MicroHorror

Laura was driving down the freeway and applying her makeup when her cell phone beeped with a text message.

“Don’t bother,” the message read. She didn’t recognize the sender.
 
“Who is this?” she texted back with one hand, holding her lipstick with the other and steering with her knees.
 
“The makeup,” came the reply. “Don’t bother.”
 
Laura frowned.
 
“Why not?” she texted, her thumb racing across the keypad.
 
“Look up.”
 
Laura looked up just as her car slammed into the back of a semi parked on the shoulder, shearing off the car’s roof and lopping off her head.

I thought the golf course might be the one place where I wouldn’t have to worry about zombies. I was on the 13th fairway lining up my next shot when I heard a loud moaning behind me. I turned to see a zombie a couple hundred yards back. He was looking up, shielding his eyes from the sun. He had a golf club in his other hand. I guess he was trying to holler “fore,” because the next thing I knew a golf ball bounced off my head. By the time I came to, the zombie golfer had taken a pretty good bite out of my shoulder. Fortunately, I was able to fight him off. I just hope I can finish my round before I join the ranks of the shuffling dead.

An oracle came to young Jeremy in a dream.

“Your family will rise above all others,” the oracle told Jeremy. “You will be like fruits on a great tree.”

Jeremy told his mother about his dream. She scolded him and warned him not to tell anyone else, for they lived in a community that did not tolerate believers.

At school, Jeremy told his best friend about his wonderful dream.

That night, an angry mob dragged Jeremy and his family out of their house and strung them up by their necks from the great tree in the town square.

The United States wasn’t ready for a vampire president.
 
The candidate’s platform seemed plausible. He proposed a network of regional “turning centers,” which would create jobs for the unemployed. He argued that a U.S. military made up of vampires would be unbeatable. And he suggested that in an America populated by vampires, health care costs would be a thing of the past.
 
The opposition Van Helsing party candidate countered that while unstoppable at night, a vampire army could easily be vanquished by the enemy as it slept during the day. He wondered aloud where the “turning center” jobs would go once everyone became a vampire. And he questioned where a vampire nation would find sustenance when there weren’t any humans left to feed on.
 
In the end, a radical faction of the Van Helsing party found the vampire candidate in his coffin in a Motel Six in Poughkeepsie, New York and fed the candidate and his casket to an incinerator.
 
Despite the setback, the vampire party wouldn’t rule out fielding a candidate in the next election.

Consciousness returns as she tastes river water. The car fills up, and she flails against the seatbelt. She’s drunk again, and she can’t unfasten it. The water surges in, bubbling higher and higher around her. She tilts her face up to suck one last breath from the shrinking pocket of air, and then she’s underwater. She looks behind her and sees her toddler son struggling in his booster seat. She screams, and her lungs fill with water.

I could feel blisters forming on my palms as I shoveled the last of the dirt onto the pile. I had a newfound respect for those who did this kind of work before the days of front-end loaders and backhoes. I wasn’t too worried about the blisters. They’d go away. I was just glad to have the problem with my daughter’s good-for-nothing boyfriend taken care of and the burying done.

I tried to warn her about that boyfriend of hers. I told her he was no good, but she wouldn’t listen. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Teenage girls don’t listen to their fathers anymore. I guess they’re too busy sending text messages and taking naked pouty-faced pictures of themselves in the bathroom mirror.

I could tell by the looks that punk gave me when he thought I wasn’t looking that he had no respect for his elders. And I could tell by the way he leered at my daughter and grabbed at her ass when he thought I couldn’t see them that all he was interested in was getting into her pants. I tried to warn her about that, too, but she didn’t want to hear it. I told her I wasn’t raising no whore, and she started bawling and stomped off to her bedroom.

I woke up in the middle of the night and heard squeak, squeak, squeak coming from my daughter’s bedroom. I grabbed my gun, walked down the hall to her room and opened the door. Her window was open, and that no-good punk was in the sack with her. Next thing I knew I was looking through blue smoke. My ears were ringing, and the smell of gunpowder was stinging my nose. My daughter’s bed was a bloody mess.

I can tell you it took some effort to drag that boy’s body out to the back yard. He was a big kid. My daughter was a lot smaller, so she was easier to lug. Digging a hole big enough for the two of them–now that was a job.

I told her I wasn’t raising no whore. She should’ve listened to her father.

When darkness falls, good men ponder evil deeds while evil men sow rotting seeds fermenting in their brains.

When darkness falls, protecting light is washed away. The wall that by the light of day is thick between the living and the dead is hardly there at all.

When darkness falls, kids take the steps by leaps and bounds, listening for the sounds of hands that wait to grab their feet.

When darkness falls, the heart of man is turned to blackened charcoal and his soul to vile stew.

When darkness falls, the wise stay home. The desperate and the stupid roam to find their awful fate.

Jonas knew they couldn’t keep the baby. No matter how excited his wife had been about conceiving again, he couldn’t ignore the voices that told him the baby wasn’t theirs to keep.

Jonas carried the small bundle to the outhouse. The voices were loudest here, a droning babble rising from the stinking dark hole. He could hear them calling for the child. Jonas held the bundle over the opening and the tiny body tumbled out. It sank into the muck amidst a handful of tiny yellowing skulls.

The voices were silenced, except for one. Soon it was silenced, too.

Having Tony around for holidays like this one was nice, Veronica thought to herself as she picked up the small heart-shaped box of candy and walked toward the door at the rear of the house.

She’d had some issues with boyfriends in the past, and Tony had been no different. He was wonderful at the beginning, but then he became abusive. First he used his mouth, then he used his fists. But they’d worked things out, and everything was fine now.

Veronica reached the door and opened it. Flipping the light switch, she stepped into the garage, reflecting on how Tony had been with her since just after Christmas. She’d have to do something really special for him next time Christmas rolled around. For now, the candy would be fine.

Veronica stopped in front of the industrial-sized freezer. She opened the lid and waved away the escaping fog to reveal Tony’s frozen corpse. She gently fitted the heart-shaped box into the hole in Tony’s chest where his own heart used to be. She leaned down and kissed his frosty, grey lips, then straightened back up and smiled, licking the moisture from her lips. “Happy Valentine’s Day, baby,” she said, and she closed the freezer lid.

The devil appeared to the disheartened quarterback in the locker room at halftime.

“I can guarantee you victory,” the devil offered, “but the price will be high.”

“Please help me,” the quarterback said, and shook the devil’s hand.

His team won.

After the game the quarterback found out that the bus carrying players’ wives to the stadium had burst into flames. No one survived.

The quarterback, who was single, wept.