MicroHorror

“City Financier found murdered in his flat,” screamed the headline of the evening newspaper, discarded by the previous occupant of the toilet cubicle.

Kurt leaned back against the door, and felt a repeat of the pain in his chest he had endured, sprinting across the station to catch this train and a seat in First Class.

The Express thundered along as he read the details of the murder: the severed finger the police assumed taken by the killer as a trophy.

“It’s not possible,” he whispered, looking at the photograph of the man he had been contracted to kill only three hours ago. “How could the newspaper have heard so quickly?” He glanced at the top right corner and read the inscription: “Special Edition.”

He waited until his breathing returned to normal, relieved the pressure in his bladder, then left the cubicle with the newspaper.

Turning left, he stepped into the buffet car, frowning as he glanced out of a window. They were in a tunnel, hurtling along at speed.

“Don’t remember a tunnel on this trip.” Panic gripped him at the realization he might be on the wrong train.

The shutters were down at the buffet. No amount of banging and shouting provoked a response, and a stiff Scotch was an urgent requirement.

He wiped a hand across his sweating brow, conscious it was getting warmer.

“Where the hell is everyone?” He stormed back into the first carriage, where he remembered seeing a young woman as he passed through.

“She’ll know where we’re going,” he mumbled.

The table had been cleared and the occupant was missing. He glanced at the window, seeing a dense blackness, with the heat becoming unbearable. Kurt, the cold killer with no nerves, no feelings, no compassion or remorse was worried. He was more than worried. He was frightened. Entering his carriage, he noticed that an attendant had placed a fresh cup of coffee on the table, and he sank down into his seat. Gratefully, he leaned back and sipped the hot brew as he tried to think about the crisis. Still sweating from the heat, he took off his jacket.

Looking up, he could see a laptop being used further along and relaxed. At least there was someone else in the carriage

Kurt instinctively felt in his jacket pocket for his trophy: the severed finger was missing. He turned out each pocket on the table, but the victim’s digit was not among the contents.

Running down the aisles of the swaying carriages, he reached the toilet cubicle. The package must have slipped out when he bent down to pick up the newspaper.

He stared at the notice on the door, telling any intending user the toilet was out of order. Kurt turned the handle–the door was locked.

Sweat poured down his face, from fear and the air which was becoming increasingly hot with an added sickly smell. He wiped a hand across his face and staggered back along the hurtling train, trying to keep calm. It didn’t matter now where the damnable train stopped. He had to leave it and disappear.

Collapsing into his seat, Kurt turned the front page of the newspaper: all the pages were empty.

The heat inside the train had him gasping for air, and he undid his tie and top collar button as the train began to reduce speed.

He glanced at the newspaper, which now had a new front page story.

“An unidentified man collapsed and died while about to board a train this evening. Police confirmed that the missing finger from the murdered financier was found in a jacket pocket.”

Kurt could smell burning flesh, and flames were licking the sides of the carriage, with the laptop on the table ahead flashing a message in bold letters. He staggered from his seat and forced his way to the computer. The owner was absent, and Kurt screamed as he read the message:

The Next Stop is Hell

The world nearly ended in the summer ten years ago. Yet nothing really ends. It continues onward without care, for it’s not capable of caring. He has come to see it is nothing more than dirt.

Meshullam is surprised that he survived this long. There is no America anymore. This is now the United States of Nothing.

Now he is Schochet. The butcher. The Torah doesn’t allow for the consumption of blood in any form. Which is why they make him slit throats. They want him to despise this life. They want to break him. He won’t let them.

They have another person named Yitzhak, the son of a Rabbi, to give blessings. He was fourteen when they found him. He is now a man but still more of a child. He mumbles the words and watches with a glazed expression.

Once a month he has done this, like a ritual, for ten years. They want kosher meals. They laugh and schedule it on holidays like Hanukkah and Yom Kippur. Whatever is listed on the old calendars they find in desk drawers.

The last woman looks up at him. They will bottle her fluids like wine and write upon the label, vintage seventeen years. He says a prayer for her. It is far better to die than live in this world.

Kashrut is why they do this. An animal must not be unconscious for slaughter. The main artery cut with the sharpest knife.

He is done for now so he leaves.

There is no sunlight in the buildings. Meshullam hasn’t been outside in days. The windows are spray-painted black. Something as simple as a warm California day is kept from him at butchering time.

When the light hits him it’s miraculous. He lets it touch malnourished skin. The vitamin D deficiency causes him muscle pains. They’ve been keeping supplements from him because he sings to children in Hebrew. He could escape, but there is nowhere worth running.

He led a sheltered life as a good Orthodox man. Meshullam shunned the modern world. As a scholar he used to lecture with great knowledge about Israel. Now there is no audience. The temple at which he once prayed was burned to the ground along with the other churches in town. Every offending house of worship was scourged from the earth. Assimilation was once said to be his people’s greatest enemy. It doesn’t matter. There must be so few Jews now.

The restaurant is all that remains unchanged in a once thriving city. The people supposed to protect them failed. He didn’t know who that was meant to be. He just knows that they never showed up.

A young man called Dusty sees the blood that stains his smock from the loading dock. Golden eyes gaze at him sadly. He escaped from the first attacks and wasn’t turned properly. He is still human enough. Dustin stays here to keep his family alive. They treat them like beloved pets.

A Korean woman named Myung comes out the back door for some air. Dustin hands her a towel. She cleans up the wounds. Myung is a table for businessmen at the bar. They eat sushi off her half naked body. She is covered in small scars where a customer wasn’t generous enough to apply healing saliva.

He doesn’t want to see this.

He walks down the street to the latest pile of rubble. He watched over the years, as one by one they tore down the dead neighbors’ houses, pillaging them for all their treasures.

Underneath the remains he sees a stack of books. He looks for some reading material for them and himself. Among the worn Tom Clancy novels is a Harlequin romance. One look and he angrily tosses aside Vampire Lovers with all the other trash.

Then picks it up again. He shakes his head. Whoever could have wanted this? What kind of person would ever have wished for this?

Okay, Candy, my dearest sister, I think I’ve got you this time. I’m a physician and know how to make one thing look like another, so I should be able to pull this off. I can make murder look like an accident.

You always were the clever one. I remember my first T-Ball game. I was the only girl on the team. Five years old and up to bat. Hit that ball over everybody’s head and rounded the bases. Turned and looked to the bleachers, hoping to see the smiles on my parents’ faces.

But that’s not what I saw. You made sure of that. You started coughing and sneezing so bad Mom and Dad rushed you to the hospital. I had to ride home with Aunt Sally.

They said you had asthma, and oh, how you could get what you wanted after that. I remember when I broke my leg playing football with the boys and couldn’t move from my bed for a few weeks. That was fine, because Mom sat there and played games with me and read me stories. That was until your inhaler all of a sudden stopped working. And, of course, a lack of air takes priority over a lack of mobility. Mom went to the hospital with you, and I got Grandma, who couldn’t see to read and didn’t like to play games.

A time I like even more than that was when I took up drama. I got to play Juliet in the year-end production. I was so excited, right up to the point you developed your agoraphobia and couldn’t leave the house. You developed panic attacks right about the same time, gasping for air, turning purple and passing out. You looked so pathetic, and, of course, the only thing that kept the attacks at bay was having both Mom and Dad nearby. They got to watch my play on tape, but I doubt they heard much with you wheezing away in the background.

That’s not it. There’s much more. With the agoraphobia still alive and well, they missed my valedictorian speech. They were on the way to my college graduation when you made your first suicide attempt. The second came when I graduated from med school. Then there was my wedding, where you became so emotional you once again managed to stop breathing and had to be rushed to the hospital.

Well, Candy, you’ve thwarted my attempts at love for the last time. Yesterday, I brought my first child home from the hospital. Mom and Dad are on their way to meet him, and I’m sure you’ve got something in mind.

But this time, I’m a step ahead of you. As I said, I’m a physician and I know how to make a murder look like an accidental death. And since Mom and Dad have always thought the worst that could happen to a person was for their child to die, they’ll have to ignore whatever you come up with and stick around to console me.

Mark hated the damned poodle from the moment his wife brought it home from the pound. Fucking fluffy piece of living crap. All it did was eat, sleep and shit. And frequently it would shit on his expensive Persian rug. The last straw was when Mark got up to pee one night and stepped on the dog’s tail, and it nipped his ankle.

“You’re taking that fucking dog to the vet to have it put down!” Mark hollered at his wife. “I will not have a dog living under my roof biting me!”

Mark’s wife’s eyes brimmed with tears as she led the poodle out of the house the next day. Mark kicked back and enjoyed the peace and quiet. Until the phone rang, that is.

“Honey, Fifi’s gone!” It was Mark’s wife crying on the other end.

“Good,” he said. “Come on back home.”

“No, she’s not gone gone,” his wife blubbered. “She’s not here. The shot they gave her did something strange to her. Instead of going to sleep, she started growling and showing her teeth. She kinda puffed up…”

“Puffed up? What do you mean, puffed up?”

“She got bigger,” Mark’s wife explained. “Then she jumped up and tore out the vet’s throat.”

Mark felt the blood draining from his face. His wife’s voice sounded as if it was coming from far away. The knuckles on the hand he was holding the phone with had turned white.

“Then Fifi ran for the door. One of the technicians reached out to try and stop her, and Fifi flashed past her, teeth gnashing, like a buzz saw on four legs. She smashed right through the door with the tech’s severed arm still in her mouth.”

Mark no longer heard his wife. His attention was focused on the front door, where a guttural growl that had started out very low was growing louder and louder. The phone fell from Mark’s hand and clacked to the floor just as the front door exploded inward.

In the distance, jagged mountains stood dark and grim against the dismal skies like eerie monoliths built by some extinct race of giants. A biting wind drove the falling snow against a countryside already stripped bare by endless winter months.

Deep into the earth burrowed the cold, and far and wide it spread, freezing trees at their roots and seeds in their coats until it came to an ancient burial ground and seeped into the bones of the dead that rested there, and caused them to shiver. So long had it been since Mother Earth felt the twinge of life She mistook the shivering of the dead for birth pangs and heaved them forth from Her womb.

The dead were hungry for flesh, and in search of flesh they wandered the wastes. They came to a village, but it was abandoned; and they found the occasional hovel, but these were unoccupied; and once they happened upon a man they thought to be sleeping only to discover much to their disappointment that he was buried under the ice and could not be eaten. So they wandered till they came to the edge of a wood.

Blackbirds in their thousands were perched on the skeletal branches of the trees, wearied from carrying frozen souls to the Otherworld. Eyeing the dead as they approached, one of the birds said to the others, “I know many of these men, for I gave them passage to The-World-Beyond-The-World: there is Medrawd the Quiet and Áedh the Big Mouth, and Hengist the Strong and Caderyn Chiselaxe and Tamun the Stump.”

“And Haerviu the Not Normal,” said another, “and Drust the Demented.”

“And Máedóc Boar-Shanks and Seisyll the Surly–how can it be that the dead walk?”

“Be ye not concerned,” cackled old Badb the crow, “for this be the way of flesh. So flesh dies, so shall flesh rise. Flesh feedeth the soil and flesh sprouteth from the soil. What goeth into the earth always returneth. But the earth hath not tasted flesh in some time and starveth as we starve–yet our Earth Mother in all Her mercy hath regurgitated the flesh before us to feed us, Her servants. It may not be the best meal we’ll ever have, but come, let us not deny ourselves the gift given by our goddess.”

And Old Badb led the way, leaping into the air and spreading her black wings; and the blackbirds in their thousands followed, a column of shadows first swelling against the murky white and gray skies then descending upon the dead, scraping flesh from bone, plucking eyes from sockets and tongues from mouths, gnawing on earlobes and pecking holes in skulls, and ripping and scratching and clawing, and feasting, feasting, feasting. And in moments the dead were in ribbons, tattered and fraying, held together by only threads of sinew and strands of tissue; and in moments more even the scraps were eaten and the bones were stripped clean and the dead fell into piles, dead once more.

Snow drifted across the flesh of the Earth Mother.

“It needs something here. A semi-colon, I think. Maybe a period. You know, to make it stand out. To make it more forceful.”

She rambles on, drones on, mumbles on, not knowing what she’s saying, not caring what she’s missing, only looking at the little blips and smudges–punctuation marks, she calls them–scattered throughout the manuscript and seeing if they measure up to some eighth grade standard she was taught long ago, treating them as if they were the reason for the story in the first place, which they never were, but she can’t see that because she’s too busy fussing over the smudgey things and where exactly on the page they ought to go and what kind of words they ought to get hung next to or on or under or after and the like.

“And your sentences…” she says, leaving the words hanging out there like that, all on their own, filling up the room with their grammatical wisdom, as though that alone–the mere uttering of the words–ought to be enough to set me on the straight and narrow or whatever it is she’s trying to set me on, and I find myself beginning to wonder if her sphincter muscle has maybe had this massive convulsive contraction, the waves of which have travelled all the way up her spine, where they are at this very moment, pinching off what’s left of her brain.

“What about my sentences?” I ask.

“Well, they’re too long. They’re run-on.”

The way she says the words, it’s like they were passed on down to her in a vision by noneother than god himself, who as it turns out, likes to appear in visions from time to time when he’s not too busy creating universes or teaching grammar, and she insists in the politest of catholic school girl ways that, by the way, he’s the kind of god who would always spell his name with a capital letter, when what she really means is that she thinks I should be using that kind of spelling–the capital letter kind–when I spell god instead of the little letter spelling I like better because it makes him seem more human somehow, and she ends up missing the point of the novel entirely, but then she wouldn’t know literary genius if it bit her on the nose, which is something I’m tempted to do, except that it wouldn’t do any good.

So instead, I pull out this piece I’m packing and blast her between the eyes, and her blood comes squirting out of the hole the bullet makes, and it lands in little drip-drop droplets all over my manuscript, making it look like the thing is ruined entirely, except that when I go to pick it up, I notice that it’s now punctuated with all the proper little smudgey things she likes so much, and I wish to hell I’d shot her in the arm or someplace like that that wasn’t quite so fatal ’cause now I gotta go find me a new editor to shoot so I can finish punctuating my literary masterpiece.

Jane was my first love.

When I first saw her across the crowded bar, I knew she was the one. Then I remembered that pretty girls like her never talk to guys like me. Then again, no one ever talks to me. I sighed, sipped the last of my warm beer and trudged home.

She was there again the next Friday and the Friday after that. Finally, after weeks of heated self-debate, I summoned enough courage to make my way across the room to talk to the statuesque goddess leaning against the wall near the bathrooms.

My mouth opened, but words spewed awkwardly from my lips. I shook my head and tried to start over, but fell mute as I became lost in her warm brown eyes.

She smiled politely and said, “Relax, you don’t have to try so hard; I’m sure you’re a nice guy.” She then put her hand on my arm to reassure me. It felt so right. I fell for her there and then.

Everything happened fast, but before complacency settled into our relationship, it was over. I still don’t understand how it fell apart so quickly.

I pleaded for another chance. “Please don’t go. You are my destiny,” I said through clenched teeth.

“I’m sorry, Johnny, but it just didn’t work out. You’ll get over this and move on,” she replied as she ran from my apartment.

Yes, it ended badly, but I would do anything for a second chance. I’d tell her I’m sorry for the pain and suffering I put her through. I’d hold her tight and try to explain why I had to act as I did. Hell, I’d even recite one of Shakespeare’s love sonnets if it helped her understand my longing.

Then, after the histrionics stopped, I would kill her again. Brutally. While there’s nothing quite like your first love, nothing beats the thrill of your first kill.

It’s funny, but something dawned on me as I stood over the blood-covered body of Jane Doe III and watched it writhe in pain and labor to breathe. I realized that Jane, or whatever her name really was, was right about one thing: I have moved on.

Jackie had never met her birth mother, though she’d dreamed of her for years. Finally, she contacted an agency that was able to locate her mother, who, as it turned out, lived right across town. Jackie made the trip to her mother’s run-down tenement and stood there, working up the courage to enter.

“Oh, Momma,” Jackie cried, “I’m coming home.”

“Move!” A man shoved past her.

Jackie took a deep breath and entered the tenement. She stared up the rickety stairs and gingerly placed one foot in front of the other all the way up to the third floor, where she walked to apartment 3F and pressed the doorbell, waiting for the soft, velvety voice of the mother she’d dreamed of. Instead, she heard a gravelly bellow.

“Who is it?”

“It’s your daughter.” Jackie’s voice trembled.

Silence followed for three heartbeats before the gravel ground into her soul.

“Which daughter?”

It had never occurred to Jackie that there might be more than one of her. In her mind, she’d always shared an exclusive relationship with her mother. She spoke through fresh tears.

“You gave birth to me twenty-five years ago. They named me Jackie.”

The gravel ground to a halt as heavy locks clicked and the door groaned open.

“Momma?” Jackie asked the thing before her, which better resembled a blob in a tent dress.

“Momma?” she asked again, as recognition failed to surface in the thing’s eyes.

Before Jackie could react, the thing spat a wad of slime into her face.

“Gross!” cried Jackie, “Why did you do that?”

“From me you come, to me you shall return,” the thing graveled.

Goosebumps rose on Jackie’s flesh as she realized her reunion fantasy was crumbling.

“Hey, it was nice meeting you, but I have to get going.”

As Jackie turned to go, the thing opened its cavernous mouth and sucked her inside. Jackie flailed and gagged against its rancid breath. A large, wet tongue wrapped itself around her as she slid down the thing’s throat. She ended up in its stomach, where she could hear its heartbeat merge with intestinal rumblings. She curled up in the darkness and prayed for salvation. It never came.

It was another day and the thing belched as its doorbell rang. With effort, it raised its enormous bulk off a sofa chair and went to the door, bellowing in a voice as gritty as gravel.

“Who is it?”

Of course, the thing already knew who it was. They’d come in droves ever since it had enlisted with the agency. It was not their mother, nor had it ever been, but they were so desperate for that primary source of comfort that they were willing to believe whatever lies they’d been told. Little did they think as they extended their tentative fingers toward the doorbell that they were making a choice, and all choices have an outcome. Sometimes, in fact, the outcome is inevitable.

A zombie is pounding on my door. He’s big, angry and hungry and smells like the rotting flesh that his body has now become. His voodoo mistress has sent him to my hideout shack here in the abandoned sugarcane fields near the bayou.

And he is not alone. Through a crack in the panel wall I can see dozens of stiff zombies, standing waist-deep in the splintered cane rows, eyes staring but not really seeing, waiting for the feast to come. And that feast is me.

The night is dark, rainclouds obscure the harvest moon, but the zombies’ eyes shine with an unnatural glow, like the strange lights that rise from the bayou’s muck and sulfur pits. If this is not a glimpse of Hell, it’s as close as I want to get.

I know who sent them. Only one person could command a full army of the risen, decaying dead: Madame Halli, the voodoo queen of this area. We had crossed paths in the bad part of the city, where I had been forced to hide, and where she conducts her business, unholy and evil as it is. A runaway girl, Mira, whom I had met a few days before, and formed a friendship with out of necessity to keep my location a secret, was a slave of Madame Halli’s. Only fifteen, Mira was bound to Halli, traded by her own father so he could be freed of the Madame’s hold on him. Her tentacles are long and tight, and without mercy. Mira was forced to work as a prostitute, one of Halli’s many business operations.

Mira brought me food and news, sheltering me in one of the rooms she used for her customers; yesterday I gave her enough money to escape this life and Madame Halli, putting Mira on the bus myself. I must have been seen, and all things are reported to Halli in this area of the city. After evading some of her heavily scarred goon enforcers and their blood-stained machetes, I took off on the run again.

This old cane-drying shack has been my hideout ever since. Not much, but it’s protection from the elements, and it is isolated. The door is shaking on its worn hinges now as the zombie pounds relentlessly. He has his command and nothing will stop him. An eerie hum vibrates through the damp air from the zombies waiting in the cane field. They want to feed. They can smell my warm blood, coursing through my living veins.

The clouds part and a huge, full moon shines down, bathing the whole area with a cold, white illumination. Now the tables will turn.

I can feel the change coming, and the strong moonlight on me only increases it. The hair, really fur, pops out in tufts, the claws and fangs begin to poke out of my skin and gums, the ears become pointed and elongate. This is why I must constantly run and hide. I am cursed. I am a werewolf.

But for once, my curse will prove useful. As my human intelligence rapidly dissipates, I laugh through my pain as muscles stretch on my body, tearing my clothes, for I know that I will enjoy ripping all those zombies to shreds. My anger will fuel it, and I can imagine how easy it will be to claw apart the dead flesh of zombies, leaving only twitching limbs and heads floating in the bayou slime. Then back across the sugarcane fields to the city to find Madame Halli herself. I’m a wolf; I have her scent, and I can track her.

The door gives way and the zombie lumbers in; my change is nearly complete, and I slash so deeply across his stomach that he collapses in two wet pieces to the floor.

She wasn’t sure when she decided to fuck the Devil, but there was only one option at that point and she knew it.

The Devil was going to be hers. Hell be damned.

He entered her room just before midnight. The room was small, almost barren, decorated in the haute-macabre of black-laced decadence, where clove cigarettes were smoked as incense. Two tea lights burned atop a small, stylized altar. The tea lights guttered and nearly extinguished themselves as he entered, causing shadows to dance about the room like gothic gremlins.

Mansell’s Lux Aeterna roared through the air.

She rose to meet him, her gloved fingers clasping her black satin robe to her throat. He stepped closer, a rush of being, amorphous, lurid. She let the robe slip from her fingers, let it fall past her snow-white skin to cluster around her bare feet.

The full-length, mauve gloves were the only defense decency offered as she stood before him. He reached for her, touched her. She shivered, her breath bated. His fingers caressed the gentle curve below her navel, slowly moved upward, causing her flesh to tingle.

He smiled.

She screamed.

The gothic gremlin shadows danced.

Afterward, when there was nothing left, he blew out the one still-burning tea light–the other having been engulfed by the shadows shortly before.

In the sudden darkness–with Mansell’s Lux Aeterna on repeat, still roaring, driving, building–the faint, nearly stale, clove-cigarette incense failed to cover the bitter, metallic tang that was beginning to permeate the room. Subtle currents, not unlike the gentle curve beneath the navel, driven by the fading vorticity of the blown-out tea light, by the reverberations of the climaxing orchestration pouring through speakers now hidden in the darkness, increased the entropic manifestation of that new, bitter, metallic tang.

And in that darkness, as his passage, vorticity, and candle-extinguishing followed him from the room, as Lux Aeterna reached its last crescendo and descended abruptly into the final, quiet sob of a few lonely notes, she simply, silently, ceased to exist.