CHAPTER ONE

 

Flex Sheridan’s Chronicle

 

 

 

 

Late June, 2011

 

 

 

“Hey, Flex,” her voice said, recognizing my number on her cell phone. She sounded tired.

“Afternoon, beautiful. How are my girls? I was thinking about heading down to see you guys. It’s been six months.”

Jamie sighed. “I’m not sure now’s a good time, Flex. Jack and the girls are fine, but I have a headache. A doozie.” She sounded more distracted than disappointed.

“That sucks,” I said. “Migraine?”

There was a pause on the line. “Yes and no . . . not really. Not the normal one.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know how . . . fuck! Fuck!”

“Jamie, what’s wrong?” She never cussed, and two fucks in a row was unheard of. There was more silence.

“Jamie?”

“I’m here,” her voice came, weaker. “I didn’t have the prisms, you know? How I always see prisms in my peripheral vision before one of these comes on? I felt restless, not able to sleep, but having dreams while I was wide awake, like fantasies of . . . of . . . I hate to even say it, but, like cannibalism. Scared the heck out of me, Flex. I don’t . . . ” She trailed off again.

I waited, but had to prompt her.

“Like what? Nightmares?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Not like normal nightmares. These were like flashes. Pictures. Images. Just brief, terrible . . . Fuck! Hold on.”

“Jamie, are you okay? You should be in bed!”

The line was still live, but she said nothing. I heard her breathing, raspy, short.

“Flex?” She was back.

“I’m here, Jamie.”

“I’m not right," she said, sounding distracted. "I’m so fucking hungry. I’m ravenous, Flex. Like I’m starving!”

“And you’re dropping the F-bomb more than I’ve ever heard you. What’s that about?”

“If you knew, Flex. If you knew how this felt! The dreams were terrible, dark visions of . . . I don’t know. Hell, maybe. Darkness. Evil. I felt it. I woke up soaked, and the covers were wrapped around me like I was spinning in my bed. Jack said he tried to wake me, but I just kept mumbling and thrashing.”

“Jamie, I want you to get to bed. I’m coming over. Right now I’m in Atlanta, so it’ll take me about 5 hours to get to Gainesville from here.”

“Flex, you don’t have to come. I’ll . . . I’ll . . . FUCK!”

The phone dropped. I heard screaming. First it was the terrible sound of Jamie screaming.  Next I heard what sounded like a door slamming against a wall.

My fingers gripped the phone like a vice. Then I heard Jack’s voice in the room, calling for Jamie. I heard some bumping sounds, and then his voice, louder, into the mouthpiece.

“Hello? Who is this?”

“Jack! It’s me, Flex. What’s happened to Jamie? She was telling me about her headache, some dreams she had last night, and then she just screamed. Where is she?”

Jack’s breathing was panicked. “I heard it from my desk in the bedroom, and ran in here. The phone was on the floor, and the door’s wide open. She doesn’t do that because of the swimming pool and the girls. Flex, hold on. Let me check on Jesse and Trina.”

I held the phone for what seemed to be ten minutes, though it could not have been more than one. His voice finally came back on the line.

“They’re fine. In their room. Flex, I have to go. I have –”

There was a loud noise. Crashing. Crunching. A splintering of wood. My fingers – hell, my whole hand was white from the grip I had on my cell. The words I heard right before the line went dead sent an icy chill from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.

“Jamie! No! What are you – Jamie!” It was Jack’s voice.

Then just four words from my sister.

“I’m so fucking hungry –” and a loud, wet sound, followed by a deafening thump as the phone apparently hit the floor.

I held onto the phone and listened. I screamed for Jamie, pleading for someone to pick up the dropped cell, but it sounded muffled, as though something were on top of it, blocking the receiver.

And I’m thankful. The sound I heard next was like the one just before the thump, but almost more final – a dull, wet impact. Then squishing-slurping sounds. Throaty groans, seemingly of some kind of pleasure.

I didn’t know what it meant then. I sure do now.

I held onto the phone for a good ten minutes, listening in horror before I heard a sound that rocked me nearly off my feet.

Jesse and Trina screaming. Ear piercing shrieks. A reaction of horror, pure and unadulterated.

I flipped the phone shut, jammed it into my pocket and bolted out of my house and into my Chevy. I fired it up and sent rocks spinning as I headed for the main road.  I hit the I85 south in ten minutes and looked at my watch. It was 4:00 PM.  My tears didn’t start to fall until the interstate changed to I75 and I pushed it up to 95 miles an hour.

I did not bother to dial the house again.  The minutes passed like hours.

 

 

*****

 

 

 

It wasn’t possible to keep up the speed all the way. I had to stop for gas twice. The old Suburban wasn’t built for efficiency, and fuel prices sucked ass.

I crossed the state line around 7:30. It was still light out because of Daylight Savings Time, and probably would be until just before 9:00 at night. Good. I wanted light, and lots of it.

Writing this, I’m really thinking back on that day – one of the blackest days of my life – and I realize that on the road to Gainesville, some shit should have caught my attention that just didn’t.

There were fewer cars on the road, but there were more accidents than usual. Bad ones. Had it been an ordinary day there were probably six or seven times I would’ve pulled over to either help or see if everyone was okay, but that particular day I had my own problems, and I was distracted. I’m sure I missed a lot of what was happening along the way.

When I think back to that drive, I remember seeing at least three cars completely flipped over, sitting on the shoulder or smack in the middle of I75 on their roofs. I must have been in some kind of shock not to really wonder about it. All that aside, there were other signs.

Thanks to the self-service credit card readers at gas pumps and quarter-operated air pumps for the tires, you never even have to speak to the attendants at most gas stations. So I should have found it odd that the attendant began staggering out of his little room toward me as I was getting back in the Suburban, but it barely registered at the time. I knew I’d paid up, finished my fueling, and didn’t give him a second thought. I looked at him, threw him a quick wave, but I didn’t see him Not really. He was probably only two feet behind my truck when I hit the gas.

And now that I think back, there was something wrong with him. His jerky movements, the strangeness of his eyes. His purposeful intent as he approached me. His eyes weren’t really . . . what’s the word?

They weren’t there.

In retrospect – fucking hindsight again – I’m damned lucky. I was carrying only a 5-shot Smith & Wesson .38 Special at the time, and while it would have been plenty of firepower, there’d have been no reason to think I needed it until it was too late.

They say the lightning strike most likely to kill somebody is the first lightning strike of the storm. That’s because it’s when people least expect it. For me, the zombie at the gas station was the first lightning strike. And I was just lucky enough to be out of its reach.

No sense in looking back. But what I’m saying is the signs were there. It had begun and I had no clue. I told Jamie I was in Atlanta – well, that’s not entirely correct. I’m outside of Atlanta, in an area called Lula. It’s unincorporated, sparsely populated, and only about 20 minutes outside of civilization. But for that 20 minutes of driving, there’s nothing. So where I live feels pretty isolated.

And these days I tend to like it that way.

You should know that at this point I hadn’t reconnected with Gem yet. I was on my own, having had my way with a number of women through the years, and lots of them having had their way with me. In fact, it seems women had just plain had it with me.

Not that I was a bad guy. I never slept with a woman I didn’t believe I cared for at the time. How long that went on depended a lot on them. I wasn’t attracted to the completely dependent type with no interests other than me, the kind that sat around and waited for me to decide what to do, and I didn’t like the ones that seemed not to really care if I was there or not. I was seeking a balance; a woman who had her own life and interests, had an interest in mine, but who didn’t hang everything on my plans, and who didn’t hang on my every word.

That was Gem. She was the best fit I’d ever had. Beautiful and tough. Comfortable and easy. No guilt, no pressure, but great sex. And when I had something for work that I needed to do, she was genuinely interested.

Hell, I was only an electrician, but if I had a circuit layout to design, she’d sit there and drink coffee and just watch me lay it out as though what I did was art, a creation. In a way, I guess it was, but not like her stuff. She was a true artist. Paint and clay ran through her veins.

She’d always been an artist and illustrator, but the latter was more for architectural design, and it bored the shit out of her. It was a way to make money when her art wasn’t moving in the local galleries, but there was too much structure and no freedom of expression. I could always tell when she was working on building illustrations; she was grouchy and cussed a lot. She’d put down her weed for coffee and the edginess showed. But even her architectural drawings were amazing to me; the perspective, the shading. No bullshit. She was and is pure artistry, and I got into watching her do her thing. When she got into her own creations, whether with paint, clay, copper or paper, she blew my mind. The woman could make a shit statue that blew my mind, for Christ’s sake. As for her mind, it functioned in this world, but also in an alternate world; we’ll call it the abstract world. She saw things differently. Nothing sequential about her – she had her own approach, is about the only way I can explain it. She shifted the order to suit her brain and made it work even better out of order.

A genius in her own right. And I lost her. I didn’t even realize how important she was to me until I did. I guess I’ll explain that later. Back to the problem of the day. Shit. The problem of the rest of time, unless something drastic changes. The Zombie problem. There. I used the word, and if you laugh, then it’s years later and the problem is just a footnote in history.

And you have no fucking idea how insane it really was.

 

*****

 

I pulled up to 45 Randall Street in Gainesville at 8:42. Light was fading with the fast dropping sun, now a glow on the horizon. I’d wanted to get there earlier, but I was there now, and that was all that mattered. I threw the transmission into park when I slid to a stop ten feet from the door.

The screen door was closed, but the front door remained open. There was something splattered on the screen and I ignored it as I had all the bad signs along the way.

“Jamie!” I yelled, slamming the door of the truck as I sprinted toward the house. I looked around. Her house was isolated from the neighbors by virtue of her acre lot and a heavy growth of trees all around. The single streetlight on the gravel road just at the entrance of her driveway was just flickering into life as the sun dropped completely. No lights were on in the house, but I could still see okay; the sky still glowed a light blue, but would soon fade to a moonless black.

I felt the .38 in the back of my pants, but I didn’t pull it out. It was Jamie and Jack’s house, for God’s sake. I’d never need it here. I approached the front porch and jumped the steps, landing outside the door. I grabbed the screen door handle and my hand immediately became wet with something cold, slick.

I pulled back suddenly, and rubbed my fingers together. The wetness felt familiar. It was dark inside now, and I couldn’t see through the netting of the screen, so I wiped my hand on my jeans and pulled the door open. As I took two steps into the room my hand fell on the light switch, and I flipped it to the ‘on’ position.

And suddenly my feet were slipping like a goddamned cartoon coyote, as I tried fruitlessly to backpedal. The blood drained from my face, and I felt pale and weak. My left boot abruptly gripped the rough floorboards and I was propelled backward through the door and onto my back, sliding all the way down the two steps into the dirt. I heard screaming, then realized it was me.

I scrambled back to my feet and ran to the truck where I grabbed my cell phone off the dash. I opened it and punched in 911.

It rang several times before the familiar tone sounded, followed by a voice that said, “All circuits are busy. Please try your call again later.”

I threw it back inside my truck and slammed the door. My hand moved to rub the pain where the .38 had jammed into my back when I fell. I removed the gun, and though I knew it was loaded, I flipped it open and checked anyway. With 911 down and out, I was on my own.

My right hand shook as I aimed the revolver toward the light filtering through the blood-spattered screen door. I willed myself to go back inside. I didn’t want to. I wanted to go back in there as much as I wanted to sit down in a sadistic dentist’s chair and have a root canal without anesthesia, but I didn’t have any choice.

I pulled the door open again, felt the wetness, this time all too aware what it really was. It was everywhere. Blood. Jack’s blood. Who else’s? Jesse’s? Trina’s? Where the hell was Jamie, and who did this?

Moving along the wall, I looked down and took in the scene. Jack’s body lay sprawled on the floor, his shirt torn open. His chest had been splayed open, and it was fairly easy to tell what the weapon was, because it was still embedded in his abdomen. The small hand axe’s wooden handle had smeared, bloody handprints on it. What appeared to be small handprints. Not a child’s kind of small.

A woman’s. Jamie’s kind of small.

But it was not the axe in his stomach, nor the gaping hole that should have revealed Jack’s heart but didn’t – now it was just an empty pocket – that drew my attention. It was his head. A serrated steak knife lay beside it, and the dome shaped chunk of the top of Jack’s skull lay just behind the body. It had been sawed off with the knife.

I turned and puked into the sink in the counter behind me. I puked my guts and kept puking until nothing else came out. Then I dry heaved a few times just for good measure. There was nothing left.

I had to see what the prize was. Why cut open his head? Why cut open his chest? I could see the heart was gone – it was just a dark hole. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and slid along the wall back toward the door and bent down, my gun aimed down the dark hallway just in case.

“Holy hell,” I said. “Holy fucking hell.” His head was empty. The brain was gone. I’m no doctor, and I didn’t have to be to know what I was seeing was the nub of the brain stem.

What had Jack done? Had he gotten mixed up in some gambling shit? Borrowed money from the wrong people? He fucking delivered coffee or something! He was about the most benign guy I’d ever met. Who would want to kill him, and where the hell were Jamie and the girls?

I strained to focus, trying to get my heart to stop slamming so hard in my chest. It was still about 80 times faster than normal, but the gun in my hand calmed me a little, and allowed me to take in the rest of the scene.

There were footprints. They looked like women’s shoes. Flats. About Jamie’s size. Tracking through the blood. There were what appeared to be knee prints, too. And hand prints. I didn’t know what to think. Had Jamie come in and found him like this and dropped to her knees beside him? I refused to think about what I’d heard Jamie’s voice say on the phone nearly 6 hours ago now.

I’m so fucking hungry . . .

I needed to find the girls. I backed away from the horror scene splayed out in the entry and moved into the hallway, gun held out. I flipped on the light and the yellow glow washed down the hallway and bathed the living room, chasing away the shadows. Both were empty. I wanted to call the girls, but the last thing I wanted them to do was to run into that room and see what I’d seen.

But they already had, hadn’t they? I’d heard them screaming over the phone line.

“Jamie! Jesse! Trina!” I called. “It’s Uncle Flex! Don’t be afraid. Come on out here if you hear me. I’ll get you out of here!”

Nothing.

I moved down the hallway. There were two bedrooms down there. One just up on the left side. Directly across from that entry there were two double bi-fold doors where the laundry room was. Not much room in there. Washer. Dryer. A large sink. Down at the end there was a door outside, a bathroom on the left, and the other bedroom on the right side. That was the master bedroom.

As I approached the first bedroom door, I heard a low thump. I stopped. There was no wall switch in this room. There was a lamp plugged into an outlet. I’d stayed in this room a lot because while it was the girls’ room, when I’d visit, the girls would share a bed and I’d sleep in the other twin sized setup, my feet hanging off the end of the tiny mattress. The lamp was right between the two beds, but the darkness was complete, and I didn’t want to stumble around, giving up my present location to whoever had done this thing.

And I didn’t bring a damned flashlight.

“Jesse?” I whispered. If she was here, and she was hiding, I didn’t want to frighten her anymore than she already was. “Trina? It’s Uncle Flex. If you’re in here, come to me now. I’m right by the door.”

Something slammed into my legs and I felt it closing around me. I almost staggered back, but caught myself on the doorframe with my free hand. I recognized the feel of little arms around my upper legs.

“Uncle Flex,” came the tiny voice. “Mommy’s . . . scaring me.”

I knelt down and pulled little Trina into my arms. “Shh, baby. I got you now. Is your sister in here with you?”

Her body shuddered in my grip and I pulled her tighter to me. I felt her shaking her head no. “Mommy took her. Mommy’s real sick.” She wouldn’t speak above an airy whisper.

“Close your eyes, sweetheart. I’m taking you outside.”

She pressed her face into my shoulder as I scooped her into my arms and stood, backing out of the room and into the hallway again. I hurried down the hall toward the door, holding her tight to me with one hand, and the gun barrel leading the way like an arrowhead. As I got into the entry where Jack’s body lay sprawled and exposed, she sensed it. Trina pressed her face tighter into me. I pushed open the screen door and walked directly to the Suburban. I looked in all directions. If Jamie somehow did do this, it was her I looked for. In my mind it was still impossible. A maniac had done this; had broken in, killed Jack, and taken Jamie and Jesse while Trina hid. The 6-year old was just confused and frightened.

But I had seen the handprints. The footprints. There was something really fucked up and inexplicable going on. I pulled open the truck’s door and deposited Trina gently inside. She held onto my arms as I tried to let her go.

“Baby, I have to find your sister and mama, so you stay –”

“Don’t find mama don’t find mama don’t find mama,” she stammered, hyperventilating, her body shaking.

“Okay, Trina. Okay. If I find her, I won’t bring her here, but I think she’s sick, honey.”

Trina, her hair over her face and her eyes wide, said “She took Jess. She’s gonna eat Jess. She was eating daddy.” Then she erupted into tears.

I stared at her. I didn’t know what to say to her. What she had just said was my greatest fear, and what my crazy, freaked out brain was thinking since I’d seen the horrifying scene in the entry and connected that with what I’d heard on the phone, but I wasn’t in that mindset then. I was not programmed to believe that human beings – human beings in my family that I loved – could be out there killing other human beings that I loved and . . . and eating them.

“Stay here,” I told her. And when I close the door, I want you to lock it and lay down on the floor over there. And stay down. Understand?”

She nodded. I kissed her little cheek, rubbed the back of her head with my hand, and pulled away. “On the floor now.” She obeyed, and I pushed down the lock and closed the door until I heard it latch.

Then I headed out into the moonless night, looking for my sister and my niece. And not really wanting to find them.