Episode 4.4: The Poltergeist

“Vonix? No.  They were always a bit outside our price range…but why do you ask?”

            

“Oh, uh no reason.  They’re just…pretty cool I guess.” Lyle looked at me with an odd expression but made no reply.  My mind briefly wandered back to Jeff, the weirdo who wanted to force me into his schemes to repopulate the world.  I smiled softly as I remembered the sound my hammer made as it shattered his arm. 

             

Lyle’s car was parked at the very back of an underground parking lot outside of the grocery store.  The lot itself looked like most other places—headless bodies thrown around everywhere, pools of blood, bags of food that had been discarded in the chaos.  All the death and destruction that was splattered on every wall and littered in every street had kind of lost its affect on me, but Lyle the baker? Lyle the family man?  He looked like he was going to barf—which got me thinking of my dad.

             

For as long as I could remember, my father was a ghost.  Not a quiet, brooding ghost that silently wanders through old hallways or shows up randomly in a Polaroid.  Dad was the kind of ghost that throws shit around and draws bloody pentagrams on your mirror while you’re sleeping.  A poltergeist.  That’s what my father was. 

             

He was tall and skinny like our new friend Lyle, but dad’s eyes didn’t look back at you.  They were like one of those two-way mirrors—you looked into them and you knew there was someone looking back at you, but you had no idea who it was.

             

It wasn’t just the abuse and pain that got to mom and me.  Bruises healed, blood could get cleaned up.  It was the Fear.  The Fear was a constant houseguest.  Each moment of each day was tainted with the knowledge that at any moment, the poltergeist could creep up behind us and sink its teeth in.

              

My mom always talked about leaving.  She came up with an escape plan and everything. 

             

“We could pack up and go stay with my sister up in Midvale,” she’d say, “She hates the bastard as much as we do.  I’d find work and you could go to school up there.  It’d work, by damn.” She said this at least once a week for five years.  Five years of dangling a vulgar hope in front of my nose and then backing off.  But one night, by damn, she made it.  She got out of that haunted house, even though it meant forgetting something that I thought was very important to her: Me.  Little Marla.  I woke up on the morning of her departure with the Fear already perched at the foot of my bed as it always was.  I went downstairs for breakfast like I always did.  But instead of walking into the kitchen to see my mom pouring me some Rice Chex (like she always did), all I saw was the poltergeist hovering over the kitchen sink, grasping a butcher knife.

            

“Your mom’s gone.” He spoke without any tinge of emotion.

              

“Where is she?” I asked.

            
“She’s just gone.” 

Gone.  

 I was eleven.  

 My chest filled with acid and I felt like I was going to dry heave.  How could she leave me? I thought bitterly.  This whole time, all those plans, and she left without me? Tears filled my eyes as I thought about the many long years that stretched out before me, the years that I had to spend alone inside a haunted house.

Episode 4.3: A Baker Named Lyle

We crept as silently as possible to the back of the store towards the bakery.  Loaves of French bread and rows of donuts waited indifferently behind their glass display cases, as if today were any other day.  Another sound pierced the air—this one more like the pots and pans were being kicked around on the floor.  There wasn’t much light coming from the windows that peeked into the kitchen, but I could see a slight, shadowy movement somewhere in the darkness. 

      

Minh had removed the Glock from her waistband and now held it rigidly, ready to blow a hole through anything slimy that we found back there.  I pressed the barrel of my shotgun up to the swinging door that led into the kitchen.  My mouth had gone dry, and I felt my heart thudding against my chest.  On my second step into the kitchen the lights flicked on, and I ducked behind the nearest counter.  Minh ducked back into the bakery.  I saw her pink and black hi-tops slide quickly out of the way.

             

“Is…is someone there?” I heard a shaky male voice ask.  My first instinct was to jump up and give the owner of the voice a big hug, but my experience with that crazy bastard back on campus made me think twice.

            

 “Yes.  There’s two of us,” I yelled back without standing up, “We’re not here to make any trouble.” The male voice gasped in relief.

            

 “Oh! Survivors! How…how wonderful.  Please, come out.  I’m not going to hurt you.” My paranoia had not quite subsided, and I poked my eyes up over the counter so I could see the owner of the voice.  He was an older guy, maybe mid 50’s.  He was beanpole tall and an unkempt mess of a comb-over clung halfheartedly to his balding head.  He was wearing an apron that was stained with blotches of dried blood. 

             

“Let me see your hands,” I yelled from my cover.  He raised them quickly, as he glanced around the kitchen.  He was unarmed, but that didn't necessarily mean he was stable.  I stood up and set my shotgun on the counter in front of me.  As soon as he saw me, he dropped his hands and let out a pitiful moan—one that hinted at both grief and excitement.

           

 “What are you doing here?” I asked as Minh entered the kitchen and stood behind the counter with me.

             

“I…I work here.  Or, I guess, I did before all of this happened.  I had just started my evening shift when I saw people’s heads buh-blowing up.  Customers, employees.  Some ran outside, but I…I wuh-was too scared.  I just waited here until the screaming stopped,” Tears started to well up in his eyes, “Muh-my wife and daughters…I duh-don’t even know if…if they’re still alive.” The man broke down the way a toddler does when he finds out he’s lost and alone in the middle of a department store.

             

“If…if only I could reach them…I…I…” His sentence was interrupted by another bout of sobbing. 

             

“Well,” I spoke as softly as I could, “Where is your family? Where do you all live?” The man regained a bit of his composure.  Rubbing the wetness from his eyes and face, he explained that he and his wife live in the Avenues, which was about seven or eight miles away.  I guess the violent arrival of extra terrestrial lifeforms had left him a bit too petrified to make the trip back to them.

            

 “So, right now they’re just as likely to be alive as anything else.  Let’s just go and find them.  I’m sure they’ve just holed up inside your house.” His face brightened a bit at this.

            

 “Duh-do you think so? Really?” I shrugged.

            

 “Only one way to find out.  We’ll go with you, right Minh?”

             

Nod, followed by a grin.  The baker introduced himself as Lyle Wallace and once we got packed, I found him to be kind of pleasant in an awkward way.  As we left the shattered remains of the front entrance to Dan’s behind us and stepped into the light of the morning sun, a hideous thought entered my mind.

             

“Lyle,” I asked, “Your wife and daughters…have they by chance been using Vonix cellphones?”

Episode 4.2: Grossery Chopping

The thing about humanity being totally blindsided by an invasion of parasitic aliens is that—for whatever reason—it makes the automatic doors in front of grocery stores not want to open for you anymore.  I learned this while I was loading a few extra shells into my gun as Minh and I approached the entrance to Dan’s.  The door didn’t open and the plexiglass shoved the barrel of my gun back at me, causing the stock to bite into my hip.  The pain was so sharp that I clutched the handle (trigger included) too hard and BANG! SHATTER! I had just blown a hole in the door.  Minh, who was standing behind me simply stared at the flurry of broken glass on the ground, demurely walked over to the not-automatic door, and pushed it open.

            

I was slightly comforted to see that the glittering spread of glass that I had created didn’t add much to the mayhem that had already arrived inside Dan’s Food and Drug.  Headless bodies clung to overturned newspaper stands and palates of bulk dog food.  They were splayed across checkout counters and stacked up against the icy doors of the frozen foods section.  I could still recognize that grocery store smell of floor cleaner and refrigerated food, but it was buried deeply inside the bitingly metallic stench of blood.  I was jolted out of my horrified trance when Minh grabbed my elbow.

            

“Shit! Minh! I coulda blown your head right off!” She just shrugged and held up a hideous fluorescent green and pink backpack.  I noticed that she was wearing one of equally offensive color. 

            

“Oh! Good idea, Minh!” I rifled through the pack to see how many little pockets I could fill, “I don’t suppose they had any backpacks that didn’t look like TRON puked all over them?”

            

Head shake.  Followed by a confused expression.

             

We filled Minh’s pack mostly with light stuff—beef jerky, fruit roll-ups, and some bags of mixed nuts.  I found a can opener and crammed as much canned meat, fruit, and vegetables as possible into my pack.  As I was doing this, two thoughts barged into my head.  First, between the two of us, we could only carry about a week and a half’s worth of food.  Second, just where in the hell were we going to go?  I stopped packing and thought about these two party crashers.  I told Minh to stop for a moment.  It didn’t make sense to pack without having some kind of destination in mind.  Where did all the other survivors end up? In an instant so quick it felt like a direct response to my question, I heard the earsplitting clatter of metal pots crashing to the floor.  It came from somewhere towards the back of the building.  I stepped in front of Minh and cocked a shell into place.

            

“Minh, I’m going to see what that was.  Do you want to stay here?”

            

Head shake.

         

“Do you want to come with me?”

           

Nod.

Episode 4.1

EPISODE 4: "SURVIVING"
STARRING: MARLA MANSLAUGHTER
SALT LAKE CITY, UT

I wish I could say that things got better after aliens arrived and blew up Fort Douglas.  But they didn’t.  I was glad to have found Minh, but she wasn’t much of a conversationalist. 

Because I’m clever. 

            

 Those were the last words I heard her speak.  After we left the ruins of Fort Douglas, she would only communicate by nodding for “yes” and shaking her head for “no.”

             

“Was that your car you were sleeping in?”

            

 Nod.

            

 “Do you know what year it is?”

            

 Nod.

            

 “Are your parents somewhere nearby”

            

 Head shake.

            

 “Are your parents still alive?”

            

 Head shake.

            

 “Do you want to come with me?”

            

 Nod.

            

I didn’t even learn her name until that afternoon when we ducked into an abandoned Jeep to hide from a flock of head-poppers.  After we reclined the seats and listened to the little snot walkers slither through the street, she reached over and grabbed my hand.  I felt a cold chain dig into my wrist and looked down to see what it was.  She was wearing one of those bracelets that look like pretty versions of hospital I.D. bands.  On the small card of metal that connected both ends of the chain, I read the name Minh Ha.  I lifted it from her wrist with my thumb and saw characters that I assumed to be her name in what looked like Japanese to my untrained American eyes.

            

 After the head-poppers had vacated the premises, I pointed to her bracelet.

             

“Is that your name?”

            

 Nod.

            

 “Minh Ha? Did I say it right?”

            

 Nod.

            

 “I’m Marla.” I shook her hand, and she smiled.

            

 She looked like she was about twelve or thirteen—that streak of orange in her shiny black hair could have only been the result of a misguided attempt at preteen rebellion.  I felt bad for the girl, but I secretly wished that my first companion in this new apocalyptic world would at least talk to me. 

            

 We wandered down Foothill Drive towards the Dan’s where I used to buy my weekly college rations of Easy Mac, Diet Coke, and chocolate-covered pretzels.  I was clinging to the idiot’s hope of running into someone who knew what the hell to do in a situation like this, which reminded me of the conversation I had with the mysterious and awesomely named Max Bodycount.  My memory of meeting him was now fuzzy and dreamlike and even though I was lugging an automatic shotgun that he gave me, I began to question whether or not the meeting ever really took place.

            

 Marla Manslaughter. 

            

 That’s what he “dubbed” me.  At the time, I guess it felt like I had some kind of destiny…like I was supposed to know what the hell to do in a situation like this.  But right now, as I wander down the automobile graveyard that was once Foothill Drive, as I sidestep broken glass and errant brain matter with a mute preteen in tow, I feel pretty damn helpless.