Evil Origins: A Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection (61 page)

His satiated hunger released a secondary level of concern. John
shivered in the unheated house and fought to keep his eyes open. He thought of
Jana’s touch and his side of the bed, which brought flashes of incriminating
cell-phone pictures into his head.

John looked around the room, trying not to focus on the
decaying bodies of his friends. He cursed at the house, reckless, screaming
into its black abyss. Only the November wind replied with another rattle of
window panes.

Dead. They’re all dead.

He turned the flashlight on and walked from the kitchen to
the dining room. He passed the beam over the oak crown molding that he helped
Reggie put up a few months earlier. As the light moved down the wall, John saw
dark splatters covering the light-beige walls. Elsewhere he saw various friends
and acquaintances in grotesque positions, arms and legs twisted in severe
angles as if dropped from the sky. The faces of others sunk in sickening pools
of blood. He saw the Werewolf and the Headless Horseman in one corner. John
moved into the living room and identified the red-headed Witch, the Pirate, and
the French Maid. He knew their names of course, but preferred to think of them
as characters in a movie.

I have to save the survivors.

John passed each of the dead, hoping not to find Reggie. He
climbed the stairs to the second level, stepping over a body that lay crumpled
on the landing. At the top of the steps he turned left toward the spare
bedroom, where dresser drawers tumbled across an upturned mattress. Bullets had
punched black holes in the wall and shattered windows overlooking South Belvoir
Road. His head ached and he reached into his pockets for a phantom pack of
cigarettes.

“She, drugged me, sent pics to my wife, and stole my
smokes,” he said to himself.

John moved into the next spare bedroom. The rumpled bedding
hid shapes under the blood-stained sheets. The odor of feces and death forced
John to place his arm in front of his face. The beam from the flashlight hit
the frozen faces of two beautiful, young people. They appeared to be naked
under the sheet, but John had no desire to find out for certain. Both bodies
wore a third eye punched through the middle of their foreheads.

He entered the master bedroom and saw a shape on the bed. He
saw the silver and turquoise ring on the middle finger of a hand hanging above
the floor. Dark, syrupy blood discolored the end of the pinky finger. John
moved to the other side of the bed, knowing his best friend was gone like all
the rest.

John flew down the stairs into the living room. He pulled
the Venetian blinds to one side and peered out. Empty streets stared back at
him. Not a single car or pedestrian passed while he observed the neighborhood. No
games of soccer, no strollers, and nobody doing yard work. An empty street in
Cleveland’s December would be expected, but not early November. Most people in
the city savored every last day before the specter of winter moved in and
banished the citizens to the confines of their dry, drafty homes.

The streetlights remained dark as night came to steal the
waning rays of the late autumn sun. John sat at the window for an hour, trying
to decide if he could wake himself from the nightmare. A lone pit bull stalked
down South Belvoir Road, daring anyone to push him to the side.

John turned to the living room and walked toward the Scream,
his mask still firmly in place. John searched the man’s pockets underneath the
black cape and managed to find a cell phone. He turned it on and waited for the
“No Service” message. John shut the phone off and shoved it into his pocket.

John heard a vehicle. He ran to the window, let the blind
fall shut, and peered through the tiny opening between it and the window sill. Blinding
bursts of white lit the desolated street and narrowed as the headlights formed
two solid, penetrating shafts of light. The armored vehicle moved at a steady
rate. John crouched down low and fixed his eyes as it slowed to a stop in front
of Reggie’s house.

Chapter
6

Three soldiers, dressed in urban camouflage, jumped out of
the APC, also known in the military as a “battle bus”. They swung their machine
guns in swooping arcs, daring anyone to set foot in their path. Muffled voices
filtered through the deteriorating leaded windows of Reggie’s living room. John
watched with relief as the sergeant led the men to the house directly across
the street and stopped two feet in front of the door. A flashlight mounted on
top of his weapon passed over the living-room window and through the glass
panes of the door. Without a word of warning, the soldier smashed it with the
butt end of his weapon. Crackling glass fell in tiny shards onto a weathered,
leather sofa. He reached through the hole and unlocked the door. John watched
the trio of flashlight beams popping up throughout the first floor. After they
entered, the beams jumped in each room, eventually rising from the second floor
to the attic.

The wind rustled the leaves and pitched them down South
Belvoir Road. John held his breath, waiting for action. The house across the
street remained still, the darkness returning to snuff the flashlights. John
shuffled his feet and put a hand on the middle of his back. He did not take his
eyes off the house.

After what felt like hours, the three soldiers came out the
front door of the house across the street. Without streetlamps, John saw just
eerie silhouettes moving through the lowering November darkness. One of the
soldiers stopped and faced the brick to the right of the front door. He made
erratic motions with his arm, and the three men climbed back into the APC. The
headlights once again cut through the late evening air and fell upon the stray
pit bull. The dog barked at the APC while backing away from it. John saw the
fear and confusion in its eyes, even from a distance. The driver inched the
troop transport forward, a warning not heeded by the dog. It continued to bark
until the APC ran it over. John sat back and took a deep breath as nicotine
withdrawal reared its ugly head. He felt the burning itch to light up a
cigarette and considered searching his dead friends’ bodies for one.

He moved across the living room toward the kitchen and
walked down the steps to the mud-room landing. The side door to Reggie’s
driveway sat ajar. The scent of moldy leaves drifted through the opening. John
stepped over the broken glass of the screen door and crouched low against the
side of the house.

As low as he could get on two feet, John sidled the length
of the driveway, stopping behind the trunk of a bare maple hanging over the
lawn. He looked up and down South Belvoir and saw no movement for blocks in
each direction. Not a single light shone from any streetlamp or deserted
window.

With the tools and supplies clanging in the duffel bag, John
sprinted across South Belvoir and behind the overgrown bushes of the neighbor’s
house. He held his breath and waited for the crack of a rifle or the accusing
beam of a soldier’s flashlight to find him. His cheek brushed the coarse mortar
crumbling from the old, red brick. John tasted fresh spray paint hanging in the
night air. He craned his neck above the bush and examined the front door
without revealing his entire body. Slow, red drops appeared on the brick to the
right of the door. John reached out and let one of them fall into his palm. When
he brought his hand back toward his face, he recognized the odor of spray paint.
Using his sleeve as a damper on the powerful beam of the flashlight, John aimed
it up toward the top of the door. A crude and shaky hand had sprayed a red
circle on the brick, and a five-sided star filled the space inside. The hair on
John’s neck rose as gooseflesh broke out on his arms.

Chapter
7

John stood and slung the duffel bag around his head and over
his left shoulder to keep it from swinging into his legs. He walked through
piles of leaves, kicking up the pungent odor of a dying autumn and forced out a
brutal sneeze that rattled his sinus cavity. As he glanced back at Reggie’s
house, he saw the pentagram inside the circle painted above and to the right of
the front door. John flashed the beam toward Reggie’s neighbor to the left and
saw the same thing. Reggie’s neighbor on the right owned a two-story colonial
with white siding, and it gleamed like weathered bone in the darkness. John did
not see the pentagram symbol anywhere on the front of that house. He walked
onto the colonial’s front porch. Old, wooden planks bent under his feet and
cracked as he moved toward the living-room window. A deserted, two-person swing
squawked at him as the wind blew it in each direction. John’s survival instinct
warned him at the same time his rational mind catalogued observations of the
house. He cupped his hands around his eyes and peered through the living-room
window. The furniture remained upright and it did not appear as though a
struggle had ensued here as it had in Reggie’s house.

When the beam of the flashlight lit the face of the young
man standing in the living room, John lurched back and held the porch railing. The
boy, sixteen at most, wore shoulder-length hair that fell in greasy strands. A
white shirt covered his torso, with spreading circles of darkness under his
arms and neck. His blue jeans clung to his hips, and both knees poked through
holes in the denim. Bare feet kept him fastened to the living-room floor.

At first, John mistook the boy for a Halloween zombie, like the
mannequins people dress and put on their front lawn to scare kids, but this boy
was definitely alive. Time passed in awkward, loping increments. John’s hand
held the light on the boy’s face. The boy’s eyes reflected it back, giving him
a feral quality. With synchronized movements, John stepped backward, toward the
porch steps, as the boy advanced toward the front door. In one motion, John
jumped from the top step and landed on the moist wood chips of the neighbor’s
landscaping. He heard the tumbler of the front door and the hinges swing the
door open. A deafening roar followed a flash of light. John threw himself to
the ground as another blast rang his ears amidst the burning fragrance of
gunpowder. He recognized the sound of the twelve-gauge shotgun from his time as
a youth hunter in the Pennsylvania woods. Now someone else was doing the
hunting, and John was his prey. John crawled through the hedgerow that
separated the houses.

“Servants of the dark one suffer to the revelation!”

John heard the words spew from the boy’s mouth, but the
ringing in his ears made it difficult for him to focus on them. He jumped up
and ran down the driveway of the red house into the backyard. John glanced over
his shoulder and saw the boy walking toward him. The young man did not run and
he did not stray from his course. His bare feet sloughed forward over shards of
broken glass, penetrating his skin like miniature daggers.

Another shotgun blast. John heard the individual pellets
lodge in the side of the garage. Judging from the spray pattern, if the boy advanced
another ten yards John would be dead. A six-foot cedar privacy fence ran the
length of the property. John saw a chain-link fence on the other side,
separating the white house and the red house. He lunged for the top pole and
scrambled over it. John fell for longer than he expected and winced as the
weight of the duffel bag slammed into his ribs. He stumbled to his side and
fought to keep from losing his balance. An explosion rocked the fence to the
right of his head.

John ran through the backyard of the property behind the red
house and down the driveway to Winston Road. Intellectually, he knew that he
could be running right into the raised barrel of another assassin, but his
fight-or-flight instinct moved him as far from the deranged teenager as possible.

He stopped where the driveway met Winston and looked over
his shoulder. He did not see the boy and heard no other shots except the ones
still ringing in his ears. John heard a familiar growl and knew he had no time
to stop and think. From the far northern end of Winston Road came another APC. John
saw red pinpoints bouncing from tree to tree, moving off of parked cars and
overturned garbage cans.

John sprinted down the middle of Winston Road where it split
two blocks before reaching Mayfield. East and West Winston looped in a
semicircle and met a block apart on Mayfield. He dodged to the right, onto East
Winston. John glanced back at the beast bearing down on him and hoped the
distance disguised his choice. Night fell hard and the dead street lights aided
his escape. He ran toward the third house and dove into evergreen bushes next
to the front door. John’s ankle throbbed and he felt the warm, sticky blood
running down his side where the duffel bag had cut into his flesh. John saw the
APC disappear around the bend on West Winston.

With images of the zombie teen from the last house flashing
through his head, John stood and peered into the dark living-room window,
concealing as much of his body as possible and hoping he had come upon a house
devoid of corpses. Furniture was strewn around the place, resting in heaps of
torn fabric and upholstery. He covered the flashlight with a sleeve and shone
it upward toward the front door. The running, red paint of the circled
pentagram crawled down the brick. John reached up and touched it. The paint
felt tacky, but the chill of the Cleveland autumn may have slowed the drying.

John kept his back to the house as he sidestepped toward the
rear. Around back, he found a door clinging to its hinges. He had stepped
across the threshold when a wall of odor almost knocked him over. Motionless
lumps lay spread across the kitchen floor. He jumped over one and bounded up
the steps toward the second floor, with his ankle protesting the rapid
movement. When he reached the second level the smell dissipated, allowing for a
deep breath. John stuck his head in each of the three empty bedrooms, and
entered the one with the least amount of scattered furniture. A single bed
stood in the corner and a chest of drawers tilted to one side, spilling spare
sheets and blankets onto the carpeted floor. John shut the door and threw the
lock into place. He tossed the duffel bag to the floor and sat on the floor as
exhaustion pulled his thoughts askew. He laughed at his own desensitization of
the carnage, surprised he was thinking about sleep amidst all of the death.