D.O.A. Extreme Horror Anthology (4 page)

“Jack! Pal! How’re those accounts coming?”

“I’m on it, Mr. Davis,” said Jack, biting back a grimace.

“I’m relying on you.”

“Yes, Mr. Davis. Working through my lunch,” he told him, and hated himself for sucking up. Fuck off, he thought, but only to himself.

“Good man. Just as soon as you can. Mail ‘em to me, eh?”

Eh, fuck.

“Yes, Mr. Davis.”

Jack’s boss walked away, and Jack turned back to his screen. All work and no play. His troll sneered at him. It called him a pussy.

“Shut up,” Jack told it, and flicked his screen up. Numbers. It was all done by numbers. Everything could be reduced to numbers, or so the mathematicians said. But Jack knew the truth; numbers reduced
you
.

He set to tapping, and the pages flew by. For a few blissful hours Jack had no daydreams. The clock ticked past, marking off numbers on the face. People passed his cubicle—seven. He went to the toilet. Twice.

His phone rang. Twice he picked it up. More work. Demands from Mr. Davis. Twice he didn’t answer it.

Then, it was just him and the numbers, sucking his soul out through his eyeballs.

By four, he was finished. Five cups of coffee down.

Jack hit send. See if Davis could wiggle his way out of that one.

He looked up. There were fewer heads. It must be cigarette break time. He wished he smoked. Those bastards took up half the day developing cancer. If Jack got cancer, it would be for free.

He almost wished he had cancer. A day off wouldn’t hurt.

Johnson. Fuck Johnson.

Jack stretched his legs out. The back of his chair chose that moment to pussy out on him. His legs flipped in the air again. He whacked the same knee.

“Fuck!”

Heads turned in unison. He wanted to put his fingers up to them. Jack knew one of those bastard bitches stayed late and switched the chair back on him every day. No matter what he did, he always got the same chair.

He put his face down.

Fuck Johnson. He brought up the Internet. Click, click. What a beautiful variation from tap, tap.

Variation, Jack realized, was why people kept on living. They waited for their shows to change, they tried tea one day instead of coffee, hot chocolate instead of tea, a mistress instead of a faithful wife.

But they would never be free. They wanted variation, but within a strict set of boundaries. They wanted it to be comfortable. They wanted parameters.

There were no parameters. You didn’t have to put up with the same old dross. Jack knew that. If you just had the imagination. You could go anywhere.

Click, click. The sound of an empty chamber. Flick knife opening. Hammer on nail.

Tap, tap. Brought to mind a drip. Endless. Rhythmic. Crazy-making. The sound of every day.

Click…clickclickclick…click. New patterns. New rhythms. Alien and new. Nothing familiar about the sound.

It relaxed Jack. A flood of pictures poured over him. Words. Stories, news stories, alien abduction stories, stupid-people stories, conspiracy stories. He washed in it.

Four fifty-five p.m. Time to get his jacket on. He looked around him. People were standing up, stretching out their aching backs, pulling on jackets.

Jack caught a nameless drone’s eye. A dead, soulless eye. No imagination.

Put him out of his misery. Go on. Take the axe. Look down. The axe is already in your hand. A swing, a hit. A cracking sound, and the axe is stuck. The rest of them look around. Perhaps they can all jump you before you pull the axe out. Perhaps you can beat them to it. Nothing to it, but to try.

Jack grabbed the handle of the axe, and pulled. The sound he could hear was screaming. His. They were silent. Silent, waiting for freedom. Waiting to break out.

The axe came free. For a moment, he thought he saw them smile.

He shrugged his jacket on.

A nod to a co-worker. No words. There is no room for words in a world of figures.

Jack shouldered his way out the door, his phone ringing behind him.

It would be Johnson. Too late.

He walked slowly to his car. Put the key in the ignition. Pulled away, then a second before it was too late, slammed on the brakes as Sarah pulled out in front of him.

She threw him the finger and
he accelerated into the side of her car, staving it in. He leapt out of the car and ran around to the driver’s side, put his foot through the window, smashing the glass. He reached through and grabbed a handful of her pert, prim hair and rammed her head into the steering wheel, again, and again, and again.

Jack mouthed ‘sorry,’ even though the stupid bitch had pulled out on him.

He drove sedately home.

Put the key in the lock. Pushed open the door.

“Jack!”

“Yes, mother. I’m back.”

He took his jacket and hung it on the peg. Only then did he go into the front room. It was his rebellion. Great things start out small.

“You’re early. You can do my feet before dinner.”

He looked at the obese woman before him, splayed out on the couch. She couldn’t reach her own feet. It was a miracle she could still get out of bed. Her mouth held a cruel smile, maliciously bent.

“OK, mother,” he said meekly.

He walked to the shed, took the saw out. He oiled the blade lovingly, running a finger along the jagged teeth. He walked, sedately, back to the living room. He could afford to take his time. The fat, sick bitch wasn’t going anywhere.

He did her feet. He always did as he was told.

He tidied the kitchen, wiped the crumbs from the sofa.

And that, thought Jack, was another perfect end to a perfect day. 

He turned on the computer in his bedroom. For a few blissful hours, it was just words and pictures. No demands. Instant access. He dabbled with some sedition, dallied over a little porn, did a crossword. Words and pictures. The sheer joy of it eased his shoulders.

He wound his neck in, went to the bathroom and washed the blood from his hands.

Then he stripped and changed into his pajamas.

Jack brushed his teeth carefully, taking time over each separate tooth. He squeezed some blackheads from his chin. Before he lay down, he got on the floor and did forty push-ups.

Panting, he threw himself into bed.

Jack lay perfectly still for a while, just staring at the ceiling, with a smile fixed on his face. Just another day of holding it all in. It was amazing, he thought, what you could do if you set your mind to it.

He turned onto his side and closed his eyes.

Cold Air

Edward R. Rosick

Helen and I became friends during our 4th term of medical school. On the surface it seemed an odd relationship: Helen was forty-five and divorced, with three grown children; I was twenty-eight, an overweight ex-molecular genetic technician and bored with my job and my life.

Relationships have a way of bringing people to new and unusual places. But the joining of our odd couple, was to take both of us down the very stairs of hell.

Our final anatomy class of the winter semester was
Anatomy 700
:
Advanced Dissection of the Human Nervous System
. We spent countless hours in the anatomy lab huddled around stinking cadavers as we shifted through the brachial plexus and all its branches, and searched for the tiny chorda tympani and their hundreds of kin.

It was a tedious project, one that taxed our bodies and minds to their limits. During those days, standing hour after hour over the cadavers, our own bodies reeking of formaldehyde, Helen and I learned about each other as we took solace in our shared burden.

I still remember quite clearly how she expressed her abhorrence for the anatomy lab. We were in her apartment during a rare free afternoon, sitting in front of a small gas space heater that struggled against the cold winds that battered her cramped upper-floor apartment. I sat on the couch and let the currents of heat work into my skin while Helen made hot chocolate for us in the kitchen. When I heard her mutter something under her breath I left my warm enclave and walked over to her.

“I hear talking to oneself is the first sign of insanity,” I said.

Helen, dressed in blue jeans and a thick wool sweater looked at me with her emerald-green eyes. “Sometimes I think that next time I walk into that stinking anatomy lab all the cadavers will sit up from their tables, form a big circle around me and start giving a discourse on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

“We’ll be done in there after this term,” I said after we had walked back into the living room with our hot chocolate—liberally fortified with 100-proof bourbon—and sat down on the couch. “Once we’re out you’ll probably decide that you miss the place.”

She shook her head. “No way. When we’re in there hour after hour teasing out those tiny nerves and vessels, I start to feel…” her voice trailed off and she gave a deep sigh.

“Feel like what?”

“I start to feel like them. I start to feel so fucking old and tired. I bet that if I lay down next to one of the cadavers no one would notice.”

“I would notice.” I put my arm gently around her shoulder. “You’re not alone. I feel just as tired.”

She managed a weak smile and laid her head on my shoulder. “Douglas, you’re so young. Sometimes I wonder why we’re still friends.”

I pulled away for an instant, thinking she had grown tired of me, thinking she had found herself another man.

“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll make it through.” She got off the couch and turned up the thermostat.

“Of course you will. We both will,” I proclaimed, realizing she wasn’t talking about leaving me at all.

It was at that instant, that I saw in her eyes a dark, vacuous glimmer before she suddenly leaned down and kissed me full on the lips. Just as quickly as she had kissed me, Helen moved away and stood by the heater.

“Haven’t you ever wondered about the cadavers?” she said in a soft, far-away voice. “Haven’t you ever wondered who they were, where they were from, what they did with their lives?”

I was still shocked at the kiss. “No,” was all that I managed to mutter.

“I have.” She came back over to me, squatted down and placed her hands on my knees. “All the energy those people once had, all the life that once flowed from their pores, now all gone. It’s like a giant vacuum in that lab, a huge cold maelstrom of dead, and I swear I can feel it drawing me in. That’s what I hate about the lab. Not the smell, not all the inane, worthless details we’re forced to memorize. I hate the death.”

“We’ll always have to deal with death,” I said. “All of our patients will eventually die.”

She got up with a frown on her face. “But that’s different.”

I was utterly perplexed. “How is it different?”

She frowned. “It’s just different. When people die there’s still that spark, still a core of life in them. Even now we can bring people back from the dead four, even five minutes after they have clinically died. And who really knows what happens after that, how long their energy, their soul is with them.”

“Then where does the soul go?”

Helen’s eyes sparked and danced, and I told myself it was just a reflection from the outside setting sun, just too much bourbon in the hot chocolate.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” She smiled fiendishly. “That’s the one we’d all like to know the answer to.”

After that discussion, we didn’t talked about the subject of death again for months. The second year of medical school quickly turned into the third, and we were thrust into our hospital externships.

Helen and I picked the same hospital to work at, and managed to schedule our first two rotations of pathology and emergency medicine together.

I witnessed the first step in her decent to madness one morning after we had finished up an autopsy in the pathology lab. The body was that of a fifty-two year old man, an alcoholic and drug addict who looked more like one hundred and fifty-two. His liver was rotted and his intestines were filled will large chunks of feces. After one hour I left to go get some coffee in the cafeteria. Helen stayed on, finally meeting me in the cafeteria an hour later. Her blue scrubs were stained brown and red, her graying brown hair was frazzled, and there were dark circles under her bloodshot eyes. 

“You look tired,” I said.

She blew across her steaming cup of coffee and looked at me over the edge of her glasses. “I was on call last night. I haven’t had any sleep in thirty-one hours. I should be fucking tired.”

   “What was it down there in the path lab?” I asked. “Why did you stay so long? We had already done everything we needed to.”

“Do you really want to understand?”

“I want to try.”

She looked around as if scanning the cafeteria for spies. “Last week I got a chance to do an almost instant autopsy. The guy wasn’t dead for more than fifteen minutes.”

I shrugged. “So you did one yourself, we’ve all—”

“No, that’s not it,” she interrupted. “I felt it. For the first time I really felt it.”

As her eyes burned into me, and her hot breath smelling of coffee and unbrushed teeth washed over my face, I wanted to leave, to run from her and never look back. But instead I asked the very thing she wished me to ask. “Felt what?”

“Cold air.” She giggled a bit, a small, high-pitched sound, like something that would come from a small, wounded animal. “That’s what I call it. The leaving of the soul. Cold air. It’s—,” She stopped and looked around again. “I shouldn’t say any more. There are too many people here, too many ears.”

I reached over and held her hands. “We all know bodies get cold after a person dies. That doesn’t mean it’s their soul leaving them.”

“No!” she exclaimed, then quieted her voice. “No, it’s not just the body getting cold. I can feel a real current, a movement outward from the body. I don’t know just yet what it is exactly, but I will, Douglas. I will.”