawing at the bloody asphalt. How could she still be moving?
One of those at the feast, what was once a young man, stood up and turned from the others. He lifted the remains of bowel to his lips and took a squirting bite. Worse, he was staring at Earl with shiny, plastic eyes. The yellow light from the truck’s flashing hazards reflected no life from those eyes. The thing was dressed in a tattered suit, covered with dark stains. If it wasn’t for the blood smeared across its face, Earl might have noticed the heavy undertaker’s makeup hiding a large cranial dent and cuts from the car windshield that had claimed the boy’s life. The horror took a step towards Earl, attracting two more of those from feeding on the body. These joined in the hunt, fanning out to encircle him. The group of dead shuffled slowly along, on legs that didn’t exactly understand the concept of balance.
Earl back-pedaled and lost his footing where the pavement met the dirt, dropping off a couple of inches. He didn’t make it to the ground. A waiting body arrested Earl’s fall with grasping arms and bit deep into his neck. He screamed and thrashed, breaking the weak grip of the corpse’s arms, but not its teeth. A mouthful of skin, vein, and muscle left his neck with wash of blood down his chest and shoulder. Earl shrieked and backhanded the biter out of reflex. He made for the truck’s cab and found two more of them there, climbing slowly through the open door, searching for more like Earl.
The car accident kid and his followers were nearly on him, followed by his assailant. The biter had recovered from Earl’s assault, still chewing awkwardly on his neck flesh with a broken jaw. The blood drained quickly from Earl’s body and his legs buckled. He staggered along the roadside, putting distance between himself and the pack. There were six of the things passing the front of the rig, coming for Earl. Their shadows were thrown by the headlights, reached him instantly, clawing at him.
Earl turned from the mob and stepped o ff the shoulder, scrambling up the road-side embankment as quick as his fading strength would allow. His vision blurred and the hole in his neck was starting to scream behind the adrenaline. He pushed through the low pine growth and into the deep brush, ignoring the thorns that torn his jeans. Almost a mile later, he emerged into a pasture beneath a damp, foggy sky. His bleeding had slowed to a trickle and to all appearances, he was calm and collected. Earl had also been dead for ten minutes.
Mother’s Day
In Harmony, Georgia, a teenager named David Jacobs tossed about on his bed, unable to sleep. The night was a humid soup and while it was getting into the fall, summer would not lie down and die. He closed his eyes tight, and relaxed on sweaty sheets. He lowered his breathing to an even, measured rate and listened to the drone of insects just outside his window. The cacophony out there was busy tonight; hoppers, crickets, and katydids carrying on without a care.
David expelled a frustrated breath and sat up against the headboard. He reached over and checked the time on his cellphone: 10:58 p.m. It’s Friday. I went to bed before ten, he thought. I have no life. To further the point, he noted that no text messages had been received that day. He stared up at the white drywall tiles of the ceiling, a ghostly green illuminated by smart phone. Each tile was heavily pockmarked and pitted as qualified for artsy design in mobile home terms. David often looked for patterns, shapes, and codes in the random holes and recesses. The tiles made a poor substitute for stars, and remained as obtuse. They would keep their secrets for another night. The phone’s screen went dark and he reached the threshold of snooze.
A scratching noise began at his window as if something were tracing long, slow lines on the metal screen outside. David popped open his eyes, thinking the sound imaginary or part of a dream half-fulfilled. A few seconds later the sound came again, light brushes along the aluminum wire. Cautiously, he leaned over and pulled back the curtain. He looked into a grossly unkempt backyard, bathed in blue by the light of the half moon. The security floodlight on the outside power pole had burned out months back but David’s dad didn’t care enough to report it to anybody at least no one with any authority to get it fixed, but he did bitch about to his son. David let the curtain fall and relaxed again. It’s just a moth bumping the screen.
That couldn’t be right. There was no moth outside his window and no sound left in the world. Something had changed. The night was silent, which left only a nervous heartbeat and shallow breathing filling David’s ears. The sudden quiet was wrong. It pressed into him with weight. Nothing stirred. He pulled back the curtain once more and peeked out to see knee high grass under a starry sky.
The front door of the trailer opened with a sustained creak. David stopped breathing. He turned from the window to stare at his bedroom door. The next sound was unmistakably footsteps, travelling down the tight corridor towards his room. The steps were light, slow and gingerly taken. If not for the quiet gloom, he might not have heard them.
“Dad?” There was no answer, just another step.
All right. This is weird, David thought. No, this is fucked up. He scanned the room for a weapon. He saw the small pellet gun, a gift from his parents when he was twelve. It had been wedged between his dresser and the wall for years and he couldn’t remember whether it was even loaded. David jumped up, snatched the gun from beside his dresser and scrambled back on the bed. He cocked the air gun, filling the chamber. The noise of the air pump boomed in the dead silence of his room. The footsteps stopped just outside his bedroom door.
“Dad...is that you? Did you get off work early? Dad!?” David hissed out his final short question and leveled the gun at the door. The knob began to turn. David gripped the flimsy air gun with sweaty hands. What the hell am I gonna do with this thing?
“Please be a dream. Please be a dream. Please be a dream.”
His breath rushed out tight and fast. He closed his finger on the trigger and squinted through the sights. The door slowly crept open.
The bedroom door bounced weakly against the wall. The hallway was illuminated by an old yellow socket light near the bathroom door. It was dim, but enough for David to see a thin silhouette standing before him. David raised his head from the gun barrel as he recognized the form: long, flowing hair over lithe shoulders and thin, graceful frame.
“Mom?”
The question was no more than whispered. He would never receive a reply. The woman stepped into the room, staggering slightly, as if drunk. David closed his eyes tightly against his mother’s ghost. He willed his body to try an escape, something was not right. David lay back slowly on his bed, away from the phantom. The walking corpse of his mother reached for her son’s throat, closing with a death grip. Through the mass of hair in her face, a gaping mouth pressed forward. Amanda Jacobs had been dead for a month.
*****
Miles across town, seventeen-year-old Jodi Campbell suffered through disturbing dreams. She lay in bed beside her ten year-old sister, Jessica, who clung to Jodi’s back like a drowning sailor. The whimper of nightmares and the grimace on Jodi’s face was a stark contrast to the peaceful smile on the calm face of Jessica.
Jodi rattled awake. She groaned and sat up, breaking the grip of her sister, and flung the covers to her feet. The night air was sticky and sweat coated her body. The lights were still on in the bedroom and the bedside clock displayed 9:20 p.m. She didn’t remember lying down to sleep. Her computer was on, and in the instant message window tucked in the corner of the screen, her friend’s last message was visible, “hold on. Dad’s bitching at me from the hall. BRB.” Jodi remembered chatting, and then nothing but terrible dreams. When had her sister even come into the room? Jessica latched onto her once again, remaining blissfully asleep. Jodi relented. Disturbing the disturbed would mean trouble from her “special” little sister.
Jodi lay down again and turned onto her side, facing the wall. She was overshadowed by a rather gaudy poster that her father had given to her as a little girl. The soft-lit image was a stark white unicorn with streaks of pink down its mane and several bright sparkles as if its skin was embedded with diamonds. The single, penetrating horn rose up in an illusion of 3-D, but only if viewed unblinking for several seconds. The fabulous beast hung on the wall in a frozen strut, unable to escape the frame.
A small sigh came from behind her. Jodi didn’t glance back to check the prone lump of Jessica. The sigh changed to a whimper and the little girl rocked Jodi’s back with a sharp kick. Jodi winced and Jessica followed the assault by latching on once again to her big sister.
Jodi looked again at the unicorn and remembered what had awakened her. She had been a participant in a dream, but Jodi had felt detached, realizing that she was seeing herself through another’s eyes. She noticed that her view was very low as she looked up at her own body. Whoever she was in the dream was someone of short stature.
She and this other had been walking along a pristine lake on a brightly shining day. She was a female; that was evident, as the wind whipped long dark hair about her face. Jodi glanced up to the expression upon her own face. There was smirk, almost a malicious grin that gave her chills. It frightened her because she recognized that expression.
The two kept close to the shore, allowing the warm water to lap over their toes. The wind picked up, enveloping them in the smell of cedar wood and whispering of peaceful days ahead.
A rustling in the woods away from shore had drawn their attention. A magnificent white horse trotted out from the forest. It was this horse, the unicorn on her wall. The unicorn snorted and stamped the ground. The horn caught the sharp sunlight and Jodi winced and looked away. When she turned her head back, the unicorn was moving directly towards the pair. Jodi remembered seeing large plumes of mist pumping from its nostrils. It continued its charge, increasing speed. The beast’s eyes were hellfire red and a mucus of flame trailed from its mouth. Monstrous hooves exploded the earth at every stomp. The unicorn sliced the air like a freight train, barreling towards them.
The girls stood in the path of the approaching nightmare. Jodi’s view was cut off as the larger girl, her dream-self, stepped in front. Jodi could see nothing but a white cotton nightshirt shielding her. Only the sound remained and the fluttering heartbeat of a girl that was not her own. A monstrous whine sent shudders through Jodi’s tiny, child-like body. The monster was now impossibly close.
