Dead Stop Read online

  The effort looked almost comical, despite the fact it came from something that shouldn’t exist. It wobbled before him like a bad performer on a tightrope, and was forced to take a step backwards to widen its stance and keep from falling. Then the wretched thing just stood there, its arms out in front of it like a sleepwalker, slowly feeling the air in front of it.

  Apparently it couldn’t open its eyes.

  That’s right, the old man realized, they sew their eyes and mouths shut! Or glue’em or something.

  His initial terror started to fade as he watched the shape stand there in the shadows, weaving back and forth in blind disorientation. Despite its ghastly appearance, the thing also possessed a certain pitiful quality…more like something lost than something resurrected. As the shock of its appearance faded, he realized it seemed less threatening by the minute.

  It’s clumsy. It’s slow. Hell, it’s a girl for God’s sake! It can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds…a hundred and ten tops. I’m almost twice its size.

  Amos squinted at it in narrow concentration and took a slow step to his right, taking care not to make any noise as he did. As he expected, the few times the thing grabbed outwards it reached for where he had been standing before instead of his new position. And as he watched it grasp in futile desperation at the air, the old man started to think of it more as a “she” than a thing.

  Whatever it was now, this had once been a woman who had walked this earth alive. She had lived, loved, hurt, and hoped before death had come and taken all that away from her. She must have had a family and friends, for somebody had loved her enough to see she had been buried in what must have once been a nice gown…a gown he now realized had most likely been a prom dress.

  This had been a young woman, hardly more than a girl.

  He could even make out a withered sprig of a flower lovingly pinned on the front of the garment.

  Now horrors of a different kind rose in his thoughts.

  Was this still her? Did she know what had happened to her? Did she understand where she was and what state she was in? As unbelievable as it sounded, was this an alone and confused girl who somehow awakened in her coffin? Trapped alive in a blinded corpse?

  Compassion began to war with fear, as he watched the wretched thing waver in what looked to be silent misery. Amos was a kind man, and even though he didn’t understand how this had happened, or how it was even possible, he realized what stood before him might be a tragedy of the most monstrous type. And while there was nothing he could imagine doing for somebody in her plight, the thought of abandoning her to a fate like this felt monstrous as well.

  He had to know if she was in there.

  “Miss?” he called softly, taking a careful step back as the figure immediately zeroed in on his voice and started reaching his direction. “Miss, can you understand me?”

  She took a halting step in his direction, then stopped as she nearly stumbled and fell again.

  Amos took another step to the side, eyeing her with both pity and caution.

  “Miss? I need you to think? I need to know if you’re…you’re…” he held up his hands and shook his head helplessly, trying to figure out how to finish the sentence.

  The dead girl started then stopped once more, obviously trying to reorient to the new location of his voice. This time she only made a half hearted reach in his direction before letting her arm fall limp at her side.

  The gesture contained a certain sense of defeat, as if she understood its futility.

  “I want to help you,” he swallowed, and moved sideways again as he spoke. “But I need some sign you’re…you.”

  She just stood there, blindly turning to track his voice. No expression crossed her masklike features, and he wondered if it were even possible for her face to show any emotion she might have..

  “Miss?”

  He frowned as the girl slowly started to shake her head.

  “Miss? What are you trying to do?”

  He stopped moving, trying to understand this new development. What was she doing? Could she understand him after all?

  The dead young woman continued to shake her head in what appeared to be some form of denial. Her hands flexed, curling and uncurling with small, sickening crackles of disused joints. Strands of hair started to drift from her scalp as the shaking began to increase in tempo.

  “Miss?” he stared in both dismay and concern. Was this emotion? Could she actually be aware of her state, and suffering from the horror even worse than him?

  She now shook her head violently, her hair whipping about in a shedding black cloud that settled about her. The force of the motion caused the bones in her neck to pop and snap even louder, and the effort even threatened to upset her precarious balance. The effect was somewhere between hysterical negation and an animal shaking its head in distress.

  Then she stopped and buried her face into her hands.

  “Aw hell,” Amos groaned, both moved and repulsed by the obviously grief stricken figure.

  This was completely insane. Over the years, and even serving in two wars, Amos thought he had seen the worst the world had to offer. But this was sick beyond belief. He was as scared of death as any man, yet he could only wonder what kind of loving God would ever allow something like this to happen to a human being? Especially a young woman!

  A second later, he got his answer.

  The dead girl’s fingers tightened into bony claws and with one deliberate, downward motion, she ripped her own face off.

  The cracked, grey skin tore with a gristly rip and slid off in a single rotten sheet, revealing the stained skull underneath. Withered and blackened muscles twitched like oily worms across the thing’s ghastly visage. Many no longer had a purpose and writhed uselessly, the features they were intended to manipulate having been removed. On the other hand, the jaw muscles were still attached and now could move freely, causing the exposed mandible to work in a disturbingly experimental chewing motion.

  But even worse were the eyes.

  Shrunken lumps set deep in black sockets, they now fixed on the old man with insane intensity. Nothing even remotely human showed in those glaring orbs, and Amos came to the sudden realization God had nothing to do with this. Not one little bit.

  Its jaw gaped open and the monstrosity lurched for him. Both of its claw-like hands now extended towards him with ferocious intent. Amos stumbled backwards, caught off guard by the sudden transformation, and the thing closed the space between them in three swift, awkward steps. One of those raptor-like talons closed on his bicep as he turned to run. Its grip was painful with surprising force.

  Amos had just enough time to realize he had been drastically wrong about this creature.

  It wasn’t slow.

  It wasn’t weak…

  …and it was hungry.

  He screamed and tried to flee as the dead woman pulled herself up on his back and sank her teeth in the place where his neck joined his shoulder. Her weight on his back overbalanced him, interfering with his ability to run, and the intense flare of pain in his shoulder disoriented him. He could feel the yellowed teeth slice into muscle. Its legs wrapped around him and its other arm now embraced him from behind. The stricken man spun in desperate gyrations, attempting to throw the stinking horror off him while it tried at the same time to shift its grip from his arm to his head.

  The two engaged in a frenetic dance any antelope and leopard down through the ages would have recognized.

  In an adrenaline laced burst, he rammed into a tree at an angle calculated to drag her off. The impact was painful and jarring, but it nearly succeeded. The grasping hand fell away, and white hot agony erupted as the monsters teeth tore free of his shoulder…along with a mouthful of red dripping flesh. Amos cried out and spun again in an effort to twist free of the remaining arm and make a run for the tractor.

  He almost made it.

  The dead woman’s embrace started to slip, and he surged forward in the direction of the gates…when another powerful
grip closed around his ankle. The wounded man fell, thrashing wildly to the ground.

  He twisted and looked down at his foot to discover it in the grasp of another corpse. This one, for some unknown reason, was dragging itself along the ground. But it had already solved its blindness problem as well, for another skeletal visage grinned back up at him. It’s freshly exposed skull leered at the man for a horror prolonged second before turning and closing its jaws around his ankle.

  Amos shrieked anew as he felt bone splinter and snap under the pressure.

  He tried to kick free, but the pain and blood loss were starting to take their toll. A second later the dead woman fell back upon him, hands clawing like iron talons. That’s when Amos Godfrey finally understood he was going to die. But even worse, right before her form blotted out the world he saw more forms lurching in his direction from the shadows, some still dripping dirt from the graves they had just vacated.

  Other hands grabbed his twisting body, and he gave one last wailing scream as more rotten toothed mouths closed on various parts of his anatomy.

  Then the woman’s jaws found his throat and his pain came to a quick and merciful end.

  Chapter Two: Twilight

  As the sun set, now unseen behind the encroaching clouds, twilight fell over the Mazon County Cemetery like a blanket.

  A swift drop in temperature heralded the leading edge of the storm as it moved in. The first stirrings of wind began to whisper through the dry stalks of corn in the surrounding fields. Along with it came the smell of rain.

  Darkness formed in pools beneath the trees at the rear of the graveyard, masking the carnage from the attack of an hour earlier.

  A dry flash of lightning revealed the ground to be carpeted with crows. They covered the area of Amos Godfrey’s demise like a large black amoeba, strutting and crowding against each other, while picking at the blood covered grass and shreds of flesh left behind. Others filled the tree limbs overhead, and all the nearby tombstones were crowned with their black bodies.

  There hadn’t been much left to go around.

  What had once been the old caretaker now consisted of a large blood soaked patch of earth strewn with gnawed bones and ragged bits of cloth. Only his feet remained intact, tossed aside as they were protected by boots with laces far beyond the feasters ability to fathom and untie.

  The same flash of lightning also revealedthe crows were not alone. The blackness under the trees concealed figures standing still and silent in the approaching night.

  No speech, groans, or any other form of utterance issued from the motionless shapes. A slight breeze picked up and stirred wisps of hair and strips of clothing hanging from their desiccated frames, but otherwise they may as well have been the statues posted over some of the older graves.

  Their blank, skullish visages faced whichever direction they had been when the bloody feast had come to an end. No hint of purpose, or even the former ghoulish life, showed in their eyes.

  Then, as twilight deepened…something changed.

  To the east, a light flickered, then came to life against the darkening horizon. It shone bright and steady, an almost actinic white, just barely visible over the tall rows of corn.

  The darkness under the trees filled with the beating of wings as their owners took flight to the branches above. A brief chorus of harsh caws filled the murk, then the birds fell silent to monitor further developments. One of their deathly companions had stirred, and caution dictated they remain a safe distance. Now they waited to see if it would happen again.

  They didn’t have long to wait.

  Withered necks twisted with the creak of old leather as the distant beacon trickled into the empty awareness of the lurkers. Some of the forms shifted to allow themselves to look in the same direction as their companions, ignoring the consternation their movement caused amongst the crows. In about thirty seconds, more than four dozen sets of black sockets and grinning jaws faced east.

  A man with sharp eyes could have discerned the light was a tall, illuminated sign. If he had binoculars, he would have been able to read the word “TEXTRO,” and “Food, Diesel, Gas,” in smaller letters underneath. It glowed like a bright beacon against the evening sky, a little over a mile away.

  These onlookers understood none of that.

  The light simply drew their gaze as a new stimulus after the past hour of inaction. Their reduced eyesight could make out no details of this phenomenon, only that it was new and it shined bright in the gathering darkness.

  Ruined synaptic pathways sputtered and flickered.

  Recognition started to filter into the collective awareness.

  This was light.

  They didn’t recognize it by name, or even as much of a concept. They simply understood it as a brightness against the otherwise darkening landscape. But as they remained fixed on it, one pair of sunken eyes…and then more…started to come to life with another recognition as well.

  This was light…

  …and light meant life.

  Need.

  Once more unholy vitality sprang to being in the eyes of all the watchers, and they moved in unison towards the east.

  Some lurched, some stumbled, and some even crawled as their legs had decayed at a greater rate due to the realities of the preservation process. Embalming fluid is injected into the veins at the neck, and in some it hadn’t spread as far into the legs as it should. Yet this wasn’t the slow shuffle of the movies of yore. They moved at a steady, inexorable rate varying from individual to individual.

  It didn’t take very long for them to make their way through the tombstones and across the small cemetery. And it was there they came to their first obstacle. A low chain-link fence surrounded the graveyard and separated it from the corn field.

  At first they simply walked up against it and stopped, temporarily confused by this new development. They lined along its length and in some places piled up against it. Then old patterns emerged and the bodies remembered other movements.

  Gray hands closed on the waist high top rail, and spines crackled as the motions of climbing were attempted. Some merely leaned over the rail, resulting in them falling into the field on the other side. Others caused the wire fencing to shake and rattle as they clambered over with awkward fervor. In one place the small barrier bent and collapsed under the pressure where a group had piled up against it.

  It was ungraceful and clumsy, but the obstacle was overcome with the same silent intensity characteristic of their attack earlier. And with the barrier behind them, the grisly mob surged onwards. Withered forms plunged into the tall corn; the dry brown stalks and leaves rustling like rain as they pushed their way through.

  At no time did they lose their fixation on the light in the distance. The beacon drew them onwards, their feral eyes now shining with need. Leathery hands flexed and skeletal jaws parted as their owners strode down the dark rows toward their distant destination.

  Death was coming to the Textro for dinner.

  ###

  Twilight - Rachel

  Never forget…any time you poison an animal to the point of unconsciousness, you are taking a risk.

  Rachel threw her lab coat against the wall of her back office and swore as the words of her old anesthesiology professor rose in her mind.

  “That’s a great line, Prof,” she snarled at the tile ceiling, “A real pithy truism! But it doesn’t help me explain to kindly old Miss Tatum why her precious Prissy is dead when all she came in for was to have her goddamned teeth cleaned!”

  Realizing those last few words had come out uncomfortably close to a screech, the young veterinarian slumped into the padded chair, buried her face into her palm and rubbed her temples with thumb and fingers.

  She knew any procedure involving anesthesia ran the risk, no matter how small, of this happening. Sometimes the animal just doesn’t wake up. It could be because of an unknown heart problem or a number of other hidden conditions making an otherwise healthy appearing animal susceptible to death
by anesthesia.

  And sometimes the cause is never known.

  She had sent her tech/receptionist, Arlene, home for the evening after all attempts to resuscitate the cat had failed. Then Rachel had steeled herself and dialed Miss Tatum’s number to deliver the bad news. She only got the answering machine. Miss Tatum had probably gone to the same Knights of Columbus dinner the Hollises had attended.

  Lovely.

  All she could do was leave a message to call her office in the morning, and hate what a formal and unfeeling bitch it made her sound like.

  She really wished she had permission to start in on a necropsy. She wanted something…anything…to tell Miss Tatum that would explain how this could have happened. Some defect she could point at to help make sense of the treasured pet’s death.

  From all appearances Prissy had been a perfectly healthy eight year old cat. Now she lay stiffening in the freezer while Rachel slouched in her office, hating the world.

  Life was supposed to make sense. Things were supposed to happen for a reason. Those two central tenets of her life had propelled her into science with the firm confidence all the answers were out there, just waiting for somebody with her type of determination to find them.

  Rachel found comfort in the immutable laws of physics, math, and chemistry. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, two plus two invariably equals four, and multiplying the squared radius of a circle by pi would always give you its area. The universe had rules. Deep down she nurtured the unspoken conviction that “mystery” simply arose from the absence of data and there were no truly unpredictable events in the world.

  Her physics professor had once stated that God was found in the places where the outcomes couldn’t be predicted.

  The only thing Rachel had ever found there was disaster.

  People’s cats weren’t supposed to die just because you sedated them, and husbands weren’t supposed to get killed just because they agreed to come out with you on a house call at night and help you with a sick horse. If God liked hanging out in those kinds of places then he could damn well do it without her.