Death Row Apocalypse Read online

  The guard was fast and in one motion came forward and crashed the heel of his boot into the side of the zombie’s skull again, again, and again. Blood, skin, and eventually brain matter squished and squirted away from the pounding as the guard’s foot finally plunged through its broken skull casing embedding the boot deep within its head, causing one of its eyes to catapult across the room and land on my chest.

  Chapter - 2

  - The early years -

  I looked up to my mother. Tears streaked her face, causing small rivers of mascara to run like charcoal veins, ruining her carefully applied makeup. She was dressed for church, as we all were. Today was different, though, as the church was completely empty, except for we three and the priest.

  My palm was sweating in my mother’s grip. Whatever was going down was not right, and I was confused. The whole situation made absolutely no sense to me. During the Mass, my father placed his hand firmly on my shoulder. It was there for reassurance—whether his or mine, I was not really sure. His firm grip became viselike and anchored me in place, preventing my escape. I looked up at him. He returned the gesture and looked down at me, the only difference being that his face could have been carved in granite. Not even the slightest of emotions bled through that indomitable mask.

  We were standing two or three pews from the front as the priest energetically recited his sermon. The feeling that the proceedings were for my benefit were becoming more of a reality when he focused his stare on me alone and began literally launching word after word at me, like some demented, shuriken-throwing ninja. He was not only preaching, he was ramming the word of God into my face with such passion and strength that my hair literally stood on end. This onslaught first pounded at, and then wrenched at, my chest. With my heart hammering against my ribs, I wanted nothing more than to escape this Hammer House of Horrors.

  It hurt and then it burnt, so badly that my struggles for freedom intensified to almost epic levels, but my father held me in place, giving me a bruise that would remind me of that day for months to follow. Sweat poured from my beetroot face, and the anger in me grew and grew until I saw only red. The old priest then seemingly on cue came closer and placed his hand on my head. He then quoted verse upon ancient verse from his thick, tattered Bible. To this day, I have never heard those phrases repeated again. I suspect they originated from a slightly different version of the Holy Bible than the one my parents owned; one that was designed for challenging sources of evil rather than teaching the word of God, I guess.

  Occasionally, holy water was splashed on my face, and the sign of the cross was then drawn on my forehead. This caused me to struggle still harder against my father’s hold. But as I looked up to the priest’s face, I noticed that his confidence was in question, his fear and state of mind were clearly visible behind a fragile veil, and I knew he was weak both in body and spirit. His faith was not as strong as the facade that he portrayed, and he would be unable to finish this ancient act, and, knowing this, my resolve strengthened.

  The priest returned to the raised pulpit. He walked up the twisting staircase, until once again he looked down upon me. As he prepared for the next round, I recall feeling myself relax. My heart rate dropped back to normal, and I no longer felt the dread that had followed me into the church that day. As he began his recitation he looked toward me, then stuttered, he had clearly seen the alterations in my demeanor and was obviously disturbed by them. He took a couple of steps backwards in reflex to what he saw lurking in shadows behind my eyes. Perhaps it was one, or perhaps it was two—in either case, it was definitely one step too many, as the unlucky priest fell backwards down the stone steps that led up to the pulpit. As he fell, striking each step on his way down those unforgiving stairs, the air was pushed audibly from his lungs, until at last his head was caught at what must have been the perfect angle, whereupon a final snapping sound echoed throughout the now-silent church.

  As we left the church, I looked back and took a mental photograph of the strangely twisted corpse dressed in robes, whose head now faced the ceiling while the rest of his body faced the floor.

  These very strange Stephen King–like memories vanished from my mind until only recently, and while I remember them as if they occurred yesterday, I have come to know several facts. One, this was indeed an exorcism of some type and was focused on removing something from my soul. Two, the memory of the event was taken from me. And three, whatever they had tried to remove still lurks within me to this very day. It hadn’t slept, and it certainly wasn’t dormant. It was wide awake and skulking inside me, maturing within me over the years. The deceased priest had indeed failed, but that did not come to me as a surprise. In fact, he had managed to only suppress the knowledge of what lay within me and what I truly was.

  Before going on, though, let me set one fact straight. I’m no more possessed than any of you who are now reading these records. In fact, we are more alike than either you or your kind would care to admit. I’ll try to describe what it is that lurks inside me, and perhaps you know this about yourself also. Imagine, if you can, a werewolf standing erect, strong, powerful, and menacing, with every muscle visibly defined, but also covered from head to foot in dark, thick, coarse hair, its hands powerful, with long fingers and nails that end in vicious points. These tapered nails are thick and sharp enough to rip flesh from a crocodile’s hide. The werewolf’s head is perhaps the most fearsome of all, where sharp teeth in an elongated jaw threaten to tear even the toughest hide clean in two. It’s this that is inside me. I feel its need to rip, to tear, and to shred with teeth and claw.

  Granted this is a temper—a state of mind, if you will—but to me this is the monster that is kept in check behind my eyes. Only with time and practice have I been able to hone its/my need to spill blood. It is a symbiotic relationship of sorts that we share, one where I also benefit by borrowing from its reserves of strength and will, but I also revel in the dark bloodlust within its soul. Tell me, what is the beast that lurks within you?

  Six years later

  When I was twelve, I was often the focus of anger and violence. Somehow I attracted violence. It was not until I reached that grand old age of twelve that I came to realize that most of the problems I encountered were actually caused by myself. It turns out that I would soon develop into the universe’s focal point for all that is negative in this world.

  I can’t recall how many times I found myself in situations where I was outnumbered and outmatched. The first resulting piece of knowledge that I always walked away with was this: if I kept my mind focused, I could do really amazing things. The second piece of knowledge was that really amazing things happen when fear and danger come together. I’ll rephrase that: when fear and danger come together and fuck like rabbits, amazing shit goes down!

  In fact, during my school years I had become somewhat of a curiosity. Whenever any bully had sought me out, usually when they believed they had the advantage, I would use whatever advantage they thought they had and turn it around to ultimately evade some really nasty situations. Then, finally, at some point after the event, I would exact my revenge, sometimes immediately, sometimes days, and sometimes years later. Eventually, though, my parents had quite enough of my scholarly antics and shipped me off to an English boarding school, hoping beyond hope that the new environment would finally bring me under control, but my fun would not be stopped.

  Hounds-Tor School for Boys was as bleak a place as its name implied, and if you’ve ever seen the original black-and-white movie Sherlock Holmes & The Hound of the Baskervilles, you’ll get my drift immediately. For those that have not, Dartmoor is a barren region of land, treacherous and unforgiving. Every step one takes on the moors has to be taken with caution, for one moment you may be walking on granite, then in the next the ground is trying to swallow you whole.

  Centered slightly to the east within this desolate region was once claimed to be the oldest boys’ school in the country. The little-known Hounds-Tor School for Boys was built on the remains of
an ancient chapel and stood steadfast against time and the elements. The chapel, notably also prefixed “Hounds-Tor,” had been built on the summit of—yes, you guessed it—Hounds-Tor. A granite outcropping some 1,300 feet above sea level, and not a single piece of vegetation could offer the slightest protection from the elements for miles around.

  The name “Hounds-Tor” had been given to this rocky mound when a pack of hounds from hell had been turned to stone—or so the story went. In fact, its first mention in history is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year AD 876.

  In the spirit of all good horror movies, the summit of Hounds-Tor had previously been used as a burial site and dated as far back as 1300 BC, when the area had been a Bronze Age settlement. The chapel had been reportedly destroyed in the year of the Great Storm, AD 870, by successive lightning strikes, apparently brought on by the devil himself as he visited the chapel—or so they say.

  The school had only two floors. On the upper level were housed fifty boys in five dormitories, while on the ground level, classrooms, showers, and kitchens could be found. Throughout the building one could sense the history beneath the polished oak floors, doors, and paneled walls, where the whispers of the departed permeated every knot, crevice, and crack. In this place I was more at home than any other before or since. The fate of the school had been almost as strange as its history, for only four weeks after my departure the school was leveled by lightning strikes of biblical proportions, returning the granite walls to the soil from which they came. As if the very knowledge of the school’s long existence was taboo, all but the oldest of records mentioning it passed into faded memory. The evidence is plain to see, as even its Wikipedia page mentions nothing of the history I have detailed.

  The boys who boarded in this school had no idea what was being unleashed upon them! Because I refused to submit to school bullies and their bullying ways, the head boy and his posse decided to teach me a lesson one night, one which they were confident would bring me in line within their domain.

  It was a dark winter’s night. The dorm lights went out at 10:00 p.m. sharp as usual, at which point the bullies’ attack began in earnest in the pitch black. Having only a few seconds to consider my options, I moved silently and quickly, getting out of the lower bed of the bunk bed. How I knew they would attack and when they would attack was beyond me and still is to this day. Somehow I just knew they would come for me at that very moment.

  I moved silently to the center of the small dorm cloaked in the absolute dark that currently enveloped the room. My eyes struggled to seek out shapes while they adapted to the murky room. The boys approached. They complained in whispers as they bumped into walls and stubbed toes into bedframes. The thumping of blood in my ears intensified as one by one my assailants crept passed me, so close they almost touched me. They were so close in fact that I could feel the heat from their bodies and smell the faint odor of soap on their skin from their recent ablutions.

  Amazed that they were completely unaware of my proximity, I took full advantage of the situation and decided to strike using the element of surprise. The sense of power I gained in those moments was immeasurable. Time and the dark were now my allies, and, since I had no moral limitations, my options were wide open, and I decided to do something spectacular. The beast within was released. Its craving for blood would be sated that night.

  As the last boy passed by me, I struck. I cupped my hand over his mouth and brought the tip of the long-bladed knife to bear on the side of his neck. I could feel his skin attempt to remain intact as I pressed the blade still harder. It finally accepted the inevitable and allowed the sharp edge to penetrate the elastic epidermis. The knife was extremely sharp. I had pocketed it during my recent visit to the kitchens for the express reason I now lay out before you. It felt like I was gutting a fish, but in this case it was a human child. I slid the knife easily between his spine and throat, the blade penetrating from one side of his neck to the other. As it protruded from the far side, I began to cut with a sawing motion forwards, and in no time at all I had severed his arteries and trachea. In the time it took for his hands to come to his throat, the deed was already done.

  He grabbed briefly at his neck where I had cut, and the last of the air from his lungs gurgled and bubbled through the impossibly wide aperture that I had created. His arms dropped to his sides, and finally his head flopped backwards, encouraged gently with a slight pull of his hair with my hand. My eyes had adapted somewhat to the inky gloom within the dorm and were helped further by a little extra moonlight. I could see the white bone of his exposed spine. With a loud crack his spine snapped, while I encouraged his head backwards yet further. Blood continued to gush upwards for a few more seconds in a miniature fountain as he dropped to his knees. He then fell forward and hit the floor with a thud. A second smaller thud could be heard moments later when his lifeless head struck the floor, carried forward by its own inertia.

  Moonlight now illuminated the room fully, subjecting the witnesses to a horrifying monochrome nightmare. The gutted boy’s fingers twitched a couple of times as they performed a miniature cabaret in the growing pool of the thick, sticky ink that once coursed through his veins.

  As the blood blossomed outwards, I stood amongst the sprayed and spreading fluids with my arms out to my sides and my head angled back, looking up to the moon through the window. Covered from head to toe in blood, I was revealed for what I was, and I reveled in the moment. I could have stayed there longer, standing in the midnight-black gloss lake at my feet, but someone turned the lights on, breaking the magical moment. The blinding light illuminated the macabre scene and everyone in the dorm, bringing to an end the night’s bloody nightmare and starting one that the remaining boys would now endure until the day they died. Several lost control of their bladders, along with their minds, that night. For those boys, their nights would be forever clouded in blood and sweat as they recalled the horrific scene. None in fact would ever be able to sleep without first locking the bedroom door and keeping at least one light turned on.

  The small dormitory was covered in blood. Arterial spray had reached and covered each of the four walls, and the ceiling now resembled a piece of abstract art. In some places the blood had pooled on the ceiling, which was slowly dripping crimson raindrops, which sometimes landed on the already-drenched pajama-sporting boys. No one escaped the soaking that night.

  The whole event was somehow kept from the newspapers. The children of that fateful dorm room were treated for shock over the following years, and to this day I doubt that their sanity has been fully restored. In any case, I seriously doubt any of them regained full control over their bladders when I consider how freely they were released that night.

  Those events are not the end of my story, though, for I was immediately sent back to the US, to a facility specializing in extreme mental conditions. It was there that, after being analyzed by doctor after doctor, they resorted to electroconvulsive therapy to try and “fix” my inner demon. The treatments seemed to continue forever, with injections, medications, therapists, psychologists and, of course, a priest or two thrown in for good luck. They never gave up, and they never ran out of drugs to try. I must give them their dues, however. Before using the drugs, they talked to me at length, and at first I endured weeks of conversation, followed by question upon question, my sarcastic responses to which annoyed them to high heaven. During these sessions, they would ask me to describe the events of “that” night, and I usually responded by asking them if they would like a reenactment and to witness it firsthand, adding that perhaps one of them would like to volunteer. Usually I would be drugged and knocked out immediately without any further conversation! I guess it didn’t help when I also suggested they should volunteer their daughters to spice things up a bit.

  I think I eventually caught on after about four years of this punishment, and I decided to play the game their way. Behaving myself, I answered their moronic questions correctly, and eventually my doctors started to believe in the t
reatments they were administering to me. My case evolved and became a research success, whereupon their theories and treatments were then recorded as cures for my unique condition. All the while during my extended incarceration, my parents distanced themselves from me. Understandable, I guess. They were the only ones who had any idea of my full potential.

  My eventual release became academic and was just a question of time. Likewise, it was then only a question of time as to when I could fully immerse myself in my chosen pastime. I would endeavor to excel in my new career, as any dutiful son should do . . .

  A little later I was considered healed, and I was released on the unsuspecting general public. Put nicely, I was given a new identity, including a specialist education in a chosen field. They even covered the costs of embedding me in Tallahassee, a back-end town in Florida. This part was cheap, as I had no private possessions to speak of. I was given a new wardrobe, a small but decent apartment, and they helped me establish myself in business in my chosen field.

  In many ways I reckon this process was more or less identical to the witness protection program that one hears about in newspaper articles and, more commonly, in the movies. I’ve hinted several times now as to my new profession, and you’re probably assuming murder or burial services or something equally morbid, or at least on the same lines, aren’t you?

  In fact, I decided that I wanted to cook, specifically to be a baker. Now a baker not only bakes bread; he also creates a wonderfully broad range of doughs, cakes, sweets, treats—and the list goes on. Check Wikipedia if you don’t believe me. Anyway, they paid for one year’s tuition, and as mentioned before they set me up in business with my own store. One year is not much, but I am a fast study and seemed to have a knack when implementing my imagination.

  From the outside I was just like any other Floridian, and before long I was making a decent income and became a well-liked and widely known citizen of Tallahassee. One thing led to another and eventually I actually married. I make it sound like a life-changing event. Believe me, it was! But not the kind that one would normally attribute to the cozy ideals of love and feelings. It would be more accurate to describe it as me being dragged backwards kicking and screaming into destiny’s belly, being digested, then pushed and squeezed through the intestine, and finally having the remaining humanity forcibly removed, before being crapped out into the toilet bowl of life. My whole being tried to wrench itself away from the depths and the sheer singularity of depression that now feasted on my—until that moment—pure and kind soul . . .