90_Minutes_to_Live (14 page)

Did my mind in some way create this blood hungry beast? Maybe, but I don’t think so. I get the feeling it has been around a long, long time. It doesn’t really matter. What difference could it possibly make where it came from? I can’t escape its reach, not even across the globe and I can’t resist its call for flesh.

I really don’t have a lot of fucking choices do I? Maybe it will still be around for a long time after I am gone but I don’t have to be a part of it. The sun is nearly down. Tonight is a full moon and it is almost time. The blood-red square will be blinking in the corner of my already-opened but blank, Word document and I’ll need to feed it. Apparently I can’t do anything else.

Wery, wery manny times before. But I can make this its last meal, maybe. It will definitely be the last time it feeds at my hand.

Hey, if you were a fan, thanks for the ride. It was fun. I hope you liked my last story.

It is all true.

Brad walked down the darkened beach, just a short distance from his beachfront home where he wrote his horror stories. He was unaware of the killer who waited for him, hiding in the shadows, just out of view. As he approached, the metal blade in the killer’s hand gleamed in the full moon…

THE END

An Eye For An Eye

(Horror)

By

Brett J. Talley

When Lewis awoke, the darkness was so thick he thought it might be a real thing and his first inclination was to scream. When the truth became apparent, when he realized why not even a single shard of light lifted the gloom, he did scream. And he didn’t stop screaming for a very long time.

Lewis had been dreaming, right before his flickering eyes opened to darkness. A simple dream but not one he would have left willingly. He was in a park, with his daughter. With his Julia. It was a kite that had brought them there. A great, big butterfly kite Julia had seen and fallen in love with immediately. She hadn’t begged him for it. She hadn’t needed to. She looked up at him with those sparkling blue eyes and he saw it in her face. He’d never been able to resist that look, the one of pure joy, pure hope and a pure, unending innocence. He remembered rubbing his hand through her strawberry blond hair that smelled of peppermint and vanilla. He had opened his wallet and brought out the flimsy piece of plastic without a second thought. The drive out to the park in the middle of a little nondescript town they had never been to, just to see how her new toy flew, was serene.

The park was little more than an empty field and a few rusty, metal benches. A lifeless and desolate one at that, as too much summer heat and too little rain had turned the blades of grass a dead brown that crackled and collapsed beneath their footsteps. The constant breeze kicked up the dust left behind, stinging Lewis’s eyes and leaving grit in his teeth. But the kite flew high and Julia didn’t seem to mind. So Lewis didn’t mind either.

How long did they stay there? Hours it seemed, until the sun began to set in the western sky and Lewis started worrying they wouldn’t make it back to Denver until late in the evening. He didn’t remember leaving though. In his dream, it was as if they would linger in that place forever. He thought that was not an altogether unpleasant fate.

It was strange. He was dreaming and he knew that. Or thought he knew it, at least. It had that unreal feeling, that floating-outside-of-yourself-sensation he had come to expect from the sleeping world. In other ways, it seemed less like a fantasy. Too real. Too solid. More like a memory, but one that was hazy and heavy. It felt like he couldn’t quite see through the gloom that weighed on his vision. But yes, much more like a shrouded memory than a dream.

He even remembered how they had come to that place. They had been driving back to Denver, back from a trip to somewhere he couldn’t recall. And they had stopped for lunch. That was when they saw the little toy store with the butterfly kite she wanted. He couldn’t refuse her even before she could ask. He remembered all of that. And he remembered the man. The older guy in the brown duster and hat, the man that looked familiar to him. The one he had seen in other places, though the memories were obscured in a tangled web of confusion.

It had not been an easy passage from the dream world to the one of reality. Sleep had been thick and unrelenting. He had to fight through it. It reminded him of a time from his childhood. He had almost drowned back then on a camping trip with his Boy Scout troop. His canoe had flipped in rough water and when he sought the surface, he found himself trapped underneath the boat. He had seen the end, in the midst of that struggle. Seen his life spread out before him. Not only where he had been but also where he might have gone. And that vision had inspired him to fight. This waking sensation was not unlike the struggle against the surface of the water he had nearly succumbed to, all those years ago. Just as he had eventually broken through to fresh air, so too did he wake from his stupor. He knew immediately he was somewhere he shouldn’t be. Not yet at least.

It wasn’t just the darkness; it was the cold silence that hung over him. He had never heard absence of sound like that, complete and utter stillness. Had he been anywhere else, he would have sat up in shock. He knew such a reaction would be a mistake. Through some preternatural sense, he felt the thick darkness surrounding him hid something solid only a few inches from his face. He reached up and touched it. He felt the coarse bite of unplanned wood and screamed.

He might never have stopped screaming. He might have continued till the air was gone and he passed into oblivion. But as he cried out, beating upon the cold, pine roof above him with his frail hands, dirt filtered onto his face. Some lodged in his mouth leaving him spitting the substance back into the enveloping blackness. Something about the acrid taste of the soil brought him back, made him stop and think. “Get a hold of yourself,” he said out loud. “Think this through.” If he didn’t, he would never accept where he was, and without acceptance, there could be no solution and no escape. Now, here, in that wooden tomb, some unknown distance beneath the surface of the earth, acceptance came easily. He was sure if he could not figure this out—if he could not reason it through—he would die there.

A couple of thoughts came to him, half-remembered bits of trivia he recalled from something he had seen on television once, one of those survivor shows that had tackled this very unlikely scenario—oh the irony of that now—of being buried alive. He probably had sixty minutes, maybe an hour and a half worth of oxygen, less if he struggled or panicked. That was ninety minutes, tops, that he had left to live. The standard grave is eight feet deep, eight feet so the coffin can rest comfortably with six feet of dirt on top of it. But most people don’t know that. Most people think graves are six feet deep, which meant, whoever dug this one probably would have left at the most four feet of dirt above him. And if they were lazy or incompetent, maybe even less. Likely even less, especially if they didn't have the right equipment, and something told him he wasn't dealing with professionals. He rubbed his hands along the pine roof and pushed it gently. It gave a little and more dirt rained down on his face.

“Can’t be four feet,” he said to himself. Four feet of dirt probably weighed a lot, enough to crush the flimsy box in which he lay. If there were four feet of dirt above him, he’d be dead already. So that was a start.

He had very little space to move. He couldn’t turn over even if he wanted to. The cold grip of claustrophobia fell over him and he was paralyzed by it as much as if the wooden planks had held him fast on all sides. When he was ten years old, his cousin had locked him in a storage space underneath the stairs in his parents’ home. It had been all in fun, a game his cousin had meant to last only a few minutes. But when he tried to open the closet, the door would not budge; it had jammed. Lewis spent an hour in there, in the darkness. With the rats and the bugs and the shadows. Screaming and beating against the door as they tried to free him. He heard things that day in the little space beneath the stairs, saw things in the darkness he couldn’t explain. He had been afraid of tight spaces ever since.

The fear of death was greater. To lose control now was to surrender to that fate. So he lay there, fumbling over in his mind how this had happened, hoping that finding the answer to that question would also present an escape. He thought back to the dream, the fantasy world that had seemed so real. That vision would not be silenced, as inconsequential as he told himself it must be. But the memories came flooding back and in the deluge he found the truth: it had been no dream. It was Sunday. They had spent the weekend at the Hoover Dam. They were supposed to have been home Sunday night but they never made it. There had been a detour. They
had
been in that park, he and Julia, somewhere in southern Utah. The elderly man had been there too. The old man in the hat and the duster. It wasn’t the first time Lewis had seen him. No, there had been other instances along that journey. He had been at the diner where they stopped for breakfast. He had been in the mall where they bought the kite. Never too close, always at a distance. Lewis cursed himself for not noticing him earlier. Back then, before he came to be buried in what he hoped was a shallow grave, Lewis had only considered it in the back of his mind, in that reptilian part of the brain left over from an age when such observations were the difference between life and death.

What role had the man played, if any? His presence could not be a coincidence. He had been following them. He was Lewis’s last, true memory. Between then and now, somehow he had come to this, left to die, entombed within the earth.

Suddenly he noticed a tingling on his lips, an unusual taste he couldn’t quite place. But it wasn’t the soil. No, it was too acidic, too metallic...too chemical. He had never experienced chloroform before but it was no matter. Lewis was sure he had been drugged. Only then did he feel the presence; he was suddenly aware there was something in the coffin with him. The electromagnetic hum tripped some sixth sense and caused him to rub his hands along the wooden sides as far as he could, until he felt the sterile, artificial touch of plastic. He grabbed the walkie-talkie and pulled it towards him just as the man began to speak.

“You awake yet, boy?”

The man spoke almost in a whisper but the sudden sound split the silence as booming thunder.

 Lewis fumbled with the machine in the darkness, dropping it once. He found his bearings and clicked the button on the side.

“Who the hell is this?” he shrieked. “What the hell is going on?”

The man laughed, chuckled really. “Now, now there son. I've got no use for such language. If you’re gonna talk like that I might just have to leave you alone to your own devices. We’ll see how things work out for you then.”

“No, no, no,” Lewis begged as he felt the panic and fear overcome his anger. “No, I’m sorry. I'm sorry.” And as he said it he felt stupid and small. Inept and truthfully, just flat out scared. “Look, look you gotta help me.”

“Me? Help you? How do you think you got where you are boy? Who do you think put you there?”

“It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s ever gotta know about that. Nobody’s ever gotta know. You just get me out of here and I’ll pay you whatever you want. I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t leave me here.”

“Oh, you’ll pay me, will you? You’ll pay me? Pay me for my labor of digging you up. Is that right?”

“Yes,” Lewis said, “yes. Whatever you ask. Whatever you want!”

The man laughed again. There was no joy there, no humor. The laugh terrified Lewis. It was a sound he had never heard before. It was a laugh of hatred, of pain, and it was a laugh of anger. There was no soul in that voice, no heart. There was only death.

“Ohhhh my boy. If only you knew. That’s the thing about money, isn’t it? It’s only worth what you can buy with it. Got no value of its own. Only what you can purchase. Fact is, I got a house, and I got food and I got a car. Which means, the only thing I need to spend money on is entertainment. And let me tell you Lewis, right now, I am entertained.”

Lewis pounded his fist against the coffin lid. It cracked slightly and another rain of dirt fell on him. His anger masked the pain in his hand. “What the hell is this you sick son of a bitch! What the hell is this!”

“Is entertainment not enough? Do I need another reason? Maybe I just enjoy listening to you squirm.”

Lewis flew from one emotion to another, from fear to anger to desperation and back to fear. “I’ve got a family,” he cried. “I got people who are waiting on me! They’ll know I’m missing. They’ll know I’m missing and they’ll find you!”

“You think so? Here, a hundred miles from where you are supposed to be? I don't think you’re correct Lewis. But, just for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right. So what if they do? You’ll be long dead by then. Long dead. And do you think anything they do to me will be as bad as what you’ll suffer? As the air grows thin and you breathe in your own waste. As your throat and your lungs burn from lack of oxygen. As your brain cells die, one by one. As you slowly, painfully, slip away? Do you think anything they do to me will be worse than that?

“Hell, it’ll take them fifteen years to kill me. Even if they do find me, even if they do prove I did this to you. And even if they do, they’ll send me off on a nice, white cloud. I’ll go to sleep and never wake up. You know, I always said I wanted to die in my sleep. Seems to me I get the better end of this bargain. You’ll die in pain Lewis. I’ll just be taking a nap.”

Lewis had always believed you could reason with anyone. He was a businessman. It was his job to negotiate. People always want something. If you have it and are willing to give it away, two people could always reach an agreement. But as he listened to the man cackle on the other end of the line, somewhere above him, somewhere beyond him, he began to realize maybe, maybe that wasn’t always true.

“There must be
something
you want,” he whimpered.

The man laughed.

“This is what I want.
This is what I want.
And you are giving it to me Lewis. Oh yes…you are doing a fine job.”

“You’ll burn in Hell for this,” Lewis spat. “God will judge you for this.”

“Ahhh, now you want to bring God into it. Is that it Lewis? Is that it? God. Yes, I do believe God will judge me. But God judges us for the things we do that are wrong Lewis. And God condemns us when we do evil
Lewis
. God gives justice when injustice is done. But he rewards the righteous. He honors those who punish evil. And I tell you this, there is no greater good than a man who rights a wrong. Did you know that Lewis? Or maybe I should call you Adam.”