Dom picks his way across the warehouse floor, cursing under his breath. His shoes are new, and it’s a fuck of a thing to get blood out of tan leather.

He puts both hands up, palms out. “Marc. Take it easy.”

On the floor, Jimmy groans. He’s pulled up into a foetal position so Dom can’t tell the full extent of the damage, but his clothes are soaked in just about every bodily fluid there is. At first guess, Dom would say the kid’s lost his teeth, his fingernails, his bollocks and at least a couple of internal organs.

“Fuck,” he says and pinches his nostrils shut. The whole place is going to have to be hosed down. Disinfected.

Marc grins. His eyes are bright, glittering in the dim light. He ignores Dom and addresses Jimmy. “Do you know what the definition of insanity is, boy? Doing the same thing but expecting it to turn out different. That was Einstein, said that. Smart man. Not like you, eh? Because you should know by now what to expect when you fuck up, shouldn’t you? You should know what happens.”

He swings the club at Jimmy’s knee. It crunches, and the kid howls.

“Marc,” Dom says. Again, he’s ignored. Another swing, and the other knee goes.

Marc pushes his hair back, leaving a trail of red through the blond, then brings the club down again, straight into the kid’s gut. A spurt of blood comes out of his mouth, but no more sounds.

“Marc,” Dom says. Louder, this time. “For fuck’s sake.”

Marc spins round, the club still in his hand. “What? Have we got a problem here, Dominic? You got something you want to say to me? Some objection you want to make?”

He lets the club fly once more. Jimmy flips up and over, comes to rest on his back. His head cracks down on the concrete and one arm falls, loosely, over what’s left of his face.

Dom exhales slowly, looks down at the floor. The time for objections is past, now. “No, Boss,” he says.

“Good.” Marc’s breathing hard and his knuckles are white. “I came here to give this boy a chance to explain himself, but he decided he’d rather tell me a fairy story. It was a good one, though. You’d have liked it. Better than the three bears and the three pigs and the three fucking billy goats gruff. Magical powers, Dom. That’s how he got robbed. Not because he’s a fucking useless bastard, but because this woman’s got magical powers.” He spits into the puddle spreading under Jimmy’s head.

“Her name’s Elena,” Dom says.

Marc looks up at him. “What?”

“The woman he was talking about. Elena. I’ve been asking around, what with all the shit that’s been going on lately, and this is what I’m hearing. It wasn’t just Jimmy, that’s the thing. She turned Kelton over last night, as well. Took the lot. Everything he had. The money, the gear, everything.”

Marc leans the club against the wall, then goes to the sink and washes his hands. “You speak to Kel yet?”

Dom glances at the mess on the floor. ‘Yeah, but you’re not going to like it.’

Kelton Adams is a smackhead, but one of the functional ones. He runs his patch well, pays up on time, keeps his shit together. Went to university, still reads books. He talks a lot of bollocks, especially when he’s high, but there’s a decent brain under all the shit. Or so Dom would have said, anyway.

He rubs the back of his neck. “He said she was a goddess. Immortal Death, the goddess of time. I think that was the exact quote.”

Marc looks at his watch and lets out a hiss of annoyance. The glass is cracked. “Are you serious?”

“I’m just telling you what he said. He wasn’t making much sense.”

“No shit. How bad was he hurt?”

“He wasn’t. Not that I could see, anyway.”

“So he just let her clean him out and walk away? Didn’t put up a fight?”

Dom shrugs. “He said he did. He said he killed her, but it didn’t make any difference. Don’t ask me, Marc, I don’t know what happened. There was blood all over the flat, but it wasn’t his–there wasn’t a mark on him. Kel can be handy with a knife when he needs to be, but if she’d lost that much blood she’d be dead. So, I don’t know. Maybe she sacrificed a goat or something.”

Marc snorts. “Right, yeah. A black mass. Voodoo. Maybe that’s how she does it.” He steps over the body on the floor. “All right, let’s get this sorted out. Find out where our little voodoo princess is hiding. I think it’s time we started telling some of our own stories. Like the one about what happens when you pick the wrong people to fuck with.”

Dom makes some calls. Nine times out of ten, that’s good enough in itself. If Marc’s looking for you, you don’t want to be found. Most people decide they’ve had a good enough run and quietly slip out of the game.

But this one? No. She doesn’t disappear. She doesn’t even keep out of the way. She turns over their bookie, another couple of dealers and one of the legit-front shops–a florist, and who the fuck robs a florist, for fuck’s sake–then walks right into the warehouse while they’re unpacking a shipment.

“Hi,” she says, like it’s some kind of make-up party. “I’m Elena.”

She’s tiny–five foot and a fag paper at most–with short, dark blonde hair. Nicely curvy. Other circumstances, Dom might have shown some interest.

Marc stares at her like she’s a cockroach that’s dropped into his beer. Terry puts down the crate he was hauling and puts his hand on his gun.

The woman, Elena, just stands there. She’s still smiling, like she’s waiting to be asked if she wants a glass of wine or something.

Dom’s gun is in a shoulder holster, but it’s easily visible. Marc’s is tucked in his waistband.

She acts like she hasn’t noticed. Or doesn’t care.

“You must really have a death wish,” Marc says, and she laughs like that’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard.

“Shut up,” he says, but she just keeps laughing.

All the guns are out now, including Dom’s, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. Maybe Marc’s right. Maybe this is what it’s all been about. A death wish.

Well, if she wants to get killed, she came to the right place. After Jimmy, Dom had a nice slick metal floor put in, with a drain in the middle. There’s plenty of plastic sheeting on the shelves, and they own, in one form or another, all of the other units on the estate. No neighbours to worry about any strange noises.

“I heard you wanted to talk to me,” she says.

She’s got a bit of an accent, but Dom can’t place it. Vaguely American, vaguely Irish, vaguely something else.

“Yeah,” Marc says. “Something like that.” He looks her up and down. If she’s armed, it’s well-concealed. “So you thought you’d drop in, eh? Come and have a nice chat?”

She grins. “What can I say? I’m a thrill-seeker. Sometimes you feel the need for an adrenalin rush, you know?”

“Well,” Marc says. “I’m sure we can oblige.” He raises the gun. “How’s that for starters?”

She looks at it critically and makes a so-so motion with her hand. Marc’s face darkens and Dom knows this is going to get ugly.

“Hope you enjoyed yourself, then, love,” Marc says. “Hope it was worth it, because now it’s time to pay the bill.”

“Wow,” she says. “Anyone ever tell you that you sound just like the guy off that show about the–”

And then Marc shoots her in the face.

The force of it knocks her off her feet and throws her back against the wall. She hangs there for a second, pinned against the spray of her own blood, then crumples.

“Fuck,” Dom says. He didn’t even get a chance to put down the plastic sheeting.

Terry puts his hands on his hips and looks down at the body. “That was a bit of a waste, wasn’t it? She weren’t a bad looking lass. And we still don’t know how she was getting away with–”

“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” Marc says. “It was getting on my nerves, just listening to her. Well? Don’t just stand there, get the–”

His voice fades out, becomes muffled. Dom’s ears pop and his stomach clenches as if he’s just gone down the drop on a rollercoaster. He hates those fucking things.

“Hi,” a voice says. “I’m Elena.”

Dom swings round and nearly falls over, because his feet aren’t where he left them. He’s back standing by the shipping crates, instead of over by the door. Over by the body.

Which is gone. Or, to be more precise, is back standing upright and smiling.

“What?” he says.

Marc is next to him again. Terry’s back where he was, about to stack another crate on the pile. He drops it.

“What?” Dom says again. The smell of smoke and blood is gone.

Marc stares at his hand, which is empty. The gun is in his waistband. He snatches at it, nearly drops it.

“Careful there, cowboy,” Elena says. “You don’t want that to go off while it’s still stuffed in your pants, do you?”

Marc gets a proper grip on the gun, lifts it up and points it at her again. To his credit, it doesn’t shake. Dom still feels as wobbly as fuck. Like he’s just been through an earthquake, or something.

On the other side, Terry is smacking at his head like he’s trying to shake something loose.

Elena eyes the gun and lifts an eyebrow. “Right. Because that worked so well last time.”

“What the fuck just happened?” Marc says.

“You tried to kill me. It didn’t work. Or, to be more precise, it didn’t work for long.”

In the silence that follows, Dom’s mind flashes to Kelton, what he’d been like when Dom had found him, kneeling on the stained floorboards and rambling like a madman. Dom had thought he was praying, at first. Maybe he had been.

“Immortal Death,” he says.

Elena nods and gives him a pleased smile. “Yes. Exactly.”

Marc doesn’t look pleased. Marc looks like he wants to rip her heart out and eat it. Hers or anyone else’s, come to that. Dom shifts backwards a half-step.

“Exactly?” Marc says. “Exactly, what? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Immortal,” Elena says. “Definition: not mortal. Undying. Not subject to death or decay. Unkillable.”

“Fuck you,” Marc says, and empties the gun into her. He covers all the bases this time–gut, chest, neck, head.

After a couple of seconds, Terry joins in. The noise is very loud.

Dom looks at the gun in his own hand, then puts it down on one of the crates. Marc gives him a look of fury and Terry one of contempt, but what good do they think more bullets are going to do? Do they think Marc missed, the first time?

Terry carries on pulling the trigger, click click, long after the gun is empty. Then there’s just smoke and echoes and fast, panting breaths. What’s left of Elena is splattered over half the warehouse.

“Right,” Marc says. “That’s that sorted out. Dom, you–”

And then it happens again. The weird, hollow Zing in his ears, in his stomach. In his bones. He’s back by the crates again, next to Marc, and his gun is in his holster. He whips his head around and yes, there she is. She doesn’t speak this time.

Marc roars with rage and grabs his gun.

“Really?” Elena says. “You just want to keep going with this?”

Terry throws himself flat against the blockwork wall. His gaze roams over the floor, the walls, the crates. It’s all clean. Dom can still see the red shapes himself, but only when he shuts his eyes.

Marc keeps hold of his gun, but he doesn’t fire. “How are you doing this?” he says.

“Remember that definition of immortal?”

Marc shakes his head rapidly. “It’s not possible. It’s not fucking possible.”

“Oh, sure it is. Don’t tell me you never heard of a deal with the devil.”

Terry moans and crosses himself. Marc throws him a look of disgust.

“I was after the grand prize,” Elena says. “The fountain of youth. To never grow old, never die.” Her voice is soft, almost nostalgic. Dom’s mother used to talk like that, about fur coats and fancy cruises. He and Marc bought her plenty of both, but it never took the longing out of her voice.

“I got my chance,” Elena continues, “but you know how it is. You’re supposed to be very, very careful about what you wish for. Watch the small print, as it were. Because they’ll fuck with you, demons, if they can. That’s what happens, see, if you hang around long enough. You develop a taste for fucking with people. Because what else are you going to do with yourself, right?”

Terry’s edging along the wall, his mouth hanging open and his eyes bulging. She looks at him, and he breaks for the door. It’s thick steel and fucking heavy, but he throws it open as if it’s made of cardboard. It clangs shut after him.

“Fucker,” Marc says.

Elena smiles. “I feel confident saying he’ll be back soon enough. Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Getting fucked over. Because I specified living forever, but I didn’t say anything about never dying. So the amusing loophole is that I can still be killed. Just not, you know, for very long.”

“What does that mean?” Marc says. “What does any of this mean?”

Elena spreads her hands. “You saw what it means. I die, I rewind. We all rewind. Back to the start of the sequence, just like a great, cosmic DVD player.” She laughs. “It gives us a chance to reconsider the wisdom of our actions. Choose a different path.”

“Fuck this,” Marc says. “This is absolute fucking bollocks.”

He fires again.

Zing

“That’s three,” Elena says. “I know the whole demons, immortality, time loop thing is a bit of a shock to the system, but come on. Try to get with the programme. I might be technically immortal, but getting shot in the face still stings.”

Terry fumbles his crate again, then drops onto all fours and throws up. Marc pulls out his gun once more. This time, it shakes.

“Marc,” Dom says, holding up his hand. “Let’s take a minute. Let’s think about this.”

Marc glares at him, but he puts the piece away.

Dom faces Elena. “What do you want?”

“Finally,” she says. “Progress. Well, I fancy being the bad guy for a while. Change of scenery, you know? So I’m going to take over.”

“What?”

“Your gang, your operation, whatever you call it. It’s mine, now. You work for me.”

Marc shakes his head. “Are you taking the fucking piss?”

“See, I love that. Such colourful turns of phrase, you have here. Are you taking the fuckin’ piss?” It comes out strange, in her weird accent. “You’ll have to teach me all of these.”

“You’re mental. You’re absolutely fucking mental.”

She considers this. “Very probably, by now. But hey, a girl’s got to have a hobby, right? Eternity is a long time, my friend. And there’s only so much sudoku you can do.”

Marc lifts his chin. “This is mine. This is all mine.”

“I’m sure we can come to a mutually suitable arrangement. There will always be a place for highly motivated employees in my organisation.”

“Employees? You think I’m going to work for you? Fuck that.”

Dom starts forward. “Marc, wait. Don’t–”

Zing

“Fuck,” Terry says. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Elena smiles. “Take four,” she says brightly.

“Marc, enough with the gun,” Dom says. He feels rough, now, sick and exhausted like he’s got a two-bottle hangover. “No more. It’s not doing any good, keep bringing us back to here.”

“Smart boy,” Elena says. “There’s always a place for the intelligent ones, too.”

High spots of colour are burning in Marc’s cheeks. His eyes look sunken and yellow. His fingers twitch, but he doesn’t draw the gun. “All right. All right.”

There’s a pause. Dom and Terry both look at Elena.

“Don’t look at her,” Marc says. “She’s not in charge here.”

Terry starts edging towards the door. “Fucking stay where you are,” Marc says. Terry freezes.

“Time for negotiations?” Elena says.

Marc’s head drops for a second, then he lifts it again. “I will not have this. I will not fucking have it.” He cracks his knuckles. “All right, we can’t kill her. Okay. But it doesn’t mean we can’t fuck her up.”

He nods towards one of the metal chairs. “Tie her up there.”

Dom doesn’t move. Nor does Terry.

“Didn’t you hear me? I said, tie her up.”

Terry takes a step, one step, then stops.

“Well? What’s the fucking matter with you?”

Elena smiles. “I think he’s worried about what else I might be able to do. Isn’t that right, sugar?”

Terry doesn’t speak, but he swallows hard.

“After all, if this is real–and I think we’re all finally in agreement on that point now–then what else might be?” She runs her tongue along the edge of her teeth. “Vampires? Werewolves? What if all those monsters under the bed are real? What if I can rip your throat out, break your neck with my bare hands? What if I can set you on fire with the power of my mind? Boil your brains in your skull with a single thought? Is that what’s worrying you, Terry dear?”

She flings her hand out towards him, fingers stiff and splayed. “Scorchio!”

Terry flinches, half-ducks, and his feet tangle together. He goes down, hard.

Elena throws back her head and laughs. “Damn, but that one never gets old.”

Marc grabs hold of Terry’s arm and hauls him to his feet. “You stupid fucker,” he says. “What’s wrong with you? This isn’t Harry fucking Potter. Now get her.”

Elena grins and holds her arms out as if inviting a hug. “Want to take the chance, Terry?”

Terry backs away. Dom stays where he is.

Marc snarls at them. His lips draw back from his teeth and he looks more than half werewolf himself. He darts forward, seizes hold of Elena’s arm and yanks her around, throws her into the chair.

Dom holds his breath, and it looks like Terry’s doing the same. Maybe Marc, too.

Nothing happens.

Elena shrugs. “Oh, well. A lot of the time, that works. But there’s always the odd psychopath with no imagination.”

A grin of triumph spreads across Marc’s face. “See? What did I tell you?” He backhands her, putting his shoulders into it. The sound is meaty, solid. Her head rocks back and blood blooms at the corner of her mouth.

She licks it clean. “You learn to manage pain,” she says. “Over the years. It’s like those guys you see on the telly sometimes. Yogis, fakirs. Stick needles in them, tie bricks to their cocks, whatever. They don’t blink an eyelid. Work at it long enough, you get control. The nerves, the breath, the heart. And I’ve had a very, very long time to work at it.”

She places a hand on her chest. “There are techniques that let you take charge of the nervous system. You can hold your breath, say, or slow your heartbeat. Slow it down, or even stop it. Course, most people wouldn’t want to go that far. But then, as you might have noticed, I’m not most people.”

She smiles, and her eyes roll back.

“Oh, fuck,” Dom says, “that means–”

Zing

“Hi guys,” Elena says from behind him. “Are we having fun yet?”

Terry goes down on his knees and begins to cry.

She pulls a bag of peanuts out of her pocket, rips it open and throws one into her mouth. “Want to test me? To see how many times we can go round? I’m happy to play that game if you are. As I’m sure you can imagine, I have a great deal of patience.”

“Boss,” Terry says. “Boss, please.”

Marc rounds on him. “What? What are you saying to me? Give in, let her take everything? You want to work for her? Is that it? You’d rather work for her than me? You think she’s going to look after you? She’s a fucking monster.”

Elena munches on another handful of nuts. “It’s always interesting, to see whose mind cracks first, and how long it takes. Want to know what the world record is?”

“Marc,” Dom says. “Marc, we’ve got to–”

He doesn’t see the fist coming until it’s too late to get out of the way. Pain flares in his jaw and his knees unlock. As he goes down he sees Marc’s hands, the knuckles bleeding, close around Elena’s throat.

Zing

His vision starts to grey out, but then he’s back on his feet again. Terry’s yelling–or maybe screaming would be a more accurate word. There are more gunshots.

Zing

Everything hurts. He’s seeing double. He throws up, can’t clear his throat, feels like he’s choking.

Zing

Noise. Pain. Shouting. Elena, laughing.

Zing

“Okay,” Elena says. “Well, this is more like it.”

Dom swallows, spits. His throat feels raw. Terry is standing next to her, Marc’s gun in his hand. He hands it to her. She gives him a wide, proud smile. “Thank you, Terry.”

Marc’s kneeling on the floor. Dom goes up behind him and pulls his arms behind his back, keeping him down.

Elena has a knife. It has a black handle and a curved blade. It shines.

She brings it to Marc’s throat. Dom makes a sound.

She stills, and looks at him. “Is there a problem, Dominic? Something you want to say?”

Dom looks down at his brother for a long time. Then he says,. “No, Boss.”

Elena smiles and rests her hand on his shoulder. It’s very warm.

“Good,” she says, and they go back to work.

END

 Copyright © 2012 Michelle Ann King

Michelle Ann King writes SF, dark fantasy and horror from her kitchen table in Essex, England. She has worked as a mortgage underwriter, supermarket cashier, makeup artist, tarot reader and insurance claims handler before having the good fortune to be able to write full-time. She loves Las Vegas, vampire films and good Scotch whisky. Find details of her stories and books at www.transientcactus.co.uk and find her on twitter @MichelleAnnKing.

by

Session 9 takes place in the abandoned Danvers State Psychiatric Hospital. The film was shot at the actual facility, and a more sinister pile of 19th -Century brickwork would be difficult to imagine. A hazardous material disposal team is tasked with clearing the gargantuan asylum of asbestos. Owner of the Hazmat Elimination Company is Gordon (Peter Mullan). He needs the contract desperately, or his company is going to go under, and so promises to do in one week a job that should really take three to do safely. He and his wife Wendy have a newborn, Emma, who has had an ear infection for some time, and Gordon is clearly exhausted and worried from the moment we first see him. Meanwhile, Mike (Steve Gevedon) stumbles across old archives in the basement of the asylum. In one box he finds a collection of reel-to-reel tapes of the psychiatric sessions of Mary Hobbes, and Mike rapidly becomes obsessed with listening to the recordings. Mary suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder. She has three alters: the childlike Princess, the watchful Billy, and Simon, a presence the other two personalities greatly fear.

Shortly before Mike makes his discovery, the question of why the asylum shut down arises. Mike explains what happened, and this is where the film’s central concern with memory becomes clear.

MIKE

Patricia Willard. She was committed here in the 1970s by her parents. Manic depression, that sort of thing. Typical adolescent crap. But in the 1980s, this new kind of therapy took off: Repressed Memory Therapy. See, these shrinks figured that, with these new techniques they’d designed, they could release hidden memories of traumatic events in your life. Rape, incest. So Patricia, with the help of her doctors, recalls that when she was ten, her father raped her. But not once. No, he’d do it three times a week. And he didn’t just rape her. He came into her room at night, wearing a black robe. He’d take her and drive her to a wooded area where her grandparents are her mother were. And they all had black robes on. They’d take them off and group orgies would ensue. And then, they’d bring out the newborn. She was forced to watch as her mother would cut this baby’s heart out with a stone dagger. She’d drink the blood. Others would eat the flesh. Her grandfather her father would fuck her repeatedly. She was forced to have abortions and they’d cook the aborted fetuses–

GORDON

Enough!

SECURITY GUARD

This happened here?

MIKE

Oh yeah. Satanic ritual abuse syndrome. Was big in the 80s. Destroyed a lot of families. Patricia was ready to sue hers. Was all set to go to trial and [...] she dropped the suit. [...] Well, her parents discovered a physical examination she’d undergone about a year prior. Turns out, she was a virgin. None of it happened.

At the precise moment where Mike refers to “traumatic events in your life,” Gordon is staring at the word “HOME” on his cell. The true meaning of this moment only becomes clear in retrospect. At the end of the film, we learn that, the evening of landing the job, Gordon returned home to celebrate. There was an accident, and a pot of boiling pasta spilled onto his leg. Gordon lost control, and killed his wife and baby daughter. At this point in the film, we do not know that Gordon has done anything. But even more importantly, Gordon himself does not know. He has repressed the memory, just as he similarly represses the memories, as the film progresses, of killing everyone else. And these murders, in turn, occur at moments where the original memory threatens to surface. One repression leads to another, until the destruction of Gordon and everyone he holds dear is complete.

In this scene, then, the film is playing a complicated game of memory, horror, and authentication. Mike’s narrative is horrific, and the montage of shattered found objects and predatory insects that accompanies his deadpan narration builds that horror to a crescendo, until Gordon (the man who has committed an act of horrific domestic violence) cries “Enough!” But then we have the debunking moment, where Mike exposes his horror tale as a tissue of lies. The memories were false. We are horrified by the story, then relieved that these terrible events never occurred. Only they have. A memory is being repressed even as Mike speaks, but it is the memory of the killer, rather than of the victims. The other crucial distinction, it seems to me, is one of kind. Domestic abuse itself is not being debunked by Session 9, but the addition of gothic trappings is. The point seems to be that the banal murders human beings commit every day are bad enough. Casting the events as Satanic rituals trivializes the abuse itself, as if it were somehow not adequately evil without the further motivation of devil worship. There is also an ironically comforting construction here: devil worshippers are less disturbing than a man who killed because of an everyday kitchen mishap.

In his seminal studies of the horror film, Robin Wood writes,

Insofar as horror films are typical manifestations of our culture, the dominant designation of the monster must necessarily be evil: what is repressed (in the individual, in the culture) must always return as a threat, perceived by the consciousness as ugly, terrible, obscene. Horror films, it might be said, are progressive precisely to the degree that they refuse to be satisfied with this simple designation – to the degree that, whether explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously, they modify, question, challenge, and seek to invert it. (192)

He further argues that the monster in the horror film is the representation of the Other, and that the “progressiveness of the horror film depends partly on the monster’s capacity to arouse sympathy” (192). The reactionary horror film, then, would cast the monster as utterly Other, completely inhuman, entirely evil, without any connection whatever to humanity. Session 9 dramatizes the opposition between human and inhuman Other/Monster by recognizing the Satanic cult as an attempt to blame the crimes of sexual abuse and murder on a group that is clearly not us. These people, the rationalization goes, may look like your mother, your father, your grandparents and your mailman, but they are, in fact, devil worshippers, and are revealed as such by the recovered memory. They must be devil worshippers, because their actions would make no sense otherwise. No human being would rape or murder children without the outside promptings of supernatural evil. The film demolishes this comforting us/them illusion through the Everyman figure of Gordon.

At the same time, this is not to say that there is no supernatural agency in Session 9. There might well be, though on this subject the film engages in a form of undecidability in the vein of The Turn of the Screw or the films of Val Lewton. This is where the figure of Simon enters the game. We first encounter his voice when Gordon, being given the initial tour of the asylum, is left alone for a moment in a dark corridor (at the end of which is Mary Hobbes’ cell). A shadow passes over Gordon’s face, and a sinister voice says, “Hello, Gordon.” As Gevedon and Anderson point out in their commentary on the film, one might read this as the moment where Gordon becomes possessed (and that night he kills his family). Mike hears this same voice on the Hobbes session tapes, and it is the Simon alter that killed Mary’s family. So a reading of Simon as a kind of demon is supported by the film, and therefore, it might be argued, we are right back with the Satanic cult reading of evil. Simon, however, is not that simplistic a figure. Mary’s alters reside in specific parts of her body. The Princess lives in the tongue (because she “talks so much”) and Billy lives in the eyes, because he sees everything. In the final seconds of the film, only the audience hears the recording of the psychiatrist asking Simon where he lives. Simon replies, “I live in the weak and the wounded.” He cannot be localized in a specific body part, and given a function associated with that part. For this reason, Simon is qualitatively different from the Princess and Billy. But there is more: with this statement, Simon claims to dwell not just in Mary, but in anyone with her symptoms. He is not so much an alternate personality as a condition. He is certainly not just a demon from hell descending on the otherwise pure. Instead, he is the evil that comes from within. He is the manifestation of the desperate violence of the weak and the wounded. As with all good horror movie monsters, he is as much a metaphor as a character.

Simon describes Mary’s brutal murder of her family as the camera pans over the pictures of Gordon’s family that have been assembled on a cell wall in a macabre, blood-stained collage. This is the moment where we realize his wife and daughter are dead, though the scene itself suggests that it is in fact Phil (David Caruso) who is the murderer. In a few short minutes, however, we will know that Gordon is the killer, and that it is this moment, when he sees the pictures, that the memory comes so close to the surface that he slaughters the rest of his crew. Thus, the two sets of repressed memories – Mary’s and Gordon’s – approach revelation, both for the characters and the audience, at the same time. The return of these memories is the climax of horror. The film moves toward these revelations, and when the now-dead Phil says, “Gordon, I need you to open your eyes. Wake up, and remember,” that is the cue for the worst moment of all: the sound of Wendy and Emma being killed as the camera once more pans over their cheerful pictures. The movement in a horror film is, of course, toward ever greater horror. In Session 9, the more memories surface, the worse the horror, and these memories, unlike the ones in the Patricia Willard scandal, are authentic.

Horror is truth, truth horror. Session 9 deploys all the traditional vocabulary of the horror movie to make us fear the truth in memory. When Mike finds the Mary Hobbes tapes, they are in a box marked EVIDENCE (i.e. “truth”) in the room that contains the building’s print and audio memories. His opening of the box is juxtaposed with scenes of Gordon cutting his thumb and Hank (Josh Lucas) cursing as asbestos dust lands in his eye. There is no causal link between the opening of the box and the accidents, but we are invited to see one. Setting the truth free is dangerous. (The truth shall make you bleed.) Mike is using a hooked knife to open Pandora’s Box.

The Danvers asylum is more than a repository of bad memories. It is a decayed American microcosm, an incarnation of a rotten, disintegrating, dangerous dream. Early in the film, Bill (Paul Guilfoyle) gives Gordon and Phil a tour of the asylum. With its extensive facilities, the asylum was, Bill says, “a self-contained town.” For example, he points out, the asylum had its own bowling alley and church. The image conjured by these details is one of small-town USA, the Norman Rockwell image of a lost American Arcadia, so often the subject of nostalgic yearnings for a return to the imagined goodness of the past. Consider, for instance, the golden-hued, slow-motion shots of overalled boys running through fields in Michael Bay’s Armageddon. The nightmare that the asylum clearly was makes nonsense of this nostalgia. Seconds earlier, Phil was gazing in horror at the hydrotherapy baths, and it is clear that the treatment of the inmates in this establishment was little more than a form of legalized torture. In Session 9, any memory of the past that is not one of utter horror is a lie. As if to emphasize the idea of false national myths, as Bill makes his “self-contained town” speech, the characters walk by an office door in whose window is an American flag. The window is shattered, and the flag has a large, jagged chunk missing.

If the dream of the American past is inauthentic, so is the dream of the future. The torn flag is visible in the background in another scene. In this one Hank tells Gordon’s nephew Jeff (Brendan Sexton III) about everyone’s “exit strategies.” The hazmat disposal game is dangerous and stressful, and Hank terrifies Jeff with a graphic description of what happens if even single speck of asbestos gets into a lung. In order to deal with the stress, each of the men has an exit strategy, a dream of self-improvement that will take him away from this dangerous and underpaid work. Mike, for instance, is always reading, with the idea of completing his law degree. Hank himself has pie-in-the-sky fantasies about casino school. Only Gordon has no exit strategy, and Hank correctly foresees disaster. Anderson has commented that Gordon’s story in particular represents “the American dream gone awry.” Gordon is Scottish, and thus, Anderson explains, is the immigrant come to the States for the better life, only to be destroyed by that lie. Of course, Hank too is destroyed by his dream: driven by greed upon discovering a cache of old coins, he returns to the asylum at night and is lobotomized by the prowling Gordon. Furthermore, all the men are driven to work dangerously fast by the promise of a ten-thousand-dollar bonus. The dream of advancement through work is as lethal and false as the myth of the golden past. The presence of that shattered flag during Hank’s monologue is a visual reminder of the fact that Hank is telling himself and Jeff comforting lies. (Interestingly, the flag was not the work of the production design. It was already there in the Danvers asylum, ready for Anderson to exploit.)

The asylum also represents the future, for Bill and for the town. Bill comments that “the land is priceless” and wishes he could tear the asylum down and “put up a Wal-Mart.” He can’t, though, because of the heritage status of the building. Put another way, he cannot erase the physical memory that the building represents. Instead, the asylum will house the town’s archives (read: its memory) and administrative offices (its brain). In other words, the asylum will move from being a self-contained town to containing the actual town. “Reclaiming the dark past to build a brighter future,” Bill says, when in fact it is the dark past that is doing the reclaiming.

To return finally to Robin Wood, I would argue that Session 9 bears a particularly interesting relation to his arguments. If one accepts his contention that the horror film is progressive to the degree that it a) problematizes the demonizing of the returning repressed; and b) engages sympathy for the monster/Other, then Session 9, one might argue, is particularly progressive by these standards since it explicitly addresses these very issues, and completely erases the premise of the monster as Other. The character who commits the monstrous acts, Gordon, is also the most sympathetic, and thus the most tragic. Even when killing his friends, Gordon’s face, far from being a fright mask, bears an expression of blank yet unbearable agony; in fact, it resembles nothing so much as the traditional image of the tragic theatre mask. He is the character we see in pain, both physical and emotional, stirring our sympathy long before we know what he has done. When his repressed memory surfaces in a partial form, he tells Phil that he hit his wife, and Peter Mullan’s remarkable performance gives us a man consumed by self-loathing, recoiling from the horror of his actions. Our last sight of Gordon is of him weeping, holding a broken cell phone to his ear, pleading for forgiveness from a phantom wife. There can be no forgiveness, of course. We know Gordon best; we understand his stresses best. The monster is not Other. He is us. And so the horror we feel at his actions is a horror of our own monstrosity.

This case would be harder to make if the horror contained in the repressed memories came out of the blue, if Gordon or Mary were born killers. This is not so. From the moment we see him, Gordon is clearly a man at the end of his rope, yet he struggles to maintain a facade that all is well. He and all the other characters are constantly pretending, repressing as best they can the grim reality of their lives. So Gordon’s repression of the memory of his crime should come as no surprise: this is part and parcel of the repression he is already engaged in, the repression that pushes him over the edge. Thus, it is not the thing repressed that is the cause of the horror; rather, it is the repression itself, and the socio-economic reasons for that repression. I emphasize, once again, Simon’s words: “I live in the weak and the wounded.” Gordon was already weak, wounded by the rotting, unattainable dream.

Session 9’s vision is a dark one. The film offers no way out of trap it illustrates. But then, I would argue, the envisioning of alternatives has never been a necessary, or even desirable, function of the horror film. (Science fiction is perhaps better equipped for this task.) But what horror can do, and Session 9 does superbly, is anatomize the problem, forcing to the light what we might otherwise wish to repress and forget ourselves.

Works Cited

Anderson, Brad and Steve Gevedon. Commentary on Session 9. Alliance, 2001. DVD.
Armageddon. Dir. Michael Bay. Touchstone, 1998. DVD.
Deep Red. Dir. Dario Argento. Seda Spettacoli, 1975. DVD.
King, Stephen. The Shining. New York: Signet, 1977. Print.
Session 9. Dir. Brad Anderson. Alliance, 2001. DVD.
Suspiria. Dir. Dario Argento. Seda Spettacoli, 1977. DVD.
Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Print.

Copyright © 2013 by David Annandale

David Annandale is the author, for the Black Library, of the Warhammer 40,000 books The Death of Antagonis, Yarrick: Chains of Golgotha, and Mephiston: Lord of Death. His horror novel, Gethsemane Hall, was published last year by Dundurn Press and (in the UK) by Snowbooks. For Turnstone Press, he has written a series of thrillers featuring rogue warrior Jen Blaylock (Crown Fire, Kornukopia, and The Valedictorians). His short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies, including Dead But Dreaming and Wild Things Live There: The Best of Northern Frights. David’s non-fiction has appeared in such collections as Roman Catholicism in Fantastic Film: Essays on Belief, Spectacle, Ritual and Imageryand The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto. He writes film reviews for The Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope. He teaches film, creative writing and literature at the University of Manitoba. His website is www.davidannandale.com  and find him on twitter @David_Annandale

by

In the supermarket, she searched the shelves for possible remedies, but, not surprisingly, they didn’t have a shelf dedicated to curing the sweating of trashy literature. Would paracetamol stop the fever? Worth a try. She threw some boxes into her basket, along with several cans of deodorant. She’d sprayed herself in the stuff before leaving the house, and now her face itched.

She wandered past the book aisle and blanched as she saw Jeffrey’s all too familiar squeaky-clean face duplicated across the shelves: orange skin, white teeth, a haircut so perfect it looked like plastic removable hair that came with Lego characters. Flipping her middle finger at the fixed, laughing faces, she hurried past.

At the checkout, a burning sensation ripped along her throat. She coughed quietly. The last thing she wanted was for people to notice what was happening to her. She’d never be able to live down the embarrassment. The burn turned into a fire, roaring its way up her windpipe, eating into the soft sides of her gullet. Her eyes watered with the pain of it. The woman in front of her turned around, eyes wide. Della tried to cover her mouth, but a book fell out before she could stop it, followed by a rush of others. She spewed the books onto the floor, staring with horror at the shining, saliva coated face of Jeffrey Kline. Eyes blinded with tears, she rushed out of the shop.

She drove her car straight to the hospital, hiccupping down hard mouthfuls of books along the way. It was getting worse, and she didn’t know how to stop it.

***

The nurse at the desk rushed her straight through to the doctor’s office, cutting through the usual crowd of head injuries, people clutching their arms. Della would have swapped places with any of them in a heartbeat.

The doctor’s face turned as white as his coat when he examined her mouth. He wiped a gobbet of books and saliva into a towel and threw it away, and then he sat silently on his chair, frowning.

“Will I be ok?” Della asked between vomiting.

The doctor didn’t answer. “I’m going to take a blood sample,” he said, shakily pushing his glasses up his nose. He fumbled about with the packets, preparing the needle and tube. He managed to keep a professional attitude right up until the moment when he removed the needle from Della’s arm and took a close look at the tube containing her blood. He jumped back, almost falling off his chair.

“What’s wrong?” Della said.

“I need to call in an expert.” The doctor explained as he dropped the vial and ran from the room.

Della stared down at the tube rolling near her feet. When she picked it up, she could see tiny red covered autobiographies swirling in her blood.

***

 The experts came and surrounded her bed, jabbering but unable to do anything else. Somehow, the media caught wind of the story and camped their camera crews around the hospital. Camera clicks echoed outside her windows as photographers tried to catch sight of her. After the first day, they had to move to her to a room with no windows.

“I don’t know if you’ve seen on the news,” Della’s mother said. She sat eating the grapes Della couldn’t keep down. “Jeffrey Kline’s publicist has been contacted by the press and by the hospital but they’ve denied having anything to do with your…illness.”

Della shifted onto her side. She didn’t care about publicists or anything else. She just wanted to be able to sleep again. She couldn’t even shut her eyes without that perfect, mocking face swimming at her out of the darkness behind her own eyelids.

“Perhaps you should read it?” her mother suggested, moving aside another bowl of glossy new paperbacks. “I’ve read a bit. It’s not too bad.”

Della turned her head away. Reading it was the last thing she wanted to do. She wanted to burn every last copy. She opened her mouth to say this. “When I indulged in alcohol, I initiated my own decline.” She snapped her mouth shut. Where had that come from?

“What did you say?” her mum approached the bed.

Della shook her head and opened her mouth again. “Talking Life has been the hardest, most rewarding part of my life to date.” None of the words were her own. They wrenched themselves from her voicebox. Scrabbling at her table, she scribbled down what’s happening to me?

“I think…I think you’re saying lines from his autobiography,” her mother whispered.

It was the last straw. Della stuffed the corner of her bed sheet into her mouth and refused to move until her mother had left. Then, ripping out her cannula, pouring little red covered book droplets along the hospital corridor, she called a taxi and had it drive her to Westgrange Studios.

She waited, shivering in the cold hedges in the thin hospital gown. He would have to pass her at some point. She’d make him stop whatever he was doing to her. Hours passed. Hours spent forcing out hard, cuboid tears. Alien thoughts drifted inside her head like clouds of smog, dashing away her own memories, replacing them with strange conversations she’d never had. Images of audiences bombarded her, jeering, laughing. Her head filled with their faces, their cruel staring.

Finally, Jeffrey Kline appeared from the revolving doors, jogged down the steps and fumbled in his trouser pockets for his car keys. He looked just like he did on all those books: fake, unreal.

“What have you done to me?” she said, stumbling out of the bush. Her voice was back, but it sounded sharp, out of control.

Jeffrey Kline, his smart grey suit jacket tossed casually over one arm, backed up against the door of his car. To the right, two security guards raced down the steps, but she waved the knife at them and they stopped, pacing on the edges of her vision.

Books fell one after the other onto the floor with greater frequency, their pages blowing open in the wind. “Look at me!” She said words, any words, as long as they were her own. The knife point drew back to Jeffrey, hovering near his neck.

His eyes were blue, creased around the edges, open wide but never so wide that books would fall out. “There’s no need to do this. Whatever problem you’re having, we can talk about it.” His voice was sickly smooth, full of himself, full of his own words.

She screamed and plunged the knife into his neck.

***

Mark raised his hand for a high-five. “Awesome, I never thought science could be so much fun. You’re great, babe.”

Lisa slapped his hand impatiently then focused back on the slide under her microscope. It was important she finish up with her samples, the work she should have been doing for the past month instead of indulging Mark in his revenge. If she didn’t get her work in on time, the lab was going to get suspicious and start asking questions.

She had no idea why she’d agreed to do it in the first place. Mark wasn’t even that attractive. She glanced at his stupid, grinning face. She’d only met him two months ago, and the advertising virus she’d been working on seemed like the perfect line to impress him with when he’d been moaning about his appearance on the chat show.

“My girlfriend – ex-girlfriend now, thanks to that bastard – made me go on the show. I took a lie detector test. They must be rigged or something, because I swear I never cheated on her.” Mark had complained, scowling at his drink and clenching his hand round it as if it were a neck.

“How awful,” Lisa remembered saying as she sipped on her drink and eyed up Mark’s burnished arm muscles.

The night was all a bit fuzzy after that. She recalled undoing her top button, leaning in towards him, winking.“I work in a lab. I’m developing an oxyvendo complex.”

“Oh, right.” He scratched his chin.

She laughed at his blank expression. “It’s a virus which turns your body into a walking advertisement. I could fix you up something to infect a few people with Kline merchandise. They’ll be so angry; they’ll assume it’s all Kline’s fault!”

“You can do that?” A slow grin crawled over his mouth. He had such perfect teeth.

The sex had been amazing but not worth all the hassle. She’d never expected Kline to get killed.

END

 Copyright © 2013  Laura-Marie Steele

Laura-Marie Steele lives in Canterbury, England with her partner and a beribboned porcelain fox. She enjoys drinking tea, reading a good fantasy and watching the gulls from her window. She has written fantasy and speculative fiction for many years, taking inspiration from chance phrases and the relationships between people and inanimate objects. She has a masters degree in English and American Literature. This is her first speculative fiction publication.

by

 

“Editor’s Notes” Copyright © 2013 by A.P. Matlock
“Getting Shot in the Face Still Stings” by Michelle Ann King
“Waking Up from the American Dream”  by David Annandale
“The Autobiography of Jeffrey Kline”  by Laura-Marie Steele

* * *

Download the Free Smashwords Edition
EPUB | MOBI |  OTHER FORMATS

by ]]> http://blacktreacle.ca/2013/06/07/june-2013-issue-3-table-of-contents/feed/ 0 http://blacktreacle.ca/2013/06/07/june-2013-issue-3-table-of-contents/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BlackTreacleMag/~3/f7fwf_xZ_aE/ http://blacktreacle.ca/2013/05/07/publication-schedule-pay-rate-changes/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 14:33:25 +0000 admin http://blacktreacle.ca/?p=368 Starting today, Black Treacle will be moving to a bimonthly publication schedule. Here are the release dates for the remaining issues of 2013:

Issue #3 – Tuesday, June 4th 2013
Issue #4 – August 6th, 2013
Issue #5 – October 1st, 2013
Issue #6 – December 3rd, 2013

The decision came about as a combination of factors, but the prime reason was submission volume– We are just not getting enough yet to be able to put out an issue every month.

We will revisit this choice in 2014.

PAY RATE

With the lower frequency of publication, we’ve decided to up the pay rate to 25.00 CAN for both fiction & non-fiction pieces (You know we are open to non-fiction submissions, right?).

by

The Scorpions scuttled to their low, custom instruments: theremin, drum machine, sampler, turntable. A siren whine, a backbeat, fast and loud.

The bass drove Rona’s heartbeat.

The crowd bounced like a single organism, every strobe a snapshot. Between flashes, the exoskeletons on stage glowed blue-green in the ambient black light.

Human bodies pressed wet and warm against Rona’s back and shoulders. She didn’t blame them. She, too, was just barely managing to swallow it down, just barely managing to moor herself to acceptable behaviour. This wasn’t some Thursday night grunge band. This was Swammerdam. This was seven-foot-long super-intelligent Scorpions playing trip hop.

A hand on Rona’s shoulder. Suze squeezed her way through, handed Rona a drink. They grinned at each other. Scorpion bands were common now in Toronto and Montreal but they hardly ever came to Ottawa. Two precious hours of adrenalin, sweat and pheromones, not all of them human. Better than studying for a fucking macroeconomics exam.

Better than anything.

A young woman walked to the front of the stage. Human.

Rona knew Swammerdam sometimes toured with humans, although she didn’t recognize this one. But seeing it made it real. A human playing with Scorpions. A life like that, made possible by impossible Scorpions. The woman stepped casually over the interlocking legs, grabbed the mic and pulled it to her red mouth. A dozen long black braids snapped like whips as she howled.

Rona couldn’t see the Scorpions’ eyes; they seemed oblivious to anything but the music, their pincers spread wide over the instruments. Did they ever look out at the crowd? Did they notice her? Could they tell she was like them, in the ways that counted? Like the woman with the braids. Rona could be like her. She had to be like her. She was on the wrong side of the stage. Couldn’t they tell?

She shut her eyes and reminded herself she probably looked nothing like what she really was. Rona was amazing, or she could be. Maybe. But she probably looked like a pudgy girl in a black Swammerdam t-shirt, the black light mocking every lint scintilla.

The delicious pain of watching them play was like the pain of watching someone she had a crush on. She ought to be with them. That would be right and this was wrong.

She could enjoy the music, she could sway and bounce and scream.

But in the flash of a strobe, one part of her brain became aware that it wouldn’t be enough. Not for her. This memory would always be just a little painful. She envied the others in the crowd, regular people who could just enjoy the music, without always wanting to be the one making it.

In the next flash of the strobe Rona thought, for a second, that the woman with the braids caught her eye.

* * *

After the encores, when the house music came on, Suze grabbed Rona’s shoulder, pulled herself close to her ear to be heard. “Let’s get poutine,” she said.

Rona took a step away from her roommate. “You go ahead,” she shouted.

The singer was packing up the instruments, chatting with a cluster of groupies who had bought her a beer. Her braids swung when she laughed. Rona could do something cool with her own hair, maybe. She could put glitter in her cleavage. Distance. Always so much distance between the ideal Rona and the actual one.

“You’re drunk,” Suze shouted. “Shouldn’t be alone.”

“Fuck off. I’m not drunk. I’ve had two.”

Suze held up three fingers.

“Go ahead,” Rona shouted. She could barely hear herself, could only feel the vibration of the sound in her already hoarse throat, and wondered idly if that made her sound more drunk. “I won’t have any more. I’ll get a cab. I just want to dance a little.”

“I’m not leaving without you.”

The woman with the braids was striding through the crowd, toward the door that led to the bathroom.

“Whatever,” Rona shouted, moving away from Suze. “I have to pee.”

* * *

In the bathroom’s harsh white light, the music was stripped down to the echo of its beats. But Rona could still feel it in her ribs and she wondered whether the singer did too. The singer was fiddling with her false eyelashes, swearing at her reflection. It was just the two of them. Perfect.

“You have a gorgeous voice,” Rona said, standing behind the woman, looking into the same mirror. Her lips were tingly, a little numb. She still couldn’t tell if she was speaking too loudly. Her voice seemed disconnected from her ears.

“Thanks. Did you need the sink? I’m almost done. Goddamned Scorpion in the backstage bathroom. Prima fucking donnas.”

“Take your time. Do you want a hand?”

“Aw, you’re a sweetheart, thanks. It’s hard to do this with your eyes open, and with your eyes closed you can’t see what you’re doing.”

Rona stepped close. She had no idea how false eyelashes worked. How hard could it be? She rearranged it, timidly. Up close, the singer was no less impressive. The fuzzed hair at the tops of her braids, the sweat creases in her cerulean eye shadow, the pores in her nose, only made her more frustrating. She wasn’t much older than Rona.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Let me guess,” the singer said. “You want to know if the Scorpions talk to me.”

Scorpions, with a capital S, had been discovered, or made their presence known, in the 1970s, around the time Rona was born. It was only within the last few years that they’d started interacting with human culture: playing music, sculpting, painting,occasionally doing interviews through one of their chosen interpreters.

No one had yet been able to learn how to communicate with Scorpions. The talent simply appeared in a few humans. No one knew why only those people could hear the Scorpions in their minds, and respond.

“They do,” the singer said. “Anything else you want to know?”

“I`m a musician too,” Rona said, conscious of how close their faces were as she fiddled with the singer’s lashes.

“Of course you are.”

“I play piano. Keyboards I mean. Well, I’m classically trained but–”

“But you write songs,” the singer said, wearily. “And you sing, right?”

Rona nodded, slo-mo, the alcohol sloshing in her brain pan.

“Are you good?”

Rona blushed. “Okay I guess. Not as good as you.”

The singer pulled away, looking pained. Had Rona said something wrong?

The singer put her hands over her face for a moment, then dropped them.

“Will you sing for me?”

“Here?”

“Here.”

Rona laughed nervously. She sang a few lines from When Doves Cry, barely above a whisper. The drum beat from the bar didn’t match the rhythm.

“Well,” the singer said, cutting her off. “We all have to start somewhere.”

We do, Rona thought. This woman started somewhere. With a real human life, like hers. A human brain and human hands, not telepathy or pincers. Yet this woman–

“What’s your name?” Rona asked, as if she needed to know, urgently, and she did.

“Scarab,” she said.

“Really?”

“It is now,” Scarab said. She put her hands up over her face again for a moment. She dropped them and smiled. “Thanks. My eye feels a little better. Listen, you have a good voice. You do. You should keep singing. Can I buy you a drink?”

Rona nodded, afraid to speak a word.

* * *

Scarab took the tall cold glass from the bartender and handed it to Rona, pierced eyebrow quirked.

“What’s in this?”

Rona laughed. “Jack Daniels, Blue Curacao, peach schnapps. And orange juice. It’s sweet.”

Should she offer her a taste? Would that be weird?

“Sounds dangerous,” Scarab said. “I like you already. Gargleblaster’s a stupid name though.”

“Didn’t you ever read Douglas Adams? That’s where the name of the bar comes from too. Everyone calls it Zaphod’s but it’s actually Zaphod Beeblebrox. It’s the name of a character.”

“Huh.” Scarab was already turning away and Rona bit her lip until she tasted blood.

But Scarab turned and beckoned her with her finger.

She followed Scarab through the narrow bar, guided by the purple light tubes on the walls. Her gargleblaster was the thick green of unripe fruit and whenever Rona swayed toward the black light, a fluorescent peachy stain drifted down from the surface, eddying around the ice cubes. People jostled her and she spilled a little on her t-shirt but she didn’t care; it was distant.

Scarab opened the little door by the stage. Holy fuck: Backstage. The band room.

Suze would love that.

“Is it okay if I get my roommate?” Rona asked, leaning close to Scarab to be heard over the music. Cigarettes and beer smelled good on a woman like Scarab.

Scarab grimaced. “It’s a really small room.”

Rona turned and looked blankly at the faces in the crowd. She didn’t see Suze. Maybe she’d gone home after all.

“Are you coming?”

Rona walked through. It was dark on the other side.

* * *

Rona giggled as they felt their way down a flight of stairs.

“The Scorpions don’t like light,” Scarab said. “Especially after a show. They need to recover because the strobe lights make them crazy. Damn near kill them. I keep telling the Scorpions that people would like the shows fine with no lights, but they ignore me. Masochists.”

“They’re down here?”

“Of course. This is the band room. They’re the band. Are you scared?”

“No. I’m excited.”

“Good. They’ll fucking change your life.”

* * *

Up close, the surface of the Scorpion was both shiny and furry, every hair standing out on the razor claws. It blocked out what little light came from the doorframe behind it.

The movement was so fast, it might have been film editing. In an instant, the pincers spread wide, and eight legs flung out, bracing the enormous body, the back angling up, the tail curling, erect. Rona almost had time to wince when the pincers grasped her shoulders.

She didn’t see the stinger when it came.

* * *

When she opened her mouth to scream, Scarab thrust a rag into her mouth and bound it. The Scorpion scrabbled with its pincers on her arms for a moment, then let its pincers drop. Scarab took Rona’s elbow and walked her into the dim band room. The two other Scorpions were there, in the shadows. They might have been sleeping.

Scarab walked her gently into the room and sat her on a sagging couch of indeterminate colour. A part of Rona’s mind felt guilty for not resisting or escaping, but weakness was creeping up her legs and she didn’t want to be anywhere else, anyway. This was happening. She’d been chosen. People said all kinds of things about what Scorpion venom did to a person and now she, Rona, was going to find out.

They had seen her for what she was after all. They had known she was special.

Maybe that meant they were going to eat her, or wrap her up like Frodo in Shelob’s lair. Somehow Rona didn’t care. Whatever it was, it was better than going home to order poutine with Suze and play drunk Donkey Kong.

Scarab sat across from her, on another couch, across a low coffee table. She lit a cigarette.

“The venom takes a few minutes to get into your nervous system,” Scarab said. “Once it does, I’ll take off the gag. You’ll be fine, by the way. You’re not going to die or anything.”

Pain spread from Rona’s neck, just under her right ear. She could hear her own heart drumming way too fast.

“They don’t ask first because they don’t want anyone to say no, and then go tell people about it,” Scarab said. “I tried to tell them you were a sure thing, no need for the ambush and gag with you, but like I say, they don’t listen to me.”

Rona’s ears were ringing, giving every sound an underwater quality. She tried to wonder why Scarab sounded sad, but she couldn’t quite work up the concentration. There was no point in wondering about anything. Things just were what they were.

Her right arm spasmed.

“There you go,” Scarab said. “I’ll take out the gag now if you promise not to scream.”
Rona made some kind of movement with her head that was close enough to a nod. Scarab leaned forward, took the gag out, her face close to Rona’s.

She whispered, into the ear on the sting side, “It’s OK. Just go with it. Don’t worry.”

Her hands slipped on Rona’s sweaty skin.

“How are you doing?” Scarab asked.

Rona opened and shut her mouth a few times, feeling her teeth with her tongue. Spit frothed her lips and dribbled down her chin.

The nearest Scorpion rearranged its chitinous limbs a little, folded one pincer over the other in a clicking movement not quite human, not quite animal. It cocked its head at her in a fluid motion; everything it did was like dancing. She thought this was the one who had stung her.

Rona could almost understand the words in her head. Not quite but almost. Whispers in a far room.
Her neck hurt. And her shoulder. And both her arms. She glanced down. Each of her upper arms had a red slice through it from the pincers, blood welling and dripping.

Whispers. Distant whispers in her mind. Possibilities.

Below the deepest slices on her arms there were several shallower cuts that looked as if they’d been made by the pincers too. The pattern meant something; the more she looked at it, the more it meant.

Instructions. Cut into her skin in a language she was now able to read.

She looked at Scarab. Scarab picked up Rona’s drink, stood up, holding the glass high above the concrete floor. She dropped it and it shattered, the greenish liquid oozing into a puddle.

Rona stood too, and bent to pick up one of the pieces.

“I knew it was coming soon,” Scarab said. “They get bored easily. You have a nice voice. They like your voice.”

“It’s all for the show,” Rona said hoarsely, echoing the words in her mind.

Scarab nodded. “And everyone’s dispensable.”

They stood, and Rona hugged Scarab close, a piece of broken glass in her right hand, against Scarab’s neck.

The three Scorpions, watching, made a noise with their pincers like clapping.

* * *

The bar was almost empty, save a few stragglers who would drink until someone told them to stop.

And Suze.

She came back for me, Rona thought. Or she never left. Maybe she was here the whole time, up here with the clueless people.

She heard the Scorpions in her mind, now, clearly. Hurry up, they said. We need you.

Suze walked up to the stage where Rona was packing up the last of the Scorpions’ gear. She understood now why the band used no roadies; no awkward questions about turnover.

They need me.

“Holy shit,” Suze said. “What are you doing? What are you wearing?”

Rona was wearing a glittery baby doll shirt she’d found in Scarab’s bag. It showed some of her midriff. The old Rona would have been pulling it down all the time. The new Rona couldn’t care less. She’d chosen it mainly because its three-quarter length sleeves covered the scrapes on her arms. Her hair was a mess, so she’d pulled it into a wild ponytail on the top of her head.

“What is that?” Suze was pointing. “What’s on you?”

Rona looked down. In the black light, a spray of drops glowed lurid all the way down one leg of her jeans and on the back of one hand. She thought she’d got all of the blood off. Thanks, Scarab, she thought. It looks pretty.

The venom had subsided but everything still had a faraway, underwater feeling. Everything but the Scorpions’ words. They were trying out some chords and she heard that too, in her mind, where the world was clear.

She was beginning to understand why it had to be death, for the others. This connection felt permanent. Once the Scorpions had crawled into a mind they couldn’t crawl out.

“I’m with the band now,” Rona said, and bent down to wrap a cable.

END

Copyright © 2013 Kate Heartfield

Kate Heartfield is a newspaper journalist in Ottawa, Canada. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology Blood and Water and in journals such as The New Quarterly. Her story “For Sale by Owner” will appear soon in Daily Science Fiction. She is working on a novel. She can be found on Twitter as @kateheartfield and blogs at heartfieldfiction.wordpress.com.

by

“Even the air stank of death,” Taylor whispered running his fingers across the bars. The metal was always cold. Everything was always cold down to the coffee. Day three hundred on death row was going to be just as dark as day one.

Down the corridor Taylor could hear the sound of keys jangling– always the sound of keys jangling, locks turning, but never the sound of anyone leaving.

Then again why was he bellyaching? He brought it all on himself.

“Taylor, you look like shit today. Here you have some mail,” Carl said sliding an envelope between the bars.

“I look like shit every day.”

Carl was the only screw with any sense of humour, the others weren’t worth piss. Taylor even almost smiled watching Carl and his big butt make his way down the hall.

Walking down that hall was something Taylor would do only one more time on that happy day when they took him to the gas chamber.

In the meantime, nothing– hours, weeks, months, years of nothing wait ahead like some deranged purgatory.

He threw the envelope onto his cot. Having exhausted all his appeals whatever sat between that wrapping could wait. It wasn’t a million bucks. That was certain as the next turn of a key, not that a million, let alone a billion bucks, could do his sorry ass any good.

Fate sucked; if he could only live that day over. What if he’d gotten up two minutes later or two minutes earlier? What if he didn’t down that extra glass of whiskey? What if it was snowing? What if his car broke down? What if the universe wasn’t made of what ifs.

Taylor stood above the cot staring at the envelope noting there wasn’t a return address on it when he heard Carl making his way back up the corridor. The shuffling of shoes breaking through the silence was always more pronounced there. It wasn’t just a matter of acoustics. Quite appropriately, there were so few sounds of life on death row that any sound made stood out more, from a whistle to the drip of the faucet.

Carl hardly ever whistled but he was whistling that day. When he reached Taylor’s cell he poked his head in.

“Well, are you going to open that thing up, or are you just gonna stare it all day?”

“I think I’ll stare at it all day.”

“Suit yourself; you know why I like you Taylor? Because you are the unluckiest son of a bitch in the world.”

Taylor grinned with sarcasm, “Thanks, Carl. Have a nice day.”

“Only you could make that sound like a curse. You have a nice day too, Taylor.”

As he watched Carl walk towards the doors at the end of the corridor his grin fell and his mouth took on all the signs of a sadness that would never die. Then a tear formed in Taylor’s eye and he cried. He cried every single day. His words echoed across the empty hall, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Sadness was the only thing death row didn’t kill. He had bankrolls full of limitless sorrow to spend.

Taylor stared at the envelope again. He picked it up and ran it across his nostrils like he was trying out a fine wine, and he tossed it down on his mattress.

The mattress looked worse every day. If he was destined to die there couldn’t they at least provide a decent mattress? He kicked the side of the bed, and then he stepped over to the toilet and spat in it with a look of disgust on his face that would have turned the queen of England’s head. He didn’t come from the streets. He wasn’t some common thug. He had a Master’s degree. He had a life before all this happened, before he fucked it up, like he always knew he would, before he killed that poor child.

He sat down on the cot, promising himself he wasn’t going to cry again. He grabbed the envelope and ripped it open. Inside, a single page of unlined white paper with the words written in black ink, One day pass to live that day over stared at him like a ghost.

His hands began to shake. The paper fell to the crumbling mattress as Taylor lurched from the cot feeling the kind of fear one feels when they think someone has just seen them at their most vulnerable. A memory of his bedroom door swinging open when he was fourteen and Billy’s face laughing at the sight of Taylor pleasing himself sped through his mind.

Then anger suddenly crossed his face; someone’s idea of fun? Maybe it was Carl teasing him? But would Carl do that? They both joked around a lot, but not in a cruel way. Whoever sent this was either crazy, or sadistic. Carl wasn’t sadistic, he may have been crazy, but he wasn’t that crazy. No, Carl wasn’t behind this letter, but someone was, someone out there was playing some kind of strange game with him.

He felt a slight tingling sensation fall over his arm as if the light were changing in his cell. At first it was something he barely noticed. He continued to brood, continued to stare at the letter, continued to wonder who was behind it until off in the distance he heard the sound of music, music he recognized, music anyone would recognize as the kind that accompanied a Ferris wheel or a roller coaster, or just about any ride in an amusement park.

He heard the distinct and clear winding sound of amusement park music.

Taylor was a rational man, he knew that wasn’t possible, yet even stranger, he could smell fresh air as if he were outside, and then the most impossible thing followed; he felt a breeze hit his face. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt an honest to God breeze. His body didn’t know how to react; to run for his life or to cheer his imminent freedom.

Then suddenly the light completed its change and Taylor found himself surrounded by darkness. It was night. He was outside somewhere, somehow in the night air. The music became louder and the bright lights of a Ferris wheel sped past him close as if one of the cars were about to sideswipe him.

He lunged and rolled across what he knew was grass- real grass. The light from the wheel raced across the ground. Taylor watched it flash over his legs. His eyes shot up and he saw a roller coaster, a merry go round, booths with stuffed animals, dolls, clocks. He saw tents, all varieties of rides he remembered from his childhood spinning and lurching-The Round Up, Tea Cups…Lights speeding against the night, and the sounds of bells, of whistles, and the insane toy music.

He was smack dab inside some kind of amusement park. He didn’t know if he should stay on the ground and hide, or get up and take a look around; none if it was possible, none of it.

The sound of a bell from a High striker rang through his ears. He looked up and saw the back of a man in an overcoat taking another swing with the mallet, and next to him in a shiny blue suit wearing a glittering top hat Taylor saw a carnie barker man grinning. His teeth white as sharks, the barker called out through a megaphone pointing to the ground where Taylor was hiding, as the man in the overcoat pounding the mallet hit the bell, “That’s right, Taylor you are a winner! The brass ring! The grand prize! You, Taylor Mackey are no longer the unluckiest son of a bitch in the world, you have a chance now! One chance! Can you change that day? I know you can, Taylor!”

As the barker’s words ended the music began to spin out of control. Taylor covered his ears and cried. Dear god, where the hell was he?

“Make the music stop! Please!” He raised his fists, rolling on the ground as if the force of his movements would slow everything down, but of course it didn’t. The music became louder, and more strained.

He pulled himself from the grass. He had to make a run for it; to where he had no idea. He had no idea where he was, or if he was anywhere. Maybe that was it? Maybe they took him to the gas chamber and this was hell? There was no time to think. Everything was going too fast- the lights, the cars, the bells, his heart.

He was a winner of what? You can’t live days over. You can’t change the past. You can’t put a genie back in a bottle no matter how hard you try, Taylor repeated in his head as he began to run.
Then the barker called again, tipping his shiny hat towards the sky, “We’ll slow things down a little, Taylor, don’t go anywhere. Come here you have a prize to claim, a past to change, a boy’s life to save!”

Taylor got a closer look at the barker. All that glitters is not gold, his skin was jaundiced and his white shark teeth were green around the edges, but his eyes glowed, they glowed with a glassy stare that sent chills through Taylor’s veins.

A sick nausea entered Taylor’s stomach as the music slowed down and changed to a vaudevillian style.

The barker now stood on a small platform stage with stripped silver curtains suspended behind him. Taylor could see the Ferris wheel turn above, its lights changing the image of the barker from bright to dull and back again. Then from behind the curtain two females who looked like they just stepped out of the Miss America Beauty Pageant of 1973, wearing bathing suits and pink sashes with the words (in white lettering) We Love Taylor sprawled across them, stepped out and joined the barker, one stood on his left side the other on his right.

At that point Taylor had almost given up looking for rational explanations. He told himself he was too in it, and what if it was possible? What if he could change his past, wipe his slate clean?

Then the barker held a cane in his hand tapped it on the floor of the stage and he and the pageant girls began to tap dance a soft shoe. Their eyes stared at Taylor sending more chills through him. Everything about the strange performers seemed too exaggerated; their smiles–too broad, their gestures–too forced, and their stares–too intense.

The old fashioned music changed from pleasant sounding to a deranged version of itself, the notes bent, the rhythm sputtered. The lady on the right side of the barker lifted a bottle of whiskey in the air, and said in a Kewpie doll voice, still tapping her feet to the strained beat, “We should drink a toast to you, Taylor, to wish you success on your mission,” and she puckered her lips.

Then the girl on the left side of the barker held four glasses in her hand and in the same saccharin voice eked out, “Yes! I have a glass for each of us, you too, Taylor.” She puckered her lips too.

The barker grinned and said in a mocking tone, “But if Taylor drinks he’ll get drunk and run that boy down again.”

The two girls sighed loudly, swooned and moused out in the same mocking tones as the barker, “Poor Taylor, poor, poor Taylor.”

The notes of the music became more bent, more dissonant. The barker and the pageant girl’s grins increased in exaggerated intensity growing insanely surreal like a Fellini film gone mad.

Terrified, Taylor covered his ears, and he screeched out, “It was an accident I swear!”

“No it wasn’t, but we love you anyway, Taylor.” They sang too sweetly, smiling too broadly, still tapping to the swirling sickening refrain.

Taylor screamed out, “Stop the music! I can’t take it anymore!”

Sweat beaded on his forehead, his shaking hands tried to wipe it away. If he could wipe everything away. He kept telling himself this wasn’t happening, but he knew it was, somehow it was. Suddenly, he found himself longing for death row.

He should try and make another run for it but inside he knew there was nowhere to run. Wherever he ran he would wind up right back in the strange park that existed everywhere and nowhere. How could this desperate place possibly give him the chance he needed? How could this wretched dance change that day? He stepped away from the stage and began to walk in the direction of a tent that seemed to be calling him.

Strangely drawn, not knowing why, he made his way to the tent just a few yards away from the stage. His steps were slow. He didn’t want to set the barker off, but he had to see what was in that tent.

As he neared the entrance and pulled the white burlap back, he heard the barker call, “It’s okay, Taylor go see what that tent has to offer. We’ll all still be here waiting for ya.”

The barker sadistically grinned in Taylor’s direction and puckered his lips, just like one of the beauty pageant girls. They all stared at Taylor, lips puckered, blowing kisses, as he made his way into the tent.

The toy music sped up again.

A few bare bulbs hanging by wire from the wood frame ceiling of the tent gave off the only light Taylor had to make his way through the relatively small, but wide edifice. Several old splintery wooden crates and trunks lined the side walls of the structure otherwise it was bare, with the exception of one small oak table and chair which sat in the center of the tent.

The music still edged his every nerve, but what he had to do was sit in that chair. He had no clue why but he had to, and so Taylor inched his way to the table, sat under the dim light and waited for what he did not know. One thing he did know; the idea of changing that day seemed more and more tangible. Maybe he could do it? After all he was brought to this crazy place for just that reason even if it didn’t make any sense. Maybe he could change his destiny, only two things had to occur; the premise had to be the absolute truth, what the note said, what the barker said had to be real, if it was then all he had to do was stay sober. Surely, he could accomplish that small task, anyone could.

No sooner had Taylor thought the words when a bottle of scotch appeared on the table. When his eyes caught the bottle he nearly jumped out of his chair. Its appearance, though out of nowhere, shouldn’t have stunned him any longer, not in that place, but it still did. Obviously it was some kind of test that that Barker had planned. He’d pass it with flying colors why not? He hadn’t had a drink in years. He couldn’t; he was in prison. Oh maybe he could have obtained something when he was with the general population, but not since they sent him to death row.

He didn’t want to drink anyway; it was his drinking that brought him here.

He was finally alcohol-free just in time for his impending execution. Taylor being Taylor didn’t miss the sad irony of that, he wallowed in it, like he wallowed in everything.

Then he thought, as Taylor only would, maybe he could have just one sip?

One sip wouldn’t make him drunk would it? He could still change that day, save that boy’s life and have a taste of that fine scotch. It must have been the best, considering the situation, whoever, or whatever force was ultimately behind this wouldn’t send over cheap whiskey.

That was the last sober thought Taylor had before he downed the entire bottle.

He sat in the chair, head on the table bawling his eyes out for what seemed like an eternity. The sleek brown empty bottle lay on its side on the table next to Taylor’s head as if it was winking at him.

When he heard the barker’s voice call from outside interrupting his drunken haze Taylor’s arm swung over and knocked the bottle to the floor.

“Oh no, Taylor what have you done? How are you going to change your destiny now?”

“Poor Taylor,” he heard the pageant girls sing and swoon,” the unluckiest man in the world.”

Taylor lifted his head and cried out, “I can do it anyway. I can change it drunk or sober because I’m aware of it now, keenly aware of what I have to do. Just you watch me. I will change that day! I promise!” And his head fell to the table again.

The barker’s voice rang out in mocking cheer. “Did you hear what he said girls? Taylor said he can change that day, anyway!”

Suddenly there was a drum roll, like a game show was about to start. Taylor heard it loud and clear even in his stupor.

The barker called in a voice that would put Bob Barker to shame, “C’mon down, Taylor. You are the winner of this fine 1999 Gold Chevy Impala, just like the one you used to run that boy down. As a matter a fact, it is the very one you used to run that boy down! C’mon down!”

Taylor stood from the table drunk but determined. He could manage it somehow he just knew he could.

How on earth could he drink again and on this day of all days? What the hell was wrong with him?

He could kick himself if he could manage not to trip over his own leg. A child’s’ future was at stake, not just his own.

He was pathetic, unlucky and pathetic, he thought as he made his way out of the tent.

His breath nearly stopped because when he stepped out of the tent it vanished. The entire amusement park fell away. All that stood before him was the gold Chevy impala and an open road that seemed to go on forever into a cloudy grey horizon.

If anything could sober him up that sight could. So vast, it made Taylor feel incredibly insignificant.But he knew what he had to do. He got into the car. The car was idling. The key was already in the ignition, all he had to do was push his foot on the gas pedal, and he’d be off.

He’d take it slow, careful and slow. He could do it, he kept repeating in his head.
The highway passed by empty and grey with nothing on the side of the road except trees for miles, and miles.

Taylor began to wonder if anything was going to happen when he saw it; the outskirts of town.
The intersection where it all took place, he was approaching it. His nerves began to tense and then, like a shot out of a cannon, he saw the boy riding his bike crossing the street where Taylor ran into him just mere feet away.

This time he wasn’t going to hit him. He pushed his foot to the pedal to slow the car down even more, but in his drunken state he accidently hit the gas and he began to speed toward the boy again.

His heart thumped like it was going to explode.

He grabbed the wheel and slammed his foot on the brake.

The car swerved and screeched, and turned and to his amazement he just missed the boy.

He did it! He really did it! He shouted inside his head, when out of the corner of his eye he saw the tractor trailer that was speeding into the side of his car; the one that he didn’t see coming as he pulled into the intersection.

Taylor’s car burst into flames. Black smoke covered the street.

Soon a crowd gathered. As the paramedics pulled Taylor’s charred remains out of the torn metal a bystander said to another, “Did you see that? He came barrelling into the intersection at the same time that tractor trailer was pulling in. If wasn’t for him that truck would have mowed that boy down. He is a hero.”

“Was. Now he’s just the unluckiest son of a bitch in the world.”

END

Copyright © 2013 Bruce Memblatt

Bruce Memblatt is a native New Yorker, and a member of the Horror Writers Association.

He is on the staff of The Horror Zine as Kindle Coordinator and writes a bi- weekly series for The Piker Press based on his short story, “Dinner with Henry.”

His story “Dikon’s Light” is a recipient of Bewildering Stories 2012 Mariner Awards and his works have been published over one hundred times in anthology books, magazines and zines such as Aphelion, Cycatrix Press, Post Mortem Press, Dark Moon Books, Sam’s Dot Publishing, Strange Weird and Wonderful Magazine, The Horror Zine, Midwest Literary Magazine, Danse Macabre, Parsec Ink, The Feathertale Review, Yellow Mama and many more.

Visit Bruce’s blog @ http://brucememblatt.wordpress.com

by

“Any signal on that thing yet?” he asked Elaine.

“Be patient, dammit. Don’t you think I’d tell you if it was working?”

Jesse growled. “Just let me know when you figure out where the hell we are.”

“At least we haven’t seen any cops.”

He didn’t answer. Bad luck to talk about good luck. Funny how that works. Why not good luck to talk about bad luck? Wouldn’t that be a helluva lot better?

“Hey! I got…” Elaine hesitated. “Shit. Yeah, I got shit. Stupid GPS.”

Jesse kept driving. It was just after two in the afternoon. Five hours after he and Elaine had robbed the only bank in Haskell Canyon. The plan was to get out of Texas, be in Oklahoma before dark. Lie low. Well, that was plan as far as Elaine knew at least. The part she didn’t know about was when Jesse would put a couple of bullets in her. He’d needed a driver, and she’d been good for that, but he wasn’t planning on splitting the take with her.

The plan–the official plan–had gone awry when he’d seen that damned state trooper car about fifteen miles out of Haskell Canyon. He’d turned onto one back road, then another. He kept turning, thinking he was heading north and east each time, figuring eventually they’d hit I-44. But the parade of back roads just led to greater and greater desolation.

Elaine reached across the cab of the truck and turned the volume down on Jesse’s music.

He glanced at her, turned the music back up. “Don’t mess with the music, Elaine. My car, my rules.”

“You’ve got it so damn loud I can’t even think.”

Jesse snorted. “I bet you didn’t mind it loud back when you were my age.”

He noticed the road veering sharply to the right at the last moment and fought to keep tires on pavement. It was a close thing and the growl of the tires against gravel at the edge of the road drowned out whatever reply Elaine had for his retort. He knew she was sensitive about her age, ever since that time he’d commented that she was old enough to be his mother. Man, was that a sore subject…

The road kept curving and twisting. Jesse had no clue what way they were going. Hell, for all he knew, they could be on a road right back into Haskell Canyon. And wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass?

The road twisted around a little hill and finally hit a straightaway. A bit down the road, Jesse saw a cluster of buildings.

“Anything yet?” He asked Elaine, thinking that they had to be getting some kind of coverage this close to a town.

“I said I’d tell you, didn’t I? You just pay attention to the road.”

Jesse didn’t want to have to stop in Nowheresville. People would remember seeing them pass through. But if there wasn’t signal out here, they’d just have to chance it. Long enough to get their bearings. He accelerated on the straight, flat road. The sooner they could get into and out of this place, the happier he’d be.

The truck started to sputter. Jesse checked the dashboard. No lights flashed but something was wrong. He wasn’t getting any response to the gas and the truck was coasting.

A short ways from town the truck shuddered violently and stopped. Jesse tried starting it, but the engine wouldn’t turn over.

“Shit.” Elaine said. “This sucks.”

“Yeah, tell me something I don’t know, Elaine.” He climbed out of the truck. “I’m going into town, see if there’s a mechanic or something. Stay here. Don’t do nothing stupid. Got me?”

She nodded, her lips tight.

He started down the road. The pavement was cracked and bumpy. The town itself was off on a little spur of road, butted up against the base of a hill. Jesse turned onto that bit of asphalt and walked by a sign emblazoned “Welcome to Blackrock. Population 127.” An old Buick, rusty and missing a tire, was parked at the side of the road.

The late-September air was unseasonably hot. He was sweating as he entered town. Everything was still; no one was around. Probably staying inside, keeping out of the heat. He checked his cell phone, but it was as dead as Elaine’s.

Jesse found a gas station, two fuel pumps in front and a little shop in back. There were a couple of cars parked, but no one was in the shop.

“Hello?” he called out, his voice sounding flat. No one replied.

“Goddamn.” A door at the back of the store led to an office, also vacant.

Jesse looked around the store. It was a pretty pathetic place. He rubbed his nose and tried to think of what he might find here that would help get them going again. He browsed the auto aisle–lots more here than in the food aisles–and grabbed fuel injector cleaner and a gas can.

Back outside, he pumped a few gallons of gas into the can and dumped the fuel injector cleaner in. The heat and the weight of the gasoline wore him down as he walked out of town. By the time he got to the truck his shirt was soaked and his head was pounding.

“Run into any trouble?” Elaine asked. She was sitting on a large rock a short ways off the road.
Jesse looked at her, sitting there cool and collected. Shit, he should’ve had her go into town. After all, she was the one who bragged about running marathons in her fourth decade.

“Not exactly,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“It was weird. I didn’t see anyone around, not at the gas station, not anywhere. Like everyone just up and left town.”

He dumped the contents of the can into the gas tank and climbed into the stifling truck cab. “Let’s get going. Staying still like this is making me edgy.”

He tried starting the truck. The engine whirred and groaned, nearly turning over several times, before falling completely silent.

Jesse slammed his hands against the wheel. Pain lanced up his arms. “God. Dammit!” He threw the door open and jumped back out. It almost felt comfortable out there after being inside the truck. Elaine came back to his side of the truck.

“I’m out of ideas. You got any?” he asked her.

“There were cars in town, weren’t there?”

He nodded. “Sure.”

“Well, there you go. We’ll just have to take one of those.”

Damn. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Even if the truck had been fine with the gas, he didn’t have to sweat his way back here. The heat must have been making him stupid.

But not stupid enough to volunteer for a second hike into Blackrock. “Tell you what, how about this time I watch the truck and you go into town?”

She rolled her eyes. “Sure. Why not. You just wait your barely-legal ass here and I’ll go fetch us a car,” she said. She took a few steps and turned around. “Don’t do nothin’ stupid, Jesse. Got me?” She whirled back and took off again without waiting for an answer.

She was gone for hours. From time to time Jesse could just barely see her, down in town, going from building to building. The sun was getting close to the horizon before she returned, not with a car, but on foot.

“Something’s seriously wrong here,” she said after she sat down on her rock. “I didn’t have any trouble finding car keys. You were right, it’s like everyone took off. More like they just vanished. But none of the cars would start. I tried checking the phones, too, and all of them were dead too. The cell phones wouldn’t even turn on.”

They were both silent briefly.

“So what do we do now, Jess?”

He ran his hands over his face, thought, came up blank. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Hey, you’re the boss, right?”

“Yeah, but you’re…” he almost said older but caught himself in time to say “pretty damn smart, too.”

“Well, this isn’t exactly my area of expertise.”

Down in the town, a light flickered on. A moment later, another. And then a third. They both watched quietly as several other lights came to life.

“Should we check it out?” Elaine asked.

“Probably just lights on timers.”

“Maybe, but–”

He cut her off. “I don’t want to walk there just to see no one’s around. Besides, like you said, something’s wrong here. Cell phones don’t go dead overnight. Sounds like no one’s been there in a while. Let’s rest here tonight, check it out in the morning. If someone’s there to help us then, fine.”

Elaine didn’t answer and he figured she’d seen the sense in what he said. The truck’s cab had cooled a bit with the setting of the sun and Jesse hopped up into it. “How about you take first watch, Elaine? I’ll sleep now, you wake me up in a few hours and we can switch places.”

“Whatever,” she said from outside. Hell, good enough for him. She was getting a real attitude, but he was glad he hadn’t planned on rubbing her out too early. Having someone to watch his back during this part of the getaway was going to be awful handy.

He woke up to Elaine shaking his shoulder.

“I had an idea,” she told him. “Let’s go back into town. Probably no one’s there like you said. But I bet the gas station has maps. We get one, figure out where we are, and see if we can make it somewhere on foot. If we do that now, we can walk while it’s cool. We get to another town, there’s got to be a working car there, and we bring it back here and get our stuff.”

He didn’t like leaving the guns and the money behind. But dragging that stuff along would only slow them down and make them more conspicuous. They weren’t getting anywhere now and they’d be sitting ducks if cops showed up.

Jesse answered by getting out of the truck. He shoved the money bags under the seats, hid the guns, too. Together they headed down the road.

The night air was unsettlingly silent. Hearing a coyote or something would have been unnerving, too. But as the silence continued, Jesse thought he’d welcome a distant yowl, just to know there was something alive out there.

They entered town. Some lights shone, but there were no signs of life. Automated lights, just as he’d thought. If this town had been vacant as long as he thought it might have been, one day those would burn out and Blackrock would go completely dark.

One of the streetlights gave enough light inside the gas station that Elaine was able to find a map. She brought it outside, looked it over.

“Found it,” she said after a minute.

“Where we at?”

“Middle of freakin’ nowhere, near the center of the state.”

“Shit…”

“Closest town is about fifteen miles from here.”

They could make fifteen miles on foot before dawn if they got moving. Maybe there was a chance yet. Lift another car, drive back. But not too close. Switch the plates and–woo hoo hoo–take the money and run.

“Let’s do this,” he said. “Which way?”

She pointed away from where his truck sat. Jesse headed off down the short bit of road back towards the main road, Elaine following behind him.

Before long, the back side of the “Welcome to Blackrock” sign loomed ahead. “Thanks For Visiting Blackrock!” it said. “Come Back Soon!”

The air felt thick and Jesse had trouble catching his breath. With each step he took, the feeling mounted. He slowed to a walk but even that took great effort, like walking through hip-deep snow when he was a little kid back in South Dakota.

“Everything okay, Jesse?” Elaine asked from behind him.

He shook his head, tried to keep moving forward. A wave of nausea flowed over him and he fell to the ground. He rolled over, saw Elaine crouched down, watching him closely. He crawled towards her. There was no resistance here.

“What’s going on, Jess?”

He pulled himself to his feet. “I don’t know. Something’s wrong with me. I couldn’t breathe, felt sick. I don’t feel too bad now. Just give me a minute…”

Jesse collected himself, took several deep breaths, and nodded. “Probably just stress. Let’s go.”
Only a few seconds were needed to convince Jesse that it wasn’t stress causing his difficulty. Each step he took down the road brought back the nausea and shortness of breath. He stopped and turned away before he was forced to the ground again.

“Dammit…”

Elaine took a few steps forward. He watched her struggle, just as he had done.

“Maybe it’s something in the air here?” she said.

“Dunno. Let’s try going that way,” he pointed off the road, towards distant mountains. “See if we can go around whatever’s stopping us.”

They tried several different approaches. Nothing worked. Every time they tried to leave the town, they were held back.

Jesse slumped down to the ground by the dead Buick.

“Just gonna give up?” Elaine asked him.

“I don’t know what else to try. The cars are dead, you said. Something’s keeping us from leaving town on foot. Unless you’re thinking we’re going to sprout wings and fly, then it sure looks to me like we’re stuck.”

She bit her lip, looked around. “Let’s check the houses again, see if we can find anything useful.”

Jesse stayed on the ground, lost in his thoughts.

“Get up, dammit! We’re not gonna figure anything out sitting here.” Elaine turned and walked back towards Blackrock. Reluctantly, Jesse stood up and followed her.

“We’ll check all the buildings. You take this side of the street”–she pointed left–”and I’ll check the other.”

It seemed like a big waste of time to Jesse, but he didn’t have a better idea. Hell, he hadn’t had a good idea in months. Even robbing that bank, something which had seemed like it had gone off fine at first…

He went through the buildings one by one, not sure what he was looking for. His cell phone, otherwise useless, did work as a mediocre flashlight so he wasn’t stumbling around in near-darkness.

Jesse nearly passed up a particularly ramshackle building, but if he was going to go through this pointless mission, he might as well do it up right. He climbed the steps of its porch, each letting loose a pained creak when his weight fell upon it.

The interior of this house was as discouraging as its exterior. Clutter was everywhere, stacks of books and papers reaching towards the ceiling. He would have left right away, despairing of finding anything helpful in the mess. But he noticed one thing here he hadn’t seen in any of the other houses. A pair of suitcases sat near the front door. A quick heft of each showed they were full. Someone had been ready to leave Blackrock.

Jesse pressed on through the house. A room near the back held a large desk, bookshelves crammed full, and still more piles of papers. He swung his cell phone back and forth, examining the room. In one corner stood an oddly-grotesque statue, carved in dark wood, of a figure that seemed half-man and half-thing. He quickly looked away from it.

A book sat open atop the desk. It looked old, with those peculiarly-printed letters that he associated with the falling-apart bibles in the Lutheran churches he and his mother had frequented back in the Dakotas. Back when those churches’ free meals were all either of them had to eat.

An illustration on one of the pages the book was open to, echoed the lines of the statue, and gave Jesse a chill. The other page had blocks of text with curious headings like “Summoning the Vile” and “Parting the Barrier.” Penciled notations were in what remained of the margins of the tattered pages. “The Vile feed at midnight” read one note. “Do this when they are distracted” read another, by the “Parting the Barrier” heading.

What the hell? He flipped to the book’s cover. One word stood out to him on the cover–”Grimoire.” He remembered that word from a book a friend had lent him when he and his mom first moved to Texas. The kid turned out to be a real freakazoid…

Jesse sat in the chair by the desk. Someone had been planning to leave town. Someone who had a grimoire. A spell book. And that book talked about how to “part” a barrier. And there certainly was a barrier between him and freedom now.

He felt dizzy, thinking these thoughts. Magic wasn’t real. But he also couldn’t explain what force was keeping him stuck in Blackrock.

What the hell. Like he had anything to lose. Jesse tugged at the page. It didn’t come free at first. He pulled with more force. It came loose abruptly in his hand, tearing with a sound like a long-retained sigh. He shoved it in his pocket, gave the house a quick further glance, then headed outside.

No way he was showing this to Elaine. First, he’d seem like a stupid kid claiming that magic would help them get out of this mess. Second. Well. If it did work, then he’d be out and she’d be stuck and he wouldn’t even need to worry about shooting her later. Maybe the Vile would take care of her for him.

He hurried to the edge of town, stopping only long enough to grab his own map from the gas station. He stopped when he felt the first hints of nausea. Feeling incredibly foolish, he began to read the words from the page. They were unfamiliar words, not any English–or for that matter, any German–he had ever seen. Still, they seemed to flow easily off his tongue.

A sharp pain took his breath away, halted his words. He crumpled to the ground, eyes filling with tears. He reached one hand back to the source of the pain and drew it back, bright with blood.

“I had to see if you’d do it, Jess.” Elaine’s voice. He twisted his neck, saw her standing nearby. She held a knife in one hand, a paper in the other. “Before I could walk out of this town with you, I had to know if you’d try to screw me over. When you get to be my age, you get kind of careful.”

He heard her start to utter the same words he had been speaking moments before. As she came to a close, Jesse felt prickling on his skin, like before a lightning strike. She looked up, around, then walked forward. Hesitantly at first, then with more confidence. She was clearly past the place where they had been stopped before.

It had worked for her. He knew he had to try again, wounded or not. He couldn’t stay here. The Vile feed at midnight.

He got to his knees and started reading again.

“Don’t bother,” Elaine said. “I tore off the final words when I was in the house this afternoon.” He looked at her, scant yards away, but untouchable. “You were a liability anyway with your face being the one on the security camera, your truck being the one people might have seen. I gave you a chance to screw me over and when you took it I knew I’d just have to be quit of you.”

Bells in the church tower began to ring. One… two… three… A terrible, inhuman cry came from somewhere close, something fierce, something hungry. Four… five… six…

Elaine ran down the road. Seven… eight… nine… Jesse got to his feet. He looked around, feeling faint, trying not to fall back to the ground. He didn’t see anything, but the horrible screaming continued. Ten… eleven… twelve.

The Vile fed at midnight.

END

Copyright © 2013 Michael Haynes

Michael Haynes lives in Central Ohio where he helps keep IT systems running for a large corporation during the day and puts his characters through the wringer by night. An ardent short story reader and writer, Michael had over 20 stories accepted for publication during 2012 by venues such as Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. His website is http://michaelhaynes.info and you can find him on Twitter @mohio73.

by

“Was that a double-double?” I returned the undead creature’s vapid gaze with one of my own and pushed the metal lever beside me. A Plexiglas window slid open revealing a small box. “Swag first. You know the rules.”

He continued to stare, and I thought I saw recognition reflect from his one good eye, remembrance of better days when the Tim Hornet’s drive-thru meant coffee, donuts, and maybe a frosted cappuccino if the wife wasn’t present. The zombie fumbled through the pockets of his burial suit. I tapped the small photographic collage of random jewellery taped to the safety glass. Almost child-like, the creature associated the pictures with the gold band on his ring finger.

“That’s right.” I nodded encouragement then grimaced as the zombie tore the finger from his hand, dropping wedding ring and digit into the box.

Releasing the lever closed the outer window. Pushing another lever opened a trapdoor hatch and the payment dropped into a plastic container already half-filled with jewellery. Next, I placed a paper cup filled with a portion of human brain into the cubicle, slid the door shut and pushed the lever again.

Growling something unintelligible, the zombie fumbled for the cup, brought it to his rotting lips and tilted his head back until the thick slab of cranial organ wormed into his mouth.

“Always fresh at Tim Hornets,” I said as the thing lumbered away on rigor mortis stiffened legs. He’ll be back. Zombies always came back. Caffeine or brain, a habit is a habit and giving the monsters what they needed helped control the infestation, so sayeth the Ministry of Zombie Food Services.

I sighed and looked at my watch. Three more hours till my shift ended. Leaning against the lifeless coffee maker, its circular hotplates cold and dusted over with disuse, I watched the closed-circuit monitor for movement near the drive-thru window.

“Bucky, get out here you peckerhead!” What Chief Johanson lacked in stature he made up for in volume. No one knew his first name. Formerly a Chief Petty Officer in the Royal Canadian Navy, Johanson firmly believed everyone who worked for him was a deaf idiot. That went double for work-release parolees like me.

“Yeah, Chief?” I stepped into the doughnut shop’s dimly lit counter area.

Johanson charged at me like I was a new recruit. He would’ve looked ridiculous in his yellow tunic and chocolate-brown trousers if not for the pistol holstered around his waist. “Did you place the order to re-stock the brains last night?”

That’s when I noticed the refrigerated display case. Once used to keep milk and other beverages cool, it now did the same for brain-filled paper cups, only the case was empty. My gaze flicked to the cellphone cradled within the recharge dock on the back counter. The battery had lost power the night before and I’d mopped the floor while the phone recharged. The new guy, Tommy Leblanc, had knocked the bucket over, spilling sludgy water everywhere. Cleaning the mess took another hour. After that–

Terror fractured along my spine.

As franchisee of a government-subsidized Zombie Food Services Outlet, Chief Johanson was well within his legal right to sacrifice any parolee to keep the zombies at bay should the need arise. He’d already proved his willingness to uphold the law when Kenny Chan forgot the brain order. That’s how I got promoted.

“Of course, Chief.” I forced a tight smile.

Johanson’s bushy eyebrows raised in exaggerated surprise. “Then tell me, peckerhead, where the fuck are my brains?”

Tommy Leblanc who’d just closed the door to the walk-in refrigerator, snorted.

Turning on his heel, Johanson drew his pistol. A single deafening crack boomed through the one-time doughnut shop. Inches below Leblanc’s crotch, smoke trailed from a small, black hole in the refrigerator’s stainless steel skin. A wet stain blackened Leblanc’s already dark uniform pants and a small puddle formed around the heel of his shoes.

“Find something funny, pukeface?” Johanson raised the barrel to Leblanc’s chest level.

“N-n-no, I j-j-just came from the fridge is all. My nose is runny.” He sniffed as if to prove his point, but I was sure the newbie was trying not to cry.

Johanson re-holstered his firearm and returned his attention to me. “Go get ‘em.”

I frowned. “Chief?”

“The brains, dipshit. If you made the call like you said, then they must be dee-layed.” Johanson smiled, stretching out the word as though enjoying how the syllables rolled off his tongue. “So, get to the morgue and un-dee-lay them.”

I nearly smiled myself before realizing Johanson actually meant to send me out into the Zombie Zone. Desperation-fuelled synapses fired within my fully-human-and-hoping-to-keep-it-that-way brain. I needed to convince this lunatic not to–

“Can’t I just call Sam Epstein, Chief?” I snatched the cellphone from the cradle. “I’m sure I can clear this whole thing up in a few minutes.” Including a kickback I probably couldn’t afford.

“You think I’m stupid, peckerhead?” Johanson rested his hand on the pistol butt. “Do you think we share the same level of intelligence, you miserable shit?” He bared yellowed teeth ground flat, a rabid dog daring me to answer. “I already tried Epstein. There’s no answer. Now, get your ass in the van and start driving.”

“Uh, Ch-Chief. C-can I go along, too?” Leblanc gripped the mop handle like a life preserver. “I-I mean, Bucky might need some h-help, and, and–” His brown eyes danced left and right as though searching for another reason to go.

I understood. The last thing Leblanc wanted was to be alone with the man who took a shot at his balls. “He’s right,” I said, more surprised than Leblanc that I’d spoken at all. “Besides, he has to learn the route.”

Johanson’s eyes narrowed in devious contemplation. “All right. Show pukeface the ropes.” He glanced at Leblanc. “Clean up your piss first. Then get me those brains.”

I nearly pissed my own pants. Driving through the ZZ with a trainee in tow was insane. I needed to come clean with Johanson–or maybe just half-clean. Wasn’t there no answer at the morgue? Why not say the same had happened the night before and I was too afraid to admit the truth? The lunatic could hardly blame me if Epstein was too drunk to answer the phone.

Reality crashed through my reasoning. Johanson would likely kill me anyway and feed my brains to the zombies while Leblanc drove alone to the morgue. Without me the idiot would get his ass chewed off before he went a kilometre. At least together we would have a chance.

Challenging Chief Johanson’s ugly smile with one of my own, I said, “No problem.”

“Glad to hear it,” said Johanson, though I saw little of the sentiment in his beady dark eyes. Before my bravado faded completely, I held out my hand and asked for the keys to the delivery van.

The Chief looked as if he might spit into my palm. “Better bring it back in one piece.” He slapped the single key into my hand.

Or what? My fist closed around the key and leather fob. You’ll shoot me? Call the Parole Office? I headed for the loading bay. If the van didn’t come back in one piece it was because I was dead already, or worse.

Leblanc mumbled something about changing his pants and shuffled off to the staff room. Johanson marched to his office, probably to prepare another parolee requisition form.

My ankle itched at the thought. The Electronic Monitor Anklet had been locked in place the first day of my parole. But unlike older models that merely tracked my movement using GPS, the EMA around my ankle was lined with Semtex. Should I decide to end my parole prematurely, a signal from the Parole Office triggered the plastic explosive, blowing off my foot, effectively ending my service to the Ministry of Zombie Food Service.

Feeling like a dead man walking, I headed to the garage, a hastily constructed cinderblock addition to the shop with stumpy utility lockers lining the far wall.

Leblanc hurried into the garage. “Sorry,” he said under his breath.

“No problem.” I shrugged, unsure if he was sorry about taking so long, or about going in the first place. I headed for a row of stumpy metal utility lockers and opened the nearest door. Inside was a row of giant yellow plastic BBQ forks with thick handles at one end and nub-like tongs at the other.

“Cattle prods?” Leblanc chuckled as he examined the electric baton. “I haven’t seen one of these since I spent a summer on my uncle’s farm.”

I took a prod for myself as well as a leather bandoleer laden with battery packs. “Zombies are easy to kill if you got a gun and a shit-load of bullets. We’ve got neither. What we do have are these hotshots. Zombies might be mindless, but they were once human. Electric current paralyzes their muscles just the same, hopefully stunning the bastards long enough to escape–somewhere.”

Leblanc took a hotshot for himself, gripping the weapon as tightly as he’d gripped his mop handle.

Opening the next door, I handed the newbie a leather collar and gauntlets. “They like to go for the arms and neck.” I slipped on my own armour and headed for the van’s cab. Once in the driver’s seat, I jammed the key into the ignition. The cab smelled of stale cigarettes, sickly-sweet dough, and formaldehyde.

After a few seconds Leblanc opened the passenger door and slid into the empty seat.

“Lock the doors, keep the windows closed, and buckle up.” I pressed the remote control on the sun visor. The van shook as the protective corrugated metal door rumbled open to reveal a broken Toronto at night.

Switching on the headlights, I eased the van into the nightmare that was the ZZ and pressed the button to close the garage. I nodded at a shambling zombie dressed in a postman’s uniform, adjusted my heading and accelerated.

“Wh-what are you doing?” Leblanc braced himself against the filthy dashboard.

“Chumming the water.” The creature bounced off the crash bars welded to the van’s front end and sailed through the air, sliding to a messy stop a dozen meters away.

The undead mailman lay still for a moment then flopped his broken arm aside and tried to stand.

“If there’s one around, there’s twenty more nearby. And they’re never too picky about supper.”

True to their mindless nature, zombies materialized form the shadows like actors around a black curtain. They ignored the van, preferring to feed upon their wounded brother.

“That should make some of the way easier.” I motored down the main drag thankful Leblanc couldn’t tell just how tightly I clenched my sphincter.

“What were you in for?” I asked, more to calm my nerves than any real interest.

“Uh, dealing,” said Leblanc, distracted. “You?”

I gave Leblanc a sideways glance. Thin, with greasy black hair and haunted eyes, Leblanc looked like a junky in perpetual need of a fix. “I hacked the wrong computer.” I said.

“Cool.” Leblanc’s head whipped back as we sped through another intersection. “Is this Dundas? Why are we still on Dundas?”

“The morgue is on Grenville, north side of the ZZ.” I swerved around the husk of a burned out SUV, a fossil of what had once been a thriving metropolis. “Taking the long way along the fence-line up Bathurst then along College might seem safer because of the tighter security near the Living Zones, but it leaves us outside that much longer. Too much chance something could go wrong. Dundas to Bay is quicker.” I winked.

My assessment held true, and we turned onto Grenville without incident. Entrance to the morgue was through a parking garage door at the end of a shallow incline. While long abandoned as the official office of the Toronto Coroner, the morgue was kept open as a conduit of fresh supplies for the small chain of Tim Hornets franchises operating within the LZ. The only entrance was a large black roll-up garage door at the base of a shallow incline.

I eased up to the door, pressed the intercom and waited. The doors remained closed. “Nobody home.” I shifted the van into reverse. “Guess we can go back.”

“No.” Leblanc grabbed my arm. “I mean, try again.” He quickly released his grip at my hostile glower. “Johanson won’t like it if we come back without his brains, and I don’t want to get shot at again.”

“Relax.” I concentrated on backing up; the way was tight and I didn’t want to scratch the sides of the van. “Anyway, what can Johanson do? The place is closed. And watch the way you’re holding that hotshot. You’re gonna zap me if you’re not careful.”

Too late, I realized Leblanc meant to do exactly that. Only unconsciousness relieved the currents of electrified agony.

* * *

I awoke to blinding white light and a piercing headache.

“He’s up,” I heard Leblanc say. “Told you I didn’t fry his brain.”

Tensing my muscles to charge the sound of his voice, I discovered my arms and legs were bound.

“Take it easy, my friend.” This new voice, a woman’s, came from my left, opposite Leblanc the prick.

“What’s going on?” I squinted into the light. “Where’s the coroner? Where’s Sam Epstein?”

“Old Sammy’s kind of retired,” she answered in low, even tones. “For the sake of convenience he’s still collecting his paycheck, but he’s left me in charge.”

Was this even possible? Sam Epstein was more butcher than coroner. The city morgue had become the new Potter’s Field for the homeless and unwanted. Sam removed the brains and packed them on ice for distribution. What he did with the rest of the bodies I didn’t want to know. But Old Sammy wasn’t that old, no more than thirty, far too young for retirement. Something smelled funky and I didn’t like it. “Just who the fuck are you?”

“Marion Rotundo.”

I wanted to puke. The Rotundo crew made zombies look like missionaries.

“You’ve heard of me.”

I swallowed, nodded.

“Good, then enough of the foul language. Treat me with respect, and I’ll treat you the same.”

“Yes, ah. . .” I paused unsure how to address her.

“Call me Marion. And your name is Bucky, right?”

My vision cleared enough to see more clearly. We were in a staff lounge, with a refrigerator, microwave, coffeemaker, and message-laden bulletin board. Rotundo stood to the right. Bantam-sized with hard blue eyes, Marion Rotundo could’ve been Chief Johanson’s long lost sister, except for the immaculate double-breasted power suit and perfectly styled hair.

“Carmine.” She looked passed me and for the first time I noticed the goon standing behind me.

“Untie our friend here. Now that he knows the situation he’s not gonna do anything stupid. Isn’t that right, Bucky?”

Carmine was more of what I expected from a goon, essentially a block of flesh barely squeezed into a cheap suit. He chuffed garlic into my face as he untied the constraining bonds.

I rubbed feeling back into my wrists and ankles. My fingers brushed the EMA and I pulled them back like they’d been burned.

“I know what you’re thinking, Bucky.” Rotundo smiled like my high school guidance counselor.

“You’re wondering how long you’ve been unconscious. Maybe Chief Johanson called the Parole Board. Maybe they’re using that little GPS to search for you right now. Or not.” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a small box with a stubby antenna. “Jammer. You’re invisible to everyone except those in this room. More importantly, your leg won’t go boom.” She smiled as though expecting me to thank her.

I didn’t. “What do you want?”

“Direct. Terrified, but direct. I like that.” Rotundo’s laugh was like peanut brittle, sweet but nutty. “What I want, Bucky, is for you to deliver a message to Chief Johanson. Tell him he’s got a new business partner, and, if I might borrow from Shakespeare, he must now pay for his pounds of flesh.”

I frowned. “Pay?”

“Please, don’t insult my intelligence. The jewellery Johanson collects from the zombies. He’s found a nice gold-laying goose, and since I’ve become his only supplier, I want my cut. Some golden yolk, if you will.”

Of course. The box of trinkets collected at the drive-thru window. The swag was supposed to go to the Ministry to help offset operating costs. Johanson must be skimming off the top. Sammy Epstein must have been on the scam, too.

And parolees like me, what did we get out this? Johanson shot Kenny, and sent me out on this ludicrous hunt for brains.

My heart hammered in my chest. The bastard.

“What’s in it for me?” I asked.

Rotundo flashed teeth too perfect to be real. “I do like you much better than your friend, here.”

“Hey,” Leblanc protested. “I did exactly what you wanted, Marion.”

Eyes still on me, Rotundo said, “That doesn’t mean I like you. And call me Ms. Rotundo. Tell you what, Bucky. I’ll give you the same deal I gave your colleague.”

My nerve endings still ached from the hotshot’s electrical current. “He’s no colleague of mine. If I get out of this, you’re a dead man, Leblanc.”

“Screw you, fucky-Bucky. You’d have done the same.”

Maybe Leblanc wasn’t too far off the mark, but that didn’t give the prick the right to shock me. I swore revenge, but first I’d have to play Rotundo’s game. “What deal?”

“Freedom.” Rotundo reached into another suit pocket and pulled out what looked like a thin chrome-plated wrench. “Recognize this?”

I nodded, unable to believe the treasures Rotundo possessed. She held an EMA key to unlock my anklet. “So, I give Johanson your message and you let me go?”

“Not exactly. Come back with my first payment, then I let you go.” Rotundo’s eyes became hard garnets. “And just so Johanson understands how serious I am, here’s something to take with you. Carmine, if you will.”

Carmine, who had moved behind Leblanc, allowed a long silver blade to slip from the sleeve of his coat. With a grace unexpected from someone so huge, he swung the short sword in a powerful arc.

Leblanc’s severed head plunked to the floor. The rest of him crumpled like a rag doll, blood spurting from the stump of his neck.

Rotundo waited till the bleeding slowed to a trickle, then bent down, and slipped a cellphone from Leblanc’s pant pocket and handed the device to me. “Let Johanson know you’re on your way back. We don’t want him calling the PO, right?” Without breaking her smile, she grasped Tommy Leblanc’s head by its oily hair and tossed it into my lap. “And don’t forget this.”

I found my voice and screamed like a child.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, I was in the delivery van heading back to the Tim Hornets. Still hoarse and shaky, I needed time to think and chose the more circuitous route along the LZ.

Johanson was too tough and too cheap to give in to Marion Rotundo’s demands. He’d probably been skimming for years and must have stashed away quite the fortune. All he needed to do was tie up some loose ends then disappear to some zombie-free tropical island.

With Leblanc dead, I was the only loose end needed tying up.

Christ, I was in deep shit and thanks to the EMA around my ankle I couldn’t even run.
I was a dead man–a dead man driving.

Abandoned buildings passed by like rows of rotting teeth. A pharmacy with shattered windows, a boarded-up army surplus store, a gutted flower shop, the entire inner city had become one enormous concrete zombie.

Throat aching, I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. “God, get me out of this and I promise I’ll go straight. Hacking just isn’t worth all this. Nothing is.”

I looked up in time to see two zombies standing in the middle of the street, caught in the headlights like frightened deer. Instinct took over from common sense. Instead of running them down with the van’s crash bar, I reefed on the wheel and headed directly for a derelict bus. “Oh, shit!” I jerked the wheel the other way, the van listing as tires left the ground. Panicked, I adjusted my steering and the frame shuddered when rubber again touched pavement.

Leblanc’s head bounced like a medicine ball around the floorboards by the passenger’s seat and unwound from its blood-soaked rags.

I pulled my gaze from the sight and jumped on the brakes with both feet, holding tight to the wheel as the van fishtailed to a stop.

Harmless halogen beams speared the zombies who closed upon the van with the tenacity and speed of rabid turtles.

“So much for praying.” I eased off the brake and steered away from the dynamic duo of death.
Under control again, I reached over to secure Leblanc’s head and spotted the yellow handle of a hotshot poking from underneath the seat. I fantasized zapping Johanson and Rotundo with the cattle prod. The image made me smile then laugh hard and loud until my sides hurt and tears filled my eyes.

“I’m going to die.” I wiped my eyes dry. What was I going to do, fight Johanson, Rotundo, and zombies? No one could do all that alone.

I looked at the hotshot. Did it still have a full charge? Rotundo had my bandoleer and without it I’d only have the one battery.

It would have to be enough.

Slowing the van, I made a quick U-turn back the way I’d come.

* * *

“Back already?” Carmine’s voice crackled over the static of the morgue’s call button.

“Johanson says he accepts your deal,” I shouted into the speaker. “He says it’s better than going out of business. Open up. The Chief says he needs those brains.”

The metal garage door clanked open and I backed into the morgue’s loading bay, a low concrete dock for unloading stretchers from ambulances and hearses. The garage door rumbled shut before I turned off the motor.

Barely breathing, I stepped from the van and headed toward the dock. I left the hotshot on the passenger seat. Marion Rotundo would just take it away then have Carmine behead me in punishment.

Rotundo waited with Carmine by the van’s rear door. Both casually sipped coffee from Tim Hornet’s cups. “It’s good to see you again, Bucky,” she said and made a point of pressing the button on the EMA jammer before shoving the device into her pocket.

Clumsy from fear, I clambered onto the dock. The band around my ankle felt like a thousand pound weight.

“What’s that?” Carmine nodded at the van’s door. Water seeped from the bottom and dripped to the loading bay floor. “Gas leak or somethin’?”

My heart froze and I struggled for calm. “Ah, Johanson made me load some ice to keep the brains fresh. Must be melting is all. Now, you’re going to let me go, right, just like you did for Leblanc?”

“Of course.” Rotundo’s smile was like nitrogen. “The same deal, exactly.”

My skin prickled as though kissed by arctic winds. I imagined Carmine slide out his blade, felt the gleaming steel hiss through the air, heard the sound of metal slicing through the tendons of my neck. I shuddered with awareness. Rotundo never meant to let me live, but something deep inside me had wished for some honor among thieves.

The truck bed tilted to the right.

“Did you see that?” Carmine reached inside his coat with his free hand.

Acting quickly, I stooped down and unlatched the crescent-shaped lock for the roll-up door.

“What’s wrong, Carmine?” Rotundo turned to me, concern invading her implacable stoic manner.

“What are you up to, my friend?”

“I’m not your friend, Marion.” I heaved on the long dirty canvas strap tied to the door’s handle. “But I got some new ones for you to meet.” The door arched smoothly along well-greased rollers.

“Fucking Christ!” Carmine had his gun out and fired madly into the rear of the van. Like a blessing, the gunshots deafened me to the unearthly moans of my new-found friends. The first zombie fell, but others reached out, grasping and clawing like at the gangster’s clothing like Velcro.

Flame belched from Carmine’s gun again and again, but most of his bullets ricocheted off vintage WWII helmets strapped to zombie heads, or embedded within flack-jackets protecting rotting chests. When he emptied his clip, he exchanged gun for sword, swatting at decomposed necks as yellow broken teeth champed at his exposed flesh.

All too little, too late.

Fear can make a guy do crazy things. Fear of death can make a coward into a hero. I’d run on nothing but terror and adrenaline when I crashed the van through the front window of the abandoned army surplus store. Once inside, I’d covered the van’s storage area with a tarpaulin, filling my makeshift pool with cases of bottled water liberated from a nearby vending machine. Using Leblanc’s head as bait, I’d herded a dozen zombies to the store then tossed the head into the back of the van. The zombies followed the scent of fresh brain like lemmings. Once all were inside, I’d pressed the hotshot into the pool of water, stunning them en masse.

It had taken nearly an hour of repeated stuns, and my leather gauntlets saved me more than once, but I managed to strap on their body armour.

Then I’d taken my army back to the morgue.

Crouching low to avoid Carmine’s wild shooting, I leaped off the dock and scurried to the passenger door. I reached for the hotshot when the window exploded into a thousand tiny granules.

“You little fucker!” Rotundo stood on the dock, pointing a nickel-plated pistol. “I’ll kill you myself.”

I launched into the van just as bullet hits peppered the door. Whining softly, I crawled to the driver’s side. From the side view mirror I saw the way was clear and eased out the door with my hotshot in hand. Slowly, I headed back for the dock.

A choking scream echoed through the garage and I peered around the side of the van, my eyes stinging from sweat. Four zombies lay on the ground, their helmets punctured with small black holes. The rest feasted upon the gory mass of flesh and guts that had been Carmine. Near the feeding frenzy, a Tim Hornet’s coffee cup lay in a pool of sticky blood.

Rotundo was nowhere to be seen and my first thought was that she’d escaped. The press of a gun barrel against my skull told me I was wrong.

“Fucker.” Rotundo was surprisingly strong and easily spun me around to face her. The gun barrel seemed as big as a cannon. “You’re zombie food.”

I looked passed the gun at the dishevelled suit, the grime-smeared face, the pure panic in her eyes. She looked just like me and the thought helped take the fear of dying away.

“What’s the matter, Marion, nothing to smile about?” I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for the bullet.

Click.

Nothing.

Marion’s gun was empty.

Like awakening from a nightmare, I remembered I still held the hotshot. Jabbing the electrodes into her stomach, I pulled the cattle prod’s trigger.

Rotundo collapsed into a fetal position.

Not wasting time to savor my victory, I rifled through her pockets until I found the EMA key. Prize in hand, I headed for the driver’s door when a hand gripped my ankle. I looked down at Rotundo, her face a mad grin of smeared lipstick and insanity. In her other hand was a switch blade.

Before she could stick me, I swung the hotshot like a golf club, driving the handle into her face. She released me and howled with pain. Blood spurted from her mouth and she spat out a broken tooth.

From the dock, half-decomposed noses pointed in our direction like hunting dogs from Hell.
Understanding the inevitable, I jumped back into the van, jammed the lever into DRIVE, and crashed through the closed loading bay door.

* * *

“Where the fuck are you?” Chief Johanson’s voice blasted through the cellphone’s earpiece.

“Me and Leblanc are going to take some time off,” I said. “Permanently.”

“Really? You disappoint me, Bucky. I thought you were smarter.” To his credit, Johanson actually sounded genuine. “See you in hell, peckerhead.”

I disconnected. I’d used the EMA key to unlock my anklet and slipped the explosive ring around the gate to the Live Zone. For a moment I wondered if Johanson would make the call to the PO. A few seconds there came an ear-numbing bang and the gate swung open.

After wiring it shut the best I could, I made an anonymous call, reporting the breach. It was the honest thing to do. I’d made a promise to go straight and meant to keep it.

Smiling, I tossed the phone away and headed for civilization wondering what country life was like.

END

Copyright © 2013 Mike Rimar

Originally from Kitchener, Mike Rimar now lives in Whitby, Ontario with his two daughters.

Despite its contrary spelling, Mike pronounces his last name as rhymer. Beyond that he is a man of mystery, even to himself. That he writes at all is most baffling. Only an average student, he can barely spell, grammar makes his head hurt, and science is far from his best subject. He is a taco puzzle wrapped in a tortilla shell enigma.

He does like a good cooking show and has been observed staring at non-stick frying pans far too long to be healthy.

You can find his work in Orson Scott Cards InterGalactic Medicine Show, Tesseracts 15, Writers of the Future XXI, and more recently in Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories, and When the Hero Comes Home 2 e-version. His website is http://www.mikerimar.com .

by

March/April 2013, Issue #2
Release Date: April 2nd, 2013

Table of Contents

“Editor’s Notes” by A.P. Matlock
“Welcome to Blackrock” by Michael Haynes
“Night Shift at the Tim Hornets” by Mike Rimar
“The Three Hundredth Day” by Bruce Memblatt
“A Pair of Ragged Claws” by Kate Heartfield

Cover Image

“Skull” © 2006 BenedictFrancis, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

* * *

Download the Free Smashwords Edition
EPUB | MOBI |  OTHER FORMATS

by