Peaceful Valley is about to become a slaughterhouse!

 

Savage Species

© 2013 Jonathan Janz

 

The construction of the Peaceful Valley Nature Preserve, a sprawling, isolated state park, has stirred an evil that has lain dormant for nearly a century, and all the men, women, and children unlucky enough to be attending the grand opening are about to encounter the most horrific creatures to ever walk the earth.

 

The Arena

Part Four

 

The two groups meet in a terrible and unexpected way. Sam, Charly, Jesse, and Red Elk mount an impossible rescue mission to save Charly's baby and the other kidnapped survivors, but the Children and the Night Flyers have other plans. As Eric descends into madness, a surprising victim will face his wrath. 

 

Enjoy the following excerpt for The Arena:

Jesse awakens in his grandpa’s living room. He knows this isn’t possible, but the ratty green carpet, the recliners worn shiny with use, even the huge console television are items he recalls from his childhood. It occurs to him he might be dead, that he’s in some unremarkable purgatory—this isn’t glorious enough to be heaven and it’s way too mundane for hell—but he also suspects he might be in a coma. He has a vague recollection of the Night Flyers, of their earsplitting screeches and the dizzying sight of Emma being borne away over the endless drop. He wonders if the others have been eaten the way Clevenger was. The thought troubles him, and he brushes it away.

The living room is just as he remembers it, only there is no sign of recent habitation; this too troubles him. The television is not only dark, but its enormous, olive screen is dusty from disuse. There is no glass of 7-Up fizzing next to his grandpa’s favorite recliner. No morning paper either.

Yet the house is not devoid of life. He is as certain of this as he is that something terrible is about to occur. He pivots his head with a slow creak of tendons and peers fretfully down the hallway. It’s not much of a hallway, only two rooms on either side and a bathroom straight ahead, yet now that short hallway seems interminable. He does not want to walk the fifteen paces to his grandpa’s room, but he finds himself doing just that, his nerveless feet treading the tattered green carpet, and then he is outside the door.

Jesse imagines the room within: redolent of talcum powder and Old Spice aftershave and arranged with militaristic order. Grandpa was in the service—Air Force mechanic—and his time there instilled in him the habit of making his bed each morning, of folding his underwear neatly within his bureau drawer even though no one—not even his wife—would ever know he folded them.

A brutal railroad man begins swinging a sledgehammer within Jesse’s chest cavity, the iron head striking just under his right pectoral muscle, the ache spreading down to his solar plexus, his belly, and Jesse leans forward breathlessly on the wooden door.

The door opens, and his discomfort and fear curdle into revulsion. The familiar smells of powder and aftershave have been routed by old feces and the halitosis of one who is being eaten from the inside out.

The croaking voice from the bed makes him jump.

“Ten years too late.”

Jesse shakes his head, mouths the words Tried to come, Grandpa, but he can’t make a sound.

“Tried to come, my ass,” his grandpa says, and despite his anxiety and breathlessness, Jesse is compelled to study the wasted figure on the bed to confirm it is indeed his grandfather. In life the man had seldom sworn, and never in such a curt, sarcastic voice.

“You either go somewhere or you don’t,” the corpselike face growls. “You want to see a person, you see him. Nothing stops you if you care about someone.”

Jesse can’t respond. What’s there to say?

The face, he notes with quiet dismay, is sunken and creased, the folds like some old, musty tarp heaped in a corner and colorless with age. The whiskers are black and sparse, with salty tufts sprouting from the jawline, where the nurse’s razor has missed. His grandfather was a thin man most of his life, but the figure on the bed is an animate skeleton, the splotchy skin bagging down around the elbows as though a molting process has begun.

“You’re a superficial little bastard, you know that?”

Jesse looks up, stunned, and sees his grandpa watching him. As if to confirm the caustic declaration, Jesse finds himself looking not at his grandpa’s irises but rather at the red troughs of sagging eyelid that form their southern borders.

“That’s right,” his grandpa says, “focus on the ravaged body.”

Jesse shakes his head.

“The one time I needed you.”

“No.”

“Rebounded how many missed shots for you? Ten thousand?”

Jesse closes his eyes, the hot tears squeezing through.

“How many times I pick you up from little league practice?”

“Every afternoon,” Jesse whispers.

“I ever miss a game of yours?”

“Not one.”

“Didn’t I read you books?”

“You know you did.”

“Frog and Toad and Dr. Seuss and those goddamn Clifford books.”

Jesse hangs his head.

“We looked at the sports page together,” his grandpa goes on, “talked about who was hitting and who wasn’t.”

“Every day,” Jesse agrees, “all summer long.”

A palsied finger shoots out, jabs him in the arm. Jesse sucks in a startled breath.

His grandpa’s crooked teeth are gritted in rage. “And don’t you give me any of that modern crap about brainwashing you with sports and letting a kid find himself. You loved that stuff as much as I did, and you know it.”

“I did, Grandpa.”

“And when you got into taking pictures, who bought you a brand-new Polaroid?”

“You did.”

“And film. Christ, you went through it like it was free, but did I complain?”

“You never complained, Grandpa.”

The corpselike body astonishes him by sitting erect, the yellowed nest of pillows around him retaining his shape.

“Then where were you, Jess? Why’d you abandon me?”

Jesse is bouncing on his heels now, humming in misery.

“You’re not gonna run away this time,” his grandpa growls.

The door behind him slams shut.

Jesse murmurs, “I failed you, I’m sorry.”

He moans at the flare of hostility in the man’s rheumy eyes.

“You failed, huh? I’m sorry, Grandpa, and all is forgiven? Well, to hell with that.”

His grandpa thrusts the covers down, revealing impossibly skinny legs, bare and hairless below the hemline of the stained hospital gown. The legs swing toward Jesse. The feet are swollen and plagued by open sores.

“Please let me go,” Jesse whispers.

“Ohhhh,” his grandpa says, bloodshot eyes stretching wide, “‘let me go’, the boy says. Well I’d say you did go, didn’t you? Went everywhere but the hospital.”

“Grandpa—”

“Went to your made-up girlfriend’s house for dinner, took her to the drive-in.”

“Grandpa, please.”

“Named her Juliet. Kind of an idiot you think I am anyway? Juliet? Why didn’t you name her Ophelia or Miranda or Lady Macbeth instead?”

Jesse tries to grope for the door, but his hands hang limply at his sides.

“That was the biggest insult,” his grandpa says. “The condescension. Why didn’t you just tell the truth, ‘I’m scared of coming over there and I’m a lazy, selfish prick’. It woulda hurt, but at least I wouldn’t think you thought I was an idiot.”

“I didn’t think—”

The curtain-rod arms shoot out. “The hell you didn’t!”

The praying mantis body rises toward him.

“And the worst part,” his grandpa croaks, the exposed lower teeth so crowded Jesse can see several places where one tooth overlaps another, “the worst part, my unfaithful, lying grandson, is how I only asked for one thing from you your entire goddamned life. Just one thing.”

Now the livid face hovers inches from Jesse’s, the death smell rotting out of the wet mouth.

“You remember what I asked, boy?”

Jesse squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head weakly. Of course he remembers. One day late in his senior year of high school he’d been worrying about how he’d pay for college, his mother having saved next to nothing, and Jesse himself with only a hundred or so in his account. His grandpa matter-of-factly fished an envelope from the table next to his recliner and handed it to Jesse. When he opened it he discovered it was a college fund with more than enough to carry Jesse through his undergrad years and maybe a little further. He took in his grandpa’s quiet smile, too moved to speak, and his grandpa had said, “Just be there for me when I need you.”

Jesse sobs, makes high, keening sounds, but he can’t sink into his grandfather’s arms because the man he loved is gone and has been replaced by this vengeful doppelganger.

“‘Just be there for me’,” his grandpa repeats now. “Was that too much to ask?”

“No.”

“Yes! Oh yes it was, my boy. All I wanted from you was a little time, some diverting conversation. We cancer patients tend to value that, you know. It makes the end more bearable.”

A rustling sound fills the small room, and at this Jesse opens his eyes and sees his grandpa has opened his gown to reveal a horror of a body. The skin of the chest is peeling in charred curls, revealing portions of the ribcage and the pink-black lungs within. The belly too is being eaten away by maggots and slugs, the purple organs within a squirming refuse heap of decay.

Jesse gags, claps a hand over his mouth.

“Sure, puke your guts out,” the thing that could not be his grandpa says. “It’s what I did. And I did it all alone, didn’t I? Your mom came around sometimes, but we were never as close as you and I were. Or at least as close as I thought you and I were. But you—” jabbing a finger into Jesse’s sweat-soaked shirt, “—you proved me wrong, didn’t you? It was like you wanted to punish me for making that one request of you.”

The dying face shoves into his, rancid spit flying from the wasted lips. “Well, you punished me good, didn’t you? I saw you every week of your life until I went downhill, and then you didn’t show up for six stinking months! Didn’t even come to the hospital when I was so drugged up I couldn’t move. Your mother begged you and begged you, but you used every excuse imaginable to make sure I didn’t sully you with my death.”

And now the face is altering. Even through Jesse’s tears he can see the rheumy eyes turning green and changing shape, the nubby brown teeth elongating and tapering at the tips.

The thing that had been his grandpa but is now one of the Children seizes Jesse by the wrists and thrusts his hands into the writhing cesspool of its belly, the maggots squirming hotly against his fingers, the pulpy intestines perforating around his nails, seeping their discharge over his knuckles. The now-pale face looms before Jesse’s. It opens its flyblown maw and clamps down on Jesse’s cheek and crunches through cartilage and gristle. Jesse wails into the scalding wet stench as the creature’s black tongue snakes out…