No response, no show of any emotion. Still gripping Maria by the collar, Angie tilted her head in the direction of the back of the store. It was slow, but quite deliberate. Neither Kim nor Wes moved. A slight crease in the brow. Angie peered at the space between them and the door and, without warning, violently vomited a massive amount of the seeping darkness. The others screamed, and Kim began to pull Wes away when the discharge started to reform into the symbol she had seen back farther in the store.
Herded by their captor, Kim and Wes did their best to help Maria along. One of Angie’s fingers had punctured the back of her left thigh and walking was near impossible. Mostly carrying her down the aisle, Kim couldn’t help but eye the medical supplies that lined the shelves, but she didn’t dare pause to retrieve anything. Not that it would matter. She had seen the sigil scrawled in shit and felt what it represented. None of them were going to survive tonight, and if anything, she should try for any item on the shelves that would allow her to take her own life as quickly as possible.
Maria continued to bleed and weep, blubbering an occasional prayer while Wes just stared blankly, the shock too much for him to fully absorb. Kim wondered which of them would get slaughtered first.
Rounding the last corner in the store, they found Joyce cowering under a shelf of boxed wine. She was shaking uncontrollably, eyes wide and staring off. The large puddle underneath her form drove home her fear.
Kim’s heart lurched, and she surged forward only to then follow the older woman’s line of sight to the doorway of the stockroom. Kim fell to her knees, a scream lost in the madness she was seeing, and found by Maria behind her.
Once it had been all of them. The old lady, the fat man, the little boy, the elderly man… even a teenage girl and a toddler. Once. Now they had stripped down to their barest, truest forms and all congealed together like animal fat cooling in a frying pan. A single, quivering bulbous entity, it hummed with a black cellulite frequency not meant to be experienced. From holes and digits, midnight rivulets of living corruption writhed and undulated. One had clasped onto the corpse of Dr. Homme by the leg, her skull smashed in, and was drawing it closer to its mass. Dwight was already half-consumed, his legs already devoured and his flabby torso hanging upside-down up of its center. The stockboy’s dead eyes were already twitching with black flecks.
Wes deposited Maria over by Joyce, then helped Kim up as Angie moved almost gracefully over to the hulking monstrosity. With her good hand, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a boxcutter, a tool used so often when on receiving duty. Liquid black eyes turned to examine them all in turn as she extended the blade, Wes’s mouth opening as if he were going to protest whatever action she had in mind. But Angie was no longer “in mind,” and the employees watched aghast as she deeply split open Dwight’s unconsumed belly. The horizontal gash began to bleed, and Angie cut again and again until he looked ready to be disemboweled, a few bits on entrails hanging out. Then, her act completed, she stepped back and lowered head almost reverently.
“What the…” tried Wes, as the gaping wound began to shift.
“Go ahead,” came a voice from Dwight’s bloody torso.
It was voice as black as the night sky, warm as newly spilled blood and as sweet as rotting apples. Kim felt it tickle between her legs as it spit pus on her heart. The four assembled merely gawked in abject horror.
“Go ahead,” it said again. “Ask.”
“What?” Wes managed to feebly get out.
“Hmmm… almost. You scurrying mammals always ask the same things. Questions to quantify and qualify. ‘What, how, why?’ There are no answers. Perhaps it’s all pointless.”
“What?” Wes blathered again.
It laughed, wet and malicious. “Such small things, so scared. All you have are moments.”
One of the blackened tendrils shot up and then plummeted down into Dr. Homme’s damaged head. It began to suck the flesh out in a meaty grind, its own disease left in wake. The carcass seizured and began to void fluids and waste. A second dark tentacle came to lap up the spillage. Kim covered her mouth and nose to hold back a gag.
“Ah, it doesn’t matter, remember?” it said.
Kim’s eyes shot up.
“Now, which of you will be the betrayer? Who among you will abandon your friends and escape? Which of you would be free?”
“None of…” began Wes.
Kim spun and fled.
Behind, she heard Wes scream something, then she heard him
She paused only for a second, then kept running. She had left her purse inside, so she didn’t have her cars keys. Didn’t have her apartment keys, money, license, anything. It didn’t matter.
Kim collapsed by the side of road, giggling in between her sobs. She hadn’t really escaped, it had just wanted to see her damned and broken.
While she might be alive, she had seen behind the curtain and was now damaged by the knowledge gained.
There on a length of grass along a state route in Logres, Ohio, a young woman lay with a violated psyche, her presence undetected for sometime until a passing driver called 9-11. There were no bodies found at the Thru-Drug store, no scenes of violence, no questions ever answered. None of the employees present that night, save Kim Reynolds, were ever seen again.
She never said a word, because she knew the truth. She knew that monsters had been out Trick Or Treating that evening and would do so again anytime they wished. She knew she had been given a few extra moments, as ruined as they were, and that in the end…
… it didn’t matter.
THE WOLFMAN’S WIFE
Sarah E. Adkins
Sarah E. Adkins earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing/Poetry from Chatham University in 2008, and a Bachelor of Arts in Writing from the University of Mount Union in 2003. She has published poems in
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Alexandra Grayson pushed the old Subaru slightly over the speed limit to get to the grocery store, and her pace walking in was quicker than any of the other store patrons. She practically threw items into her cart and when she had everything she needed, her eyes scanned the available check out lines for the quickest option. She chose to use the self-checkout machine, but was behind an elderly woman who was moving very slowly.
“Here, let me help you,” Alex forced a smile.
“Oh, thank you, dear,” the old woman patted her hand and let Alex scan her items for her and bag them up.
Timothy Greyson finished stuffing a change of clothes into his gym bag, along with soap and shampoo, towels, a toothbrush and toothpaste. He zipped the bag and threw it over his shoulder and began pacing back and forth across the kitchen. He grabbed a banana from the counter and peeled it, took a few bites, then tossed the rest in the trash. Timothy looked at the clock on the microwave. He looked out the window. He let out his breath he
