Evil Origins: A Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection (20 page)

The girl
smiled, which precipitated a burp, which turned into a full revolution ignited
by the acidic burn in her stomach. She turned in time to project the vomit over
the bar and onto the webbed plastic mat that kept the bartenders from slipping
on the wet floor. She coughed and spattered like an old truck, and Samuel could
do nothing but stare at the skin horizon that appeared under her shirt and
above her shorts when she leaned forward on the stool. He studied the smooth,
white skin, turning his head sideways. Samuel was glad she did not ruin that
space with a tramp stamp, like most of the girls at college did. He knew the ’90s
were just the beginning for tattoos, and he really liked the hot biker-chick
look. But on this lady, he was hoping to slide in behind her and enjoy the
unobstructed view of the beads of sweat that would collect in the small of her
back. He imagined her long, blonde hair splayed out and falling down over the
sides of her breasts. He would grab her hips and hold on for as long as the
ride lasted.

“Get her
out,” said the bartender while unfurling countless paper towels off a roll and
dropping them to cover the puke. “And I had better see that piece-of-shit car
of yours on the street in the morning.”

The remark
and ensuing odor of sickness snapped Samuel out of his fantasy. He noticed that
he had been rubbing her back while she vomited, and his fingers had moved further
south until they caressed the waistband of her hip-hugger jeans.

Samuel blinked,
returning him back to the present and his mental prison cell. He took shallow
breaths, knowing the memory was not finished. He thought of Mara, wondering if
she was being forced to relive a time from her past, the reopening of wounds
that had never quite closed.

He felt the
warm, penetrating feel of her tongue in his mouth. Samuel pulled her closer
with two hands on her hips. The alcohol killed the taste of vomit on her lips,
but did not protect his nose from the odor of summer trash coming from the
dumpsters in the alley.

“Right here.
I want you right here.”

Samuel put
his hands on her breasts and pushed them up, feeling the stiffness of her
nipples through the thin T-shirt. He looked into her eyes and saw the hazy
glaze of 3:00 a.m. in them. The woman’s head moved in stuttering motions as
Samuel fought a losing war against the vodka shots.

“I have a
queen-size bed in my room. We can do all kinds of stuff on that.”

She grinned
and slid her hand inside his jeans. Samuel moaned, tilting his head back
against the wall until more loose mortar rained down on them.

“Get a
fucking room!”

Samuel and the
woman looked down the alley at the opened steel door at the back of Joey’s
Grill. A short-order cook with a soiled apron and a cigarette dangling from his
lips emptied a garbage pail into the dumpster with a wet smack.

“Get out
‘fore I call the cops, or worse yet, ‘fore Slimy Larry comes back to his
cardboard house and stabs you both in the gut.”

Samuel
giggled, and the woman slid both hands around his waist.

“I can’t walk
no more,” said the woman.

“I think I’m
parked around the corner, at a meter.”

She stepped
back, lifting her head off his chest. She drew an index finger down over her
bottom lip, smirking at Samuel before waving it at him. “Naughty boy. Gonna
have to punish ya.”

“The house
is only a few blocks. I’ll be fine. No faster than twenty-five, I promise.”

The cook
shook his head. He flicked his cigarette into the dumpster while stepping
through the steel door, pulling it shut with a sound of metal on metal that
echoed through the alley.

“‘Kay,” the
woman said, “but hurry.”

Samuel led her
from the alley to the sidewalk. A few lonely souls skulked by, caught in
drunken limbo. The bars had made last call, and the breakfast restaurants
hadn’t opened yet. He glanced to his right and watched the neon sign of the bar
flicker into cold darkness. He turned in the other direction and stared until
he saw the taillights of his Dodge, the twenty-inch tires snuggling up to the
curb.

He had done
this before. Many times. Samuel knew the drill, knew his limitations like every
good drunk. He would ease into the street, stay slow, and keep to the
residential streets. Avoid traffic, and that would allow him to reach home safely.
Intellectually, Samuel understood the risks he was taking, but the young
college girl pawing at him skewed all of the statistics. He would return to his
room and they would explore each other like first-time lovers do. It was the
aroma that drove him mad. Samuel could smell her.

“Lezzgo,
silly,” she murmured, placing a hand in his lap.

Samuel shook
his thoughts loose and put the key in the ignition. Fear slid across his face
until he realized it was the wrong key. After four more tries, Samuel
discovered the ignition key and started the car. The Dodge came alive with a
throaty rumble after he pushed the clutch to the floor and pumped the
accelerator three times. Pearl Jam’s “Oceans” came through the speaker system,
and the woman fumbled for the volume knob, turning it until Samuel felt like
Eddie Vedder was singing to them from the backseat.

“Album of the
year,” she murmured.

“This is
killer. Not sure how Pearl Jam is going to top this record.”

Samuel
fastened his seatbelt and looked over both shoulders before easing into the
empty street. His body took over as if the effects of the alcohol, the slurred
speech and the slowed reflexes, had subsided. He looked at the girl and pointed
to her seatbelt. Samuel wanted to see the way the nylon restraint would run
between her breasts, accentuating her curves.

“I trust
you,” she said. The woman closed her eyes and leaned back against the headrest.

Samuel put
the Dodge in first gear and eased from the curb. The parking meter stared at
them as they drove past, its cyclopean eye red and menacing. He coasted
underneath the first traffic light, which blinked yellow in the pre-dawn
darkness of Fifth Avenue, the main strip dissecting the quaint college town. The
next set of lights swung in the gentle summer breeze, red.

“Wazzup with
these?” he asked.

The girl
just mumbled.

Samuel
waited and looked back and forth, wondering why the second intersection’s
lights had not gone to blinking yellow, and more importantly, why they were red
in his direction. Before he could contemplate the answer, a dagger of light
pierced his rearview mirror, and by the time Samuel reached to flip his mirror
to the nightshade angle, the vehicle was beside his.

The chrome
side mirror captured the reflection from the copper street lights in a way that
made it look alien. But it was the 1977 Chevy Corvette attached to the mirror that
made Samuel forget about the sexual tryst he had in the works. The tinted
windows and T-tops made him think that the vehicle had to be from California. They
did not have the need or the legislation to make that happen out here. Chrome
side pips ran from the back of the front tires underneath the door until they
flared out at the rear. The black paint job glistened as if the car were wet. The
‘Vette slowed at the intersection until four inches separated the passenger-side
window from Samuel’s. He waited as the window came down with the slow lurch of
a handle turn.

“Dodge,”
said the voice from inside the Corvette.

Samuel
paused and looked over at the girl. She smiled and then winked at him.

“Ain’t even
close. You got sixteen pistons under that hood. Over three hundred horses. Go
pick on someone your own size.”   A voice came from inside the Corvette, hidden
in the blackness. “No balls. I get it.”

Samuel
gripped the leather covering on his steering wheel.

“I can handle
the lady too, seeing as how you ain’t got what it takes to satisfy her.”

Samuel
looked at the light and back at the empty void of the Corvette’s window. He
nodded and turned his attention back to the dangling traffic light,
anticipating the turn to green. He set his left hand on top of the steering
wheel and dropped the right on the gear shift set between the seats. He revved
the engine a few times and used his left foot to push back into the seat. Samuel
took his right foot off the brake and teased the clutch with his left until he
felt the gears of the manual transmission edging forward, pleading to open up
into a full gallop.

When the
light turned green, Samuel slammed the accelerator to the floor and popped the
clutch with his left foot. The Dodge lurched forward, and he heard a giggle
from the woman sitting next to him. The engine drowned out the passionate
wailing of Eddie Vedder as the CD player moved on to play “Release.” The rear
tires of the Dodge screamed, and the acrid, bitter smoke of burning rubber
reached his nose as the Dodge pulled him underneath the traffic light and down
the right side of the street, now serving as a drag strip.

The Corvette
appeared to hover next to Samuel’s car, teasing and taunting him like an angry
sibling. It stayed locked in position, using the oncoming lane as its own. Samuel
heard laughing coming from the passenger-side window until it ran back up,
drenching the Corvette in complete, inky blackness.

Samuel
glanced at his gauges, the needle pushing toward sixty. The blinking yellow
lights at the intersections faded like fireflies in the summer night. He tried
not to think about the people on the sidewalks witnessing the race. Samuel
loved this college town. They knew him here. They knew his car.

The Corvette
roared, and Samuel saw the black sports car lurch forward. He smiled and shook
his head, frustrated by the driver’s decision to toy with him and, at the same
time, impressed by the sheer brutality of the Chevy’s 305 block. He feathered
the clutch to bring the RPM gauge back into the red before shifting gears. Samuel’s
blonde cohort smiled while holding the seatbelt across her chest.

Samuel
watched the taillights of the Corvette move forward as his own speedometer
broke the century mark. The two cars rocketed down the sleepy street like two
bullets from a gun.

When the
Corvette jacked low and dipped a shoulder into the highway onramp, Samuel
realized he had to concede. He knew the Daytona did not have the handling of
the Corvette, and he pulled the car to the curb, feeling the effects of the
alcohol replacing the adrenaline of the race. He picked up the woman’s purse
and searched through her wallet until he found her ID, complete with home
address. Samuel glanced at the woman and he turned the car around. He drove
toward her apartment, where he would most likely need help to take her safely
inside.

The race
left him dizzy as its effects receded in much the same way that the alcohol had
hours earlier. Samuel would have to lick his wounded pride and forego the
physical satisfaction of a sexual conquest. He found no solace in doing the
right thing.

He felt her
hand in his, tiny and vulnerable. She squeezed to let him know she was still
there. The room came back into focus, and he recognized the same
indistinguishable furniture that had been in the other cabins. Samuel’s breath
hitched in his chest. He stood in the middle of the room with Mara at his side.

“Did you see
it?” he asked her.

She nodded and
wiped a tear from her face.

“I should have
learned from that. It was so close to being a catastrophe.”

Mara turned and
trailed a finger down his cheek. “We all fall short. We all screw up.”

Samuel brushed
her hand aside and walked to the window. Blackened film covered the windowpanes
as it had all of the cabin windows in this locality. He tried seeing out of
one, hiding the rest of his tears from her.

“Where are we?”
he asked.

“Another cabin.
Probably a little further down the path, but not too far from the Barren.”

The moments
preceding his visceral memory flooded Samuel’s head. He recalled the shuffling
horde of the undead and the distant but closing sound of the pack howling at
the dead sky.

“Major and
Kole. What do they want?”

“Not sure,”
Mara said, shaking her head. “I think Kole wants to inflict pain, and he
doesn’t care who he hurts. But Major, yeah, Major wants something more.”

“More than
what?”

“More than
hurting you. He wants out of here. We all do.”

***

Kole and Major
ambled along the path, weaving in and out between the creatures. They seemed to
have no purpose other than following Samuel and Mara. Major expected to be
blown back by their rotten filth, but the sense of smell had all but
disappeared in the locality. Along with the loss of sound, he knew the Reversion
was almost complete.

“Can we get to
them?” Kole asked. He hobbled forward, each couple of steps causing him to
wince in pain.

“Yep,” replied
Major. “The walking corpses will keep ’em pinned down. Won’t hurt ’em none.”

Kole nodded and
kept walking, occasionally sidestepping a group of the creatures. He passed one
on his left, looking deep into its face. Kole shuddered when the creature
turned its blank eyes on him. He felt the desperation there, the pain.

“Think the next
cabin is over that ridge,” Major said, shaking Kole from his thoughts. Major pointed
along the path in the direction the horde was traveling. A throaty howl broke
through the silence and made the horde stop in their tracks. Major and Kole
turned to face the alpha male striding along the path, the wolf’s eyes never
leaving the staggering undead.