(SSSC) Seven Days

Seven Days

Small streams of light poured in through the blinds of the man’s single window. Located on the same side of the small apartment as his bed, Derek felt the searing brightness from the window penetrate his eyelids and awaken him from his deep sleep. The force of the light pried Derek’s eyes open, and he inhaled deeply as the shock of the light forced open his tiny pupils. Derek could feel the dilation stretch his pupils to an unnatural diameter. Pain flowed through his eyes into his brain, and he felt his hangover. Familiarity returned, and Derek began his usual Monday morning routine.

Being an alcoholic was not easy, but one got used to the tortured mornings and everyone developed their own tricks for returning their bodies to normalcy. During his only two AA meetings Derek had met a man who prescribed tomato juice and raw eggs for a beer morning. He felt like this was a beer morning. Derek stretched out his legs and rolled over to sit up on the corner of his bed. He searched out the floor at the foot of the bed and found his piss stained Haines from the weekend. Derek slipped the cotton underwear over his feet and up his legs, letting them rest on his hips, the elastic a little slack as he got up from his spring filled resting place. Forcing his legs to make the journey to the kitchen Derek called out for his dog, Pokey. A small Shih tsu, Pokey was the only guard dog Derek needed. Pokey would bark at anything, and it was usually the dog’s high pitched yelping and whining that brought Derek out of his weekend blasé, the dog was always very hungry on Monday mornings.

For over three years, Derek had continued on the same path of alcoholism. Everyone at work knew his problem, but Derek would always show up on time and he did do decent work. Derek was a rare alcoholic; he saved his indulgences for the weekend.

After pouring his tomato juice and opening a couple eggs into the same glass, he gulped back the concoction that would make the pain subside. Derek grabbed the Kibbles-n-Bits from under the sink as soon as The Cure hit his belly. Before he could pour the dog’s food however, Derek was ambushed by an aural onslaught that split his head and toppled his alcohol-weakened body to the enameled floor of his kitchen. The phone rang with such force that Derek could do nothing but writhe in pain on the floor. For what seemed like an eternity Derek crawled on his hands and knees towards the sound. First one hand than the opposite knee, Derek moved helplessly toward the objective that always seemed just out of his reach. The ringing would not stop and every tone that emitted from the speaker on the side of the phone felt like a safety pin had been plunged deep into his frontal lobe. “Pick up you #ing machine!” Derek thought to himself as he struggled to end the incessant ringing. When he thought his brain would explode from the pressure that had built up inside his skull, Derek reached the cord on the wall and pulled the phone from it’s place on the end table, just outside of the passageway that connected his living room to the kitchen. Derek left his head to rest on the soft but filthy carpet in his living room as the bare kitchen floor cooled the other half of his mostly naked body.

“Hello? Derek, are you there? Are you there? Hello!” Small, seemingly insignificant sounds traveled through the air between the phone’s receiver and Derek’s ears.

“Uh.” Derek allowed the sound to pass through his clenched teeth and into the receiver.

“Derek, God-damnit! Where the hell have you been?” It was that little prick from Accounting, what was his name?

“Yeah.” Derek replied as he turned down the speaker volume on his phone.

“Where the hell have you been,” The Prick replied. “You better be real sick, ‘cause the boss is pissed.” Andrew, that was The Prick’s name.

“Listen Andrew, I must have over slept. The weekend was kinda rough. I’ll be in soon.” Derek kept his sentences short, his mind would not allow him to clearly formulate a complex thought, let alone speak at length.

“The weekend?!” Andrew’s voice rose, he was definitely pissed. “You had a rough weekend?! It’s Friday afternoon, I haven’t seen you in all week and people are talking. That drunk this and that drunk that. That’s what they’re saying, Derek. You had better have a good excuse.” A small click followed The Prick’s tirade and then dead air. Andrew The Prick had hung up.

Friday? Derek’s confusion let his eyes roam to the blinking light on the phone indicating that he had unchecked messages. The quick push of a button signaled the machine to spew forth a prerecorded announcement.

“Four unheard messages. Listen to messages?” Derek pushed the button again to cancel the message playback function.

“Four messages,” Derek said to no one in particular. “One for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.” A quick glance at the clock told Derek it was twelve-thirty. He had better hurry.

Derek raced into the kitchen, hastily poured the dog food into the food bowl on the floor, spilling some, and refilled the water bowl with fresh water. He left the stray bits of food on the floor of the kitchen. After finding nearly fresh socks on the floor in the bedroom Derek pulled them over his yellow toenails. A stray thread caught the edge of the big toe on his left foot and tore the nail from its root. The nail did not cause any pain, and Derek let it fall to the floor choosing instead to pull his trousers over the soiled underwear he was already wearing. Derek didn’t hear the low growl that came from under his bed.

Having already thrown a wrinkled shirt over his pock marked body; Derek hurried from his apartment towards the elevator while he tightened the Windsor around his neck. Derek walked through the open elevator doors, and pressed the button that would take the elevator to the ground floor. Resting against the far wall of the small box as it descended, Derek observed the backs of three other occupants of the elevator as they moved purposefully toward the front of the small space; one passenger hit the button for the second floor. “Assholes,” Thought Derek as the elevator chimed, signaling that it had reached the second floor. The doors slid open smoothly onto the hall where two more passengers waited to get on. The three people Derek had been traveling to the ground floor with got off at this floor, and the two waiting to get on stood motionless, staring into the open elevator with looks of bewilderment that mirrored those of the passengers that had just gotten off. Derek stood, still resting against the back wall of the elevator and returned the glares of all five assholes that refused to ride down with him.

“Too good for me, huh?” Derek said to them as he pried himself away from his resting place and pushed the button for the doors to close. “No problem.”

“Oh my god …” Said a female voice before the closing doors cut her off.

When the elevator came to rest at the ground floor, Derek waited a second for the doors to open and moved quickly through the lobby, the crowd parting for him as he headed for the doors that lead to the street outside. Reaching the street in record time, Derek hopped into a cab that just dropped off a pretty woman in a business suit.

“Twenty-second and Third.” Derek commanded to the cab driver as he sat down in the back seat. The cab driver glanced into the rearview, his face scrunched into a tight ball of muscle and tendon, his eyes barely visible and the lower portion covered by a handkerchief.

“Sure,” The driver said in muffled tones that barely escaped the polyester material that covered his mouth and nose. The driver reached for the fare box and started the meter at five dollars.

“Five bucks! Are you mad?” Derek cried. “I take this route everyday and it doesn’t run me anymore than five total!” His anger made clear to the driver by the quick and brutal tone in Derek’s voice.

“Rate hike,” The driver spoke in an accent that combined with his turban caused Derek to conclude that he was Hindu. “Everyone has to eat.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Derek mumbled. No matter, today was not the day to argue over a couple of dollars. Today was the day when alcoholism might catch up to him. Mr. Belmont, Derek’s boss, hated drinkers. Ever since the accident that left his daughter, Amanda, a paraplegic, Mr. Belmont had no time for Derek’s problem. Although the board of health and safety had deemed alcoholism a disease that needed treatment, Mr. Belmont’s pain at the sight of his crippled daughter was unleashed on Derek every chance the boss had. This could possibly be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The cab came to a stop in front of Orion Head Office, and Derek paid the driver eight dollars.

“Keep the fifty cents.” Derek stated before he shut the rear door of the cab. As he walked into the building, Andrew The Prick immediately accosted Derek.

“You’re toast, buddy.” A small smile turned The Prick’s mouth into a pompous smirk. “Belmont wants to see you immediately.” Andrew really was a dick, Derek thought. He had probably told the boss that Derek had been bingeing and that was why he couldn’t make it to work. Even still, the thought had just occurred to him, how could a man miss four days of work and not remember anything beyond the previous Friday afternoon? These thoughts occupied his mind as Derek pushed passed The Prick, so enveloped in thought that he didn’t notice Andrew’s smirk turn into a visage of horror and disgust as Derek brushed past.
_________________

Derek walked as though possessed; leaving in his wake a plethora of appalled faces and turned stomachs, heading inexorably towards the office of one Mr. Belmont. It was not until he had reached the knob to the office that consciousness left Derek’s mind.


_____________________________________________________________________
“That #ing drunk,” Paul Belmont thought as he sat in his plush leather chair, overseeing the profit sheets scattered across his oak finished antique desk. “The health and safety commission has thwarted all my attempts to terminate that scum Derek Thompson.” Thought Belmont. “Not this time. Drunks are good for nothing, diseased creatures that disserve no quarter in life. They need to be locked up in jail, all of them.” These were the thoughts running through Paul Belmont’s mind as the doorknob to his office began to slowly turn counterclockwise and the heavy wood door crept leisurely inward.

As Andrew followed Derek along the hallway towards Mr. Belmont’s office he past various cubicles where the usual sound of keyboards being pounded was replaced by the twisted retching of employees and the slopping of their purges into wastebaskets across the office. Andrew himself was shocked at his own ability to resist the urge to relieve his stomach of the recently offending lunch he had just devoured. Andrew was careful not to follow too closely as the smell from Derek’s passage seemed to linger for a few moments before moving on. As he watched the door to Mr. Belmont’s office close behind Derek, Andrew could not help but feel the impending doom and had turned and was running full out by the time the screams started.

At the sounds of pain coming from the boss’s office, various heads raised from their wastebaskets, dripping mucous and the odd undigested morsel from quivering lips. As if all at once the room was on its feet, standing uncomfortably and shooting nervous glances at each other. To an outsider looking in, it may have seemed that the crowd was preparing to give a standing ovation, celebrating an Oscar worthy performance from their chief of staff. However, all eyes turned to the office door as the screaming subsided, and the gate to hell creaked open.

Slowly the door opened wider, beginning as a mere crack the opening eventually revealed a figure that seemed to drip flesh from its body. As the door struck the stop designed to save the drywall from being penetrated by the knob, the crowd witnessed the unveiling of the office behind. Blood splatter doused the walls; Mr. Belmont’s body lay prone on the expensive Asian rug that covered most of the office his head seemed to have been torn from his body. All eyes once again returned to the figure in the doorway, and before anyone could realize that it was eating Mr. Belmont’s brain from out of his skull they had already turned and began running for the exits.

Letting out a tortured wail, the corpse that was once Derek Thompson shuffled slowly towards the crowd rushing for the exits. The panicked mass had caused a bottleneck effect at all the doorways and as the corpse tossed Paul Belmont’s empty skull aside it was already reaching out to commandeer another. Blood and brain matter mashed in between the snarling creature’s teeth as it brought down Carol Bowman from Human Resources.


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Sirens roared down Twenty-Second Street. Blue and red lights flashed chaos across the brick and concrete buildings along the side of the well-traveled road. According to the complainant, Andrew Harper, a disgruntled employee named Derek Thompson entered the Orion building at approximately 12:45 pm and attacked the owner, Mr. Paul Belmont. Officer Tyson Rockfield and his partner Sandra O’Rielly were the closest to the scene at the time the radio call came over the police band. Speeding through the light afternoon traffic the officers reached the building within five minutes of the original call. Tyson screeched the cruiser to a halt and slammed the car into park.

“Careful, Sandra. This could get rough.” Tyson warned as they got out of the cruiser. Tyson’s experience in shots fired situations was not lost on Sandra. She both admired and respected her partner, who had taught her much over the last three months they had been assigned to each other.

Reaching the door of the three-story building, the two officers entered Orion’s head office. Screams could be heard just beyond the lobby, and as they stepped inside the building a swarm of fleeing employees confronted the officers. Sandra instinctively jumped behind Tyson, who was a mountain of a man, and drew her police issue .45. Tyson would not be slowed much by the surging mass of frightened employees. Seeing the abject terror in their faces, Tyson’s instincts in human relations told him that it would be pointless to try and induce order into these escaping office people. Instead he bulled his way towards the main floor, throwing puny software programmers and receptionists out of the way. The odd necktie wearing geek would grunt loudly as he slammed face first into Tyson’s massive and heavily armored chest. Trudging through the sea of living flesh, Sandra stayed close behind Tyson, one hand griped his belt and left her knuckles white from the strain. Sandra’s other hand held her glock in a firm but relaxed grip, pointed at the ceiling and positioned close to her body.

Tyson was fast for a man of his size, and his defensive lineman background made it easy for him to clear a path to the main offices. Clubbing people aside with his left hand and raising his right as if swimming through a sea of water and not people, Tyson alternated hands and sides. It really did appear as though he was swimming through the masses.

When the officers got close enough, Tyson grabbed the side molding of the doorway and pulled, his right forearm bulged with effort and his bicep knotted into what looked to Sandra to resemble twenty-inch thick rope, strained to the point of snapping. With a low snarl, Tyson drew the two officers into the doorway.

It became obvious immediately that these people had reason to run. About ten feet from the doorway leading to the lobby crouched what appeared to be a man. The man hunched with his head down tearing apart the flesh of his victim, attacking the throat with his hands and teeth. The man savagely tore chunks of flesh from the victim’s neck with his teeth and wrenched with unbelievable force at the head. It seemed to Tyson that it was trying to cleave the head from the body.

Sandra bumped slightly into Tyson’s back as he stopped in the doorway. Not moving for a moment Sandra let her ears take in the scene first. What she heard disturbed her. It sounded at first like a slow sucking. Wet noises accompanied grunts and guttural accents, slopping and slurping, followed by heavy breathing and an occasional crack like a knot of wood popping in a fire assaulted her ears. Sandra crept her head to the side of Tyson’s massive frame, took one look at the carnage in front of him, aimed her weapon and fired three shots into the man who hovered above the victim.

Tyson was snapped from his hypnosis by the sound of Sandra’s glock erupting as it spewed metal projectiles into the flesh of the man who at this point could only be described as a cannibal. Sending the murderer flying onto his back, the two officers had only moments to take in the gravity of the disfigurement that this poor woman had been subjected to. Almost as soon as Sandra had holstered her weapon, the man got up off the floor. Three holes were visible in his torso as he slowly rose to his feet. Tyson was the one who now drew his weapon. His experience pushed the fear aside and his training took over.

“Freeze asshole!” Tyson ordered. The man labored forward, arms outstretched. He resembled a mummy from the old horror movies Tyson watched as a kid. Dragging his back foot along the floor, the man, who must have been Derek Thompson, inched toward the officers with slow but deliberate determination.

“Get on the floor! On the floor, asshole!” Tyson’s orders did nothing to stop the slow moving figure from continuing his journey. Only four or five feet remained between them. Sandra redrew her gun and prepared to fire when Tyson’s muzzle erupted with one round aimed at the man’s head. Plowing through skull, brain and finally more skull, the remains of Derek Thompson’s bloody thinking meat was left splattered on the floor just above where his body lay still.

The two officers pointed their guns to the ground, and walked in a crouched posture toward the remains of Thompson’s victim. The remains appeared to be those of a woman, and the identification tag on the body named the victim Carol Bowman, Human Resources.

“Poor woman.” Sighed Sandra, who still could not separate personal feelings from her job.

“Yeah, nasty little scratch she got, eh.” Tyson chuckled a little nervously as he continued on to check the body of the suspect. When he got to the second body, Tyson visually searched for an identification tag like the victim wore. Not finding one, Tyson allowed his eyes to investigate the body as a whole. The suspect was covered in blood, and had half of his face blown away by Tyson’s police issue Glock .45. At close range the firearm could do some serious damage. Tyson noticed that the man appeared to have suffered grievous injury himself, and to his untrained eye, Tyson also thought that the body appeared to be already decomposing. “Better let the coroners figure that one out,” he thought to himself.

[edit on 21-10-2007 by Enrikez]

As Tyson moved to investigate the remainder of the scene he noticed the carnage in the office at the end of the hall. Moving quickly passed the numerous cubicles toward the office Tyson spied another body among the blood soaked walls.

Tyson turned when he heard the commotion behind him. Backup had finally arrived. Officers poured in through the doorway leading from the lobby, some Tyson recognized while others he did not.

“Tyson, grab your partner and get over here!” Tyson’s boss bellowed from above the first victim they discovered. Tyson was interested to find Sandra puking in the far corner of the offices. Tyson walked towards his partner, careful not to disturb the integrity of the crime scene. When he reached her he put his hand on her shoulder, and without saying anything walked her back towards the bodies.

“Chief.” Tyson addressed his boss.

“Tyson, you and the rook get back to the station and start your reports before she becomes bulimic.” The chief motioned towards Sandra. “I’ll get the rest of the guys to set up the crime scene, it’ll take forensics a few minutes to get here. This mess won’t be cleaned up until morning.”

“Sure thing, Chief.” Tyson responded. Tyson was used to being cutout of the investigative part of the job. He didn’t mind, Tyson looked at himself as an enforcer of the law and so did his boss. “Let the detective wimps have their fun,” Tyson thought, “I already had mine.”

“Oh, Tyson. I almost forgot.” The Chief was always ‘almost forgetting’ something. “Officer O’Rielly gave me the quick run through of what happened here, I’m goin’ to send you over to the coroner’s office next week after they’ve dissected these meat wagons. I think you can give them the exact story from then on in. You know, help ‘em out a little?”

“Sure chief,” Tyson chided.

“You two take the rest of the week off.” Tyson was used to the down time associated with a shooting incident. It was supposed to settle the officers down and help them deal with the fact that they just killed someone. Tyson did not need the therapy offered at the station after such incidents, but he thought that he might just make an appearance for Sandra’s sake. “Just finish those reports okay?” The chief put his hand on the bulk of muscle that was Tyson’s shoulder, patted it twice and turned back toward the crime scene.


_______________________________________________________________________

The examination room of the coroner’s office was an unpleasant place to be at the best of times. For Sandra and Tyson, seeing the three bodies laid out in front of them made the two officers even more on edge. The coroner, a slightly brooding man, was busy setting the chest splitter into the corpse of Derek Thompson when Tyson approached him.

“Any leads, doc?” Tyson questioned.

The coroner left the corpse with its chest cavity gaping wide while he walked, slouched and shuffling his feet, towards a group of bodies that lay on the other side of the room. Tyson followed him and motioned for his partner to do the same. Sandra had the look of a deer mesmerized by the lights of oncoming traffic while it stood in the middle of the road. Even with Tyson there, the therapy did not seem to have helped her conscious much. She may not like being surrounded by corpses, but she followed Tyson’s instructions.

“Bus accident.” The coroner stated. His voice had a slow and minor slurred quality to it. The deliberateness with which the small man spoke evidenced a certain rasping that sounded as if it began deep in the man’s lungs, and gained force as air was pushed past his teeth.

“I haven’t done much with your bodies yet.” He continued. “Nineteen from the accident came in about four hours after yours.” Tyson saw six bodies clustered closely together, each on their individual steel gurneys, which the coroner was now standing beside. “Crowded this place pretty good. Most were simple head wound trauma victims, very fast work as for cause of death; some have even been buried already. There are two still in the lockers,” The coroner motioned with his left hand at the far wall of the examination room, where the bodies were laid on similar gurney’s that slid in and out of the wall. “Those have internal injuries that need to be catalogued and explained. These six here are slow work, they are the worst of the bunch. They all have multiple injuries, lacerations and breaks mostly. It takes time to narrow down the exact cause of death in these cases.”

The coroner pronounced each word as if it were it’s own sentence. All the time in the world, it seemed that this man had. His rasping voice tickled the nerve in Tyson’s shoulder that controlled the officer’s annoyance level.

“I was just about to remove your partner’s bullets from this man’s chest,” The coroner pointed at the corpse of Derek Thompson. “When you walked in.” The coroner never looked at Tyson, he was always looking at the tiled floor or the rotting bodies that lay spread out in the room. This did not just tickle Tyson’s annoyance nerve, it tugged at it with little pulls that sent small waves of anger through the officers body as the three of them walked back to Derek’s corpse.

The coroner reached into the pocket of his lab coat and produced a large set of pliers, plunging them deeply into the open space that used to be Derek Thompson’s chest.

“All I could accomplish,” The coroner continued, “Was a few preliminary incisions.” The coroner then produced a small scalpel from the same pocket as the pliers, and began cutting away muscle and sinew from around the bullets that rested deep in the body. “Then I had to use this,” The coroner held up his pliers before shoving them back into the body. “To remove all the glass shards from the accident victims.” As he spoke the slouching man expertly removed all three bullets that Sandra had released into Derek’s body the week before, and dropped them into a steel bowl beside the body, which looked to be filled with some sort of solution that reeked of alcohol. Tyson noticed the precision with which the coroner worked, “Steady hands.” The officer thought.

“Interesting scenario you’ve brought me.” The coroner continued when he was finished removing the steel slugs from the body.

“Interesting,” The man repeated as he moved around to the other side of the corpse. “Because bodies usually don’t start rotting until after they’re dead.” The coroner produced a tube that had been hidden from view by the angle that the officer’s were viewing the scene before them. In his latex covered hand, the coroner brought the tube over to what seemed to be a fresh corpse, and after making a small incision with his scalpel, inserted the tube into the body’s belly button. Blood started to flow through the tube, making wet splashing sounds as it hit the bucket on the floor below the body.

“You don’t sterilize your instruments, sir?” Sandra spoke for the first time.

The coroner raised his eyes from the fresh body, and for the first time looked directly at the officers, puzzlement furrowed his brow. “These people cannot catch infection, my dear.” The man spoke in a tone only the demented humor of a man who surrounded himself with death could produce. While a small smile crept over his face, the coroner continued, “They are already dead.”

The emphasis on the last word made the hair on Sandra’s arms stand at attention, and a shiver accelerate up her spine.

“You mean this guy was rotten before we shot him?” Tyson brought the subject back to their case, and reinforced his earlier observation of the scene.

“The rate of deterioration in the soft tissue of the body suggests to me that this man had been dead for about seven days.” The coroner’s voice picked up momentum as he spoke, “Before he got here.” The coroner continued, “From what I saw of his arteries, blood hasn’t been flowing through his body.” The rasping got worse as the man picked up speed. “The heart hasn’t pumped blood for a considerable period of time, very strange.” Tyson looked at Sandra, and saw in her reaction what he felt inside himself, but would not reveal. The look of her face and the feelings inside Tyson were the same, confusion and something more primal. Maybe a tinge of fear?

“What’s this?” The coroner spouted, back again to his slow and deliberate way of speech. The coroner reached down to the corpse’s ankle and lifted the leg off the gurney. On the calf of the corpse Tyson saw what the coroner was looking at, a small grouping of puncture wounds a few millimeters in diameter and not very deep.

“A bite,” The coroner exclaimed with more than a little confusion.

“Someone bit him?” Sandra came to the obvious conclusion, and voiced it.

“No,” Answered the coroner. “Not someone, but something. These punctures are not shaped like a human’s tooth pattern.” The coroner brought his face closer to the wounds. “They look canine.”

_____________________________________________________________________

The investigation team led by Chief Brian Stanton, arrived at Derek Thompson’s residence only after extensive questioning of the man who reported the incident at the Orion building. That questioning revealed that Mr. Thompson was a heavy drinker who frequented Dirty Dick’s, a bar just south of his apartment. The team headed there first. After questioning the regulars, who would no doubt have seen Derek in the bar at times, they had gathered what amounted to very little information. It seemed that Derek Thompson was not a very well known person; sure everyone knew his face and name the detectives questioned, but any personal information that could be of use in their investigation was scarce. The team had been given Derek’s home phone number from Andrew Harper, and to trace the number to an address was a quick task that took only seconds. Having exhausted their leads on the street the chief directed the team to the Thompson residence.

Derek Thompson lived not in squalor, but by the look of the building he was not a rich man either. Brian Stanton led his men through the lobby and into the elevator that would take them to Derek’s floor. The doors to the elevator opened to reveal the hallway beyond, and Brian stepped out of the elevator. The men who accompanied the chief were three handpicked detectives and a forensics expert that Brian had not met before. The four men approached the door to Derek’s apartment and waited.

“Okay boys,” The chief said. “Show time.” Brian grabbed the doorknob to Derek’s apartment and twisted it clockwise, the knob turned. “Not locked.” The chief thought.

Pushing the door open, the team entered the apartment.

Tyson thought about the puncture wounds on Derek Thompson’s calf as the coroner continued working on the body. He thought that they were probably superficial, but could not shake the feeling that they were odd. Even to his untrained eye, Tyson could tell the difference between the punctures and the bullet wound that had torn most of Derek’s face off. The coroner had said that the difference was usually a key in deciding if the wounds were inflicted pre or post mortem. The coroner told Tyson and his partner that the punctures appeared to be pre mortem, but the bullet wounds were inflicted after death.

“What do you think of that, weird huh?” Sandra leaned close and whispered into Tyson’s ear.

“Come over here,” Tyson responded, and walked Sandra to a corner of the room by the shelves in the wall of the examination room that held the bodies not being worked on. Out of earshot of the coroner Tyson watched the strange man as he spoke. “Either this guy is crazy, or we have a very weird situation on our hands.”

“Yeah,” Sandra replied. “He probably thinks we’re crazy. Did you see how he looked at us when we told him that the perp was ripping her head off when we found him.” Sandra pointed to the half decapitated body of Carol Bowman, which the coroner was busy removing vital organs from.

“Did you here that?” Tyson said suddenly, as he turned to face the shelves in the wall.

“No, I didn’t hear any…” Sandra was cut off by a loud bang from inside one of the shelves. Tyson, startled, instinctively reached for the glock on his hip, as Sandra let out a short but piercing shriek. The hard steel brought calm back to his moment of surprise, and he put his finger to his lips to indicate that Sandra should be quite.

“What was that?” The coroner hollered from the other side of the room, looking up from the body of Carol Bowman. Tyson signaled for silence from him as well, and the coroner began shuffling slowly towards to the officers. Whisking sounds began to emanate from one of the shelves, similar to the sound windbreaker pants make when someone walks in them, followed by three more loud bangs.

Tyson reached out to the shelf where the sounds were coming from slowly with his left hand, careful to keep his right firmly on the .45 in its holster. More whisking sounds and loud crashes started to come from the shelf next to the one Tyson was reaching for, and then from the shelf above that one. The chorus of shifting sounds and banging crashes was accompanied by muffled voices coming from other shelves along the wall. Tyson grabbed the handle of the shelf he originally reached for, and yanked hard and fast. The shelf flew open, smashing to a halt at the point where it was extended to its maximum, revealing the body of a young woman, naked, and badly bruised. A gory hole in the left side of her skull was big enough to see splintered bone, but was cleaned of blood. The woman’s head fell to the side, the banging did not stop from the other shelves on the wall and as the woman opened her mouth, Tyson heard Sandra’s body hit the floor as she fainted.

“What is happening? Where am I?” The woman screamed. “Help me! Help me!” She continued to repeat herself as other shelves slammed open, revealing hideously deformed bodies that echoed the naked woman’s words screaming for help, or expressing their confusion.

_______________________________________________________________________


Brian Stanton had no idea of the events happening at that moment across town at the coroner’s office. Brian’s thoughts were squarely on the task in front of him. His mission was to open the door before him and investigate the residence of Derek Thompson, hopefully finding some clue as to the gruesome scene at Orion head office. As the door swung open, the foul stench of decay wafted into the hallway of the apartment building. Disgusted, Stanton and his men pushed forward, and into the apartment. Immediately visible to the men was the kitchen to the right. A few unwashed dishes sat on the counter, and an untouched bowl of dog food lay on the floor, surrounded by scattered bits of food that littered the filthy tiles.

“Fed the dog and then killed his boss. A caring psychopath.” Stanton thought as he motioned for his men to be quite while spreading the investigation through the rest of the apartment. It was not until Stanton was opening the freezer door (Where many psychos keep their most prized possessions) that he heard the scream coming from the back of the apartment. Vicious growling and barking preceded the gun shots that rang through the small apartment as the chief hurried to the origin of the disturbance, screams echoing off the walls as he ran.

When Brian reached what appeared to be Derek Thompson’s bedroom, he walked into a nightmare. Stanton saw all four of his men bleeding and screaming in terror. The forensics expert lay on his back at the end of the bed, trying in vain to fight off the small dog biting at his throat. Carcasses of small rodents lined the room, and Stanton could hear small bones crunching as the forensics expert rolled over them in his fight with Derek’s dog. The other three men that Stanton had brought with him were having problems of their own as well.

All three seemed to be under attack from unseen assailants. It wasn’t until one of the men kicked a tiny ball of fur from out of his trousers that Brian realized his men were being eaten by rats. As he looked around Stanton saw the holes in the walls where they were now emerging. Scores of rats began to flood the room, over taking his men in a sea of straggling fur that moved and tore flesh without remorse.

Chief Stanton was just beginning to draw his pistol from its holster when the dog stopped its attack on the forensics guy and began to eye Brian as he stood in the doorway of the bedroom. Fumbling with the safety, Brian only managed two shot to the dog’s body as it pulled its way along the floor on its two front legs. From what Brian could see the dog had no hindquarters at all, a trail of intestine unraveled along the floor behind it as the dog slowly inched forward. The last thing that Brian Stanton saw before pain erased his consciousness was the dog tearing at his thigh while rough hairs moved over his body creating islands of searing heat along his face and chest.

Sandra awoke from the cold floor of the examination room disoriented. She felt as though she just survived the most vivid and dangerous dream of her life. In her dream the dead walked the earth. Visions of cemeteries filled with nothing but holes underneath tombstones haunted her vision the same way a bright spot will leave a trace after staring directly at the sun. Her vision included the dead shuffling down the sidewalks of the city, some dressed in the finest suits and gowns, all covered in dirt and blood. What she saw when the residue of her dream had passed was as strange as the dream itself.

As Sandra rose from the floor of the examination room, she saw Tyson and the coroner through a circle of naked flesh, catching glimpses of their clothes as the mass shifted. Although mostly naked, the people who surrounded her partner and the coroner looked to have suffered all sorts of nasty accidents and wounds, any of which would have caused much discomfort to any human being. These people looked to suffer very minor affects of their injuries however, for they appeared to be moving quite well for the condition their bodies were in. As a matter of fact, when Sandra moved closer, it looked like there was quite the commotion going on. Limbs were brushing against bodies, and the mass of people in front of her seemed to shift and move position with each other for no apparent reason. Sandra could see Tyson’s blue uniform through the maze of limbs, shifting along with the mass.

In her dazed state, Sandra brushed past a gurney on her way to the crowd, which knocked over a small glass bottle of cleaning fluid, which in turn smashed into tiny shards on the floor. Hearing the glass break, the crowd turned around in unison to face Sandra. Their faces were deformed and covered in blood, some had chunks of meat hanging from their mouths as they turned. An object dropped from the hands of one of the naked men and rolled towards Sandra’s feet. As she bent to pick the object up off the ground, she stared into the eyes of her partner. Sandra’s jaw dropped open, hoping to let out a scream that never came. As she rose from the knee that she had lowered herself on, her eyes left the empty skull of her partner, and leveled off to meet the eyes of the naked crowd that shuffled toward her. Sandra merely watched, in shock, as the mass of undead lurched the final few feet until they would reach her.

Sandra’s thought as the first naked woman put her hands on the officer’s throat was that she had not yet awakened from her dream. As the pain of teeth tearing through her flesh raced through her brain, Sandra still had the presence of mind to close her eyes, hoping that she would wake soon. When the final shadow passed through her mind, Sandra was sure that is what it felt like to know you were waking from a dream.

Very long but very good . Man you sure can write! Brovo!

Thanks for the kind words!

I was pretty worried about posting this, mostly because I wasn't sure if people would bother reading a longer story. I'm really glad you enjoyed it.

It needs some 'tightening up' and the ending feels a little forced, I have a problem because there is really no main character for the reader to identify with etc. There are a few things I am not happy with, including the editing (or lack thereof).

However, I think it is an enjoyable adventure to go on and there are a few clever little things in there that people may not get in their first read, it's a little more complex than I should have attempted, but oh well.

That was a damn good story, I was hoping you would actually go farther! Great job!

The part about the dog slithering with entrails trailing was very gruesome and creepy. Excellent crime scene Halloween story. Zombie hell! Keep up the good writing you have a real talent.

This is a dope story!!