in blood like that. For some reason it seemed different than touching the car. More intimate.
The inside of the trailer was blanketed in darkness. Of course. What light there was inside was shining through the windows from the moon, so it was just ambient spooky light. My flashlight lit the place up good, in pretty little cones of light. As flashlights do. You ever watch a horror movie where the hero has the flashlight out and pointed at a benign wall and he’s shining it around with nary a thought and thinking everything was all right with the world and you, the viewer, can see the monster just out of reach of the light by about two inches? And you’re screaming at the screen for them to run, run, run?
Well, I kind of felt like that.
I turned in a quick 360 degree circle to make sure there were no monsters creeping out of the darkness and then did it again just to make sure. I was trying to catch them by surprise but, of course, there was nothing there. There never is when you’re looking for it. Not that I was expecting monsters. Monsters weren’t real. It was just that kind of night.
Fannie Mae stood a step behind me with a couple fingers gripping my belt loop. I could feel her tugging on me and it was more a reassurance than anything else. Everything would be okay as long as she was there. She was the innocent girl who always survived the monster movies. Plus I knew that if something did come screeching out of the darkness at me that she’d yank me back out of its reach. Again with the hopefully.
There was nothing in the living room to indicate any trouble. A few muddy tracks on the floor but those could have happened at any time. There was no reason to suspect that someone had jimmied the door open and shuffled straight across the floor to the hallway leading to the bedrooms, leaving muddy tracks everywhere. No reason at all.
As we started walking down the completely dark hallway (no windows there) I began to feel an itching in the middle of my back, between my shoulder blades. I whirled around, throwing Fannie Mae off balance, and shone the flashlight at the hallway behind us. Nothing there. The itching continued and I whirled back in the direction of the bedrooms.
Mason Smith stood before us.
Fannie Mae let out a little scream. It seemed little over the roaring of sound within my ears at least. For a second I thought I might pass out, but I knew if I did that it would be all over. I didn’t allow myself to do it, but it was close.
His head was cocked at a weird angle, the same one it was in the last time I’d seen it when he’d been leaning against the monument in the cemetery. Back when he was dead. His mouth was open in a wide smile, the muscles pulling tight against his cheeks. His teeth were black and stained with blood. He reached out to me with his hands, straining across the gap of six feet or so to reach me. But he didn’t move forward at all. His mouth opened and closed as if he were trying to talk. Or, as I realized suddenly with horror, like he was trying to eat us.
He still had on the jeans and shirt he was wearing before, but they were completely coated in mud and dirt and blood, as if he’d dragged himself on the ground for a while before remembering how to walk. His hands were coated with gore and his nails looked broken and jagged. Several were pulled back completely, resting at a 90 degree angle against his fingertip. I was guessing he’d somehow used those to force the door open.
He took a shuffling step toward us, sliding his foot on the floor, making a scraping sound that just set my teeth on edge and made my tongue burn. Then he stopped and sniffed. His eyes opened wider and a low moan came from his throat. And yes, it sounded just like the moans zombies always make in movies.
Then he turned around and shuffled back into the bedroom he’d just come from. A few seconds later I heard the tinkle of breaking glass and a sound that could only be interpreted as a zombie pulling itself through a window. Hard to describe but you know it when you hear it.
I’m guessing it’s just one of those things.
Goosebumps the size of walnuts trailed down my flesh. A line of them started on the back of my neck and traveled down the length of my body. I started shaking, shivering. My teeth chattered so hard that I thought a few would snap in two. Every hair on my body stood on end. I was scared spitless, that is no lie.
Fannie Mae gripped my hand so hard that I thought it would break. I could feel her shivering next to me.
Neither of us spoke.
I forced my legs to unfreeze and did my best to run gimpily down the hallway to the bedroom we’d seen him go into. It was the master. There was only one window in there and it faced the back of the trailer. The curtains billowed silently in the wind. I could see jagged strips of glass still set in the frame. They were covered in globs of blood.
I shone the flashlight around the room and rested it on what was on the bed. What was left of Tamara’s parents. The goosebumps left my flesh in a flash of heat and my body broke out in a quick sheen of sweat. I felt like I was going to throw up. The sound of Fannie Mae retching behind me didn’t help.
Tamara’s parents were strewn around on the bed like sacks of meat. Blood splatter covered the walls and the bed was soaked through with what looked like gallons of it. Great hunks of meat were missing from their bodies. Her father was missing most of his stomach and gray loops of intestines spilled out of the hole looking like roles of sausage links. Hunks of them were randomly missing, too.
Her mother was half on the bed, her top half on the floor. Her arms were splayed out above her head and were somehow still providing support. Her hair was arrayed around her on the floor as if she’d been primped especially for this position. She was nude. I registered that as a side fact as I tried to take in the tableau before me. Tamara had gotten her good looks from her mother, there was no doubt.
But those good looks were not in evidence before me.
Her left breast was just gone. Torn from her body like so much meat. Deep gouges as of teeth scraping the flesh were on practically every inch of her body. Half her neck was gone. Ripped and thrown to the side. Her spine glistened wetly through the wound. Hopefully that was the first hit and she hadn’t felt every other indignity done to her body.
I stood frozen, just taking it all in. I couldn’t stop looking. Every horror imprinted itself on my brain.
Fannie Mae pulled roughly on my arm. “Let’s go, Dukey. Please. Let’s get out of here.”
I let her drag me behind her as we exited the bedroom. My eyes were still drawn to that bed and the massacre of Tamara’s parents. Had they made no sound? I knew the neighbors weren’t that close by but surely someone would have heard the screams coming from this charnel house of death.
