The Battle

Dr. Krone landed on his knees, flabbergasted, as the life in him seemed to drain out through his feet. “No…you didn’t…WHAT DID YOU TYPE!”

Hillary was alarmed. “I told you it was dangerous to let him roam the mansion. He’s not hooked up to the machine.”

Dr. Krone, Sr. refused to be defeated. “No, it’s not over. The machine works both ways. I can reverse the command.”

Dr. Krone, Sr. raced for the closest machine, but Craig tackled him. “It’s time to enjoy your treatment, you sick asshole.”

“You can’t stop us,” Hillary cheered. She was already standing at the machine, ready to type in new commands. “My husband’s right. We can reverse your commands.”

And that’s when they trudged out from the darkness. Body bags were ripped to shreds. Corpses limped toward them, coming alive. Rotten muscle audibly tore and bones clinked loose beneath the softening flesh of their bodies. The present stench was light comparative to this new moment. The ripe fog carried so thick, everything was demurred by a see-through gray net thick enough to be sticky. Hillary was the first to be forced to the ground. She was surrounded by two dozen walking corpses, pushed from one to the other, each rendering a mouthful of her face and throat until she was screaming and faceless.

“Save me—anybody!” Hillary’s tongue was bitten from the mouth after an intimate kiss from a hungry corpse, and then she vanished beneath the dog pile of feasting corpses, batting her arms for her life and delivering soggy screams.

Dr. Krone, Sr. dove into the pile to reclaim his wife. He was forced onto the ground beside his dissected wife. Heads bent down and lifted up from his resisting body, pecking and rendering his flesh. “Aaack— Guagh— Ahhhhhhh!” Blood-laden cries were quickly smothered until he was dead once again.

Craig didn’t know where Dr. Krone had hidden himself. The enemies were still after Craig. The room bustled with activity, and he was the only living person who owned a real heartbeat.

He flopped onto the floor when Edith shot an arc of flames at him. The heat grazed his back, the flames inches from burning him. A daring corpse of desiccated flesh and browning bones—over a century dead—removed the fuel line from the tank.

Edith screamed, “Oh shit!”

Craig worked to his feet to sprint in retreat.

Kaboom!

Edith and the corpse were engulfed in caustic explosions. Half the room was lit up, firelight dancing alongside the branches of static electricity. Across the room, Brandon drove the concrete saw ahead of him and split four corpses down the middle. If the man had a head, he’d boast a grin. The flesh wall of malformed body parts sucked in corpse after corpse, and after burying them in layers of living, breathing, and deadly skin, they were spit out bones, blood, and organs. The wet splashes and muffled groans—tranquilized wild animals—of the snuffed dead continued unending. Katie strangled a corpse with an umbilical cord, lifting it from the ground and driving it face-first into the floor with a bone-crunching impact. Rick Margolia flanked as many corpses as he could with his cleaver. Brandon was finally overpowered in the opposite corner. Craig caught four corpses tugging on each of his arms and legs and then forcing them from the sockets with a wild blast of blood and uncoiling of cable-thick muscle tissue.

The concrete saw was stolen from his father and claimed by one of the undead, and Rick’s head was dismembered from his neck in one swipe.

Craig eyed the machine within four steps of him. He could type for the war to vanish completely.

He decided not to waste another second waiting.

“We are your family, you can’t destroy us!”

The cold and wet umbilical cord wrapped around his throat. It was so tight, he heard a soft snap. His throat burned and radiated razor-sharp agony. He couldn’t breathe. The pain was as stunning as it was paralyzing. He was on his knees, bent forward in struggle. He couldn’t shrug his wife from strangling him.

Her belly was pressed against his back, the protrusion wet. “Can’t you feel her kick?”

Craig indeed felt the soft touch against his back from a dead foot.

“She could’ve been someone special,” she wheezed from the effort of choking him. “Someone different than you, someone much better!”

The room spun in a dizzying frenzy. The loss of air was stealing his equilibrium. The room was upside down, right-side-up, and then murky and in focus again.

“Aack!—pahlease!”

His concentration spread out across the room. Corpse hands smothered Susan and clenched their nails into her flesh. In one death-delivering effort, the flesh over her sternum and face were removed with the smoothness of butter. She was punched through the torso by six hands and lifted in the air in a grotesque presentation. Willis crumpled on the ground, burning to cinders and ash in the aftermath of the flame-thrower tank fuel explosion. Corpses throughout the chamber reached and battled over the squares of skin and human anatomy they tore from the wall of flesh. Alice stood her ground until she was covered up by fifty corpses and eaten alive, swallowed up.

Craig’s eyes rolled into the back of his head. His vision failed to refocus. Katie’s cold dead breath played against his neck. She kissed behind his ear, leaving a slimy patch of skin and mucus. “I will see you in hell, and then we’ll finally be a family.”

His brain boiled with the need for oxygen. His lungs spastically tried to inhale and exhale to mimic the act of breathing. Each attempt issued the raw agony of broken ribs. Seconds from death, Craig let himself go limp.

He kept thinking, where had Dr. Krone disappeared to?