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michaelkayauthor-blog · 5 years ago

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Song Of The Dead: A Horror Short

Music drifted across the night like fireflies dancing in the wind. My mind was on other things, that night, and I didn’t notice it at first. If there was anything strange about it, if the music carried any hint of its true nature, I only noticed it somewhere in the deep and primitive recesses of my mind. For hours I sat atop that hill beneath the boughs of an old apple tree and listened to that merry tune, lost in my thoughts. When the strings faded and the jaunty drums echoed their last I headed home, giving it no more thought than I the sound of wind or the brook babbling nearby.

Weeks passed, and the tune came each night I spent beneath the tree, lifting my spirits and easing heavy thoughts. The day approached quickly when I would see Erin again, the girl who broke my heart while I traveled mindlessly across the world. Erin and her new husband, Derek, would at last return to the small town where we grew up. She was my oldest friend and, if only in my own mind, so much more. If I didn’t welcome her back, in proper Stevenrow fashion no less, who would?

A party was called for, it was only polite, and as much as I wanted to I couldn’t ask her to leave Derek at the hotel. At night, the music drifting from just over the next hill would keep the dreams at bay. At least, until it faded. Then came the nightmares. Her and a mysterious, faceless man I knew to be Derek laughing at me. Erin telling me she never loved me. Never could.

The night of the party came, and I was filled with trepidation that, perhaps, was as much instinct as self-pity.

“You’re kidding me, she’s married now?” Erin almost squealed as she came up behind me.

“Jess? Yeah, married Todd Baker,” I answered, offering a half-hearted nod to the tall man standing behind Erin. “You remember? Odd Todd?”

Erin hugged me and glanced over at Jess Oberman and the tall, almost beautiful man handing her a drink. “Odd Todd? That’s Todd Baker! God, he’s changed.” “Unlike you,” I said, pulling back and smiling. “Looks like a few years in the city haven’t changed you a bit.” It was only partially true. The clothes she wore were off-the-rack, but designer. They clung to curves I didn’t remember her having, and the engagement ring shining on her finger was a none-too-gentle reminder of just how much things changed. “Well, aren’t you going to introduce me?”

“Oh! I’m sorry. Derek, this is Will. Will, Derek.”

I shook his hand with a too-firm grip and tried my best to hold my smile. “Derek. Glad you could make it. How’s life in the big apple?”

“Don’t think I’ll ever get used to it,” He said with a drawl I didn’t expect, “Home never feels so far away as when you’re standing in Times Square.”

“Where’s home?” I asked, surprised to find myself warming up almost immediately.

“Nowhere, Kentucky,” Derek answered with an easy smile that looked less forced than mine felt.

“Land of moonshiners and hunters.” It was more mean spirited than I meant, but if either of them caught on they didn’t show it.

“You get me one of those beers there, and I’ll tell you stories that’ll turn your hair white.” He laughed.

How could I refuse?

We talked into the night and, one by one, the guests vanished around us. Erin and I shared stories of the old days. Running wild by Dye Creek, chasing rabbits in the fields around Lover’s Lane. In turn, Derek shared his own tales of the hollows and secrets of the Kentucky mountain men. Even if it wasn’t all entirely true, Derek knew how to spin a tale.

Long after the guests left, we three sat on the back porch of my old family home sharing stories and drinking beer. I should have seen it coming, but the music was such an everyday occurrence that even when it started I barely registered Erin and Derek taking notice of it. The drums were especially jaunty that night; the strings seemed to vibrate, their notes hanging in the air. Perhaps they were not calling me, or perhaps I simply lack the curiosity she found in him. Either way, it was Derek who first spoke up that night.

“Where’s it coming from?” He asked, breaking the silence that fell over us when the music began.

If I could, would I take back the words I spoke in response? That’s one question I’m glad I’ll never have to answer.

“Hell, let’s find out,” I yelled, taking a few staggering steps toward the distant hill where, to my intoxicated brain, the music shone like a beacon. “What do ya say?”

Derek seemed unsure, but Erin answered for him. “Why not? It’ll be like old times.” She stumbled to her feet, leaning on me as she did. I remember the smell of her perfume that night, I remember everything despite the alcohol. There was warmth in her eyes, a smile that seemed to light up her face. Adventure sat on the horizon, and we would rush toward it together. “It’s getting late,” Derek said. It was too late to stop us though; we already lurched toward the source of that upbeat tune.

Together we three intrepid adventurers made our way across the fields and over the hills, seeking the source. In that magical moment, with alcohol coursing through my veins and Erin by my side, we might have been explorers hunting the source of the Nile, unafraid of the dangers lurking around us and unconcerned with small matters like safety.

Light shone above the last hill separating us from the music, shadows shifted and painted the grass with dappled light. A fire, the bright orange glow unmistakable even from a distance, lit up the dale that proved the source of our mysterious music.

“Oh. Wow.” Erin breathed in, her breath catching as we took in the sight spread below us.

Figures moved in the firelight. Men and women, all dressed in the finest clothes from a dozen different time periods, danced together in a steady waltz. From atop a nearby rise we watched them dance, but we weren’t alone. Sitting at the edge of the fire was a man, his black clothes formal but out-dated. A tuxedo that might have fit in at a Victorian-era ball sat on his broad shoulders and his hair hung in thin strings, partially covering his face.

“Who are they?” Erin whispered, almost too quiet to hear over the music. As her question ended, the music changed. The strings turned slow and somber, and I realized the music came from nowhere in particular, filling the air as if conjured out of some ethereal realm. My eyes were focused on the dancers below us, so I didn’t see Derek walk away into the night. Even now, I’m not certain he didn’t vanish into the shadows, lost to our world in an instant. What I did see was Erin take slow, steady steps down the uneven ground.

With each step, her clothes changed. Dark blue denim faded, turning a pale white as the legs flowed out and grew together. The neckline of her white tank top rose while soft silk flowed down her arms. Erin moved like a dream, her steps showing a grace I never saw in her before, her shoulders bouncing with each planted foot until finally covered by the silk and lace.

“Erin?” I called out to her. My mind was slow to catch up to what was happening. My heart, though, was quick to recognize how beautiful she looked in white. Low, throaty horns replaced the jaunty drums. Combined with the strings it made for a sad waltz, and I found myself remembering the letters Erin wrote to me, the last one of all telling me she couldn’t wait for me anymore. While I was lost in reverie, Erin moved into the circle of dancers, her hips swaying and hands caressing the dress she had not worn that night. I moved without even thinking, making my way toward her with no other thought than her beauty.

She held out her arms, waiting for me. Her hair fell in dark ringlets, lipstick and blush turned made her look like a porcelain doll in the firelight. She wasn’t porcelain in my arms though. The music filled my ears and fogged my brain, but I remember the touch of her hand on mine and the look in her eyes, so filled with love. It’s like describing a dream, now, and like a dream, I acted on impulse and not thought. We danced a somber waltz for what felt like hours, one hand on her waist and the other cupping delicate fingers tipped in vermilion.

The music ended, fading into the aether from which it came, and the sound of a single man clapping invaded the falling silence.

“Oh, that was very good.” The man sitting by the edge of the fire’s voice was like honey and fire ants in my brain. “I knew. I could feel it, boy. You want her. Need her.”

“What?” My mind was clearing, but slowly.

“I’ll make you a deal. A bargain, as it were,” he continued, ignoring my interruption. “When you hear the music come to this place. She’ll be waiting for you dressed in the finest silk, young and beautiful forever. That’s a promise. Any time you want her, you come and she’ll be here with open arms.”

Each word carried a weight of importance. A bargain? Young and beautiful forever? Waiting for me? I looked at Erin, her eyes still glassed over. She didn’t pull away when I caressed her fingertips. Her lips parted as if waiting for a kiss and her hip, still now that the music no longer played, rested firmly beneath my hand.

“Well boy, do we have a deal?”

I looked at the man and saw that beneath the string hair his eyes burned bright as if the fire reflected there came from some deep place within him. The sane part of me, the part that could think of something besides the scent of her, screamed. It was wrong, the voice said, she doesn’t belong to you. A better man might have refused.

#horror #horror short #short story #writing #writers

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michaelkayauthor-blog · 5 years ago

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Esparanza - A Horror Short

There are all kinds of secrets in this world. I’ve always said it and the things I’ve been through prove it true. Esperanza, Texas is one of them. I’m not supposed to talk about Esperanza, I’ve been promised very bad things will happen if I do, but I’ve never cared much for threats. See, I’m sitting here on a quiet beach in Mexico sipping a margarita with enough Pesos to keep me in cheap tequila for the rest of my natural-born life, but I still owe a certain oil company a big fuck you. What better way than spilling the dirty secrets they paid a lot of money to hide?

I used to work a rig out in Middle of Fucking Nowhere Texas. Fifty miles from the border and three hundred from anything resembling a decent meal. Me and eighty-five other roughnecks spent 9 months out of the year holed up in a shit hole company town named by the foreman in a moment of sarcasm. Esperanza, a town that you won’t find on any maps. Not really a town at all. It was just a bunch of disposable barracks thrown up around a company-owned general store and a ramshackle bar with one dirt road running down the middle.

For three years I lived there, and I was an old-timer by Esperanza’s standards. Not a lot of men came back after Christmas, and each year the company would offer big bonuses to pull in the next crop of fools looking to stash enough away for that little house with the white picket fence by pulling black gold out of a wasteland. Every freshie had his story, the reason he’d signed on to the gig. A woman he wanted to impress, a ranch in Montana he had his eye on, or a kid to put through college. No one came to Esperanza without a reason. No fewer than a dozen men died in the three years before everything went to shit, and I always figured their kids would rather have a father than a death benefit.

Of course, the fact men die for oil isn’t a secret to anybody, so let’s jump straight to the meat of this little tale. June 14th, 2011.

Rumors had been going for months that the company had found something big. Court battles, a challenge by the local native tribe, and a slew of inspections had finally ended in an official announcement. We were about to tap the biggest oil reserve discovered in Texas since the booms of old, and they wanted it done fast. Old wells were capped and half the men reassigned to digging wells and setting up new pumpjacks just forty miles outside town.

I was sitting in Mary’s, the only bar servicing the needs of Esperanza’s lonely drunks when the well collapsed. The whole building shook with the force of it and through the dirty tavern window, I could see a cloud of dust rising up from the direction of the new wells. We were all trained in handling disasters, forced to take a refresher class every six months as part of a compromise with OSHA, and the town set into motion in an instant. I was half-drunk, but I made my way to the company office and pull on an old gas mask that smelled of dust and mold. By the time I got to the waiting truck filled with off-duty oil men, it was already half full.

Most the men were unprepared. They were half asleep and half-dressed, only a handful wearing the masks they needed to make their way through the cloud of dust and debris that filled the air as we raced toward the collapse. Can’t say I was surprised by that, all the training in the world won’t prepare a man to act in a real emergency. Half the kids I rode out with were straight out of school, vocational or otherwise, and the other half were drunk old men hoping this’d be their last year digging holes and putting life and limb on the line so some foreign investors could buy another private jet. I was in the latter group myself, but I hadn’t had time to get a good drunk going. Pretty sure that accidental sobriety saved my life, without it I doubt I would have remembered to grab my own mask.

The truck pulled to a sudden stop as we hit the dust cloud billowing out from the collapse site. Most the boys started hacking up a lung, those of us with masks just sat there looking dumbfounded. It maybe wasn’t the brightest idea to drive right into the middle of a giant cloud of Texas desert sand like we could rush in and save the day. We didn’t make it a foot further, and I dropped to my knees in the bed of the old work truck when the driver high-tailed it out of there, going in reverse halfway back to town. No way I'll ever forget what he said when we got back.

“There’s things out there,” He told me when I ran up to him demanding to know why we stopped, “Things out in the dust.”

I was about to shove his ass back in the seat of that truck. I’m no hero, but I had friends in that collapse, and I wasn’t about to leave them out there if I could help it, and my first thought was that the driver had seen men out there covered in dirt and blood and panicked.

Then, one of the boys at the back of the truck collapsed, blood pouring out of his nose. Two more followed him to the ground. Everyone was in a panic then. I rushed over to the first kid who collapsed, his nose was bleeding and his eyes rolled back in his head so far all I could see was white. I’ll never forget the sight of that twenty-two-year-old boy convulsing in the dirt, his hands clawing uselessly at the ground. I had him by the shoulders trying to hold him still when he bit his own tongue off and sprayed blood all over the lollygaggers standing around in a stupor and across the face of the gas mask I hadn’t took off yet.

No point in sugar-coating it now; that was too much for me. Next thing I remember I was behind one of the barracks puking my guts out. I must’ve run off in a panic myself, though I don’t remember it. After I was done losing my head and my lunch, I made my way back toward the parked truck. The men who’d collapsed had already been carted off to the clinic where a nurse - the only medical expert in hundreds of miles - could have a look at them. A little later the foreman came on over the loudspeakers and told everyone we were officially closed for business until further notice. The foreman mentioned at the end that rescue workers were called in to deal with the collapse. I barely registered it, I was already in bed trying to sleep off the vision of that young man’s tongue flopping around on the ground.

Screaming woke me up from my nightmares that night. It was a woman’s scream, and that narrowed it down pretty fast. I jumped out of bed and ran out into the dark in my boxers and a wife-beater heading toward the clinic. Stepping through the door I saw the blood, it was sprayed across the walls and dripping from a single lamp sitting in the corner, casting the room in a reddish glow. That was the first time I saw one of them.

He was an older man, pretty sure his name was Jack or John or maybe James. Something with a J. He was thin and wiry, a tough old man who had spent his life in one kind of field or another. We’d shared drinks a couple of times, but never talked beyond that. I remembered his eyes, though, bright and clear and sharp. He had been one of the men who collapsed right after we got off the truck. Only it wasn’t really him, I’m certain of that. The thing that was crouched in the middle of the room had grayish skin, even in the dim light, and it stopped gnawing on some soft, dark piece of the nurse’s guts long enough to stare at me. Blood caked his lips, and black pieces of flesh were caught between his crooked teeth.

I backed out of the open door behind me, and he watched me as I went. I could hear men heading toward me. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I slammed the front door to the clinic behind me and leaned against it. The buildings were meant to be temporary, and the clinic was basically a small trailer with some pills and a bed in it. As long as I held that door closed I knew he couldn’t get out.

“What the hell’s going on?” the foreman, Doug Crawford, asked as he got there. Doug’s eyes were wide and deep bags were already settling in. It was just past two in the morning the day after the collapse, June 15th.

Eleven men had shown up with Doug, coming to the source of that first scream. As I sat there on the small steps leading up to the front door of a room where a nurse was being eaten, I tried to come up with the words. I didn’t have to; I was saved that effort by screams that erupted from the other end of town.

I don’t know all the details from there; I know screams rose and were cut short. Doug and I looked at each other for a long time. Finally, he turned away and headed straight for his office.

“You,” I told a kid standing with his mouth open, “You make sure this door stays shut. Nothing comes out.”

He stood there looking at me like I was stupid. I didn’t have time to explain everything to him, and I still wasn’t sure how to start. Instead, I just grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him toward the door. “Hold that shut, that’s an order.” The kid nodded; not that he understood what was going on, but I think he was happy somebody was telling him what he should do.

By the time I caught up to Doug he was already unlocking the gun case in the foreman’s trailer. Officially the guns were there in case we ran into any animals, but rumor around town was that it was just in case any cartel boys decided we were easy pickings this close to the border. Either way, I was glad to see them. Doug fumbled with one of the half dozen rifles as he handed it to me.

I liked Doug, he’d been foreman since the town opened and he was always fair. All that aside he was a Massachusetts boy who had fallen into the job when his business went tits-up. He didn’t really know the desert, and sure as shit didn’t know how to handle a gun. Me, I was born and raised in Texas. Learned how to handle a gun years before I learned to handle a woman. If you ask my ex-wife, I learned to handle guns a damn sight better. I was loaded and ready to head out before Doug finished collecting the rest of the guns. Outside we armed as many men as we could with what we had and told them to sit tight.

“We’re gonna check things out and come back. Try not to accidentally shoot your balls off while we’re gone,” Doug told the men gathered around the trailer.

We made our way across town. No need to go into the gory details though; and there were plenty. Most of the men who went out with us to try and rescue those workers had gone crazy in the night. I saw a twenty-three-year-old kid named Russell chewing on the arm of a sixty-year-old man like he was gnawing on the best ribs he’d ever had. That was the first one I put a bullet in, a single .223 soft point square in the forehead. Doug threw up on his shoes when Russell went down, and if I had anything left in my stomach I might have joined him.

Every man we found alive we sent back to the trailer. All told six men joined the ten we’d left there. The boy I’d left at the clinic was gone when we got back there, and I never saw him again. The trailer was empty, the nurse’s body wasn’t there either.

Mary’s was dark when Doug and I made our way through the half-open door. Mary’s was a converted aircraft hangar with a long bar across one wall and a kitchen in the very back. The lights were dim, and smoke poured out of the swinging door that led to the kitchen. I went to check on the cook and Doug watched the door. The smoke was pouring out of the deep fryer, but the kitchen was empty. I pulled the basket full of charred nuggets that might have been tater tots in another life and turned around to head out.

By the time I heard Doug scream, it was already too late. Mary must’ve been behind the bar, hiding, waiting. Or maybe it takes time, and she just hadn’t woken up yet. You’d have to ask someone else to explain that, Christ knows I wasn’t trying to study the damn things. Either way, I stepped through the swinging door and she was there latched on to Doug’s thigh. Her teeth went right through the denim like it was paper and blood was already pooling on the floor. He lowered his gun and blew her brains out, took her head clean off at that range.

Like I said, I liked Doug. I’m not proud of what came next, but Mary hadn’t been part of the crew that went out to save those men. I could see where Mary had been bitten clean to the bone on her upper arm, though. Maybe she’d bled out, and hadn’t turned until after she was dead. That thought keeps me up at night now, wondering if I had a choice, but it didn’t even occur to me then. Probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Doug was down, leaning against the bar with his gun across his legs with blood pouring out.

“Don’t,” Doug was pleading under his breath. He realized before I did what came next.

“If I don’t, you turn into one of those things. You don’t wanna go like that.”

“I don’t want to go at all,” he wheezed.

I don’t remember pulling the trigger, but I must’ve done. I remember Doug’s body, though, leaned up against the bar with his brains decorating the wood paneling behind him.

I stayed in Mary’s that night, and in the morning men in moon suits and guns came in and dragged me away. I was isolated, quarantined, poked, and prodded. I was released August 18th and paid a hefty sum if I agreed to disappear permanently. I might have argued, but some very stern men in very expensive looking suits made it clear that if I tried to go public they’d see to it I ended up a permanent resident at one of Dallas’ fine mental health facilities. Probably wouldn’t be hard to do to a man screaming about a zombie cover up even if these particular suits didn’t seem more like government spooks than oil money men. I did the smart thing and took the cash.

Officially a mine collapsed and released a toxic cloud of methane gas. No one who knows the real story is talking. I’ve tried to get in touch with other survivors, and with Doug’s family. No one is talking, no one will even listen. They’ve either been paid off or intimidated into keeping their mouths shut.

They sold the land to the government as part of a new military testing ground. No satellite images, no planes overhead. Nice and neat.

Or it would be, if not for the rumors you hear from coyotes, men paid to smuggle people into the states, over the past few years. I’ve kept tabs, paid the right people and asked the right questions since I made my way south of the border. Rumor has it that across the border in the land of the free the desert has gotten a lot more dangerous than it used to be. It’s not militias with guns or border patrol agents that has them scared.

It’s Los Muertos. The Dead.

#horror #short story #zombie #writing #author

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