Tandem of Terror (34 page)

"
Yes, I'm sorry about what
happened. It's okay now. You were lost but I will show you the way.
The way to fly."

She turned slowly, that soft glow radiating
around her and walked back upstairs. All this time, she was only
trying to spare me the horrible truth, but I just wouldn't listen.
Would not hear.

We found our way to the hallway with the
light at the end of it. I positioned myself and soared right toward
the light...

"
George!" Anne called to her
husband. "Come and take this damn birdhouse down. I've had it.
Melanie is in tears again.

"
Oh for Pete's sake," George
replied. "What's the problem now?"

"
The problem? The neighbor's
cat keeps climbing up and killing all the birds and eating their
eggs. This time Melanie saw it happen. She's terribly upset. All
she keeps finding every day are dead birds in the darn thing. I
won't have it any more take it down."

"
Mommy?" Melanie, her dark
hair in a bob, looked up at her mother.

"
Yes dear?"

"
Do birdies go to
Heaven?"

Anne laughed. "I'm not sure honey."

Melanie blinked and thought hard. "If they
don't go to Heaven do you think their ghosts haunt birdhouses?"

"
Haunted birdhouses?" Anne
laughed again. "Don't be silly. Now off the grass, Melanie, you're
going to get your new white dress all dirty. Come along before
we're late for church."

Melanie took her mother's hand and started
back towards their home. She turned and saw her father pull the
pole with the birdhouse atop out of the ground and watched the
small white feathers whisk out of it and flutter away on the
wind.

Fur and Bullets

Eric S. Brown

Jacob lay on the bed of his makeshift
quarters below "the wall". His eyes were open and he stared up at
the ceiling. Outside, he could hear his men preparing for the
coming night's battle. There were few of them left now. The
seemingly endless nights of fighting had claimed so many. Their
reserves were gone and they had already drafted every able bodied
adult they could find within the city proper who would come without
resisting. They were fighting a losing war against the wolves and
Jacob knew it. It was only a matter of time until the creatures
overpowered their defenses and broke in to roam the streets and
alleys as their new hunting ground.

When Jacob could manage to sleep, he dreamed
of coffee, shopping, sitting in his favorite chair surfing the web,
and all the things he'd never taste, do, or see again. Like most of
the world populace, those things had died with the world he knew
when the wolves had rose up and stepped out of the lore of myth
into harsh reality. They, not humanity as Jacob knew it, would soon
by the dominant species of the Earth. The wolves had made their
intent clear from the moment they had emerged from the shadows,
"the Earth would be cleansed of their oppressors - the single
forms," and their genocidal war raged on.

All that junk about silver bullets was a
complete load of crap. Silver wasn't poisonous to them nor did
wolfsbane keep them away. The wolves did however regenerate tissue
at a seemingly impossible rate just like in the stories though. The
only ways to kill a wolf were to cut off its head, blow it to
freakin' bits and pieces, or burn it. Jacob had learned that the
hard way at first. If it hadn't been for the fact that initially
there had been so few wolves, the war would have been lost almost
as soon as it had begun.

Jacob knew too that the wolves would accept
someone who surrendered to them but that surrender carried with it
the price of becoming a wolf one's self. It was a price too high
for Jacob to accept for the people still left alive, under his
protection in the city so he fought on. There were some even in the
city itself though that wished he didn't. Some were happy to trade
being human for the power the change would bring them and to escape
being ripped apart by blood smeared claws. Death was a powerful
motivator. Being human and the principle of not accepting something
forced upon them meant nothing to them. This country had once been
called "the land of the free" before the war and to Jacob it still
was.

The door to Jacob's quarters swung open as
Laura entered. She was dressed from head to toe in padded armor and
her long brown hair was oily and matted. "Ready to go?" she asked,
"It's starting again."

Jacob got up from his bed and strapped on a
holster belt containing twin high-powered handguns. He picked up
his modified pump-action shotgun from the table beside the bed as
he followed Laura out into the growing darkness.

By the time Jacob and Laura climbed the steps
to join his remaining troops at the top of the wall, the sun had
completely set. The howls of the wolf army were already sounding in
the night as their forces assembled outside the wall at the
forest's edge. The night was lit by the bright rays of the moon and
Jacob could see a pack of nearly three dozen wolves loping through
the debris of the nightly battle zone towards the wall. Tonight the
wolves moved on all fours. Jacob counted his blessings. Yes, they
would run straight for the wall this time and try to claw their way
over, still it was better than the nights the wolves stood on two
legs and tried to "soften up" the wall's defenses first with
weapons' fire of their own. Those nights, especially when the
wolves found or had shipped anti-tank rockets out to use on the
front lines, were the worst.

"
All right people!" Jacob
yelled to the ranks of defenders, "Let's hold it
together!"

As soon as the wolves entered small arms
range, a wave of bullets erupted from the top of the wall raining
down upon them. Automatic rifles chattered spitting out empty shell
casings and handguns made popping noises as they were discharged.
The bullets didn't really stop the wolves but the harassment slowed
them down and sometimes would wound a few wolves enough to make
them pause to heal before they continued on, lowering the initial
wave of "climbers" the defenders would have to face. The real fight
would on the top of the wall itself as the wolves reached it.

A large gray wolf with one hollow, burnt out
eye socket led the charge, shrugging off the AK-47 and M-16 rounds
which peppered and bloodied the fur of its back. It was the first
to reach the wall and sprung almost all the way to the top with a
single leap, shifting into a humanoid form during its flight. Its
claws dug deeply into the concrete of the wall as it caught itself
and began to climb the remaining distance to the top. Other smaller
wolves followed after it. Jacob ran to the wall's edge and leaned
over looking down on the attackers. He took careful aim before he
fired. The flaming round found its home in the flesh of one of the
smaller wolves' shoulders as the creature fell from the wall its
fur blazing and spewing flames from where the shell had imbedded
itself.

Similar scenes were occurring along the
length of the wall. For a moment, Jacob thought it was going to be
an easy night then he saw the tank. The tank moved rumbling up the
paved roadway towards the wall's main gate, flanked by six humanoid
and heavily armed were-creatures. Their muscle bound arms carried
M-60s like toys. They dropped into firing positions and opened up,
laying down covering fire for the climbers. Jacob realized
instantly what was coming next. "Get down!" he shouted at the top
of his lungs just before the tank's main gun shook the night. The
explosion tore away a large chunk of the wall's top killing several
defenders instantly and sending others careening off the thirty
foot drop to the waiting wolves below. A piece of the wall, like
shrapnel, impacted with the side of Jacob's head and sent him
tumbling backwards off the wall to the city street below.

Jacob awoke staring into Laura's half
shredded face. Her form lay stretched out beside him with one leg
thrown across his own battered body. Her left eye dangled loosely
by a thin piece of sinew barely attached to her the bright red and
leaking tissue. Jacob shoved her off him and sat up fighting down a
scream from the pain which shot through him. His head thudded,
something wet dripping into his vision, and one of his legs was
clearly broken, bent awkwardly in several places. One look at it
told him he was lucky to be alive and that it even if he made it
out of here it would never heal properly. Darkness surrounded him
lit only by the crackling of scattered fires. The wall was
otherwise silent.

The large gray wolf-thing he'd seen earlier
sat a few feet from him in a humanoid shape, in an Indian style
position. Its yellow eyes gleamed and burnt into him. Jacob
instinctively reached for his shotgun but it was nowhere to be
found.

In a deep voice as calm as still waters, the
wolf spoke. "Your wall has fallen before our claws, Captain. The
city is ours."

The creature looked over Jacob's shattered
body and added, "I can make you whole again. We could use those
driven like you in our midst. You have but to join us."

Jacob's eyes were wet with tears welling up
inside of him and overflowing. He coughed harshly and spat
red-tinted liquid splattering onto the fur of the thing's chest.
The wolf wiped it away with a paw-shaped hand and nodded. It moved
above Jacob and in one strike crushed the man's ribs as its claws
pulled Jacob's heart from his chest. Then the wolf cocked back its
head and howled a cry of mixed emotion into the night at the moon
above.

Monsters

Eric S. Brown

Diana yelped as she tried again to struggle
free from the silver barbed wire that held her. The shredded flesh
of her wrists leaked blood onto the table she was bound to. Regg
took a drag off his cigarette, watching the red liquid drip pool on
the tile floor below her.

"
Sorry, little lady but I
need your puppies or whatever it is your kind call your young,"
Regg chuckled.

Diana only had vague memories of how she'd
gotten here. Glimpses of men in white suits with guns storming her
home, crashing through the door of her cabin, and the rest was only
blackness in her mind. "Why?" Diana pleaded, "Who are you? Why are
you doing this?"

Regg smiled. "You must realize that most of
the world population doesn't even know that creatures like you
exist. They don't believe in demons, vampires, or shape shifters.
Honestly, how you all have managed to stay hidden for so long
amazes me. I don't suppose it matters though, does it?"

Regg got up from the chair he'd been
reclining in and walked over to edge of the table that Diana was
bound to. He looked deep into her yellow eyes. "Not a single soul
on this planet will miss you or your children. I promise you
however that your death will not be in vain."

"
I don't want to die!" Diana
screamed in his face spraying him with spittle as she
growled.

Regg rubbed the fur on top of her head,
stroking it slowly. "Too bad," he whispered. "You'll be saving
thousands upon thousands of lives. Sometimes my dear, the needs of
the many out weigh the needs of the one. You see, by your very
nature, you regenerate tissue at a highly accelerated rate. Imagine
if that could be bottled and given to terminal patients who are
suffering from diseases like AIDS or Cancer. It wouldn't cure them
but it would allow them to live normal lives for quite sometime and
allow them to live much, much longer than they would otherwise. And
well, after I uncover your secrets darling, I can even go one step
further and finish another project I have been working on: a
simple, airborne virus that which when released into the Earth's
biosphere will rid us of your species of killers and savage
murderers forever."

A second man entered the lab. He wore a fine,
expensive dress suit and a CIA badge dangled from his jacket. "Are
you ready to begin Doctor McMillan?"

Regg turned and faced the man. "I had hoped
to watch the beast suffer a bit more, sir."

"
Not on company time. We're
not paying you to indulge in your own personal perversities," the
man warned sternly. "Cut her open. I want the babies and you in the
main lab on level three with the rest of the team, prepped and
ready to go in two hours, understand?"

Regg gritted his teeth and nodded. The man
left the room as Regg picked up a large silver scalpel from a tray
beside Diana's table and turned his attention back to her. "It
seems my dear that things will have to move faster than I had
hoped," he said. "Shame, really." He leaned over her to reach out
for her stomach with the blade as she snarled and fought to get
free. Howls of pain and rage echoed in the small room.

After The
Rain

John Grover

In my dream the rain is blood, it pours from
the heavens in thousands of crimson droplets. I am terrified.
Terrified because I know they come next. The puddles. Left behind
when the rain has finished, growing in mass, surrounding me on all
sides, sinister, foreboding, ripe with malice, black and
malignant.

I run to the front door of my house and to my
horror find it locked. I'm trapped outside as thick red liquid
coats my body, streaming down my face, a rotting stench filling my
nostrils. It seeps into my mouth making me want to vomit. I feel a
scream rising but it is trapped in my throat as the blood just
pours into it.

I pound on the door in a fury, shearing the
skin from my knuckles, screaming at the top of my lungs as puddles
already begin to form. I see them from the corner of my eye, damn
abominations why must they always---