Don't Wake Up

‘Can’t wake up...”  he thinks, but something is bringing his consciousness to light. Wakefulness slithers up through the many layers of sleep and bits and pieces are coming back to him.
The pain.
As the word echoes dimly across the horizons of his thoughts he feels the flare of it growing. 
Pain.
And with the pain comes a blaring flash of remembrance. 
He was standing in a moonlit glade, his flashlight in his hand. He was angry and frustrated. The coolness of the night air and the sweat on his face chilled him and he longed for a jacket. And he had to come here to find his keys, which he’d somehow dropped, earlier during the day.
Then, the terrible thing, huge and horrible swinging down and the pain.
That was it. That was before.
Now there is pain rising over comprehension to an exquisite ringing in his mind. With it comes a fierce overwhelming sense of panic. His brain is trying to move arms and legs, trying to open his eyes.
‘No! Don’t open your eyes!’
But he cannot help it. 
And then he sees.
Hears.
Smells.
Feels.
He sees the legs first. Hairy and arching. He sees the eyes. Eight eyes, some part of his brain remembers. The body, familiar but monstrous. A tiny thing rendered huge in iron and rust.
He hears the clicking and whirring of it’s mouth parts. A strange guttural gibbering.
He smells the death around him and the acrid stench of venom.
He feels the slow bobbing, like a hammock made from bungee cords, as the terrible thing moves around him.
Now, the first tentative tap against his bundled body. Testing. The whirring increases to a high keening wail. He feels his heart beating faster. Another tap, this time harder. The wail raises to a shrill vibrato. The part of his mind that is removed, collating and distributing cold facts says, ‘A feeding song. And now the little ones will come.She’s singing to them. Dinner’s ready.’
And they do come.
He feels the pressure of hundreds of pencil sized needles sliding into his abdomen, his legs, his back.
No pain, now. Just pressure and the sinking realization, clear to him, as the horrible giant thing of iron and rust settles over him, that darkness is swallowing him too. The horrible thing that should not be real.
As his consciousness begins to fade, the voice in his head says coolly, ”Don’t worry. You’ll wake up soon...’

Released!

Prying the butter knife’s edge under the ring pull, he levered it up far enough to get his finger through. Then, hooking his finger in the loop and pushing down with his thumb, and with a loud tok, spraak,  the lid was off.
Holding the tin in his left arm, he ran the butter knife along the inside edge of the food to loosen the vacuum and then tossed the knife in the sink. Walking to his basement door he typed the six digit security code that released the door and propping it open went down the stairs.
Looking right as he neared the bottom, he gazed across the open area to her cage against the far wall. Heavy and reinforced within the substructure of the house, the cage took up one half of the basement floor plan. Clear six inch thick glass covered all but the left quarter of the cage front, where a door and a small  food depository bay were built in.
Inside the cage, she moved up to the glass, placing her claws against it and fogging the section by her face. Her emerald eyes shone with recognition and also, he saw, with hunger. He held up the tin to the glass, and she licked her lips and began to show all the signs of excitement that proceeded feeding.
Pressing a small green button on the console by the door, he stepped into a small anteroom chamber designed to allow him to pass through without fear of her bolting past him. He poured the food into the small food bay to his right and pressed another button the bay slid out into the cage and then right, across the bottom toward her watering system.
As he watched her devour the food, he noticed a small blinking light in the opposite corner. Pushing another button, the door behind him whooshed shut and the one in front slid open. She glanced up at him, but kept eating. He strode across to the small blinking light, wondering what it could be this time.
Filter changing time, he thought. As he focused on the small environmental console, he heard a deep growl directly behind him.
He turned as slowly as he dared. There she was, standing at full height over him, her glowing green eyes looking down at him with what he believed was fierce sentience. Her growl was deep, her breath rank. Sweating and shaking, he tried a few words, but she roared over his pitiful attempt. She backed away, slowly toward the inner door and pushed the exit code with her talon.  His eyes widened. She’s been learning!
Locking him in the cage he watched as she crawled up the stairs and heard the muffled thud of the basement door shutting.
Oh God,  he thought. She’s gotten out!

Never Against the Italians

Reg Kinsey flipped out his box cutter and began to break down the boxes from that day's delivery. His second day there, his second day breaking down boxes for 12 hours, sweeping cleaning and being bored. 

Not that it was worse than the mind-numbing boredom of prison. Five days ago he had been in prison, so he tried to keep his mind off of the boredom, and be grateful he was out again.

It was a job. It paid and it kept him physically moving, which he hoped would help to keep him strong. In the joint they called him BDJ. Big Dumb Jock. At 225 pounds and six feet five inches, he strongly resembled just that.

Before prison it was wise to keep himself strong and fit. In that line of work, the work he did before prison (the work that sent him to prison), he had to be strong. His bosses needed him to be strong.

Working for an extremely old 'crime family' required finesse of the mind as well. And while Reg was no MENSA candidate, he was certainly smart enough to keep them safe, and do odd 'missions'.

To keep himself safe, he paid them tributes of his own blood. With it, the Family could keep track of him, call him in need and project their own strength and longevity to him. In return they paid him handsomely. He was a familiar.

But things had gone terribly wrong. One of his Family had done some human trafficking business with the Italian Mafia. The Italians had smuggled some Chechens into the country and made Reg's Family pay exorbitant amounts of money for them.

After the pick up, it was discovered that the humans had been infected with a deadly virus that posed a serious threat to the Family.

So, he had organized and led a nighttime sneak attack on the main houses of the Italians responsible. The 'hitmen' from his Family were merciless and they not only decimated the Italians, but they also were able to score enough blood from them to make up for the infected Chechens.

Unbeknownst to Reg or his Family, the Italians had set up a secondary trap. While he was leading the attack, the Italians sent a sortie to their secret lair. Bringing with them UV lights and plenty of stakes, they murdered all but one member of the family, who was still in Romania, from a previous event.

Feeling their panic in his own blood, Reg had left his men working on the Italian clean up, and doubled back to the lair, and right into the hands of the police.

The Family's lawyers had gotten his sentence reduced considerably, but he still had to serve time.

The clean up from the event had been horrid, but he'd missed most of it. News reached him in prison that the final member of the Family had been hit in Romania as retaliation. 

So, Reg just cut boxes down and swept and cleaned and tried to stay busy. The Italians, he knew very well, would be looking for him, and against them even a 3,000 year old family of Vampires stood no chance.

Pack Habits.

When I get home, I expect the usual greetings from my family. Molly will run over and I will scoop her up and give her a squeeze. Chelsea will give me a kiss and then take my bag and coat. Ellis will grunt at me, but that’s all he usually does anyway. They will all be happy to see me, and it will make up for all the crap I have to deal with all day.
On top of everything else, tonight is very special, because tonight is family night. Tonight is Pack Night. Tonight is the Full Moon. All day I have been thinking of how wonderful it will be when I get home. Just come in, sit right down, have a cocktail and wait for the fun to begin.
Tonight is different than what I’m expecting. I walk up to the door and notice that it has been kicked open. I smell silver immediately. It’s a stench you cannot miss when you are like us. Molly and Ellis are in small steel cages, lined with silver. Chelsea has been shot and is completely gone.
Hunters.
They do this sometimes. Track our family’s and then kill the parents, leave the little ones for their ‘games’.
One of the group of hunters is laying on our dining room table having had his throat ripped out by Molly, judging by the blood on her face.
One of the men, big and stinking of bourbon, strides over and tries to put the butt of his rifle against my skull and give me a good bash, but he doesn’t know what I’m capable of. The change comes quickly for me. It’s never obvious to merely human eyes. One moment a crushed man with his family dead or in cages enters and in another moment an eight foot monster is there where the man used to be.
I take the big man and fling him out the front door. I hear his bones crunch as he hits the ground. The others scramble with their big hunting rifles, but those are not ideal close combat weapons. I dispatch three of them with one swipe. I hear the jingling of keys on the last hunter and grab him. He wets himself as I rip his arm off and put the keys to the cages in his removed hand. I turn back to human form and unlock the cages releasing my son and daughter who immediately change and go to their mother.
Between them, they can ‘wake’ her. Then she too is back, slightly dazed from her trip into death, but the beast in us cannot be killed, only stunned by the silver.
I begin to look for wallets and ID. I hope that there are addresses. I’m beginning to be awfully hungry for humans.

Burning Up

Marlot was sick.
She had a fever of 103 degrees Fahrenheit at lunch and was shaking through most of her post-lunch meeting. Taking three ibuprofen dropped her fever to 101 for about two hours, when, while she was trying to type a report for the Kimmelman Systems analysis report, she noticed that her fingers were beginning to bend more like snakes than fingers. She checked her temperature and found that she had graduated to 105 F in the space of only a few hours.
Straining for several minutes at the fine print of the pill bottle, she discovered to her relief, that it would be at least four hours until her symptoms abated. So she staggeringly fixed herself a cup of herbal tea and settled into the new sofa she had purchased for office last week.
When Donovan Kent came by at seven o’clock to check on her, she had been mid-snore and extremely disheveled on top of the tea that had spilled coldly on her slacks. Flopping her hair into a semi-workplace shape, she answered her office door in a staggering montage of drunkenness masquerading as ‘Just really sick, Boss, sorry’.
Kent, who had spent some time in India making a go of their offices there, knew a True Sickness when he saw one. He pulled out his smartphone immediately and began to dial his physician.
“Doctor Vetrov is the best in the business,” he said.
What Margot heard was, “The ventricle artery is blocked from sickness.”
She sank into panic and shock at the same time. She then passed out.
By the time Kent got her to the hospital, she had begun to turn very red. The paramedic team that responded to ‘victims of burns brought to hospital in lieu of the ambulances’ took Marlot into the the Chemical Burns Unit, fearing the worst from exposure to mixtures which had already caused severe caustic damage. Upon further diagnosis, the attending physician noted that Margot’s physical temperature had risen to 212 degrees Fahrenheit since her admittance to the hospital. When, in the pure oxygen environment, her skin burst into flame, the rest of the Chemical Burns Unit team had no chance.

Margot’s body was nothing but a pile of black dust when Edgar Farrow, Chief Medical Specialist of Cadaver Remains Diagnosis investigated what was left of her. The source of her sickness seemed to be nothing more than spontaneous combustion.
But she had been sick, before.
Or so her friend had said.
The man with the very high fever.

The End?

Local Woman Inadvertently Brings About End of the World
By Lamont Crimsly

Talbot County A Talbot County woman may be responsible for bringing about the end of the world. Mrs Eleanor Horn of 6660 St. Johns Street, near Warpingtown opened her barn for the first time in over half a century to find four very peculiar horsemen waiting inside.
“I have no idea how they got in there,” Horn claimed, saying that she didn’t think the door had been opened since before her father died in June of 1966.
Horn claims that she heard some music coming from the barn when she was bringing in her goats to feed.
“I figured that some youthful hooligans had gotten together a little band and broke into my barn to start it up”. What she found was that the same padlock was in place on the barn doors as it had always been.
Horn searched for the key and after a few hours was able to open the barn doors. “I was nervous, because my father always made sure no one ever opened that barn.” She claimed that the racket was extremely loud, however and was worried that a neighbor might call the authorities.
Upon opening the doors, Horn said four armed men riding four horses came out. She said that each horse was a different color; one white, one black, one reddish and the last one quite “pale”.
Horn was immediately reminded of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “My father was a minister around these parts his whole life and he was always preaching on the Four Horsemen. What with all the bad news in the world since I let them out of my barn, I reckon this may be the end of the world and that it is my fault.”

The Thing in the Wall.

'Where's Nelson?' I ask, looking around. It is four, and I have to leave in thirty seconds.

'He's gone to the Storage Room', says Erica, the new girl. I have got to GO. I have no time to wait for Nelson to do something I asked him to do three days ago.

This is not making me happy. I go to the elevator and I ride it ten floors down to the basement level. Mainly old paper records here. The lights are off. I switch them on and begin to walk down the corridor of shelves with boxes filled with files.

'Nelson. NELSON!' I'm shouting at him, hoping that the need for volume will overwhelm the slight tone of anger I feel at having to come all the way down. Nelson is not a bad guy. I like his personality. Personality does not get work done. Looking for the Jacobson files was something that needed to be done about a half-year ago. Nelson decided that this week was the perfect week, since we had gone though every other aspect of the case.

So he decided to do it today. With five minutes to go.

THUMP!

What was that?

'Nelson!'

He's not answering me, and I notice that I'm coated in a cold sweat. He's fallen. I know it.

Just what I need. To sit here with an employee with a cracked head, while the new girl tries to remember the number for 9-1-1.

I keep moving along the corridor of shelves, and I notice a greenish light coming from the back recesses of the stacks of shelves.

'Nelson!, Nelson are you alright?' I can't help but notice the slightly timid tone in my voice. What am I afraid of? I've been down here millions of times.

The light gets brighter, and I look to see where it is coming from. I am assailed with a stench that nearly sends me staggering back on my feet.

I continue to the end of the corridor and look right and then left.

To the left is something that defies explanation. Nelson's lower half, his feet and legs are protruding from what looks like neon green paint on the wall. Glowing Neon-Green paint that is oozing a sickly smell of death. He's being pulled in, one lurching shift at a time. I lean down to grab his feet. Someone is saying 'Nelsonnelsonelsonelsonelson'. Then I realize it's me.

A long thin tendril of shiny black reached through the green from the other side. It whips against my face, and I feel a stinging there and I know that I'm screaming and crying. There is a warmth in my groin. Many more tendrils come through the green goo each curling against the cement walls.

From the midst of the goo I see a round bulbous shape protruding. The goo does not stick to it, but falls on poor Nelson's pants. The center of the bulb splits like an old person's toothless mouth and I see within it a row of silver teeth. Or maybe they are fingers. I think they're wiggling. One tendril has wrapped itself around my neck and I feel myself pulled in. I'm not able to panic, All I feel is impending death, my heart beating like a hammer in my chest. Oh, God. Ellen will miss me. She won't understand. I was going to ask her to marry me tonight.

Oh God.

The stench...