Tandem of Terror (20 page)

Emily watches it all too terrified to run. I
yank the covers from her naked form and descend on her like a
ravenous beast. I pay her back for the countless nights I have
missed her touch in our bed before she dies from her wounds
underneath my spent body. Finally, I remove her still heart from
her chest and sit enjoying it like an apple between my teeth as I
wait for the sun to rise.

The Tie That
Binds

John Grover

Gary aimed his shotgun at the battered front
door, his face was damp with sweat, his breath was quick and his
hands trembled. The door buckled with a thunderous bellow, bowing
under immense pressure, breeching slowly. A low, angry growl
resonated behind it.

Seconds later the door burst open and a huge
German Shepherd lunged into the room. The shotgun went off.

Gunfire ripped into the dog's hindquarters
and sent it against the living room wall in a spatter of blood but
it kept on coming. Its face was skeletal; its eyes were empty
sockets. The dog jumped to its feet, bloodied paws scratched the
hardwood floor, shattered ribs protruded from a body ravaged by
decomposition and dusted with muddy soil. The animal let out a
baleful howl and charged.

A scream spilled out of Gary as he ran into
the kitchen and hurled the dining table against the doorway.
Throwing his body up against it, he braced against the undead dog's
attacks.

"
Champ!" Gary reloaded his
shotgun with jittery hands marred with bites. "It's me Champ,
stop...please stop!"

Rising barks filled the room as the beast
launched at the table again. His full weight sent a crack through
the dark cherry wood. The stench of decaying flesh filled Gary's
nostrils.

Jaws of razor teeth snapped inches away from
Gary's ear, he jumped and fired blindly over his shoulder. The shot
hit the ceiling and sent debris down upon them. Plaster dusted the
room like snow. He tasted the grit in his mouth.

Sweat drenched Gary's face and he wiped it
with skinned knuckles. He braced both feet against the nearest
wall, and used his back to hold the table across the doorway.

Silence filled the room.

Gary looked over his shoulder and sighted the
living room stairs. Behind the banister his eleven-year-old stepson
Derek glowered. A menacing smile shined across the boy's face.

"
Derek," Gary whispered. "Go
back to your room and shut your door. Champ's not your dog anymore.
It's dangerous down here. Go now, quickly before he..." Gary's brow
furrowed.
What's he doing? Why is he still standing
there?

He watched Derek start slowly back upstairs.
In his hand the boy held a knotted piece of twine tied with bones.
A giggle escaped him as he vanished from sight.

Gary stared absently until Champ lashed
again, collapsing the table on him. The two struggled as the
shotgun slid from Gary's grasping hands.

Champ suddenly sprawled across him. Bits of
canine flesh slipped off the dog while black sockets leered into
Gary's eyes. Their void threatened to drive him mad.

Rotting paws tore through Gary's sweatshirt
as the dog dragged him against some cabinets. Gary had reached for
the nearest drawer desperately and yanked as hard as he could.

The entire drawer clattered to the floor as
silverware plummeted. A butcher knife landed in his lap. He took it
up and drove it deep into the dog's skull. Its body twitched
sporadically before going limp.

Gary rolled the heavy body off of him and
climbed to his feet on wobbly legs. His hands were wet with mud and
blood. His heart was finally beginning to slow down. He limped
slowly upstairs to Derek's room and found him on his bed,
grinning.

Derek shook the twine in his hand and looked
up. "This is for killing Champ." He tied another knot into it
followed by another. "And all my other pets you killed that mom
bought me. I always knew you hated animals just like I knew it was
you who killed them."

Gary eyed a torn comic book page by the boy's
side. He just barely made out in huge gothic letters "home voodoo
zombie kit."

"
Derek I..."

"
Shut up," the boy cut his
words off. "If mom hadn't died last year she'd seen it was you...but
I have something for that too." Derek tied one last knot into the
twine and giggled.

Strange scratching sounds reverberated and
Gary turned to stare out the open bedroom window. A cold breeze
wafted through the window along with the appearance of a dead cat,
a Terrier, and lastly, a muddied pair of women's arms, glowing
alabaster in the moonlight.

Ground
Zero

Eric S Brown

The parking lot was a war zone. Outside the
super center, shoppers screamed and died in the growing twilight as
a wave of hungry, rotting creatures poured out of the derailed
train's wreckage.

High above the chaos, Agent Brant sat in the
weapon systems control section of one of the two AH-64A Apaches
which had been assigned to escort the train to the CDC in Atlanta.
He cursed to himself as he looked down at the mess below. He'd
warned his superiors of the dangers in keeping the creatures
"alive" but they wouldn't listen. Half of them wanted to study the
things to see if the virus that gave them birth could be used a
weapon and the other half were terrified of the public's response
if word got out that the government had ordered the death of an
entire town. Now the survivors, if they could be called that, of
the Mcfall's Springs incident were running loose on the streets of
Glenstown all because of their shortsightedness and the haste that
the whole operation was thrown together with. The virus jumped from
host to host at an unimaginable rate causing a gnawing hunger for
human flesh and even reanimated the host upon death so that it
could continue spreading and now it was loose not in a secluded and
rural town like where it originated but in a major city.

Brant shook his head as the pilot's voice
crackled over the radio in his helmet. "What do we do sir?"

Brant wondered if he was watching the
beginning of the end of the human race or if this was just another
pointless loss of life that the government would somehow manage to
contain at the last second like McFall's Springs and sweep under
the rug with the right "PR" spin.

Below the twin Apaches, Jessica wondered how
it all had happened so fast. She hadn't even noticed the
helicopters flying escort to the train. Her eyes had been glued to
the train itself as its wheels had skipped off the track and the
locomotive had toppled off the track's embankment only yards away
from the far edge of the parking lot. As bad as the wreck had been,
it was nothing compared to what came after it.

They came crawling and running out of the
wreckage. There must have been at least a hundred of them. At
first, everyone thought they were passengers until the people who
had rushed to meet and help them were overrun by them. Those poor
people had been knocked to the ground and ripped apart by the
things from the things from the train. It looked as if some of the
things were actually eating them alive.

The rest of the folks in the lot watched in
horror. Some pointed at the terror unfolding before them and gawked
while others broke into a run for the shopping center and the
relative safety of its plexi-glass doors. A few however who were
already in or at their vehicles though decided to attempt to
flee.

Cars backed into each and collided all around
the lot or darted for the road careless of the people in their path
adding to the death toll. The creatures entered the lot and
attacked anyone they could get their hands on. Jessica saw a man
only a few feet from her taken down by one of the things. The man
fought back but the creature managed to get its hands on his face.
Its fingers sunk deep into the man's skull through his eye sockets
until he stopped struggling and then the thing started tearing at
his fleshly wildly with its teeth. Blood covered its hungry face as
it smacked its lips and chewed on the man's throat. Jessica forced
herself to look away. She knew she had to take action or she'd be
just as dead as he was. She spun about and broke into a run for the
store's main entrance, joining the herd of frightened folks with
the same idea.

Jessica fought through the mass of people
pushing and shoving their way into the store only to run into the
panicked shoppers inside trying to fight their way out. Those who'd
been inside had no idea what was happening outside but somehow they
must have known they needed to get the hell out of here and figured
they needed to get to their cars in order to do so.

An overweight lady shoved Jessica out of her
path and sent Jessica flying to the floor. Several people stepped
on her before she managed to crawl into a corner of the space
between the store's outer and inner doors. She huddled herself into
a ball holding her legs to her chest and stared at right hand. Two
of her fingers had been broken the heel of some redneck man's
combat boots. Tears slid down her cheeks as she watched the battle
between those trying to get in and those trying to get out. She was
still crying when the flames washed over her.

"
Sir?" his pilot asked again
as Brant ended his communication with DC. Brant leaned forward
resting his head in his hands. His conversation with the powers
that be had not gone well. Again, he'd urged them to take extreme
measures but they refused. They believed they could coordinate with
the local authorities and scramble enough troops from nearby bases
to contain the outbreak. They were fools. Brant knew if the spread
of the virus was to be stopped something had to be done right now.
"This bird is fully armed isn't it?"

"
Yes sir," the pilot
answered.

"
They're sending troops to
try to contain this mess but they'll never reach here in time. We
need to do something to slow down the spread of the virus. I want
you to fly me where I can get a shot to level that store and then
expend everything else you're carrying on the parking lot. Order
the other Apache to do the same but make sure they take out the
train wreckage first just in case some of those things didn't make
it out."

"
But all those people...
"

"
That's an order soldier. Do
it or I will personally shoot you in the head myself when we
land."

The Apache swung around to face the shopping
center and Brant took aim. He released all of the bird's Hydra
70mms into the structure and then emptied the Apache's supply of
Hellfires onto the parking lot for good measure. The other Apache
picked its targets more carefully since it had a trained gunner.
Rockets flew into clusters of cars so that the secondary explosions
would maximize their damage over the large area. When both Apaches
were done, they hovered above a sea of flame. Brant ordered his
pilot to take him lower as he fired the bird's 30mm canon at
anything he could find that was still moving until he'd emptied all
of the gun's 1200 rounds.

Brant slumped in his seat. The cost had been
high but he'd done what he could. The rest was up to the soldiers
and cops rushing to the scene. He knew there would still be
infected who made it out but at least now maybe the containment
teams stood a chance of stopping the virus before it got out of
control to the point where it endangered the whole human race. He
closed his eyes and said a prayer for the dead
and
the
living.

The
Disembodied

John Grover

The town sat on the edge of Murk woods, woods
that were believed to be cursed. That was only the half of it.

Shrouded in darkness and shadow, the woods
stood ominously, vast and all encompassing, like a wall barring
anything from escaping the small town of Sotherton. A perpetual
mist hung in the pines and evergreens that towered there, thick,
white and stirring like a fog of ghosts.

It was not ghosts the town had to fear.

"You forgot to sew her mouth up," the old
mortician said, his fright coated with anger. "My God in
heaven!"

The young apprentice blinked, his face
draining of all color. He had forgotten, forgotten the most
important thing he'd been taught about being a mortician in
Sotherton.

"
I told you, over and over."
The old mortician leapt from the table, a stack of papers
fluttering to the floor. "We've got to get downstairs,
now!"

Miles outside in the darkened woods the mist
did stir, glowing with a bizarre radiance as a single stream of it
zipped from the rest and vanished into the night air.

Reappearing in front of the funeral home, the
stream of mist slipped through a crevice in the foundation, gaining
entry to the house of the dead.

The two men raced down the stairs, making
their way to the basement, the embalming room doors at the end of
what seemed to be a never-ending hall.

"
I'm sorry Gerald," the
young apprentice said. "I forgot. This is only the second one I've
done. I just forgot."

"
You can't ever forget
Mathew, ever," Gerald said as they drew upon the door. "Can't have
it happen again..."

"
What? I don't understand.
Why do we sew up the mouths of the..."

Mathew's words fell dead as they rushed into
the room realizing they had been too late. All sanity nearly poured
out of Mathew as he gazed on the most abominable sight of his
entire life.

The dead woman's body hovered above the
examining table, staring down at them with deep sunk, ebony eyes.
The white sheet that once had covered the corpse was now draped
over it, scantily covering its naked body. All its hair had fallen
out, destroyed by the invading parasitic entity. The flesh was
covered with sores and appeared pliable, almost translucent, all
its stitches had been torn out. The arms and legs were gaunt, the
rib cage bulged in its chest and its hands had become gnarled, the
fingernails sprouting and doubling in size.