Past Indiscretions Read online

  They run up a set of stairs and see a lighted kiosk.

  Inside, an old dude is paging through a magazine, earbuds blocking out the mania from below.

  “How can I help you boys?” he says when they get near.

  Panting, gasping, Harry lays it out for him. “They’re killing people, man. I ain’t kidding. They’re like…like fucking animals…”

  The old dude appraises them with narrow eyes. “This some kind of joke?”

  “No!” Bugs says. “Christ, go down there…it’s like a fucking slaughterhouse.”

  The old dude still doesn’t believe them. He shakes his head and consults his video monitors and he sees it then. His eyes go wide, he stumbles out of his seat, snatching the phone from its cradle.

  “I already tried 911,” Bugs says. “They ain’t answering.”

  “Wait here,” the old dude says, disappearing out of the back door of his kiosk.

  “Well, now what?” Bugs says.

  “He’s got a service passage back there. He’s going to see.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Harry can hear them screaming from below quite plainly now. “Call Peak or Summer. Tell them to get the fuck up here.”

  Bugs rings them off his favorites, again and again. “Man…they ain’t answering. They just ain’t answering.”

  Harry’s not surprised in the least…

  ***

  There are more brats now.

  Peak has no idea where the little shitters are coming from, but they seem to be sprouting like worms after a good rain. And all of them are going after the people on the platform in a wild frenzy of murder, biting and tearing and clawing. It’s unreal. It’s all so terribly fucking unreal. Kids attacking adults…what the hell is going on? Maybe if he had been Harry with his twisted intellectual frame of mind he would have seen the irony in it all…these people getting attacked by the things they had made with their own shivering loins…but Peak’s mind does not work that way.

  When there’s an attack, you launch a counterattack.

  His brain is very simple that way.

  So despite Summer crying out for him to get away with her, he gets right into the thick of it. The adults are outnumbered, overwhelmed, crushed down by the swarming blood-hungry brats. They are fighting to survive and most of them, in their shock and horror, aren’t even doing that. These are children, they’re just children, and you can’t hit them or hurt them…it isn’t right. So as they try to cover their faces, the children lay waste to them, not only with fingers and teeth driven by diseased brains, but with weapons now…sticks and knives and pipes.

  Peak storms over there.

  And as he runs into the massacre, he shouts: “YOU FUCKING CARPET CRAWLING, ANKLE-BITING, RUGRAT, TIT-SUCKING MOTHERFUCKERS! GET OUTTA HERE OR I’M GOING TO BUST EVERYONE OF YOU!”

  None of the adults would have seen him as their savior.

  Hell, under any other circumstances they would have been more inclined to fear him. But on he comes regardless—black leather jacketed, studded gauntlets on his wrists, tattoos on his neck, stubble on his face—to save them. He grabs one brat by the neck and tosses her off the platform. She’s followed by two more boys. Then one of them bites into his leg. Peak drills her in the face, feeling her teeth scatter like candy corn. Then he’s fighting with true tribal mania, fists flaying and boots kicking. He’s laying the little monsters out left and right, mashing their faces with his fists, breaking bones and shattering jaws, stomping and gouging, and it’s like some kind of mosh pit free-for-all. He’s getting hit and clawed and thumped, but it only gets his adrenaline juicing and his fists pumping and heart slamming. Because as much abuse as he takes, he gives it back in fucking spades—

  BANG!

  Peak seizes up as there is an explosion in his skull, a white-hot eruption of agony like his brain is squeezed to pulp in a fist. His thoughts bounce around inside his head like rubber balls. He realizes—in a disconnected, disassociated sort of way—that he’s been driven to his knees. He can feel warm piss running down his leg and heat steaming in his pants as his bowels let go. He still feels the rage and the pure animal need to strike out against this violation, but his motor controls have turned turtle and his head is full of mush. He realizes that the sound he heard was his own skull fracturing…then he falls straight over, writhing on the platform.

  He never hears the screams of Summer as she looks down on the wreckage of him, the brats beating on his head with pipes and baseball bats until his skull breaks apart, scalp sloughing in a bloody flap, blood squirting out and brain matter ejecting in pink clods like boiled shrimp. Even when he no longer moves, it is not enough. The eyes of the brats fixated and glowing hot with grisly fascination, they keep pounding on him until what had been inside his head is splattered for four feet in every direction…

  ***

  Stumbling first.

  Then crawling.

  The old dude from the ticket booth can still hear his own voice echoing in his head: You kids…you kids…what in Christ are you doing? That’s what he said right before they came at him, right before their nails dug deep grooves into his face and one outstretched hand was clamped down in jaws, teeth piercing his skin and then snapping his finger bones like green twigs.

  Then they were all over him.

  He felt their teeth, their fingers. They punched him and tore his hair out in clumps, ripped his lower lip free and smashed his genitals to sauce. A dozen of them pounded him down and bit into him and he screamed, thrashing on the ground as they held him and rode him, teeth in his throat, bones breaking and kneecaps shattering as they stomped and kicked him.

  Then he was released.

  Released.

  Now he’s crawling away, horribly wounded, everything broken and battered, his flight-or-fight instincts flooding his brain with endorphins so he does not feel the compound fractures or punctured organs, the blood seeping out between his ass cheeks or the taste of coppery vomit in his throat.

  Leaving a blood trail behind him like a stepped-upon slug, he makes for the doorway, for the stairs back up to the booth. He feels along the wall with his good hand, seeking, seeking…but it’s not so easy because he no longer has any eyes…

  ***

  “Now what?” Bugs says.

  Good question. Pulling off another cigarette, Harry thinks it over, but he’s hardwired with panic and anxiety and a mounting feverish horror, so his thought processes aren’t exactly working real good. But he has to focus. No point in trying to figure this royal clusterfuck out or make sense of it. As the man said, it is what it is. No, right now, he needs to put everything aside and think about survival, about his friends.

  “Well?” Bug says, jittery as always. On a good day he’s ready to jump out of his skin; today it’s like he already has.

  “The old guy still isn’t back. I’m not waiting. Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Back down there.”

  “Shit. I knew you’d say that.”

  Harry ignores that and moves back over to the stairs and down into the subterranean world below. He hears people still screaming, begins to smell death right away—the hot metallic odor of blood running in rivers…

  ***

  Summer sees Peak die horribly and her mind, which pretty much coasts along on well-oiled tracks day by day, is suddenly thrown into absolute shock mode. Though she’s not one to interfere in violence of any sort, preferring to keep her hands clean, when she sees what those little monsters are doing to Peak, she charges in. She does this without thinking, geared up on instinct. She knocks two or three of the brats out of the way, but by then Peak is down, his head opened up like a can of beans leaking sauce all over the floor. The children course around her…they are feral and rat-like, they smell like animals, predators: urine and pelts, salty marrow and blood.

  “STOP IT!” she screams.

  But they do not stop.

  “QUIT IT! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HIM!”

 
; Too late, Peak is already a corpse.

  Summer feels her heart pounding in her chest, thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-THUMP, like a dozen fists beating on the inside of her ribcage. The brats have lost interest in the carcass of Peak. Now they’re moving at her with a slow, evil, almost serpentine motion like mambas seeking their prey. She feels a cold hand sticky with blood seize her wrist. She looks at its owner…Jesus, some little girl, maybe seven or eight, probably had a pink Barbie phone at home…and her eyes are not human, they are small and glittering like those of a graveyard rat, her mouth stained red from what she has been feeding on.

  Summer stumbles back.

  The fight instinct in her has evaporated now.

  It is replaced by a fear that reaches right down into her bones. At any moment, the brats could leap on her and take her down, but they don’t. They move around her in some weird, almost rhythmic dance. Their bodies are lithe, well-muscled, their movements fluidic. If Summer had to describe them, she would say they were similar to the movements of cobras being charmed by flutes. There’s something almost hypnotic about it all, like they’re tuned into the same voice and thinking the same thoughts.

  The children are reaching for her now with their small blood-stained hands, mouths smiling, faces primeval and cunning with red streaks splashed over them like warpaint.

  But what really, truly sickens and horrifies her is that one of the others, a little boy, has found what looks like a concrete trowel. He squats over Peak. Giggling, he stabs the trowel into Peak’s corpse again and again and the sound of that…like a butcher knife jabbing into a soft, pulpous pumpkin…is enough to make her swoon.

  Summer screams.

  Flooded with a surreal terror, she’s fighting again.

  She slaps away those hands and lopes off, knocking a little girl out of her path in her blind flight. All she cares about is freedom. All she cares about is distancing herself from this madhouse. Before it was fight; now its flight.

  Breathing hard, almost slipping in a pool of blood that floods out from the hacked body of a thirty-something woman in a pink jogging suit, the lightning speed and quick reflexes abandon her and she feels disoriented, dizzy, her limbs thick and non-responsive, rubbery.

  A scream strangling in her throat, she drops to her knees, her body convulsing until a warm froth of vomit jets from between her lips and splatters on the concrete before her. The convulsions keep coming until there’s nothing left to retch out, until she shudders with dry heaves.

  It’s then she hears something behind her.

  The padding of tiny feet.

  Summer turns. The boy with the trowel has followed her and there is murder in his eyes, maybe something far beyond murder, a primal bloodlust that cannot be sated until he bathes in her blood, until he hacks her and guts her with the trowel.

  He comes at her.

  He dives at her.

  He lands on her and clings like a leech, the trowel slashing at her, the tip sinking into her thigh, then tearing a bleeding rent in her forearm. Summer goes wild. She screams. She shrieks. She gets hold of the boy and runs, ramming him into the turnstile. He makes no sound but a moist grunting upon impact. Any normal child would have been done in by the sheer force of it, but not this one. He makes a growling sound between clenched, pink-stained teeth, and slashes at her again.

  Summer takes hold of him.

  He is hard to manage, he moves with greasy, boneless gyrations.

  But she has him. She has him from behind and with survival instinct rioting wild inside her, she slams his face into the turnstile again and again. But still he fights. Still he growls and hisses and tries to break free. Summer, seizing his oily hair in one fist, keeps slamming his face into the turnstile until he grows limp in her hands, but it’s not enough. Something inside her has ratcheted up and it demands more than this. Whether it’s race memory of the kill or some instantaneous, unbidden savagery on her part, she clamps her teeth on his throat and bites down, feeling the yielding flesh beneath her jaws. Charged with some sado-erotic thrill, she bites deeper, enjoying the feel of the flesh tearing beneath her teeth…then her jaws sheer through and hot, gushing blood fills her mouth.

  She staggers backward.

  The boy is trembling as his carotid empties itself onto the floor.

  Summer, coming back to herself again and realizing what she has just done, takes three or four drunken steps and falls again, vomiting, trying to get the awful taste of the boy out of her mouth…

  ***

  They are everywhere.

  Harry, his fists bloody from bashing in cruel little faces, trips over a body and hits the ground as he watches them take hold of Bugs. They take him down like wolves going after an elk—he knocks aside three or four, but twice that many jump on him, ride him down, one little girl biting into his throat while another fastens her mouth on his crotch and clamps down.

  Bugs screams.

  It’s the sound of absolute horror and absolute agony.

  When he’s down, they cover him in their bodies, all biting and tearing and clawing. They force his legs apart so the girl can continue biting down on his genitals and already the crotch of his jeans is stained red and spreading. His legs and arms thrash, but they have him and there’s nothing he can do but die.

  Another boy shows.

  He has a knife.

  He looks over at Harry with flat, dead, reptilian eyes. He grins. Harry sees his teeth, he can smell the hot blood stink of him. He wants Harry to smell him, to know that he is a predator and Harry is nothing but prey.

  He seems to delight in the fear and abhorrence he inspires.

  Without further ado, he jumps to his knees. He brings the big knife down overhand and spears it into Bugs’ throat, slicing right through his windpipe. Bugs trembles, eyes rolling in his head, blood bubbling from his throat as he gasps for breath. The knife flashes again. It slashes into Bugs’ throat and Harry hears it scrape against bone as it is withdrawn.

  It comes down again.

  And again.

  And again.

  The last time right into Bugs’ chest, parting ribs and spearing his heart until dark arterial blood gushes out, spilling over Bugs and splashing the boy in the face.

  Somewhere during the process, devastated by what he has just witnessed, Harry crawls away on all fours like some kind of mole caught in the rays of the sun. His neck cringes, waiting for the knife to come down…but when it doesn’t, he gets to his feet and runs full out for the stairs down the way.

  When he gets there, a dozen more brats are coming down.

  Harry whirls, almost spills, he races in the other direction and trips over the corpse of the old dude from the ticket kiosk. His corpse is battered and broken, his face like raw, well-marbled beef.

  There is a door precious feet away.

  Harry doesn’t know where it leads to but he throws himself behind it, slams it shut, finds a lock and clicks it into place.

  Scarce seconds later, the brats begin beating at the door…

  ***

  Summer has no idea where she’s going.

  She sprints across the parking lot. She sees a man getting out of a car and is about to call out to him when two of the children attack him. No good, no good. Out of the parking lot. A grassy verge. Just through the trees she sees houses lined up in a row. Sanctuary. Though she does not think this word, it is in her head. She understands it with a pure animal sense.

  How can this be happening?

  How the hell can this be happening?

  This becomes like her oft-repeated mantra, replaying and replaying in her head, echoing around in there, looking for an answer in the depths of her mind, some reason, some resolution and finding nothing, nothing at all. It’s been less than hour, she knows. How can the world turn upside down and inside out in less than an hour? Shouldn’t it take more time? Shouldn’t it take days and weeks and months?

  As she comes through the trees, she spots two of the brats.

  They’re walking
up the sidewalk. A boy and girl walking hand-in-hand. Farther down, right in the middle of the street, two boys carry what look to be fishing spears. Like the couple on the sidewalk, like all of them for that matter, they are naked and blood-splashed. It isn’t a nightmare; it’s happening. And it’s happening in broad daylight.

  Why the fuck isn’t anybody seeing this?

  Why aren’t the police doing something?

  As Summer reaches the street, she suddenly realizes that, other than the guy getting out of the car in the station lot, she has yet to see a single car driving by or a single adult anywhere. Even something mundane like a guy taking out his garbage or a woman checking the mail would have relieved her.

  But there is nothing.

  Nothing.

  Summer runs to the first house she sees and pounds on the door. Nobody answers it. When the door isn’t answered at the house next door, she tries the knob but it’s locked. That doesn’t mean anything. Not really. People are off to work at this time of day. Her breath rasping in her throat, she goes to the next house and the next and the next.

  Where the fuck is everyone? Someone has to be home.

  And in the back of her mind, she can hear a voice speaking, a wizened voice imitating that of a child: They’re all dead, you silly cunt. This is the day the children rose up to slay their oppressors. Suffer the little children no more. They have taken the world and who can stand in their way? Who would not open their doors for some poor waifs? Who would turn God’s little lambs away?

  Summer refuses to listen and mainly because that wicked voice seems to know exactly what it’s talking about. She has to get in one of these houses and she has to do it fast because the brats are watching her now.

  Eh? What’s that? A straggler? Bring her down with claws and teeth, skin her and dump her hide with the others, shovel her carcass into the ditch. They must all die.