Bring Me Flesh, I'll Bring Hell Read online

  Nothing in life goes so easy as that.

  Instead, it was a cubby hole set into the floor that people had been traipsing across for years; Owen walked over it coming to and from this place without ever noticing that inside the deep and damp hole lay the curled and bound skeleton of a dead woman.

  Beetles bred and reproduced in her old bones; shrouds of rotted fabric. I could make out the detail of the skeleton and the crack that spiderwebbed from the clean plane of her skull and illustrated how she ended up here. A blow to the head. Beside her skull, the glint of jewelry; silver baubles she had been lain to rest with and necklaces around her throat. One wrought in the shape of an astrological sign and I understood then, through the filaments of hair matted and tangled in the webs and used as nesting material for errant rats—this was the real Madam Astra.

  Once upon a time, this had been a real functioning shop with a real functioning woman who told fortunes and believed in the fates. I saw the line of events with clarity—my wife in her tattered clothes, bloody with a set of my teeth marks—perhaps she hadn’t turned yet. Did she come here for help? Saw the light on and came out of the darkness? And the real Madam Astra would have taken her in, served her tea and read her leaves and held her hand.

  Right up until my wife turned and consumed the shopkeeper—dumping her in this place and then proceeding to consume and usurp everything else. The woman’s identity and her place of business as an empty shell to shelter her while she began to build her empire.

  I cursed and dropped the concrete square back into place. I regretted having discovered it and I sighed and resigned myself. This unknown grave must remain unknown for now. Forget all this, I told myself. There is more yet to do.

  I withdrew the gun, confirmed that my sword remained in my scabbard. I was ready.

  Zzzzt.

  A lone fly crawled from between the grate slats, black body dull marcasite in the half-light. It took off, flying lazily into the stuffy, moldy air, and I jerked the grate from the wall, exposing the opening and letting it clatter overtop the hidden corpse in the floor.

  “I’m coming, Owen,” I whispered.

  *

  Moving silently was not an option.

  The ventilation shaft was large enough to accommodate my size and width, and now that I was reduced to bones and metal plates, I was lighter than I had ever been in life; Owen was wiry and thin, allowing him to pass through the shaft with relative ease. There was no fear of falling through, but I sounded like a big brass band as I advanced, metal plates knocking against sheet metal.

  When I was still alive, and even in death, I loved movie theaters. I loved being enveloped in the kind darkness, waiting for the screen to explode into color and light and reveal moving pictures of impossible fantasies, unrequited love, and bitter revenge. But in all the time I’d spent in movie theaters, never once have I seen a movie that showed me a dirty ventilation shaft.

  In any spy movie where the hero risks his life to sneak his way into a fortified building, the ventilation shafts are clean and slick and sterile as ice; you can catch your own reflection in their smooth finish. The reality poses unexpected difficulties like dust and mouse turds and black mold.

  I scoured clean trails behind me on the surface as I moved, angling my way through a stuffy, claustrophobic descent. I pushed irritated brown recluses and wood spiders ahead of me and cleared out their nests like a whale through a sewage pipe.

  Puffs of particulate grit rose and swirled in my path. I felt packed into a vacuum bag, knocking and cursing all the way down and scrambling for purchase where the duct work graded too steeply. I could do nothing but slide down. At last, my metal plated feet hit an ornate grate at the bottom and, with vigorous kicking, I was rewarded with a clatter and then empty space beyond.

  I squirmed through the opening to fall out onto the floor. Alone in the long, damp hallway, I froze in the darkness, convinced someone must have heard my raucous passage and were laying low, waiting to press their advantage. All my senses, dulled and damped as they were, strained for signs of life. I longed to call out Owen’s name, but the words sputtered and extinguished. Cold concrete discouraged sound with the haunted austerity of a church—cold, impenetrable, and vastly unforgiving.

  My eyes adjusted to the light, seeking forms and shapes through the narrow visor, passing over the dirty floor. In moments, I recognized the doors of the living quarters, where a young boy had shown me my room, and I had showed him my gun, coaxing information from him. The moment passed from me like old reels of a silent film, lost in time.

  The orderly cleanliness of that hallway was gone. Doors once closed when I had first been ushered through the compound now stood open, and some hung askew from their hinges. Claw marks at the doorknobs and indentations in the wood. What few belongings the children had been allowed to have were flung every which way. Picture frames shattered and glass glistened like snow. Bed sheets and red robes strewn in tatters of fabric, blood stained, dirty, and in shreds. The scene filled the onlooker with a deep disquiet that the firearm in my hand could not dispel.

  The silence was absolute.

  I forged on, down the hallway. Beyond the furthest door was the main entrance leading to the altar room and the feast where I had met my hundred children. Where were they now? Beyond the door? Were they little more than animated corpses, waiting for the benediction of my bullet?

  I listened. No tell tale shuffling, no quiet shambling, no drooling zombie-gurgles from beyond.

  I paused. I inhaled and closed my metal, armored hand over the doorknob. My fingers clicked with reptilian sound.

  I opened the door.

  *

  Death lived in this room. I should know; we are well acquainted.

  With the weapon drawn and steady, ready to aim and take fire, I let the firearm fall to my side, still clutched in my hand and the armor grating against bone. The dull black plastic barrel against stained metal plates.

  I recognized the stage I once stood upon and stared at an ocean of children, all Clayton Adamson look-alikes; a slumped corpse lay upon the wooden boards now, as though the figure were only sleeping, waiting to arise and shamble to its feet. No sound, no movement, only silence prevailed. I approached the stage, my visor eye-level with the raised floor.

  “Jessica,” I whispered.

  A pyramid of bones lay crumpled in the center with strands of blond hair clinging to the gypsy garb; if I had hoped to finish her off, I’d arrived too late. Nothing but bones remained. Her skull fractured by a shotgun blast. I studied the shards of her bone fragments and wondered how we began from those backseats in a cheap car on a high school night and called it love; all the way to this very moment.

  I bowed my head and moved on.

  Below the stage, amidst overturned chairs and broken tables, were the children. Their corpses could only have been dead for a day or so, though I had been gone longer than that while convalescing under Niko’s care. Their bodies were emaciated, wrapped still in their religious robes, like monks fallen in combat; slumped here and there, some lay on top of the others, some by themselves. Their arrangement gave no clue to their demise. If they had been running, if something pursued them, if they had been afflicted by Virus X, there was no evidence of it. I expected zombies, and there were none; only dead bodies.

  A hush remained, as though I had stepped into a desert landscape. Emboldened, I yelled.

  “Owen!”

  The silence persisted. I half-expected a corpse to stir and for them to arise as one and confirm my worst fears; to descend upon me with their gnashing teeth, to feed on . . . my bones. To crack me open and extract my marrow. After that, all that would be left was my soul, and surely there was hardly enough there to make a meal.

  There was no sign of Owen. Through the helmet, I was desperate to pick out his form among the small children shapes but there was nothing. My horror at this carnage made it difficult to define my feelings—was I relieved not to see Owen here? Or did I dread that he met
with a fate worse than the peaceful slumber these dead children enjoyed? Was I disappointed?

  In an instant, they all seemed my children, children I should have been able to save. I was their father, and just like my son, I failed them each in their turn.

  I cast my gaze down to my feet. Thought about that uncomfortable sensation of shame, of failure, of bitterness. A sensation that extended beyond flesh and deep scarlet blushes and downcast eyes.

  I turned and left.

  *

  Down the hall I went.

  I sought the far room of my final memories with Jessica where I had confronted my own Id; where Jessica feasted while I wrestled with myself to awaken and fall asleep all at once. I could not imagine there were any other places left in this wretched basement to search though and my steps quickened as I opened the first door into the chamber and then arrived at the last one.

  The memory of Jessica was still fresh, vivid. The leash she pulled me along with, the dank cellar smells permeating every room and hall. The door loomed ahead and I set my hand to the knob to throw the lock.

  “Owen,” I called out, and opened it wide.

  “Vitus!”

  I stopped, my armored hand still extended over the knob; his voice resounding with every burning feeling in my heart to discover him still alive as the door yawned open. Yet, his voice projected from behind me just as the buzzing sound hit the air like a bass turned all the way up on a sound system and stitched out the rhythm of a pulse, insistent, angry, hungry. Caught between one motion and the other, I pirouetted on one heel so I stretched over the threshold to look behind me.

  Owen materialized from blades of dark and shadow with his hand snaking out into the light for me. At first, I thought he was happy to see me, his hand open to touch me, to reaffirm our growing familial bond with an embrace. My skeletal teeth mimicked a smile of delight. Alive! Relief flooded through me to see him unhurt and whole, to acknowledge the healthy glow of his youth, his aching vitality of which I could never share.

  I let go of the door.

  His face twisted, like a rag between two fists. As much as he may have loved me, his cry had not been to greet me—it had been to warn me.

  “Don’t open the door!”

  I turned back. Metal feet scraped the concrete in frantic response. Owen snapped out his firearm, cocked and ready. I lifted my weapon in pantomime of Owen’s dark shadow, turning to face the blackness beyond.

  ZZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTTTTTTT

  *

  Darkness.

  Darkness defined by our desperate and fruitless searching, our attempts to make out shapes in the blackness. Side by side with Owen, we peered into darkness, darkness buzzing and vibrating and trembling on a multiplicity of wings. A textured darkness.

  A darkness stared back.

  Flies.

  Flies so thick they formed a dark swirling mass in the center of the concrete cell, blotting out the center bulb as an eclipse. The mass of flies formed like smoke and a shifting black cloud that moved as a living tornado with a gale force surge of howling wind. I registered the steady hum of their wings. So many of them occupying one space forced their notes to resonate with one another, deepening and expanding the sound. Owen’s face became a flat sheet of paper smoothed of expression and color. The bulb chain in the center swayed with the force of the insects.

  I lifted the Glock; the threat was implied, but what did I fire at? A million targets smaller than a penny? I had expected to be forced to kill a hundred monster children. With sixteen bullets, that goal had seemed absurd; now we had left absurd long ago and crossed over into the realm of surreal.

  The fly mass hovered, buzzed, swirled, so thick they cast a shadow on the floor. I had never seen flies congregate in such a manner, as though they were all sharing a single purpose, a driving ambition without deviation of want or desire.

  In the gust of sucking pressure with the opening of the door, the humming of their ceaseless wings dropped a note and changed direction. Each individual fly turned in symphony and the frenzy of their wings increased in pace as they faced us. The sensation of unnatural fear grew acute, and with it their focus, like a thousand lasers concentrated upon us as one; the Glock trembled, knocked against my metal hand in a senseless ticking.

  Shooting was a foregone conclusion, and I did it anyway, as one whose panic trumps all reason into senseless action. I fired a single round into the black mass. My wrist snapped with recoil and I moved to stand in front of Owen. Heedless of his line of fire. The boy could save his bullets for when he truly needed them; for now, I was going to serve as his human shield.

  The reaction was immediate. As though I had thrown a rock into a still lake, the bullet disappeared into the blackness as the seething flies absorbed it wholly and formed a great black mouth that rippled in response. The rhythm of their beating wings downshifted into a deeper tonal note.

  Their queasy calm provided a prelude to the storm—in the next instant, they shattered apart.

  A collapsing tornado deconstructed the dark column of their mass and suddenly flowed through the opened door in a mist of hairy bodies and beating wings. Their velocity was directed with purpose and undisturbed by our presence as they emptied out of the room. Owen’s throat emitted a dry swallow, an audible click. I had not realized he had grabbed my arm and pushed me to the door to stand aside from the swarm while the last of a million flies seeped from the basement room.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he whispered.

  I cast a glance back down the hall where the flies had disappeared.

  “What is it?” I demanded.

  “They’re alive.”

  “Yes, I get that.”

  “No, I mean . . . they’re single consciousness.”

  “Run that by me again?” I asked.

  Perhaps the helmet was muffling my reason. I strained to hear his words, as though I could comprehend them better with the addition of volume.

  He swallowed, his skin waxen under the feeble light. The lightbulb in the room swung emptily with the breeze of the passing horde. Each detail crowded in on me to impart a feeling of unreality too intense to be anything but real. I would parse these details later to fill my nightmares with the stained concrete and the howling noise of the swarm and marry each horror to my father’s voice reading the words of Julius Caesar in my youth.

  “I don’t understand why—”

  “Help me understand why, then!” I yelled, overwhelmed with a blind urgency. We needed to get out of here. I cast my gaze back in the direction where the flies had gone. I had no reason to believe that something worse wasn’t building outside these doors and lying in wait for us every second we continued to debate our circumstances. This ominous lull was the world about to turn sideways.

  “Her consciousness,” he whispered. “It’s hers. Look, there’s theories that every cell has consciousness. Things like deep quantum chemistry having to do with quantum fields that give these cells a kind of consciousness. Maybe not identity, like you or I have identity . . . but just stick with me on this, okay?”

  I made an impatient motion for him to hurry up and get to the punchline. He stared at the armor, his brow furrowed in confusion as he noticed it for the first time.

  “Does it look like we have time to discuss my fashion choices? We’ll talk about the armor later,” I snapped. “Get to your point, boy.”

  “Look, if Jessica’s cells have individual consciousness, just like all of ours are supposed to, that basic DNA that makes us uniquely us . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “All the maggots she kept inside her, that ate her . . .”

  He trailed off and looked aside, as though he could not meet my gaze. An awkwardness in his affect that inverted my thoughts until it seemed the room rocked and rollicked about me. I reached out to hold the wall to stop my relentless sway to and fro. Implications flooded in fast, one upon the other, until I was punch drunk.

  The maggots from before had fed and slumbered in the
basement depths. While I came to as a pile of bones on Niko’s gurney, they awoke and sighed with the magical work of transformation from worm to imago to winged thing. They emerged sleek and new and hungry. Black and buzzing with the flavor of my wife wound through them.

  They were all a part of . . . Jessica. Parts of her brain, her heart, her lungs, her flesh, all of the soft tissues that made my wife. Every little part of her amplified by the effects of the pre-deceased plague. If I had chopped her into little bits and buried her in a thousand boxes, she would still be alive, still trying to feed, even if all that was left of her was a finger. Even that would still claw for freedom, would remain hungry for flesh.

  In this case, she’d been eaten into little bits and buried in a thousand flies.

  Maybe more than a thousand flies. Maybe a million. All imbued and possessed with her force, her energy, her desire to feed and destroy. Zombie flies.

  “But they’re just house flies? I suppose that’s a blessing. They can’t bite and infect unless they lay larvae in dead tissue. Sweet Jesus,” I wheezed out.

  “He’s not back, too, is he?”

  I stared at Owen. His face was stern, leaving me to wonder if he was clever enough to be so deadpan.

  “You’ll be praying that he is by the time we’re finished,” I snapped.

  *

  I told Owen that I had a plan. My plan was to use my best talent: lie to Owen about having a plan. He took strength from it, and emboldened by my fearless-leader posturing, I told him to follow me and we began down the hallway.

  My metal plated feet tapped along the concrete ground; in contrast, Owen brought with him a reassuring silence with an eye askew on the corridor behind us, his Mossberg at the ready. The sort of shotgun that puts holes in things at a 360-degree angle.

  The corridor narrowed to the altar room ahead, the one I passed through only minutes ago. A knife’s edge of weak light spilled through and cast more shadows than it dispelled.