Dead Men (and Women) Walking Read online

  A sound stopped the stalking beast. Downstairs, standing motionless, like one of the suits of armor, was Kathrina's father, Dr. Polidori. Borque spun wildly, hissing like a serpent.

  "So -- you return, Vladaslav Korbochenko?"

  The vampyre spit again, pained to hear its long forgotten name. "Call me Borque!" it demanded.

  "I'll call you Hell-spawn!" the scientist roared. "How dare you come into my house uninvited?"

  "Tsk-tsk, doktor, and you a Man of Science. But you forget, I was invited. By your daughter --"

  "Leave."

  "Never."

  "No more warnings then. I have tried to respect your existence as part of Nature's scheme -- but no longer." The man retrieved an object from his pocket. The geegaw was a gilt-worked cross of gold, borrowed from a colleague, a doctor of Archeology, Simon Feldman.

  The nosferat laughed. "Hog-wash and superstition, doktor." The creature began ascending the stairs once more. "You said it yourself. Nature's scheme. The cross has no effect -- never did!"

  "Damn you!" cursed the man, throwing the crucifix to the floor.

  Borque chortled again, spinning and leaping up step after step. "She's mine, Polidori. You are all my cattle."

  The vampyre topped the stair. The first door on its left, there he would find the beautiful and helpless Kathrina. A diseased hand turned the knob, allowing the cadaverous body to enter. Once inside, Borque screamed like a stuck pig, a pale, inhuman shriek. After a moment, silence returned.

  Downstairs, Polidori smiled. He took the stairs slowly, listening to the slow and peaceful breathing of his child. The vampyre was gone. In a moment the vlokvelk would be too. The vlokvelk had little business on this dimensional plane, except for the occasional foray for food. Top of the food chain, the doctor thought to himself. Top of the food chain.

  Nature's scheme. He was a Man of Science after all. Just like the sign on the door said:

  FREDERICK POLIDORI, DOCTOR OF BIOLOGY.

  THE NEW CREATURES

  By Tristan T. Tenorio

  Its eyes jerked open. It drew long deep breaths, wheezing as it did so. It sat up, and as it did so, it heard sounds, sounds of raised voices and scampering feet. It ambled up to his feet, slowly, clumsily trying to maintain its balance. It looked at its surroundings, trying to make sense of where it was. It was in a grassy place, probably in a park, but it did not know that. The sun shone in its eyes, the air smelled of smoke and ruin and death, but these were all new things to it. This creature, this New Creature, struggled to analyze everything. But it would be damned to fail.

  In the distance, the New Creature could see things moving. They looked similar to it, but they were not like it. The New Creature began to feel something. Something that tugged in the back of its confused mind. Not knowing what it was, the New Creature began to move. It walked with slow, sluggish steps, like something that had just awakened. It began to move towards the things in the distance. The things also began to move. They moved much faster than the New Creature, as if they had been doing it for a long time. The New Creature also began to move faster, but it was not able to reach the things before they moved out of its sight. Nevertheless, it continued to move towards them, for there was something that was compelling him to.

  When the New Creature reached the spot where it last saw the things, it stopped. It tried to make sense of its surroundings. It could see more things that were like the New Creature lying on the ground.

  But these things were not moving. They smelled a lot like the air when it awoke. They had the scent of death, and their heads were damaged. Some were black, shrunken things that crumbled when touched. The New Creature stood over the motionless things as if to mourn, but the feeling, the undeniable desire for something it could not understand, prompted it to move again.

  It walked for a good long time, through wide, hard pathways, soft, grassy parks and rocky mountain passages. The sky was soon becoming dark. The New Creature stopped and looked around. It could hear the sounds of shuffling feet, similar to its footsteps. In the fading light, it could see other New Creatures walking about. Like it, they were walking around, listlessly, as if they were looking for something, but unsure of what that was.

  The New Creatures came in different shapes and sizes. Some were complete, others missing pieces or parts, but it did not seem to bother them. Most were clothed, fully or in tatters, and some wore nothing at all. They felt no shame, outrage, nor disgust. They felt nothing save a desire, a need.

  Then, they heard it. A low, moaning sound from somewhere not too far off in the distance. Instinctively, they began to follow it. Like moths to a flame, or pilgrims to a holy place, the mass of New Creatures rushed, as best they can, to the source of the call. Some stumbled and crawled, others ran and most walked towards the noise.

  They began to hear screams, of pain and panic and sounds they could not begin to identify, mixed with the noise of ripping, tearing and devouring. As the New Creatures arrived, they came upon a scene of feasting. Other New Creatures were eating something on the ground. They began to sense something from the thing the others were feasting on. They began to reach for the sprawled thing on the ground, trying to partake of that something they sensed. They pushed, pulled and tore at the thing, tearing out chunks from it. It was warm, sticky and slippery all at the same time, and as if on instinct, they ate and swallowed the chunks of the thing. As they felt the warm pieces slide down their gullets and begin to fill their bellies, they began to walk away again.

  It wasn't because they were satisfied, it was because what they were looking for, what they desired from the thing on the ground, wasn't there anymore. And in the haze and confusion of their minds, a purpose was set. Their desire now acknowledged, wrong or right did not matter. Wrong or right no longer applied to them. They only felt a need. A need to fill the terrible emptiness within them, these pitiful, terrible New Creatures, and they would not stop until they found the something to fill that void.

  Whatever that something was, they would not be denied it. They knew they wanted something from the things that looked like them but were not them, but they knew not what it was. It was inside these screaming things, these struggling, frightened things, but it would disappear when they were torn apart by the New Creatures, in an attempt to locate that elusive something. Desperate to have that something, the New Creatures would bite and chew and swallow parts of the screaming things, their warm blood flowing into their maws, their reddish-pink flesh swallowed down their throats, in an attempt to get that something they wanted. But they would never be satisfied.

  The New Creatures continued walking all through the night, unmindful of the cold, searching for that elusive object of their desire. They knew there were more of the things that looked like them but were not like them, and they would find them. No matter what.

  BAZAAR SHADES OF SORROW

  By Penelope Allen

  His frame is painfully gaunt,

  in cinder striped rags,

  as he shuffles and haunts

  a dreadful second hand store.

  Lamps stand on sagged shelves;

  no two shades are the same:

  he's looking for long lost remains.

  He softly calls

  my Love my Life

  my beautiful Wife

  my Blood my Child

  So sweet and mild

  I am your beggar beguiled

  but only his echo rises and falls.

  Three score and three years

  since they disappeared,

  muscled away at the rail yard that day.

  Too numb struck to protest,

  he stoically prayed for the best.

  Steam rolled down the line

  until he ran out of time

  and typhoid caught him

  in camped out concentration.

  On the eve of his death,

  with devotion profound,

  he began hunting through mounds

  for their burial grounds.


  Meeting more aimless souls

  than he could possibly count.

  At Ravensbrüek,

  where women were reviled and defiled:

  ashen spirits fumed secrets

  of the fiend Irma Grese

  and her savage devil dogs.

  He scoured reams of logs

  through families of names,

  but no grasp of the same.

  At Auschwitz:

  blind to his held fast hope,

  the concierge was too cruelly kind

  with vivid assertions of Irma's coercion.

  A glimmer obsesses his mind.

  His beloveds' skin was so clear,

  so pure, that it shone,

  pale and refined with feathered laugh lines.

  He became convinced the jack booted witch

  committed an implacable sin

  and mutilated his precious kin

  to occupy a sadist's moments of leisure -

  fingering lamp lit tattoos so stark,

  they glow in the dark.

  He's consumed with grief beyond belief.

  As he spiraled

  into despair and despise,

  the love light died in his eyes.

  With a grim shudder and lurch,

  he resumes his world weary search

  of grotesque curiosity shops.

  His well worn pain and borne disdain

  of the macabre mad gadabout crowd:

  putting on freakish sideshows

  in castoff carnival clothes,

  coveting garish and obscene trinkets,

  on their junkets to flea market hangouts.

  Through jumbles of rummage sales

  they dicker, bicker and bray

  like the asses they are.

  He musn't stray too far

  from cluttered tables and stalls

  as he softly calls

  my Love my Life

  my beautiful Wife

  my Blood my Child

  So sweet and mild

  I am your beggar beguiled

  but only his echo rises and falls.

  UNDER A BLANKET OF BLUE

  By Donna Taylor Burgess

  Sam Clark knew he'd kept her locked in that back bedroom too long when she began to eat chunks of her own face. Pinched off with ragged nails, and when he peered in through the keyhole at her, he could see the hard white flashes of sharp cheekbone stark against her dusky complexion. She had taken her own top lip first and was now wearing this awful permanent grin. Her speech was odd, like a person who had been loaded with Novocain. Her teeth were stained with her own blood.

  He moved away from the keyhole and sat back down against the door. He cried into his hands. Should have done it when the first symptoms hit.

  At the onset, she'd wanted to argue with him one moment, then the next, she wanted to make up, to make love. He was afraid of her. When he indicated that he did not want to touch her, she scratched his cheek with those ragged nails and called him a weak little fuck.

  Later, she begged him to do it--to put a bullet into her head. He promised he would as she slept. But it's hard to shoot your first love in the head. No matter that she was becoming something from a cheap horror movie. And even harder when it was beginning to appear that he might well be completely alone in the world when Ellie was gone.

  She later asked for the gun, so she could do it herself, but she had been in one of those irrational moods when she'd asked. He was afraid to hand the gun over, lest she put a hole in his head instead.

  Now he sat, a broken man, a weak man, smelling the scent of feces and blood and sickness wafting up from under the door.

  ***

  The beginning of the end did not happen like in the movies. There was no slow spreading, no sense of building dread. No media-generated suspense. This was the blink of an eye. An anticlimax, that was what it was. It was Christmas morning and realizing that there was really nothing there to be excited over. It was a trip to the doctor to check a lump that turned out to be a pimple. Most of the major cities along the eastern seaboard had fallen by the time the first headlines hit the streets.

  He'd seen a segment about it on the evening news. He'd been sitting at Kelsey's Pub, overlooking the beach, drinking after work. Not that work was all that stressful. That weak thing, again. Four years of college to get paid for teaching little tourist kids to surf. He got paid--not very well, of course--to play on the beach. The television sat virtually ignored above the bar, the anchor's voice muted out in favor of Buffet on the jukebox. Film footage--it was the end of the world, played out to the strains of "Come Monday." The guy on the stool next to him stopped gnawing a buffalo wing long enough to comment, "Some government monkey must have dropped a vial." He snorted bitterly and wiped away greasy orange smear of hot sauce from his chin.

  "Must have," Sam agreed. Then he thought nothing more of it. He had a dozen sessions lined up for tomorrow. Besides, Maine was a long way from where he sat then. Government mistake or not, things would be back under control in no time.

  He pulled up out front of his place--a little beach cottage rental, just this side of falling in. Katy had locked the door and shut off all the lights, evidentially pissed that he was out so late. He fumbled clumsily with his keys in the dark, half-expecting the cool-leather touch of a snake or a lizard against his bare ankle.

  Inside, he weaved through the dark living room and into the bedroom where he saw that Katy had put the baby there in bed with her. Despite the fact that this was Katy's little signal to him that the sofa was his spot for the night, he smiled drunkenly as he looked down at his little daughter in the pale moonlight. Then he shrugged and went back out into the living room.

  He found another beer in the fridge and downed it, then passed out to a grainy old science fiction movie.

  It was just before 6:00 a.m. when he heard the screaming. He sprang up, not even awake yet, his heart thudding inside his chest painfully. He stumbled over the cocktail table, fell sprawling and wracking both knees on the floor, and scrambled down the hall to his bedroom.

  He stopped dead at the door.

  Thinking back upon that moment now, he realized that was the precise moment he went a little mad.

  Katy was kneeling on the bed. One of baby Chance's chubby eighteen month-old legs in each straining fist.

  It took a horrible moment for him to register exactly what he was seeing. Then he saw that part of Chance's torso was gaping open. The child writhed, howling in agony. Blood gushed from the wound. It was painted on Katy's mouth and up onto her fish-white cheeks like a clown's smile.

  "Katy?" he croaked. "Katy, what the hell have you done?"

  Katy glared at him through cloudy eyes. Her always perfect blond hair was now a tangled nest.

  "Young meat is tender meat, but you're next, you drunk motherfucker!" she snarled. Then she tossed the baby to the floor. Chance landed with a terrible thunk and howled even louder, if that was possible.

  Katy slid off the bed and shambled toward Sam. She hiked up her blood-soaked cotton nightie and did a sick parody of seduction.

  "You know you want it, Sammy. Come and get it."

  He stepped back, shaking his head. "No."

  "I'll bite your little dick right the fuck off."

  He ran from her then, believing every word she said. He could not recall her ever using that type of language with him. She had never raised her voice to him before, not in their three years of marriage. Not even when he'd deserved it.

  He fled the house, and he was screaming like a child running from the boogieman. "Oh God! Oh God!" and out the door, clearing the front porch steps like a hurdle. He tugged the door of the Wrangler open and tore open the glove box. He kept a loaded .38 in there. He'd bought it after a failed car jacking attempt back when he was in school. He had never fired it.

  Every few seconds, he glanced back toward the house to see if Katy was coming for him. He waited a moment, but she never appeared.

  ***

&
nbsp; Back inside the baby was silent. The entire house was silent, for that matter, except for that dratted leaking faucet he had promised to tighten. He held the gun out in front of him and he could not stop it from shaking. The thing felt too heavy and awkward in his fist.

  He moved slowly through the little house, rubbing at his sleep-blurred eyes with the back of his hand.

  "Katy?"

  Drip. Drip.

  Outside the bedroom and he could smell the patchouli incense Katy burned sometimes. But now it was mingled with a foul stench of waste--vomit or shit. And the metallic air of freshly spilled blood. A lot of it.

  Closer and he could hear Katy. Chewing. Chewing on what? Jesus! Lips smacking wet and loud.

  He screamed again--could not help himself and plunged through the half-closed bedroom door.

  He shot his wife in the face three times before he ever realized he had actually pulled the trigger.

  Katy fell back and Chance's legs dropped from her dead grip. Katy had started in on the baby's thick, soft thighs. Bone and muscle peeked through, glistening.

  The baby twitched on the floor between the bed and her crib. Then she twisted around to face him, a look of recognition in her clouding blue eyes. Blood was everywhere--on the walls, the bedcovers, the drapes. It pooled on the floor like spilled paint. The twitching worsened and then the baby began to howl again. Sam shot the baby, his lack of experience with the gun causing him to only graze her face. He moved the gun up a fraction of an inch and then he turned away.

  He pulled the trigger again and all was silent except for the drip drip of that fucking faucet. In a breath, his entire world was gone.

  His knees turned to mush and he sank to the floor, too confused to know what to do. Then he pressed the gun to his own head.