Death Row Apocalypse (3 page)
Centered slightly to the east within this desolate region was once claimed to be the oldest boys’ school in the country. The little-known Hounds-Tor School for Boys was built on the remains of an ancient chapel and stood steadfast against time and the elements. The chapel, notably also prefixed “Hounds-Tor,” had been built on the summit of—yes, you guessed it—Hounds-Tor. A granite outcropping some 1,300 feet above sea level, and not a single piece of vegetation could offer the slightest protection from the elements for miles around.
The name “Hounds-Tor” had been given to this rocky mound when a pack of hounds from hell had been turned to stone—or so the story went. In fact, its first mention in history is in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
under the year AD 876.
In the spirit of all good horror movies, the summit of Hounds-Tor had previously been used as a burial site and dated as far back as 1300 BC, when the area had been a Bronze Age settlement. The chapel had been reportedly destroyed in the year of the Great Storm, AD 870, by successive lightning strikes, apparently brought on by the devil himself as he visited the chapel—or so they say.
The school had only two floors. On the upper level were housed fifty boys in five dormitories, while on the ground level, classrooms, showers, and kitchens could be found. Throughout the building one could sense the history beneath the polished oak floors, doors, and paneled walls, where the whispers of the departed permeated every knot, crevice, and crack. In this place I was more at home than any other before or since. The fate of the school had been almost as strange as its history, for only four weeks after my departure the school was leveled by lightning strikes of biblical proportions, returning the granite walls to the soil from which they came. As if the very knowledge of the school’s long existence was taboo, all but the oldest of records mentioning it passed into faded memory. The evidence is plain to see, as even its Wikipedia page mentions nothing of the history I have detailed.
The boys who boarded in this school had no idea what was being unleashed upon them! Because I refused to submit to school bullies and their bullying ways, the head boy and his posse decided to teach me a lesson one night, one which they were confident would bring me in line within their domain.
It was a dark winter’s night. The dorm lights went out at 10:00 p.m. sharp as usual, at which point the bullies’ attack began in earnest in the pitch black. Having only a few seconds to consider my options, I moved silently and quickly, getting out of the lower bed of the bunk bed. How I knew they would attack and when they would attack was beyond me and still is to this day. Somehow I just knew they would come for me at that very moment.
I moved silently to the center of the small dorm cloaked in the absolute dark that currently enveloped the room. My eyes struggled to seek out shapes while they adapted to the murky room. The boys approached. They complained in whispers as they bumped into walls and stubbed toes into bedframes. The thumping of blood in my ears intensified as one by one my assailants crept passed me, so close they almost touched me. They were so close in fact that I could feel the heat from their bodies and smell the faint odor of soap on their skin from their recent ablutions.
Amazed that they were completely unaware of my proximity, I took full advantage of the situation and decided to strike using the element of surprise. The sense of power I gained in those moments was immeasurable. Time and the dark were now my allies, and, since I had no moral limitations, my options were wide open, and I decided to do something spectacular. The beast within was released. Its craving for blood would be sated that night.
As the last boy passed by me, I struck. I cupped my hand over his mouth and brought the tip of the long-bladed knife to bear on the side of his neck. I could feel his skin attempt to remain intact as I pressed the blade still harder. It finally accepted the inevitable and allowed the sharp edge to penetrate the elastic epidermis. The knife was extremely sharp. I had pocketed it during my recent visit to the kitchens for the express reason I now lay out before you. It felt like I was gutting a fish, but in this case it was a human child. I slid the knife easily between his spine and throat, the blade penetrating from one side of his neck to the other. As it protruded from the far side, I began to cut with a sawing motion forwards, and in no time at all I had severed his arteries and trachea. In the time it took for his hands to come to his throat, the deed was already done.
He grabbed briefly at his neck where I had cut, and the last of the air from his lungs gurgled and bubbled through the impossibly wide aperture that I had created. His arms dropped to his sides, and finally his head flopped backwards, encouraged gently with a slight pull of his hair with my hand. My eyes had adapted somewhat to the inky gloom within the dorm and were helped further by a little extra moonlight. I could see the white bone of his exposed spine. With a loud crack his spine snapped, while I encouraged his head backwards yet further. Blood continued to gush upwards for a few more seconds in a miniature fountain as he dropped to his knees. He then fell forward and hit the floor with a thud. A second smaller thud could be heard moments later when his lifeless head struck the floor, carried forward by its own inertia.
Moonlight now illuminated the room fully, subjecting the witnesses to a horrifying monochrome nightmare. The gutted boy’s fingers twitched a couple of times as they performed a miniature cabaret in the growing pool of the thick, sticky ink that once coursed through his veins.
As the blood blossomed outwards, I stood amongst the sprayed and spreading fluids with my arms out to my sides and my head angled back, looking up to the moon through the window. Covered from head to toe in blood, I was revealed for what I was, and I reveled in the moment. I could have stayed there longer, standing in the midnight-black gloss lake at my feet, but someone turned the lights on, breaking the magical moment. The blinding light illuminated the macabre scene and everyone in the dorm, bringing to an end the night’s bloody nightmare and starting one that the remaining boys would now endure until the day they died. Several lost control of their bladders, along with their minds, that night. For those boys, their nights would be forever clouded in blood and sweat as they recalled the horrific scene. None in fact would ever be able to sleep without first locking the bedroom door and keeping at least one light turned on.
The small dormitory was covered in blood. Arterial spray had reached and covered each of the four walls, and the ceiling now resembled a piece of abstract art. In some places the blood had pooled on the ceiling, which was slowly dripping crimson raindrops, which sometimes landed on the already-drenched pajama-sporting boys. No one escaped the soaking that night.
The whole event was somehow kept from the newspapers. The children of that fateful dorm room were treated for shock over the following years, and to this day I doubt that their sanity has been fully restored. In any case, I seriously doubt any of them regained full control over their bladders when I consider how freely they were released that night.
Those events are not the end of my story, though, for I was immediately sent back to the US, to a facility specializing in extreme mental conditions. It was there that, after being analyzed by doctor after doctor, they resorted to electroconvulsive therapy to try and “fix” my inner demon. The treatments seemed to continue forever, with injections, medications, therapists, psychologists and, of course, a priest or two thrown in for good luck. They never gave up, and they never ran out of drugs to try. I must give them their dues, however. Before using the drugs, they talked to me at length, and at first I endured weeks of conversation, followed by question upon question, my sarcastic responses to which annoyed them to high heaven. During these sessions, they would ask me to describe the events of “that” night, and I usually responded by asking them if they would like a reenactment and to witness it firsthand, adding that perhaps one of them would like to volunteer. Usually I would be drugged and knocked out immediately without any further conversation! I guess it didn’t help when I also suggested they should volunteer their daughters to spice things up a bit.
I think I eventually caught on after about four years of this punishment, and I decided to play the game their way. Behaving myself, I answered their moronic questions correctly, and eventually my doctors started to believe in the treatments they were administering to me. My case evolved and became a research success, whereupon their theories and treatments were then recorded as cures for my unique condition. All the while during my extended incarceration, my parents distanced themselves from me. Understandable, I guess. They were the only ones who had any idea of my full potential.
My eventual release became academic and was just a question of time. Likewise, it was then only a question of time as to when I could fully immerse myself in my chosen pastime. I would endeavor to excel in my new career, as any dutiful son should do . . .
A little later I was considered healed, and I was released on the unsuspecting general public. Put nicely, I was given a new identity, including a specialist education in a chosen field. They even covered the costs of embedding me in Tallahassee, a back-end town in Florida. This part was cheap, as I had no private possessions to speak of. I was given a new wardrobe, a small but decent apartment, and they helped me establish myself in business in my chosen field.
In many ways I reckon this process was more or less identical to the witness protection program that one hears about in newspaper articles and, more commonly, in the movies. I’ve hinted several times now as to my new profession, and you’re probably assuming murder or burial services or something equally morbid, or at least on the same lines, aren’t you?
In fact, I decided that I wanted to cook, specifically to be a baker. Now a baker not only bakes bread; he also creates a wonderfully broad range of doughs, cakes, sweets, treats—and the list goes on. Check Wikipedia if you don’t believe me. Anyway, they paid for one year’s tuition, and as mentioned before they set me up in business with my own store. One year is not much, but I am a fast study and seemed to have a knack when implementing my imagination.
From the outside I was just like any other Floridian, and before long I was making a decent income and became a well-liked and widely known citizen of Tallahassee. One thing led to another and eventually I actually married. I make it sound like a life-changing event. Believe me, it was! But not the kind that one would normally attribute to the cozy ideals of love and feelings. It would be more accurate to describe it as me being dragged backwards kicking and screaming into destiny’s belly, being digested, then pushed and squeezed through the intestine, and finally having the remaining humanity forcibly removed, before being crapped out into the toilet bowl of life. My whole being tried to wrench itself away from the depths and the sheer singularity of depression that now feasted on my—until that moment—pure and kind soul . . .
Okay, you got me! I was far from pure and kind, but I had decided I needed to conceal my talents. Otherwise, it was very possible that I might end up the guest of yet another facility, with no doubt a new range of drugs to try out.
It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that my wife was as instrumental to my education as the yearlong cooking classes. Let it be said that there are some women that cannot, that must not, be trusted and certainly should never be partnered with.
You are probably sitting there nodding while reading this and wishing that you could travel back in time somehow and change the past. If you are, you can’t, so you won’t, so ask yourself if it’s too late—and if it is, then what are you going to do about it? If it’s not too late, make a run for it.
Whatever you do decide to do, at the very least do something. Anything! Do it perhaps sooner rather than later, though, or risk forever being trapped, with your soul being drained by that leeching two-faced vampire-bitch cow-tart from hell. (Note to self: that was fun, putting it down on paper. Note to reader: sometimes it’s okay to call the kettle black. Ask Dr. Phil if you don’t believe me.)
Anyway, I was born into a realm where marriage was both unavoidable and ill-fated. Eventually I escaped from that place, but not until about five years later. Did you know in some countries that’s just three years less than the life sentence given to murderers and rapists? I ask you, where is the justice in that? Given the option, I would have gladly endured the extra three years in prison in exchange for some peace of mind, and perhaps I could have kept a little more of my humanity. (Note to self: I must stop exaggerating. I think we established earlier that I have no humanity.)
During my five-year torment in marriage hell, I evolved further still. Over those five long years, the few remaining qualities that made me somewhat human were systematically stripped away. What she failed to realize was that she would be sealing her own fate by her own actions while simultaneously providing me with the tools to ultimately survive in the coming apocalypse. She had unwittingly been honing a blade of unrivaled quality that would in the fullness of time be brought against her.
Chapter - 3
- Sevens my lucky number -
The zombie’s eyeball rested on my chest. Its gaze is perhaps better described as an unblinking stare. Up close, I noticed further qualities that added to the unusual orb. The iris was not covered with a white glaze but had actually changed color to almost white. Off-white or cream would perhaps be a closer approximation. In any case, it continued to sit there, fixated on me.