Patrick D'Orazio - Coming the Dark

Jeff waited patiently as Megan finished dry heaving. With the door shut and the towel in place, the smell was shifting from overwhelming to barely tolerable once again. She wiped a thin line of spittle from her mouth and stood leaning over the sink.

“Go back outside. I can do this by myself,” Jeff said. “There isn’t anyone here. They must have taken off.” She shook her head but looked woozy, and her knees almost gave out on her.

“Well, at least stay down here. I can’t have you barfing up a lung while I check things out upstairs.” Megan tried to retort, but the heaves came back in a rush, and she bent over the sink again. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Jeff said as she waved him off. He started toward the stairs.

It was gloomy on the second floor, but even with the blinds and curtains closed, there was more than enough light for him to see that nothing was hiding in the shadows cast in the hallway. The sun was dipping into the west, but it was still light outside. He set the flashlight down at the top of the steps and glanced over at the open area to the right. It was sparsely furnished with a small bookshelf, TV, and a couple of chairs. Looking down the hall, he could see that all the doors were shut. He moved into the sitting room and opened the blinds on the window, letting in more light. With bat in hand, he turned to check out the bedrooms.

The smell wasn’t nearly as strong up here, and Jeff was already envisioning being able to bunk for the night in one of the bedrooms. They could discuss plans for tomorrow after they settled in.

Moving across to the first door, he leaned against it and listened as he held the knob. As he had suspected, there was no sound except that of his own heartbeat. Still holding the bat, Jeff opened the door in a rush.

Nothing stirred, and he moved in slowly, the bat held in front of him like a sword. The dim light revealed that the room had belonged to a teenage girl. The pink paint and the posters of the boy bands du jour made it obvious. The bed was even made. The room looked organized, but a thick coating of dust made it clear it had not been used in quite some time.

He moved across the hall and checked the next room. This was a boy’s. There was a NASCAR poster with some driver Jeff didn’t recognize on the wall along with several other posters featuring muscle-bound superheroes. “Where were you guys when we needed you?” he whispered before stepping back into the hall.

The next room was another boy’s, this one the younger of the two. Jeff smiled as he looked at the toys strewn across the room and the stickers adorning the walls. Unlike the others, this room had a lived-in look about it, with books and stuffed animals lumped in random piles, though the boy’s dresser was caked with as much dust as there had been in the other bedrooms.

Stepping back out into the hall, he shut the door behind him. There were two more doors to check, and he already knew which one was the bathroom. Although he could detect no odor coming from it, he was inclined to leave it shut after Megan’s foul mistake downstairs.

The final room at the end of the hall had to be the master bedroom. This house was similar enough to Jeff’s that it seemed obvious. Turning the knob, he pushed the door open.

The scene that awaited was like something out of his worst nightmare.

Body parts lay splattered across the floor. The king bed looked as if someone had been taken apart piece by piece on top of it, with the remains spread from the headboard down to the foot of the mattress.

Ragged piles of bones were strewn across the room. Something that looked like a child’s ribcage lay crushed near a dresser, a trail of viscera leading from it to the back wall, on which an explosion of blood and entrails was displayed.

The room’s disarray and the streaks as though bodies had been dragged, fighting, through it hinted at the struggle that had taken place. There were other horrors as well…lumps of pulped meat, gristle, and cartilage. It was a slaughterhouse.

But that was not the worst of it. Not by far.

Jeff’s eyes focused on a woman’s corpse partially hidden behind the bed. He could see that it had not been long since she was killed. In fact, the smells in the room were fresh; everyone in it had died recently.

The woman’s body had been brutalized to the point where there was barely anything left of her neck or upper torso. Even her skull had been cracked, and her brains, or what remained of them, dripped onto the floor.

Horror blazed through Jeff like an inferno, burning every nerve ending in his body. Her arms were outstretched toward him, her fingers gripping the carpet as if she had been trying to drag herself toward the door. Although the back of her skull was crushed, her eyes remained open, and it appeared as if she were staring at Jeff, a permanent scream frozen on her face.

When the corpse gave a violent twitch, he took an involuntary step back and jammed his fist into his mouth to prevent a scream from bursting from his lips. A small yip still came out as his eyes grew wide in terror.

That was when a man stood up from behind the bed. He had been feasting on the lower half of her body and had been hidden from view. It was hard to understand how he had remained hidden, as big as he was. Strings of his wife’s intestines dangled from his mouth, and a smear of blood covered the bottom half of his face.

The man’s milky eyes widened when he saw Jeff, and he let out a bloodcurdling scream as he charged. He was a blur as he tore across the room. Jeff had never seen someone infected move that fast.

He barely had time to react before the hulking figure crashed into him, driving him back into the hall and down to the floor. Jeff’s breath came out in a huff, and the baseball bat flew clear as his hand slammed into the wall.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Jeff blurted out as the stench hit him just before the tremendous weight of the man came crashing down. The infected man was a giant-three hundred pounds at least. Jeff moved his stinging hand and desperately beat at the ghoul’s face. Its mouth was already plunging toward his shoulder, the cracked and broken teeth on display as the beast ignored his blows. Shifting his assault, Jeff pressed up against its forehead, hoping to keep the teeth at bay. The skin was dry and loose under his hand, and he felt it start to tear away from the man’s scalp. Jeff knew that if he tried to hold on for very long, the flesh from the top of the ogre’s head would slide off the skull and it wouldn’t even notice.

Jeff felt a mammoth hand wrap around his throat and was able to suck in one last breath before his airway began to constrict. The man-mountain’s fingers were trying to dig into the soft flesh there. As he fought to free himself, Jeff knew it would not be long before his throat was ripped out.

He snatched at the monster’s paw with his free hand as panic kicked in. He was still holding the ghoul’s head away but only had a few seconds to work with. He grabbed at the fingers around his throat and tried to pry them free. The skin here was loose as well, and there was no way to get a solid grip. Jeff succeeded only in peeling away layers of flesh as he frantically dug at the digits.

Despite the panicked kicks and the frenetic contortions of his body as he tried to throw the giant off, Jeff made no headway, and spots began to swim before his eyes. All he could do was pray that unconsciousness claimed him before the teeth tore into his flesh.

There was a deafening roar in Jeff’s ears, and the grip around his throat loosened. Some sort of viscous matter dripped onto the hand that had held the monstrosity’s head at bay. It slid down his arm in thick globs. He struggled to breathe as he frantically fought to get the dead weight off of him. Pushing the head aside, Jeff maneuvered away from the hand that had nearly crushed his neck, and desperately sucked in air. Megan’s face swam into view. She was saying something, but he couldn’t hear her. She looked alarmed as she tried to help him move the ton of dead flesh off his body.