Greg Gifune - Kingdom of Shadows

As if in a trance, Snow approaches the last table, the only one covered with a white sheet which has apparently been thrown there to conceal Carbone’s body. “Carbone’s dead,” he says. “He’s dead, and he’s back in that van.”

Mesmerized, the others gawk at their likenesses on the tables before them, confusion and fear igniting as one and slashing at them like razorblades. Rooster cocks his head, studying his own face just feet away, eyes closed and face void of expression as if in the throes of a deep, drug-induced sleep.

Inches from the covered metal table, Snow pokes at the sheet with one of his .45s. The sheet begins to shake in response, as whatever lies beneath convulses. Horrified, Snow yanks back the sheet.

Sans johnny, wires and tubes, Carbone’s nude body lies quivering violently on the table. His lower abdomen and sexual organs are ripped to shreds, and the remainder of his body has sustained thousands of small but horribly deep serrated cuts, as if it’s been wrapped in barbed wire then torn free. The lacerations, many blackened and scabbed over, others fresh and still bleeding, form a crisscross pattern on his savaged skin that is as strangely alluring in its symmetry as it is appalling in its brutality.

As Snow backs away, both .45s locked on the body, Carbone suddenly sits up, vaulting forward. His eyes open but they are empty raw sockets. He continues to spasm uncontrollably in seizure. “He’s coming.” His voice is no longer exclusively his own, but many, and sounds as if it is stacked atop countless others, giving it an unsettling echo-like, inhuman tone. “He’s coming…”

Hands to his ears, Nauls stumbles back into the hallway like a terrified child.

“Shoot it!” Landon screams.

Snow is frozen in place.

“He knows who we really are,” it says. “He knows the things we’ve done. Our secrets, he knows them all. He’s coming…”

“God help us,” Rooster mutters.

“God?” Carbone turns what remains of his butchered face in the direction of Rooster’s voice. His split lips curl into a hideous, bloody-toothed grin.

Starker levels the AK-47 and unloads.

The discharge is deafening in such an enclosed space, and sends the body tumbling from the metal slab. It crashes to the floor as if boneless, flesh slapping cement floor as the impact empties the remains of its internal organs from the body cavity.

From the corridor behind them, Nauls begins to scream.

At the outskirts of the city, on a lonely dirt road, Rooster leaned against Nauls’ car and smoked a cigarette. He’d waited as Nauls and Landon poured over the material in the briefcase, then he answered their questions as best he could. Both men exchanged uncertain glances throughout, and now stood watching Rooster as if expecting him to tell them what to do next.

“They used us like lab animals,” Rooster finally said. “They wiped our minds clean, and now that we’re starting to remember they’re taking us out one by one. They figure they can toss us aside like garbage.”

“We are garbage,” Nauls replied quietly.

“Maybe so, but we never even got the chance to make things right, to—”

“What?” Landon interjected. “ Repent ? Save our souls? Deliver ourselves from evil like this Poindexter dude told you?”

Rooster stared at him.

“Maybe that’s exactly what we’re doing right now,” Landon said.

A breeze blew past, causing nearby trees to whisper and sway.

“We have to go back,” Rooster said.

“To the farmhouse, are you serious?” Landon gave a wry smile. “You want to go back there?”

Rooster nodded, smoke curling around his head like creeping vines. “You think you could find it again after all this time?”

“Yeah.” Landon looked to Nauls but he had his back to him. “I can find it.”

He hadn’t expected Landon to be so adamant. But then he hadn’t expected his and Nauls’ nearly blasé reaction to the things he’d told them either. Something had changed since they’d driven out here. The moment he’d agreed to go with them they no longer seemed quite as upset as they’d been initially. He dropped his cigarette and pushed away from the car. “You’re sure?”

“Rooster, I… we’ve …been there since.”

“You’ve been back there since that night?”

“You don’t understand,” Landon said. “We never left.”

Running… screams… confusion…

Panic explodes through the darkness…

The flashlight bounces, throwing strobe-like splashes of light along the corridor, floors, walls and ceiling before finally settling on Nauls. His face protrudes from the darkness, eyes closed but with a look of horrific pain. Blood slowly trickles from his nostrils into his beard.

The others scramble about trying to cover the corridor. Landon frantically knocks Snow out of the way and climbs the stairs back to the house.

Nauls opens his eyes. “He’s here,” he says in a loud whisper.

His body begins to shake. Slowly at first but gradually building in intensity, he begins to buck, wracked with increasingly violent spasms. His thin frame twists as he flails about, and his weapon falls to the floor. He brings his shaking hands to his face, screams and stabs his fingers directly into his eyes.

Rooster reaches out in an effort to stop him, but it’s too late.

Nauls tears his eyes from their sockets with a spray of blood and fluid, his screams replaced with laughter as his spasms grow worse and he begins to spin like a top.

“Jesus God!” Snow shrieks, falling away in horror.

“Go!” Starker grabs Snow and throws him toward the stairs. “Go!”

Rooster stands paralyzed, holding the flashlight on Nauls, who comes to rest, laughing through the blood and pain, holding an eyeball in each hand as if in offering, hideous moist strings dangling from them and dripping blood. “We’re going where there are no eyes,” he says, his voice little more than a garbled growl now. “Where everyone is blind… yet everyone sees.”

Blood suddenly spews from his mouth, eye sockets, nose and ears. Like something has exploded deep inside him, the blood sprays free as his screams return, this time as raspy, animal-like squeals. “He’s here,” he gurgles, choking on the blood as it pours out over his bottom lip. “He’s—”

Nauls flies backwards, crashes into the far wall like he’s been thrown by something savage and powerful. His body slides to the floor, swallowed by the shadows there.

Rooster feels Starker’s enormous hand clamp onto his arm and yank him back just before he fires a burst from the AK-47 into the darkness. Together, they run for the stairs. “Don’t look back!” Starker yells out.

But it no longer matters.

The darkness, and all that dwells within it, follows.

In the room upstairs, Snow lurches about, lost in the dark, his guns at his side and his mouth open, soundlessly forming words—perhaps prayers—while something speaks to him from the surrounding shadows only he can hear. The voice of a woman, a young woman asking him why, her voice oddly hollow as she shuffles about nearby, hidden in darkness, her breath cold and rapid on the back of his neck. But when Snow turns there is only night, moonlight and fog beyond the blown-out windows. The scarecrows watch a field of weeds, a dead forest and a path to nowhere, an empty road no one will ever cross again.

The voice, different now—neither male nor female and no longer entirely human—whispers his name.