Authors: Alan Spencer
Brandon placed his hand on his shoulder, every word laden with whiskey. “Your blame is full of ‘what-ifs’. The storm wasn’t your fault. And you’ve used your car to drive to work every day. Cars break down randomly, whether old or new. Stop blaming yourself. You’re in your prime. You need to get out there and meet people. Find happiness again.”
Craig hugged his father close after hearing those words, and his father was taken back by the gesture, but then he soon returned the affection. The moment was short, but necessary. “Thanks, Dad.”
“I should’ve said something to you before about Katie.” Brandon looked him in the eyes. “It doesn’t always come out when you want it to.”
No shit. After death is pretty late.
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
Craig realized he’d forgotten why Brandon was here until the farthest door to the left was rattled, the knob tested. “
Let me in!
” Tina screeched, slamming her fist against the door. The chairs were knocked apart in moments after the repeated round of shoulder ramming.
They were both paralyzed. Brandon gripped the bottle upside down like a club.
“She’s lost it,” Brandon said. “She wants to cut me up. Tina wants me dead. I’ve cheated on her for so long, she’ll never forgive me. And I know about Parker, and I don’t care. Tit-for-tat, you know. I’m a shitty husband, but I don’t deserve to have my throat slit.” He turned to Craig with a needy gleam in his eyes. “You have to talk her down. Maybe she’ll listen to you. Please try. Save me, Craig. I’ll be dead if you don’t.”
Craig could be a world-renowned negotiator, and it wouldn’t help. His mother was convinced Brandon must die, and so he would.
The door was kicked open in one wild ramming motion, tatters and slivers of wood bursting and flying across the room. Tina worked through the pieces of the barricade, swiping each of the axes in her hands to complete her mission, the blades audibly swooshing through the air. She wore a white T-shirt stained in sweat and blood and a pair of black jeans.
She aimed one axe at Brandon, as if mentally carving him up. “There you are.”
“Mom, stop!” Craig pleaded, stepping between them. “You must listen. Dad’s sorry. He admits he fucked up. But you have to calm down. Put down the axes. Please.”
Tina’s mouth had completely opened, near the point of breaking the jaw. “
No more apologies. No more bullshit
.”
She hurled the axe at Brandon, forgoing words. Craig ducked, avoiding the incoming weapon that spun handle, blade, handle, blade, handle, blade with a wild fanning of air.
Metal splitting into bone, Brandon was struck mid-sternum.
“
Graaaaaw!
” Brandon landed on all fours, paralyzed, clutching the handle that wouldn’t budge. He kept watching Tina, more scared of her than the weapon plunged into his body. “Run, Craig—she’ll come for you next! She’s lost it. She wants to murder every trace of me. I don’t know what’s gotten into her. She’s not rational. She’s psychotic!”
Tina hopped on top of the conference table with a twin clop of leather boots. Brandon wheezed, losing blood and the ability to breathe. Blood funneled between his hands and stained the floor. He reached out to Tina for mercy. His eyes were wild, his mouth cringing in deadly anticipation. “
Forgive me, forgive me!
”
“Parker says you’re beyond forgiveness.” She twisted the axe handle in her hands. “God’s the only one who can save you from your sins. Repent. The time of atonement is now.” She raised her head up in a challenge. “Ask for forgiveness.”
Craig clutched onto a chair and threatened to throw it at her. “Put the axe down, Mom!”
He realized how crazy that statement was.
An exaggerated grin played out on her lips, one of malevolence. “Dr. Krone has shown me the truth. You can’t lie to me.”
“
Dr. Krone
,” Craig muttered the name a curse. “This is all his lies. He’s manipulated you, Mom. Divorce the bastard. Yes, he’s a jerk, but that’s not a reason to plunge an axe into his chest.”
A bead of sweat trickled across her lips, her words spraying, “Oh, but it is.” She hopped off the table, lunging down, and landed in front of Brandon. He was helpless as she raised the lone axe with both hands and plunged it mercilessly into her husband.
Thack! Thack! Thack!
Craig reeled as a spectator to the brutal murder, each of her laughs the shrill and cackle of a true demented killer. Each hack landed mid-skull cap, splitting it down the middle, the flesh audibly parting, the skull creaking open. Then the last two swings connected on each side of the neck as if she were chopping down a tree from the base. After the blows, Brandon’s body and head landed independently, the head rolling across the floor and then banging into the wall.
Tina turned to him, the blood drenching her body sullying her motherly image. “You look a lot like your father, Craig. A part of him is inside of you.” Spinning the axe handle, his mother aimed the weapon at him. “I must remove him from you. Then I can love what’s left of you.”
Tina stepped closer. Craig shut his eyes, desperate to deny what was about to occur. He imagined a knife, the Browning, a flame thrower, but none of it happened no matter how hard he focused.
It’s because you don’t want to hurt her, you fool.
“Please reconsider this,” he begged her, cupping his hands together. “I still love you.”
“And I love you enough to remove your father from your body.” She licked the blood from the edge of the axe, though she wrinkled her nose after tasting it. “His blood is vile with the taste of sin. So many women he’s bedded, he’s never been mine completely. But I’m not living that life anymore. Parker has emboldened me with the Holy Spirit. I’m not a battered and abused wife.”
“Put down the axe. This isn’t you, Mom. You’d never do this in real life. Can’t you see it’s not right?”
Brandon’s headless corpse twitched. He heard blood squirt from the stump three times and then stop. She relished the sounds. Absorbed it. Tina made a bee-line for Brandon’s corpse. She touched her finger to his neck and tasted it and raised her voice in demonstration. “His blood is sweet now. I have freed him of his sins!” She eyed the body and her son, the body and her son. “You see—don’t you see now, Craig? He’s free!”
The corpse seized Tina’s body around the back and forced her close.
Craig sprinted out of the room.
The Kitchen
Craig crawled through the wreckage of the blockade and slammed the conference room door shut behind him. There was no way to block it, so he ran, trying the other doors in the hallway, though each of them was locked. He attempted to batter them down with his shoulder without success. The doors themselves felt like concrete. Impenetrable.
The top floor had nothing left for him in regards of salvation. Craig raced for the stairs, taking them down two at a time. The mansion would be a labyrinth of memories. He couldn’t hide from them no matter where he ran or hid. His mother had already finished off his father, his only friend in this place. He was beheaded, and he would suffer the same fate soon enough, Craig believed, or worse.
He gripped the handrail so he wouldn’t tumble forward. Static electricity crossed his body, channeling up from the wood, and it jolted him five times in a row.
Crackle, crackle, crackle, crackle, snap-pop!
He met the end of the steps, clutching his chest, pained by the electrical surges traveling through his body. Patches of his arms were burned black and smoking.
The bars over the windows and the door in the living room proved this mansion to be a prison. The kitchen was the only logical place to go. He wasn’t sure what happened to his rolling pin from earlier, but he was determined to find a better weapon.
The blink.
Oh shit.
There was no cognitive response to the instant change. The kitchen in the mansion expanded. He was in a restaurant-sized kitchen now. Pots boiled with angel hair pasta, rotini, ravioli, and spaghetti noodles on stovetops. On the counter, pork sausage was cut up into discs about to be fried up in a pan. Craig walked past a dish machine that was running, steam and burning hot water pounding within the box. So far, nobody was in the kitchen. Carts were heaped with dirty pots and pans, baking sheets, and kitchen utensils waiting to be cleaned. He feared to speak or to make a sound. And that’s when he overheard a muffled plea that resounded from the back of the kitchen. “
Nooooooo!
”
He limited his stride. The noise funneled into the room and echoed from a chamber below. The steel shelves blocked that section of the room. Containers of marina sauce, pesto, boxed noodles, fresh tomatoes, a medley of spices, and walk-in refrigerators kept his eyes busy. Anybody could be hiding nearby.
He swiped a six-inch chopping blade from the magnetic strip hanging above the ovens. He clutched the weapon and pictured driving it into his enemy and then winced, imagining his mother hacking his father’s head off.
Craig sucked in a nervous breath. He checked behind the shelf of boxed items and caught an open door. A stairway. Firelight flickered with varying intensities upon the wall. There were no other lights on below, only fire.
“
Noooooo! Mmmmmmmph!
”
He teetered on the first step, nervous after hearing the grating screams. In that moment, he whipped around, checking for his safety, and he discovered the kitchen had vanished. A wall was suddenly pressing up against his back, the wall shifting, inching and pushing him down the steps and eventually urging him through the entry below. Crossing that threshold, the wall left him with no escape. There was no other route but forward.
The sweet scent of firewood—cherry and oak—filled his nostrils. That succulent hint of slow-roasting meat attached itself to the air, though he shivered in the cold. It was near freezing. The walls were frosted despite the fire, crystalline. Smoke billowed up to him, but it didn’t cloud the room. There was ventilation circulating from somewhere.
Reaching the end of the stairs, he looked on into a room. Meat hooks hung from the ceiling, rusted and without anything to reflect except orange firelight. Naked bodies were suspended in the air. Four dozen at a quick guess, each pitted through the shoulder blades. The blood had long since been drained from their pale and flaccid bodies. Their heads had been shaved along with their extremities and genitals. The cold lent a blue pigment to the skin.
Another square door glowed past the bodies, the source of the firelight. All he could do was cross the room and face the scene.
“
No—stop—don’t kill me!
”
The pleas raged from a new victim. They had to be victims, he thought. Anybody in this chamber was on the chopping block, including him.
You’re going to have to walk through them to the other side. Dr. Krone won’t have it any other way. Unless you can walk through walls, forward is the only option.
He cradled the knife he’d stolen by the handle, the blade aimed at the floor. “I know how to use this,” he threatened. “Don’t make me, because I will.”
The bodies took up most of the space. He turned to the side and fitted through a row. He brushed up against the bodies, each cold and stiff. The hooks grinded and squealed at the intrusion. He was halfway into the room, into the bodies. Craig stepped over a drain, and nearly slipped, it being iced over. He gripped a man’s torso by both its arms to prevent himself from falling. He looked up and unleashed a startled breath. The head was turned down at him. The eyes were forever open, crusted by ice. The mouth was a slit, the purple tongue within arched as if on the verge of speaking.
Craig shoved, and pushed, and collided into the bodies, frantic to evade the room. The screeching hooks reached a crescendo, everybody coming alive at once. Bodies swung back and forth like laundry on the clothesline. He held his breath to contain his screams. Running forward, then battering through them, he ran through the exit.
“Thank God.”
He spoke too soon. His hair was wrenched back. Both feet left the ground, and he was yanked back into the crowd. They were alive, crowing, berating, screaming, threatening, lamenting, and cheering. Muscle fibers audibly broke and stretched to seize and grapple him. Blue faces shifted with delight and excruciating agony. Others coughed up black blood. Thin patches of his scalp were uprooted. Warm blood quickly turned cold, streaming down his face and neck. His feet still hadn’t returned to the ground. They gripped him underneath his arms, his torso, his shoulders, and his hands to propel him.
He was punched in the jaw before he could scream for help. He bit his tongue mid-blow, the taste of copper and iron filling his mouth. He swallowed twice, and the blood kept flowing.
The corpses couldn’t speak words. The ululations and moans carried with the loudness and bass of a boom box. “
Uuuuuuuunnnnnn
.” “
Muuuuuaaaahhh
.” “
Guuuuuuuuuuh
.”
His knife clanged to the floor. He was defenseless. A hand was shoved into his mouth. It threatened to snuff his airway and strangle him. Craig had no other option. He clamped down, the force of his bite severing halfway through the ice-cold wrist. The hand removed itself, startled by the bite. “
Muaaaaaah!
”
He slithered from their grips, plopping down onto the concrete. Craig crawled on all fours. Claw marks and bites flared up and down his arms, fresh and flaring up. Continuing forward, banging his arms, and legs, and elbows against the concrete, he crossed the threshold of the room. The firelight glowed feet in front of him, urging him on. He couldn’t turn back. The victims were pent-up and enraged. They’d surely tear him to pieces if he drew close enough to them again.