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Stephi held her eye open wide while she brushed her lashes with the growth formula, her pale eye vulnerable and watering in the bright vanity lighting. With each stroke, she focused on getting the expensive lash oil down to the roots before dragging it out to their tips. She tried not to move, tried not to breathe too deeply, knowing any slip could equal a jab to her sensitive eye, a painful mistake.
A door slammed somewhere in the house, causing her to jump and jam the lash formula wand into her eye. The pain was sudden and piercing. She yelped and blinked, her vision darkening to complete blackness in the matter of a few agonizing seconds, a blurry halo swallowing everything. She leaned over and fumbled blindly with the sink before getting the faucet on, quickly splashing water onto her face and into her eye frantically. She needed to see, to know the source of the commotion-though she felt in her stammering heart she already knew-. She blinked and through the tears she could see just a bit but everything around her was still blurred. Her hands shook as she blotted her eye with a hand towel. In the bedroom behind her, thundering footsteps made her jump and wipe at her face in a frantic race to correct her vision, to clear away the darkness and the unknown and to confirm what or who was stomping in her direction.
“Shit,” she cursed.
Her vision cleared, and in the mirror she saw the bathroom doorway darken with the hulking silhouette of her husband. Even through watering eyes she could tell it was him by the shape of his head and how he held his hands at his sides balled into fists, not to mention he was already demanding things of her in his usual grumbling voice.
“I told you to pick up the living room and the bedroom before I got home and you’re too busy in here looking at your damn face. You’re always blowing my money on face creams and stupid shit. Why do you obsess over your looks so fuckin’ much?”
Stephi didn’t answer. She wiped the streaming tears from her face with the back of her hand, reminding herself how volatile Teddy could be. She needed to remain quiet and do as she was told.
“Don’t just stand there lookin’ stupid, run me a bath!” he said.
Stephi nodded and turned to the bathtub while he stomped back into the bedroom. She cranked the handle over to the hot water side and stuck a stopper into the drain. Her anger ate at her, it screamed for her to tell him off.
I stabbed myself in the eye, you stupid motherfucker! Why couldn’t you just stay at work? I hate everything about you!
“Look at this place, are you hanging artwork again? Wasting all my money on amateur paintings?” his voice grated on her, it was obnoxiously loud even over the running water of the tub.
She leaned over the sink again and examined her eye in the mirror. It was red and irritated, her sclera bloodshot like crimson spider webs. She dabbed at her eye and barely got it to stop watering when he came back into the bathroom.
He was in his underwear and in his hand he held the hammer she forgot laying on the dresser.
“Put this shit away
and take your clothes off.”
She turned to face him and he tossed the hammer at her. She didn’t catch it; it bounced off her thigh and hit the floor with a loud clank.
“Fuck,” she gritted her teeth and gripped her leg.
“Hey! Watch your damn mouth!” he threatened and grabbed her by the shoulder.
Pinching her roughly with one massive hand, he forced her down to the ground.
“While you’re down there,” Teddy said, innuendo heavy in his voice, and pulled his underwear down. “Why don’t you get me started?”
Lately it felt like any sexual interactions between them were predatory or only done as some form of sick punishment to her and she couldn’t understand why. They didn’t always get along but their sex life was decent up until the last few years, it was becoming like torture to her. Stephi’s hand found the hammer and she couldn’t take it anymore. She looked up at him, smiling down at her, it made Stephi feel vile. All she could focus on was how lumpy the veins in the side of his head looked, how she hated them, they always bulged and looked disgusting. Her eyes zeroed in on them and all she could envision was a bull’s eye tattooed there, a target begging the hammer to find it.
She was faster than him, stronger than he ever knew, and he truly wasn’t expecting her to finally realize she had had enough.
Stephi watched Teddy die and it was better than she ever imagined it would be. His naked body convulsed and slumped in the bathtub after a momentary horizontal ballet of grappling and slipping on the blood-slick porcelain each time he tried to escape the water. Finally, after what were only a few minutes for her but eons for him, he gave up and he let himself settle into the bloody tub. His hand went to the agonizing crater in his skull, he mouthed silent words. She wasn’t sure if he was begging for help or continuing to verbally abuse her before his life faded away.
Maybe he just had to call her a whore or a bitch one last time.
His body slid further down into the water, his blood rapidly clouding it a deeper shade of crimson. She was happy they selected a larger tub when
the house was constructed, his hulking body eased into the warm red bath nicely without his knees being bent. She watched with a quivering hand, the hammer heavy in it. Stephi let him continue to bleed out in the water for a couple hours while she collected her thoughts, and devised a plan to get rid of his corpse.
She was given the handheld electric carving knife as a wedding gift from one of her cousins, she scoffed at the gift when she opened it. She never planned on slicing her own turkey at the dinner table like Martha Stewart. She was relieved she had it once she realized her husband was far too big to carry and there was nowhere to stash an entire body unless she wanted to try burying him in their backyard. Again, heavy labor like digging a hole was not in her repertoire and her nosey neighbors might see her from their second story bedroom window, so that was definitely not an option. She thought of cutting him into pieces and tossing him in the lake but she worried he’d end up rising to the top because shit always floats. A better place came to mind, a place more deserving of a piece of crap like Teddy.
Her husband’s head was a pain to cut free, the blade got stuck on his spinal cord several times and she resorted to forcing the blade along with her body weight before it made its way through with a wet crunch and hit the bloody porcelain on the other side. His torso was the real bitch, and when she accidentally sliced one side of his stomach open she almost couldn’t go on. She paced the bathroom, breathing deeply, trying to will the nausea away. The smell of his insides was something she would never forget, like wet dog and blood. She couldn’t just cut his arms and legs off; she needed him in smaller pieces in order for him to fit in his new tomb. She pieced them out by sectioning them off at each joint. She forced herself through it and reminded herself of the Hell he had made her endure. Cutting him into small pieces with an electric meat cutter and fishing handfuls of his insides out of the tub then shoving them in plastic bags put Stephi’s gag reflexes to the test but her hatred for Teddy numbed her gut and her feelings of remorse. The bathtub caught nearly all of his blood, making the clean-up easier for her. Lugging his pieces out in trash bags wasn’t so easy. He felt heavier in separate bags than when he laid on top of her in bed, or when he pushed her around and shouted in her face when he was angry. She wondered if his sudden weight gain wasn’t just her own conscious telling her what she had done was wrong. She told the doubtful side of her mind to shut up and continued the act of securing her freedom. It was hard but she managed
to get it done by lugging him piece by piece out the side door and soon he was packed away on the back of his golf cart.
Serenity Canyon was an exclusive neighborhood and had houses lining each of the streets which circled around the luxury clubhouse in the center, all boasting a quick walk to the best putting greens in Arizona, many right outside their doors. The plan was created to only accommodate up to twenty large cottages with well-manicured lawns and views of the iconic red rocks of Sedona, Arizona, creating sky rocketing property values and a sense of being totally elite for its residents. On one side stretched the expansive lake and golf course which were built first and became the go-to course in all of Arizona in a few short decades. When the housing development was announced, a rabid war of the who’s who of the West Coast started. Only those with the heftiest bank accounts came out as victors and became the permanent residents there in Serenity Canyon. Teddy was one of them, which delighted Stephi at the time, and soon their new home was constructed. But, she quickly learned it would be the most regal prison she had ever seen. The neighborhood came complete with its own security crew who watched over her like jailors for her influential husband.
At the far edge of the golf course and lake she could see her destination, hidden behind a row of tall hedges, almost invisible in the dark. The lights were on at the club house at the center of the development but she didn’t worry about being seen, many of the neighbors used their golf carts to haul bags of trash to the dumpsters behind the club. She would just say she had cleaned out her garage if any neighbors greeted her. It was late anyway, many of the residents were well into their golden years and were asleep, and those young enough to be awake were working on keeping their own secrets hidden. If she had learned anything from her well-to-do neighbors while living at Serenity Canyon with all their perfect white smiles and designer clothing, it was how to be a better liar.
The house Teddy bought for them happened to be on the opposite end of the development but he, like all of his neighbors, had only a short ride on the golf cart to reach the course, a selling point for the residents. He bragged to his military friends how he only had a five minute golf cart ride to the first hole. He had no idea when he purchased the place that one night he’d be making that quick, familiar journey in a number of pieces and wrapped in trash bags. Teddy’s prisoner was breaking free of her gilded cell and ridding herself of the warden who had left her with bruised ribs and broken teeth
on too many occasions to recount.
Stephi’s blood-slick hands fumbled with the heavy bags for the fourth time as she stumbled up the pathway from the cart in the dark. She worried one might spring a leak, but just like the commercials on TV advertised, they held his pieces and fluids nicely without losing a single drop of blood. If she could have left a truthful review on Amazon, she would have, but she knew it was out of the question.
She kicked the outhouse door open and heaved two bags onto the floor beside the others. The one with his disfigured torso and innards was too heavy, she had to carry it alone and use both of her hands. It made a wet sloshing sound as she struggled to carry it up the small hill that reminded her of when Teddy hated the gazpacho she prepared for him after he complained about her lack of cooking skills. The bastard took one bite, gagged and dumped it into the trash then made her haul the bag to the trash can immediately. With each sloshing step she prayed the bag wouldn’t break because he’d slap her and make her clean it up. It was the last time she tried cooking for him or playing the good wife role, he wasn’t worth it. She often wondered why she had ever married him, but each time he was away at work for weeks on end and she was left to do as she pleased in the luxury community she remembered, especially when she used his credit card to pay for drinks at the clubhouse for all her friends. Her life was perfect all accept for him, and now he would be gone forever and she would live life how she pleased.
The outhouse, nicknamed The Shit Shack by the crass cleaning crew, was rarely ever used. It reminded Stephi of the restrooms at a summer camp she went to as a child and it made her cringe. The cramped emergency-use bathroom was built when there was only a golf course in Serenity Canyon, years before the construction of the luxury cottages and new country club with tennis courts and swimming pools. It had a light on a timer inside of it but no lights outside. It was out of place in the ritzy neighborhood but it was hidden out of sight behind a high wall of hedges. Like a blemish beneath a pound of concealer, it wasn’t easy to see but almost everyone knew it was there. It was actually only kept around to provide a place for the employees of the grounds to use if they
chose to. The lowly folk in maintenance were prohibited from using the neighborhood outdoor facilities, even though they were employed to clean them. The residents of Serenity Canyon were far too high-class to be seen doing their business in an open hole over a mound of feces only concealed by a thin steel trap door, and that’s why Stephi figured they would never find Teddy there. His pieces would slowly rot away down in the dark hole amidst an occasional pile of waste deposited by a sick caddy or a hungover gardener.
Finally rid of him.
Stephi turned to look in the cloudy mirror. She was a mess but she was free. If liberation made her look ten years older, she would deal with it until after she cashed his life insurance check and found a good plastic surgeon. She went back to work, holding her breath as she tore the bags open over the reeking toilet bowl. She couldn’t escape the stench of Teddy’s blood and the mounds of feces beneath it. There was a gaping hole directly under the steel toilet, a mouth of Hell opening wide to receive the bastard she married. It had a wide trap door of sorts, the entire width of the bowl, no water, and a pedal to step on which released some kind of blue fluid, it smelled faintly of mint to mask the horrors below it. It yawned open, a filthy steel maw, before dropping whatever waste someone left in it down into the abyss beneath it, which was a hole about seven feet deep and four feet in length and width, a tomb of water soluble toilet paper, urine, and fecal matter. The steel plate was filthy with dust and dried bodily fluids, the walls and corners of the floor also held a dirty film as if no one had even been inside the outhouse for weeks or months. It was the perfect place to be rid of Teddy.
One by one, she let his pieces fall into the stainless steel commode and stomped on the pedal until they were drowned in blue liquid and then dropped into the black hole. She listened as they plopped down into the godforsaken sludge. His ribcage had to be sawed into six jagged sections, and she cursed as the saw slipped and scratched at the porcelain beneath him. She let them fall into the darkness like pieces of a puzzle she didn’t care to ever put back together. The bloody, crooked chunks of flesh and rib bone once guarded his heart, the cold unmoving organ which should have been devoted to her but never was. She smiled bitterly to herself, he deserved to be there. He was such a piece of human waste.
“Who’s the cunt now?”
At last, she unwrapped his head, bloody and slippery as a dead fish in her hands. It was lopsided from the blow she struck him with and from the few extra she gave him to ease her perpetual anger. It was nearly flat on one side and though the trap door seemed to accommodate
large loads, she hoped it would fit. His face was like a butchered pig’s, drained of blood and devoid of life. He still sickened her and frightened her, just by looking at his jaws, always set in a way she thought made him look perpetually bitter, ready to spew hateful words at her. His pale eyes were still wide open in shock. It was the first time she had ever seen fear in them and it was there now forever. The hammer to the side of his head did him in so quickly his face still held a look of confusion, disbelief she would ever raise a hand to him, let alone a hammer. She almost took a picture of it.
“Look at you now!”
She stepped on the pedal but the head got caught in the hole. She was forced to push it down and as it fell she caught a glimpse of his fetid tomb before she removed her foot from the pedal and let the small door shut on him, trapping him. She could faintly see the pale shapes of his bloodless pieces nestled cozily in the putrid piles of human waste and fluttering winged cockroaches.
The phone rang but Stephi didn’t hear it at first. She was too busy scouring the condo, cleaning any traces of evidence she may have left behind. When she did hear the phone ring, she yanked it from the wall and threw it down the stairwell.
Probably his mistress, of course beating on me wasn’t enough, he had to go and cheat on me too!
Stephi steadied herself and pushed his infidelities out of her mind, they didn’t matter anymore. She didn’t care who was trying to reach her or him, her life was changing, morphing into the existence she always wanted. The one she deserved. She would just need to put on the distraught face of a woman missing her husband. She would practice it in the mirror until she got it just right and tell the rest of them at the club Teddy went on a hunting trip, and when he never came home she would claim he must have met trouble somewhere on the road. It would be weeks before she would file a police report. It would give her time to construct the perfect alibi, and to work on her acting. Stephi couldn’t just pretend, she would become a distressed wife, and soon a grieving widow once it was clear he was never returning.
Dr. Abileen shook her head, and hung up the phone.
“Dr. Reinart isn’t answering. His cell is going to voicemail and no one is answering his landline.”
“Would you consider that unusual for a man like Theodore?”
She looked to the broad man in the black suit and nodded, “Yes, Teddy always answers the phone.”
“Teddy?”
“Theodore, Dr. Reinart,” she said.
“And do you think he was in contact with the parasite?” a second, thinner man in a black suit asked.
“It’s highly likely we were all exposed. He was one of its developers and present when the first patient came back,” she answered.
“How did the exposure occur?”
“Our first test patient died, many hours later he came back to life. We were struggling to contain him, and he,” she hesitated, “vomited on all of us.”
“Vomited?” the agent asked.
“Yes, like in the movie The Exorcist. Projectile vomited on all of us,” she said, her hand straying to her stomach.
“Who was the first?” the agent asked, stepping away from her just a few extra feet.
“A cancer patient. He agreed to undergo Dr. Reinart’s testing as long as his family was handsomely rewarded after he was gone. That’s all I know about him.”
“Why did you conduct this testing on a human and not a monkey?”
“Dr. Reinart said he tested it shortly on rats and didn’t want to waste time on testing it on anymore animals, and he had a willing subject,” Dr. Abileen answered as she perched on the edge of a desk, her eyes never leaving the agents.
“And you didn’t question that?”
“I’m not the one in charge here. I only followed orders,” she folded her arms over her chest.
“I see, and let’s be frank here. I don’t think you mind, in your present state, if I’m brutally honest. This isn’t the only operation using humans as test subjects. So, I’m not completely surprised. I just wonder why you didn’t anticipate a bad outcome.”
“Would it have made a difference if a monkey was the subject, and came back to life and puked on us, exposing us all?” her
eyes narrowed
“I suppose not, and Dr. Reinart, did he appear sick when he left?” the broad man asked.
“No.”
“Give us his address,” his thin partner chimed in.
She scribbled down Dr. Theodore Reinart’s address and through a thick glass window before her she could hear groaning. Her heart stuttered in her chest, and in her mind a timer began, one she had no idea when would go off, but she knew it was there and it turned her stomach.
“What is the latency period, doctor?” the thin man asked, looking up through the bulletproof glass. He spun slowly, surveying the almost honeycomb shaped lab positioned on the outskirts of Phoenix in an unassuming industrial complex owned by the United States government. They were at its center and all around them were separate rooms, four in front of them were visible through the wrap around window. The two rooms behind them were for the guards and filing cabinets, there was also an entrance from the outside but no visitors were allowed in. Those rooms had no windows, and only one of them had a door to the lab. No one walking from the street could see in, and if need be, no one could get out, not even the doctors. The four rooms before them were laboratories all interconnected by thick steel doors, perfect for isolating problems. Those rooms were where the “magic” happened.
“I can’t say for sure. The first one happened nearly twenty-four hours after death but the second was much sooner,” she answered.
“Why was Dr. Reinart allowed to leave?”
“He conducted testing on all three of us who were exposed and it seemed we were all okay. None of us showed signs we were carrying the parasite in our blood. It wasn’t until Dr. Entz came back that I began to worry it was hiding within us. If that is the case, it would mean we could change faster than the first subject,” she tried explaining.
“How much sooner?”
“I,” she hesitated, her eyes flickering to the window the groaning resonated from. “I can’t say. This is something we’ve only just begun to research. It could be anywhere from two to twenty-four hours. It was only supposed to leave the subject paralyzed, not a zombified
corpse.”
“Did Dr. Reinart have an antidote or something?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Seems a little irresponsible,” the thin agent said with a smirk.
“Listen, I couldn’t contact the doctor. I feared the worst, so I alerted the higher-ups and they sent you. We may be looking at an outbreak if Dr. Reinart ends up like Dr. Entz, ” Dr. Abileen’s voice rose with impatience.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”
“Twenty-eight hours, and fifteen minutes,” she answered, glancing at the clock on her computer screen.
“So, he could be just like our gurgling, puking buddy in there?”
“Yes.”
“And how are you feeling?”
“Tired, but fine,” she answered.
“And yourself, would you like to enjoy these hours working, or would you like it over with now before you end up like him?” he pointed to the widow.
A garbled voice moaned and a bloodied hand fell against the glass. In the dark room on the other side loomed the silhouette of a man, twisted and crooked. He was hunched slightly, his abdomen protruded unnaturally, clearly pregnant with something writhing beneath his skin, His cheeks bulged and wriggled, something moved beneath his pale flesh. One eye bulged and receded as if something was building there, ready to burst and force the eye from its socket. Thick mucus hung from his mouth, tinged bright yellow-green with stomach bile. He walked though he shouldn’t, he snarled, screeched, and clawed the air though it should have been impossible because his heart was still. He was dead and yet very much alive. His attention turned to the voyeurs at the window, he raged at them. His shrieking voice rang out and it was followed by a yellow shower of vomit against the window pane. It made her tense up, her gut knotted.
“I’m not dead yet.”
“Yet.”
She recalled Dr. Entz’s agony at the moment of his death. It was so sudden. She knew this could be a disaster, if not the end of mankind if it continued to spread. Especially if the parasite had mutated and was able to take a hold of someone quickly, it would be like a wildfire in a summer wind. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to endure the agony and the madness of it and yet she held a tiny fraction of
hope she could find the off button, the cure.
“I owe it to the world to stop this before it really starts. I will let you know when I want to end it,” she spoke.
“We’ll leave two men outside the door, they will be given instructions. You have twenty-four hours, unless your change happens sooner, and then they’ll blow your brains out.”
She nodded and turned back to her work, “Okay.”
“Godspeed, doctor.”
Dr. Abileen didn’t know how to respond, she figured she didn’t need to care about polite pleasantries anymore. “Just find Reinart and bring him here if you can, and if not, then destroy him completely before this gets beyond any control…and I mean destroy him completely,” she said.
“How long do you plan on keeping the other?”
“Until I decide if he’s useful or not.”
“And you can handle disposing of him?” the thin man asked.
“I took care of the first one. They can be knocked down by firepower, but the only way to end them is by burning them to nothing, ” Dr. Abileen nodded her head to another room beyond the large glass window. In it was an incinerator with its mouth open like a stainless steel monster.
“Besides, I’m already a potential carrier. Why endanger anyone else, why risk having anyone else exposed when I can get rid of him myself?”
“You guys don’t fuck around, do ya? With an incinerator like that, I’d say ol’ Teddy thought this might happen, that ya might need to perform a hasty cremation?” he said, eyeing it.
“When you work with biological weaponry like parasites and viruses, you need to be prepared. In this case, we were lucky to have it. It was the only way to stop the bastard.”
“Looks like we’re heading to Sedona, a few hours north of here, ” the thin man spoke to his partner as he read the address scrawled on the sheet of paper.
They left the lab, and behind them Dr. Abileen could hear the thick steel bar pushed into place, the containment lock. She was only leaving there once she was good and dead. She needed to make the last of her life meaningful.
In the darkness and filth, the mound of feces writhed with the movement of Teddy’s broken body. A cold, bloodless eyelid blinked. His mind awakened to a blank darkness, a curtain hiding something important. It echoed with voices but it saw no faces, it was trapped in some liminal space between living and dead, haunted by a life he once lived but could not remember. A finger twitched on a hand two feet away. It crawled through the stinking waste, dragging its arm behind it like a tail. Toes wriggled like fetid little piggies, as the hand dragged them closer to the lopsided head. Teddy’s mouth hung open in a silent scream of animalistic rage as its body fought to reassemble. Long white tendrils snaked out of the ragged wounds left by Stephi’s shaky hand and an electric meat cutter from each severed body part. They wormed and squirmed until they found each other and slowly they began winding together and pulling his pieces closer and closer to each other until they started to stitch him back together. His flesh was covered in excrement and crawling with the roaches that had made the bottom of the toilet in the Shit Shack their den. His eyes blinked rapidly, his body a mass of raw nerves, agony unceasing. His body was slowly fusing together. Along the jagged incisions, the skin was coming together in thick, painful swaths of scar tissue, puckered and red beneath his dressing of fecal matter.
Hours passed and his confusion steadily grew to rage, his pain multiplied until it was a driving force, urging him to stand on his trembling legs. Teddy sat up, howling as his insides shifted beneath his healing wounds. His stomach and other organs had been shredded by the miniature saw used to piece him out and as they dragged themselves back into the cavity of his abdomen. He didn’t know how he ended up there, who he was, or what the purpose of his existence was now. Within him, commands were sent, his reawakened brain twitched and squirmed. He was confused and frightened but he obeyed and stood in the knee-deep filth, it steadily pulled him downward like rancid quicksand. He looked above him in the absolute darkness and saw nothing but those piloting him urged him to jump. Teddy leaped up with all the strength in his weak body and felt his head and arms connect with something cold and hard. Roaches fluttered down from the ceiling of his tomb, their wings tickling his cheeks. He was commanded to jump again, this time he knew to expect something to be just above him.
He touched the slimy underside of the toilet above him, it knocked him back down again, spraying his disfigured face with blue liquid. In frustration he jumped back up and punched upward with all of his power, even in a debilitated state his strength was ten times what it was when he lived. He had no idea, but the vermin living in the shit hole witnessed it and scurried away for their lives, burrowing into the crap, yellowed toilet paper, and minty blue liquid. His anger was blinding as he leaped and punched the steel above him. His fist knocked the toilet free from the bolts holding it to the floor of the Shit Shack. The commode fell to the side, exposing the hole beneath it. Above him, the faint light of the moon shone through a tiny vent at the roof of the outhouse.
Teddy jumped and grasped the edges of the abyss he woke up in and pulled himself up into the outhouse. He grappled and fought until he flopped like a newborn foal onto the tile floor, covered in fecal filth. He stood on trembling legs, motionless for a moment, feeling the burn in his muscles. He took a step forward and a motion censored light flipped on, blinding him. He shrieked and grabbed the broken toilet and threw it against the wall. The shack trembled. His erratic motions spattered liquefied excrement across the floor, walls
walls, and ceiling. Teddy froze when he caught a glimpse of himself in a scratched mirror. He was a monster, gnarled, hulking and slick with feces and blue water. He stepped closer to the mirror and placed his palm against it. He was alive, but who was he, why was he here? The squirming in his brain shut down those thoughts, and ordered him to kill, to procreate. Teddy felt a sudden burst of anger surge through him. His limbs moved and not really of his own accord, there was a message, a demand, and his body complied before he gave it a second thought. He was simply informed of what he was going to do and it happened, no questioning; only obeying. He beat the walls of the tiny outhouse, he was reborn to kill, and he would do it. ...
