Past Indiscretions Read online

  Wait…someone on the porch.

  Just down the way.

  Vaulting hedges, Summer runs down there. An old guy is sitting on his porch reading the newspaper. Oh, thank God, thank God. But as she gets up the steps, crying out to him, she sees that his throat is slit ear-to-ear.

  The next house.

  And the next.

  And the next.

  The door is answered.

  “Oh God…” Summer pants, falling through the doorway. “Help me…please help me…”

  The woman, a mousy thing in fluffy pink slippers, lets her in. “Good Lord…what happened? Was there an accident?” she asks, seeing the state of her visitor, the torn clothes, the blood.

  Summer falls into a chair, trying to catch her breath. “There’s been an attack. At the train station.”

  “Terrorists?” the woman says, as if she’s long suspected those devils would show their ugly faces again.

  “No, no…nothing like that. There’s…there’s bodies everywhere. It’s kids. The kids are attacking the adults. They’re slaughtering them like cattle.”

  The woman steps back. “Are they? Are they really?”

  “Yes!” Summer says, seeing the disbelief on her face. “They’re killing everyone!”

  The woman nods. “Is it drugs, honey?”

  “What?”

  “Have you been popping pills or smoking crack or something?”

  Summer is speechless. This woman is not only out of touch she’s plain stupid to boot. Summer sighs. She has to handle this in the right way. “No, I’m not on drugs. The children are attacking adults. They’ve killed at least two dozen of them at the train station. I just came from there. They attacked me…look at the blood on me! Do you think I did this to myself?”

  “You need to settle down, you need to—”

  There’s a knock at the door.

  “Oh, whoever could that be now?” the woman says.

  Summer is on her feet. “Don’t answer it! It’s them!”

  “You need to relax, honey,” the woman tells her. She opens the door, shrugs, shuts it. “Nobody there. Maybe I’m hearing things. Now I’ll call the police and get us some coffee.”

  Summer, breathing hard, feeling reality grinding to a halt around her, gets up and paces back and forth. She goes to the window and parts the curtains. Nothing out there. Not so much as a single kid.

  Then…movement.

  A girl with a bloody axe in her hands steps out from behind a tree.

  Summer turns to call out to the woman, but when she looks back the girl is gone. Oh my God, I’m losing my fucking mind. The cops are going to come and they’re going to take me away.

  She hears the woman talking to someone.

  Must be the cops.

  A trickle of fear rolling down her spine, Summer goes down the hallway to the kitchen. She arrives in time to see the naked girl with the axe. The woman screams as it cuts into the back of her neck with a spray of meat and juice, spilling her to a bleeding heap to the floor. The girl stands over her, swinging the axe. It splits the woman’s head clean open, globs of tissue and blood splashing over the tiles.

  Summer turns and runs.

  As she reaches for the front door, she sees framed photographs on the wall. The woman with a baby in a stroller. The woman with a little girl. Hiking. Halloween. Christmas. Birthdays.

  Running out the door, Summer knows that the little girl in the picture is the same one with the axe.

  The woman she murdered is her mother…

  ***

  In the ticket kiosk, Harry waits.

  And waits.

  Hunched down behind the counter so the brats cannot see him, he waits while the world at large unravels. He wonders what got to the kids. What turned them into monsters. Was it some evil force like on a TV show? A biological weapon? A chemical spill? A nerve agent? Or was it none of those things? Whatever it was, he knows, the entire thing happened very fast. Chain-smoking, he thinks about how many kids there are in the world. Not every adult has them, but many do. Sometimes two or three or four or five. In his thinking, it seems that there are more of them than adults.

  Thump.

  Something strikes the outside of the kiosk and Harry flinches, but he does not move. The brats are out there and he knows it. But he is locked in safe and sound. They cannot get to him and if they do not know where he is, they will not try. The old dude left a lunch box and a Thermos. So he has supplies. He can stay in here as long as he has to.

  But what if that’s days? Because it could be. If this isn’t brought under control then it could go on and on and on.

  Harry refuses to think that.

  Worst case scenario, he’ll slip out after dark.

  In the distance, he hears someone scream. Another adult brought down. Jesus. Was it happening in every city? Every town? Every village? Again, he refuses to think about that. He can only consider his own survival. There’s no room for anything else in his mind.

  He waits and waits.

  Finally, daring it, he peeks over the counter. He can see no one out there save a few bodies sprawled not ten feet away. He wonders about Summer. Did they get her, too?

  Steeling himself, he rises up.

  No kids anywhere.

  He waits another five minutes, then ten. Okay. Maybe now’s a good time to make a break for it. But where? A car. He decides he’ll get a car and get the fuck out of this place, go somewhere where there’s adults. Somewhere the kids haven’t gone crazy.

  He unlocks the door of the kiosk and steps out into the killing fields…

  ***

  Roped like a steer, the children drag Summer through the streets.

  She doesn’t beg or plead because her throat is sore from doing that. Whenever she opens her mouth, they hit her. Scratch her. Bite her. Jab her with knives. The girl with the bloody axe is with them. She leads the little parade straight out of hell and the others follow reverently in her wake. The brats do not speak. It’s like they’ve lost the ability for verbal communication. They interact with grunts and growls and hand gestures. They seem to carry on entire conversations this way.

  Summer was captured outside the woman’s house.

  They had been waiting for her.

  They dropped from the trees and came out of the hedges. She tried to escape and it was the worst thing she could have done. She was beaten nearly unconscious, whipped and cut. The girls dug their nails into her and scraped her skin raw. The boys pummeled her with their fists. And when there was no fight left in her, the boys urinated on her.

  Now she’s being dragged somewhere.

  She can taste crusty blood on her lips, feel it drying on her cheekbones, thickening like mud in her hair.

  A bridge.

  Summer can see a river spreading out beneath. Why do they bring her here? Are they going to toss her over? She hopes they will because she’s a good swimmer. If that’s the worst, she can live with it just fine. But she knows then in the black depths of her heart that it will not be that easy. The noose is tightened around her throat. The other end is tied off to a lamp post. It’s at least a fifteen feet drop to the water and there isn’t that much rope.

  “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!” she screams.

  She fights and thrashes, but in the end they overpower her and throw her over the railing. A scream rushing up from her throat, she feels the descent, the weightlessness, the water getting closer…and then a jarring concussion in her neck, a whip-snap popping as her vertebrae is broken, a feeling like her spine has been pulled out through the top of her head. Her bowels void, her bladder empties as muscular control is lost. Spasms run through her body as nerve endings go haywire, shooting one last jolt of electricity through her…then a numbing blackness.

  Her body swung back and forth, back and forth, the rope creaking and creaking against the bridge…

  ***

  God, they’re everywhere.

  Are they that cunning?

  That sly?

  That
imaginatively malicious to lay a trap?

  Harry doesn’t know, only that as he got clear of the kiosk they came springing out, small elfin figures with gnashing teeth and outstretched fingers, malignant little hobgoblins primed on hate. They move around him, rustling and swarming, bringing a violent stink of savagery and death with them in a hot seeking cloud.

  They rush at him, two and then three of them.

  Harry smashes one in the face—a girl—with his left and drills another with his right. He can feel their lips mash beneath his heavy knuckles. He kicks another and she pinwheels into two more. He pounds them and wails on them, fists flying. He stomps them beneath his boots. He picks one up and tosses it at a pack of them.

  But they have no fear.

  No fear of pain or punishment or death.

  He harvests them like wheat, dropping them like a scythe, but still they come on, more driven, more enraged, more anxious to take him down like prehistoric men assaulting a mammoth.

  They cling to his legs and jump on his back and attach themselves to his arms so that he can no longer effectively kick or hit. He swings to the left and they swing with him. He jumps to the right and drags them along. He’s towing a dozen of them by the time he reaches the stairs, his breath coming in short sharp gasps and his muscles fatigued, the fight bleeding out of him.

  Maybe they know this.

  Maybe they see he’s tiring.

  And maybe, just maybe, they sense it.

  At the stairs, they suddenly release him simultaneously and it’s his own brute force and forward momentum that carries him off the landing where he misses the first step, boots skidding on the second…and then he’s going down, flopping and loose. He shoulder cracks off one of the concrete steps, dislocating something, his head hitting another, dazing him. He rolls down and down, his body taking a merciless beating, his weight carrying him faster and faster in a tangle of arms and legs.

  Then something snaps in his back as his upper body wants to go one way and his lower another.

  He lands at the bottom, broken and bruised and bleeding.

  There’s absolutely no sensation beneath his neck.

  Nothing. No feeling. If he moves his head he can feel the slopping, noodly mass of his body and it’s like being moored to a formless bulk of rubber. Oh, Christ, not now…not fucking now! Summoning up every shred of willpower and stamina in his mind, he forces his body to obey but it’s dead weight. Paralyzed. You’re fucking paralyzed. He tells himself it’s temporary, that feeling will return. His spine took some trauma and shut everything down.

  That’s all.

  That’s all it is.

  But then the brats come down the stairs, surrounding him, making hissing and whistling sounds like insects in a summer field. They pack around him until they’re a solid fleshy mass of tiny bodies and staring black, insectile eyes. They are waiting for something.

  Then Harry sees.

  A girl steps forward with an axe.

  She’s covered in blood, her hair matted and stuck to her face in greasy red strands. He sees her tiny immature breasts, her hairless pubis. Clenching her teeth and making a weird droning sort of sound, she brings the axe down. Harry feels the impact like a distant thunder, but no more.

  By then he is whimpering, tears sliding down his cheeks.

  He can taste blood in his mouth, feel the vile heat of the brats as they press in closer. The girl has something and she holds it out like she’s offering it to him.

  Oh no, oh no, not that, not that.

  It’s his left hand and he recognizes it by the thick fingers and spiked rings.

  The only thing Harry has left is his voice and he lets out a high, shrilling scream. And as he does so she forces his severed hand into his mouth as if to silence him. He can feel the still warm fleshiness of it. It’s appalling. Blood still drips from the severed wrist and it fills his mouth with a foul metallic taste like dirty coins.

  The girl keeps pushing, forcing the hand entirely into his mouth.

  Harry gags, thrashing his head from side to side…but all those hands seize his head and force his jaws open. The girl is squatting on his chest now. There’s a dull sensation of her weight. His throat shudders with the gag reflex.

  Grinning, she uses the axe handle like a ram, pushing his dead hand deeper into his mouth until it feels like his jaws are dislocating. And then three and four others help her, pressing down on the axe head, wedging his own hand deeper into his throat until he cannot swallow, cannot breath.

  His eyes bulge white, his face contorts, drool runs from his lips.

  They force his hand deeper and deeper into his airway until he shudders and moves no more.

  Fuck Shock

  by

  Brendan Vidito

  When it was over and he lay on the floor of his apartment with the taste of her on his tongue, Robert Duffy was convinced he would never have another satisfying sexual experience for as long as he lived.

  Sprawled on the carpet, looking like the subject of a chalk drawing at a crime scene, Robert reached into his sweaty underwear and gripped his cock. It slithered and slipped inside his palm, still moist with her fluids. Slowly, his wrist began to work, pumping up and down. Soon, his brow popped fresh beads of sweat and he could feel the heat radiating off his flesh in a reeking pall. He pumped harder. Then stopped. Opening his palm, he stared at his limp cock. It refused to comply with his need for release. Standing, he walked into the bedroom, crawled under the unmade, unwashed sheets and eventually, after another fruitless attempt at pleasure, slipped into a restless sleep.

  His sexual frustration persisted for several weeks. An urge was building inside of Robert, filling him, until his nights were robbed of sleep and his stomach shrank inside of him. The thought of her only compounded the problem. Every time he caught a glimpse of his naked reflection, be it the sunken chest with its nest of dark, wiry hair, or the shapeless contour of his ass, her shadow seemed to slither across his skin like a retinal afterimage. Her memory traced snail-trails across the map of his flesh, and with every gaze, Robert’s mind reflected ecstatically upon the encounter that had forever changed him. He would shiver, his skin prickling with gooseflesh. Soon it was coated in a scrim of sweat, as if his whole body had transmuted into a sexual organ, sheened in pre-seminal fluid in anticipation of the act. Only then was he able to sprout an erection. It was feeble at best, but the important thing was that Robert’s blood flowed true, and he suspected that her venom was partly responsible for this. But as soon as he tried to pleasure himself, the shadow-memory lost substance, and his cock fell limp in his hand.

  Reflecting on this later in an old sofa chair he salvaged from the roadside, Robert realized that he was suffering from a legitimate case of fuck shock. Not to be compared with its cousin, shell shock, fuck shock was the rare and unfortunate product of the most satisfying sexual encounter one could ever experience. The result was a chronic dissatisfaction with any lesser forms of sexual pleasure. In short, the victim of fuck shock could never be satisfied until he found an experience that transcended the one that brought on the affliction in the first place. Robert doubted this very much because when he tried to find her again at the abandoned storefront, the building was gone, replaced by a newly paved parking lot. Desperate now, Robert tried to find fulfillment in other ways.

  He opened his laptop and searched for escort services in the region. The most promising result was a small business called Bijou that offered a variety of women ranging in age and ethnicity, one for nearly every pallet. Fortunately, the place allowed for booking to be made by text message, allowing Robert the ease of privacy. He decided on a twenty-two-year-old brunette named Endora. He quickly received a response by text stating that she was available for outcalls and would arrive at his home shortly.

  When she rang twenty minutes later he buzzed her in. Opening the door he saw the woman advertised on the website only now, unlike her digital counterpart, she had a face. A weary complexion puckered the thin, pink
skin around her eyes, which were a muted shade of blue. Her nose was large and pitted with blackheads, distorting the otherwise symmetrical quality of her face. When she smiled, Robert saw that her teeth were stained nicotine yellow.

  But as Robert’s eyes roved over her face and figure, finally settling on her expression, he realized that they shared a mutual disappointment for each other. The ingeniousness of her smile was betrayed in the small tremors at the corners of her mouth.

  Robert looked down at himself, his dirty shirt, jogging pants, and unkempt hair and said, “I was going to wait for you to get here before I showered, just so you know that I’m clean.”

  She nodded politely. “That’s very considerate of you.”

  Walking toward the bathroom to shower for the first time in perhaps a week, Robert pointed at the rescued sofa chair and said, “You can sit there and relax. I won’t be long.”

  When he emerged from the shower, a towel wrapped around his emaciated waist, he found Endora sitting on his bed, smoothing out the wrinkles with her manicured hands. Her lips, greased in black, parted wetly and she said, “What are you thinking?”

  Robert sat down beside her, shoulder to shoulder. He had shaved the week’s worth of stubble from his face to make their encounter more tolerable for the whore. He smelled thickly of foam and aftershave.

  “I like to be surprised,” Robert said, and then, summoning the phrase from the storehouses of memory, “Show me a new experience.”

  Endora smiled politely. Robert wasn’t the first weirdo she had encountered. One guy, tall and well groomed had sobbed during sex and afterwards emptied the sodden condom in the sink and then filled it with water to check for leaks – not that he would play any part in the fathering of the child.

  But Robert was different from the usual john. Something haunted him; she could see in his eyes, the movements of his body. A specter enveloped him, an aura hovering inches above the skin like heat baking off asphalt.

  Endora touched his chest, twining her fingers through his hair. She did not detect the usual thrill of anticipation that affected the other johns. She might as well have been touching a corpse, still warm and in the grip of a bizarre half-life. He did not thrill to her touch. He might not have even felt it. For him, it