Oh God.
It’s the
only thing Gemma can think when her right eye starts weeping
blood.
Her fingers touch the crimson dribbling
down her cheek. No, not blood. Not just blood. There’s
something… else.
The swollen moon in the sky paints the
forest pale blue, bright despite the deep shadows of the
forest beneath the wide-branched pine trees. Her vision
should be clear. She should be able to see everything around
her—the car she came in, the guy she was hoping just an hour
ago would finally stick his hand up her skirt, the man she
didn’t know who had stumbled toward her with a half-exposed
brain and totally interrupted their mood.
But she doesn’t. All Gemma sees is blood.
“You’ve been bitten,” Lance says. He’s
staring at her arm, not her eye.
And still, she can only think oh God.
Her arm is hot. The bite is cold. She’s
bleeding and the forest around her is spinning and she
thinks she might die but she can only think oh God and stare
at the blood on her fingertips with her mouth gaping open
like a dead fish.
“You’ve been bitten,” Lance says again,
but the shock is starting to subside. He’s backing away
slowly.
Her vision is red. Lance’s face is red.
Her heart pounds in her throat.
“Lance,” Gemma says, reaching toward him.
She stumbles over the bloated body at her feet, but regains
her balance. Her shoulder strikes the tree trunk. “I don’t
feel so good.” Her body seizes once, and she retches;
crimson vomit splatters against the dirt.
“Stay away from me!” Lance is backing away
faster now. “Don’t touch me! Just– just stay away!”
“Lance,” she cries. Her mouth tastes like
iron and her entire body is slowly going numb from fever.
She wants her boyfriend’s touch. He always makes her feel so
good. “Lance!”
He turns and runs. Gemma wants to follow
him — what are they running from? — but finds her feet won’t
obey. She’s too heavy. Gravity’s too much. Her knees hit
dirt and distantly she thinks that her mom is going to be
angry that she ripped another pair of tights, but even more
distantly she’s thinking how stupid it is for her to be
worried about something like that.
Some kind of fluid is dripping into her
mouth and she licks it off her upper lip, and then her body
shakes again, and she dry-heaves into the pine needles on
the ground.
The sound of Lance’s footfalls in the
distance fades into heartbeats, thundering but slowing,
slowing… slowing…
The body of the man who bit Gemma stares
at her, his eye sockets empty pathways to the back of his
skull. His mouth is red with her flesh.
Slowing…
Oh God, Gemma thinks again.
Then her brain explodes out her eye
sockets. After that, she never thinks again.
****
Lance turns the key in his ignition. The
engine squeals, but won’t turn over. “Shit,” he says, “shit,
shit, shit.” There’s a few other expletives in the English
language he knows, but that one seems most appropriate for
the moment. He turns the key again. The car groans, and the
headlights flicker. “Holy. Fucking. Shit.”
A raven the size of a small dog lands on
the hood of his car. Lance stares at it for a second. Aren’t
ravens day birds? he wonders. And did I seriously just watch
my girlfriend get eaten by some crazy forest guy? And why am
I sitting here thinking when I need to get the fuck back to
Blacksville?
He turns the key again. The engine
grumbles at him again, and he’s probably imagining the
taunting tone of the clicks and groans.
“I just wanted to get some action,” Lance
pleads desperately with his car, like it would really care
that he’d only come out to the forest with Gemma for sex.
The raven opens its beak and gives a cry. To Lance’s
panicked brain, it sounds more like a laugh—his car is
laughing at him, some fucking bird is laughing at him, and
he doesn’t see anything nearly as funny about the situation.
“Goddamn bird,” he says, and he turns on
the windshield wipers. The raven, seemingly disinterested in
the danger of wiper blades, caws again. Lance turns the key
one more time, and after a frozen moment, the engine finally
turns over, and his truck starts.
There’s something moving in the forest. He
steps forward, into the place where the darkness and Lance’s
headlights meet. He’s visible from the knees down, dressed
like a janitor in coveralls. The light reflects just barely
off the wet whites of his eyes, and he doesn’t look as bad
as the last guy—not half-dead, anyway. With the flick of a
casual smile, the janitor subsides back into the darkness
from which he had come and the raven flies away with a
single irritated cackle. Lance lets out his breath. “Things
are looking better.”
Thump.
Gemma slams onto the hood of the car, her
bloody palms slapping against the windshield. The promise
necklace he’d just given her earlier that night (which,
admittedly, had been for the sole purpose of convincing her
she wanted to have sex with him) shines in the moonlight.
Her empty eye sockets, stained with blood and lumpy brain
matter, stare deep into the car.
He screams.
She gets slapped in the face by windshield
wipers, and her nose comes off whole.
Lance’s foot slams on the gas pedal. The
car leaps forward. Gemma falls off the side of the car, and
he feels something go thump under the rear left wheel.
Panic at the prospect of getting bitten
himself and guilt over having run over his girlfriend battle
within him for a moment, and Lance hesitates. When he looks
up at the crooked rearview mirror and sees Gemma — what used
to be Gemma — picking herself up off the ground, panic wins
out. “Shit!”
He drives.
Blacksville is twenty minutes away. The
car is dying and moving slow.
Gemma begins to run.
*****
Lance reaches his parent’s house before
the car dies. His truck isn’t alone in the garage– his
parents’ beat-up Isuzu Trooper has come home since he left.
The police station was closer to the highway than his house
was. Lance thinks, as he gets out, that he really should
have gone there first. That’s what you do when people die.
It’s probably what you do when dead people come back to
life, too. But even if seventeen is closer to adulthood than
childhood, his first instinct is to find his mommy, crawl in
her lap, and cry.
He isn’t real proud of himself for it, but
there you go.
He closes the garage and runs inside the
house, locking the door behind him. Outside the kitchen
window, he can see a raven perched on his fence. He makes
sure the window is locked, shuts the curtains.
The house is quiet, and Lance finds his
heart rate slowing with the comforting smells and silence of
his childhood home. There’s his dog’s crate, and the terrier
is snoozing peacefully, undisturbed by Lance’s entrance into
the house. There’s his goldfish bowl, looking like a
fluorescent bulb illuminated by the moonlight. And there’s
a picture of him with Gemma on the table, one of those
cheesy pictures you could get at the booth in the bowling
alley, and she’s not bleeding out her eye sockets.
By the time he gets to his parent’s door,
he’s walking and breathing normally, and half-convinced
himself that the events of the forest were purely imagined.
He pushes open the door to their bedroom.
Both his parents are under a thick blue comforter,
blissfully asleep. Lance kicks off his shoes so he won’t get
mud on his mom’s favorite rug and moves up to the bed.
“Wake up, Mom. Something– something’s
happened,” he says, shaking his mother’s shoulder.
She rolls over. Her head falls off and
thumps to the floor.
Her eye sockets are empty. The pillow
under his dad’s head is soaked in blood.
Talons grip Lance’s shoulders and spin him
around. The scream rising from his throat is choked off when
he sees Gemma– his once-upon-a-time track star girlfriend,
now half-rotten with her teenage breasts bare and bleeding
in the air and stripped to nothing but her pink thong and
hiking boots. Her bottom jaw looks like it’s been crushed by
some kind of animal. He doesn’t even notice that the forest
guy who killed her looms behind her motionlessly.
“Shit!” he screams again.
He tears himself from her grasp, falling
to the floor. The carpet is saturated and black — why hadn’t
he noticed before? — and it squishes as he gets to his feet
and runs for his dad’s gun locker.
Gemma’s faster. She reaches him before he
can reach the locker.
Lance grabs the nearest lamp and swings.
He hits Gemma’s noseless face and it makes a loud
splattering noise. She reels backward.
The forest man starts to come forward, but
he’s slower. Lance spins the combination into his dad’s
locker, and he throws it open, taking out the shotgun. He
has it loaded and turns to aim it before he gets close
enough to attack.
A single pump. A squeeze of the trigger.
The forest man’s head disappears in the
explosion, wallpapering his parent’s bedroom in brains.
Gemma drags herself to her knees.
“Lance,” she groans.
He grabs extra shells and stuffs them down
his pants, jumping over her body. “Stay the fuck away from
me!”
Lance runs into the hallway and out the
nearest door, pumping the shot gun once more. He realizes
belatedly that he’s gone into his fenced backyard, but by
the time he turns around to head for the front door, Gemma’s
there. She was always faster than him. Too fast.
He throws himself back against the
whitewashed fence, aiming the shotgun at his girlfriend.
There’s a tire print from his truck across her bare chest.
She holds her hands up to him, almost
imploring, and the moonlight catches the promise necklace
again. “Lance…” His finger hesitates on the trigger.
The moment’s hesitation is enough. She
slams into him, pressing him flat back against the fence,
the barrel of the shotgun in her stomach and her fingers
digging into his. Her breath has the stench of carrion, and
she bites down tenderly on his earlobe.
Lance gives something between a scream and
a sob. “Gemma!”
A new voice rasps out of her throat,
echoing and distant, as though from the bottom of a well. “I
think it’s time we take our relationship to another level.”
Lance recognizes the voice as his own. “Come on, baby. You
know you want to.”
“No!” he yells, struggling to get away.
“No!”
Her rotting hands slip down his baggy
jeans. She feels like ice.
“Please, baby,” Gemma says. “I promise
you’ll like it.”
Lance struggles, but it’s too late.
Reddish-white fluid is oozing out of Gemma’s eye sockets and
spittle is dangling from her yellow teeth. Suddenly the
thong that so attractively peeked over the top of her jeans
earlier that night isn’t so appetizing.
The shotgun goes off point-blank in the
girl’s gut. The house behind her is painted red. She jerks,
but doesn’t otherwise respond.
Gemma’s tongue licks his eyeball. She
smells like dead turkey.
“Shit,” Lance says.
As last words go, it’s not the most
poignant.
*****
The sun rises in a few hours, and the moon
dips below the horizon not long after. A wind blows through
Blacksville, sending the American flag in the town square
blowing high and Gemma’s shirt in Lance’s backyard,
half-glued to the ground by loose brains, waving like a flag
of its own. The last living person at Lance’s house, an old
man with one or two tufts of white hair and a janitor’s
coveralls, pushes over Lance’s body with the handle of his
broom. A long line of blood and gunk runs from his face to a
puddle on the ground. The old man pushes his cap back with a
hand to scratch his scalp and sigh.
“Looks like you win this time,” he says to
the bird on the telephone pole. “Gonna be a bitch to clean
up. Five bodies. Five, man. You could have made it a little
easier on me.”
The raven looks on, the second-to-last
living thing at the house. It surveys the damage from its
one good eye, red with the fire deep inside, the other an
empty socket. Its beak opens and it gives a satisfied caw.
With a flutter of wings and feathers, the
raven moves on. The janitor just sighs again and begins to
clean up. |
