Frosstbyte

See, we’d had a couple murders in town-nasty, brutal stuff that none of us were prepared for. The bodies were mutilated and pieces were plain missing. There was no clear evidence pointing in any direction, until finally something slipped. It was another one of those dead evenings right after the sun had gone down and someone came tearing into town like a bat out of hell, with bite marks on her arm and scratches in her back. All she could do was scream something about the church. Now I’d been to one of the churches in town a couple times, it made my girlfriend happy, if I remember correctly, but she was talking about the other church-the dilapidated, dreary building on the outskirts of town that managed to send chills down your spine whenever you walked by. Now, I’d pretty much forgotten about that church until that day, but I’ll never forget what I saw when I walked in. Bodies lay everywhere. Some where whole, some where in pieces, others seemed to be shambling around in a half alive, half dead trance, and in the back sat ten gruesome things. They were hairless, with white, grotesque eyes and pale, flaky skin that seemed to barely hang on their bones. Once they saw me they moved faster than I’d ever seen anything move before in my life. I cut down four before they were out of their seats and another three on the way towards me. I took the eighth’s head off with two well placed shots to the neck and the ninth with a shot through one of its milky, blind eyes. Number ten leapt at me from a nearby pew and was caught in the chest by the rest of my clip as it flew first towards, and then away from me and crumpled in a heap in the corner. If only I’d known what I was dealing with, I would’ve burned that fucking church to the ground, but I didn’t, so I didn’t.

People naturally went in to see what had happened. Touching the bodies and trying to decide just what had happened in their quiet little town. And that’s when everything started to go bad. About two weeks later, cases of a strange illness popped up all over town. Those that had gone inside the church got it first, and the religious folk called it god’s curse for those who had defiled a place of worship, but soon damn near everyone in the town had caught it. It apparently spread rapidly and before any real signs could be noticed. At the time I remember thinking that the strangest part was that at about the three week mark people who were sick suddenly died or disappeared in the night. By this point, both my girlfriend and my friend the gunsmith had caught the illness. I guess my luck had carried through to this point and I still didn’t have any signs of it. Something, however, told me that this all was wrong and unnatural. But nothing new was happening, so how could I respond.

At the end of the fourth week, only fifteen people were still unaffected. My girlfriend had disappeared late in the week and my friend only the day before. So the fifteen of us decided to gather up some guns and prepare for whatever could be coming. And come they did. The whole town seemed to rise back out of the mists that night. Every person who had seemed to die or disappear suddenly returned and came looking for something, looking for us. My guns had never before and have never since flashed so many times as they did that night. One by one my companions fell, until only I was left, and I was running low on ammo. Finally the waves of “people,” if you could still call them that, ended. And I sat down at the top of the hill to catch my breath. As I rested some footsteps ran up behind me, I whipped around to see my friend running at me with a maniacal look on his face and a 2x4 full of rusty nails gripped in his rotten hand. He fell after taking a shot to the heart and another to the head, but not before planting his board in my leg. When I pulled it out, blood flowed from the wound and I clenched my teeth in pain. I had barely dressed the wound when I faintly heard someone calling my voice down in town. It was my girlfriend. I was overjoyed and ran down as best I could. She was walking alone down the street. She was silhouetted by the mountains and the fading light in the west. I couldn’t see her face and she wore a shawl which covered her head. . But she called to me, and I came. I remember seeing a flash of a smile as she saw me come towards her and even though some part of my mind was screaming that I should run away, I just couldn’t. I walked up to give her a hug and a kiss and as her lips met mine, I felt her nails dig through my coat and into my back and her teeth begin to tear into my lip. I responded in the way I had trained myself to respond, and she, or what was left of her, flew away from me in a bloody mess.