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Day 17

Lunch consisted of a single chunk of canned meat split five ways, a box of crumbled crackers, and some tea that was brewed outside by Sandy. This was the most any of them had eaten in what seemed like days.

They sat in silence for a while, in the “conference” room. It wasn’t anything else beyond an office with a large table just behind the front counter of the storage office. Once upon a time, it had served as a meeting place for the employees, back when Dani’s parents were still in California. Since then it had become a storage room, and since the arrival of Jimmy and Edgar, it had become a dining room, of sorts. The irony was not lost on Dani. The room took on new life after the death of the world.

Sandy broke the silence. “Does anyone want another glass?”

Edgar looked up from his crumbs. He had wet his thumb to pick up the stray remains of crackers. He held out his glass. “Please,” he asked.

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Sandy took his paper cup and filled it with the last of the tea. “I have a couple more brewing. The last of my mix.”

Edgar took the small cup and took a large gulp from it. Jimmy sipped at his tea, contemplating.

Bob wasn’t at the table, instead, he was near the door, carefully looking over the makeshift repairs of the glass door. Only one of the doors had shattered, but that was still a large hole to fill and a couple of bookshelves laden with heavy boxes of books had done a lot to reinforce the cardboard and plywood. In truth, it was mostly cardboard and it made Bob nervous. The RV in front of the entrance was an extra layer of protection, but what he needed, he said, was plywood, maybe more shelves, and boxes too.

Danielle sat at the table, finishing up the last bite of cold meat. She stared at her now empty plate, still hungry, still miserable. Had it been worth it to stick around? There was safety here, sure, but it was all relative, and safety seemed like a misplaced luxury when the hunger pangs started. They needed food.

She coughed. “I think we need to go on a supply run.”

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Bob turned his gaze toward her and nodded. He rose up from his seat near the door and took a seat at the table. “I think you’re right. We should do it today. We still got light out there” he added.

Jimmy nodded. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Let me help. Saw a couple of stores nearby. We can hit them all.”

Dani shook her head. “It’s too risky to hit multiple places right now. We’re in no big hurry. We need to get the most out of one place and then regroup.”

“What do you think,” Bob asked.

Dani wiped at her forehead with the heel of her palm, a habit she’d inherited from her dad. There were a number of options all within a couple of blocks. There was a Market Bros. just down Acacia, and down Lyon there was a drug store, one of the huge chains that had a little bit of everything.

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Dani looked over at Sandy. The older woman seemed lost in thought.

“How are we for medication,” Dani asked.

Sandy peered around for a moment and shook her head slightly, aware enough to answer the question. “We don’t have a whole lot. We only had a basic first aid kit here and even that was mostly empty. Other than that Bob and I have our prescriptions and personal medications, I assume.”

Edgar lit a blunt. “Don’t forget about all that dope you got from us.”

“I don’t do that garbage,” Sandy sneered.

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Edgar shrugged. “Your loss, Mama.”

Sandy glared at Edgar, who was near twice her size and weight. Jimmy punched Edgar on his arm, making him drop his blunt.

“… Hijo de puta,” he muttered as he picked up his blunt from his lap.

“Respect, Edgar. We’re guests.”

Edgar picked up his joint from the table and took a big drag as he stood up and bowed his head in Sandy’s direction. “My apologies.” He slumped back into the chair.

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Dani grabbed a legal pad that sat at the center of the table and began scrawling some notes. She thought out loud as she wrote. “I think Jimmy, Edgar, and me -”

“I,” Jimmy corrected.

Dani cast a furtive glance at the tall redhead and grunted. She continued, “Anyway, we can hit the Wellman’s about a block down. Provided the place hasn’t been cleaned out we should be able to get food and medication there.”

Sandy glanced at the trio. She then gave Dani a pointed gaze, a warning gaze. “Are you sure, Danielle?”

Dani didn’t have time for Sandy’s paranoia. “I’m sure. We’d better get going now.”

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She rose to her feet, and Jimmy stood up nearly as quickly. Edgar rolled his eyes, took a huge drag off his blunt, and begrudgingly rose out of his chair. Dani handed Bob the legal pad as she passed by his side of the table. He placed his hand on her hand as he grabbed the pad. It was a reassuring gesture and Dani gave Bob’s hand a squeeze.

“What’s this, kid?”

“Some rough plans. You’ll keep watch?”

“We’ll keep watch,” Bob nodded.

Sandy looked miserable at the idea of leaving the relative safety of the building. Regardless, she trudged out the door after everyone else.

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The side gate’s rattle as Bob dragged it open was like a thunderstorm. Everything was so quiet now that the rattle of the gate probably carried a significant distance. Ghouls would be attracted to the sound, he figured.

Gate open, Bob stepped aside as the Cadillac drove through. Dani sat in the back seat and gave Bob a short wave. He was glad he’d had her tuck another gun into her jacket. He wasn’t suspicious of the two men, but he also knew better than to be unarmed in any situation. He’d learned that much in ‘Nam.

The Cadillac drove into the street and made a left. They were on their own now.

Bob slid the gate shut and took a length of chain and a padlock to it. Content with the security measures, he stepped into the nearest unit on the lot and took a seat in one of the salvaged lawn-chairs. Sandy sat impatiently in the golf cart, stewing.

Bob placed the legal pad on the TV-tray next to his chair. He looked it over and noticed there were a lot of notes in tiny, cramped handwriting. He’d expected Danielle’s writing to be tidy. Why he expected that he didn’t know. He’d just assumed, maybe because she was Korean, he thought. The notes seemed scattered, but he saw where she was heading with them. There were some good ideas. He’d need to talk them over when she got back. Maybe over some beers. He should have asked her to grab him a six-pack if she could.

He leaned back in the chair and stared out of the unit and down toward the other end of the property. He was already feeling tired but didn’t want to risk sleeping and being caught off guard.

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After a few minutes of silence, he asked “What do you think these things are, Sandy?”

Sandy glanced and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe some kind of mutant or something?”

“Like those old sci-fi movies?”

Sandy stared at the gate. “I guess. I don’t know. I generally don’t believe in that stuff but God works in mysterious ways.”

Bob leaned forward in his chair. Now this was interesting. “Y’all still believe in God after all this?”

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Sandy smiled, albeit faintly. “Of course I do. God is why I have survived,” she replied.

Bob scratched his chin with a chipped thumbnail. He hadn’t really considered the existence of God much, at least since his late-twenties which were spent knee-deep in rice paddies and being shot at by the Vietnamese. Sandy was maybe thirty years younger than him and hadn’t had the pleasure of such experiences. Her position made a bit more sense, taking that into account.

“Y’know, it’s probably some sort of chemical thing,” he suggested. “Lotta weird stuff tested by the government over the years. Probably some experiment gone wrong. Bringing back the dead like that.”

Sandy shook her head. “They’re not dead.”

“Excuse me?”

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Sandy dusted the top of the steering wheel of the cart with her palm. “The only way the dead could rise is at God’s hand, and I don’t see God in any of this.”

Bob rolled his eyes. Of course she was a zealot. Fuck.

Sandy stepped out of the cart and began to pace a bit. She didn’t seem to enjoy being idle here in the open. She was on the wrong end of 50, now and her curled hair had gone unmanaged for weeks. She still carried a little bit of that middle-aged spread. She was noticeably beginning to shrink in other places, though.

Though perhaps she had always been small and he’d failed to notice.

Bob leaned back in his chair. “These things, they remind me of a movie I saw when I was on leave back in the war. Might have been ‘68? I was home for a bit and I had no girlfriend, no real family besides a drunk-ass daddy and I had money to burn.”

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Sandy stopped pacing.

“Anyway, so I could have done something really damn stupid with that GI money but I just decided to go to the movies, right? I was back in New York and there was a theater that ran a few movies together for one price. You go there and spend hours watching shit and eating popcorn. Good times.”

“What was the movie,” she asked.

“I don’t remember the name, but it was something with Vincent Price as the last man in a world surrounded by these vampire freaks. They were smarter than these dead shits we are dealing with, but I definitely see some similarities now that I think about it.”

“How did the movie end?”

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“Vincent Price died. I guess that’s the only ending that would make sense.”

Sandy took a seat back in the golf cart. She leaned over the steering wheel. “No more happy endings,” she muttered.

Next Installment

Thank you for reading the twelfth installment of the Haunted MTL original series, The Dead Life. Please share your thoughts about the story with us.

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David Davis is a writer, cartoonist, and educator in Southern California with an M.A. in literature and writing studies.

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Original Series

Nightmarish Nature: Horrifying Humans

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So we’re going out on a limb here in this segment of Nightmarish Nature and exploring one of the most terrifying, most dangerous, most impactful species to walk this planet. I’m talking about us of course. Sure, as humans, we may not seem all that horrific to ourselves, but to many other creatures we have been a force of nightmares.

Humans male as drawn by Jennifer Weigel
Humans male as drawn by Jennifer Weigel

Why are we terrifying?

Humans are among those species that engage in massive modifications to our environment to serve our needs, like beavers who dam rivers, elephants who eat all of the new growth scrub to keep the savannahs tree-free, and so on. Yeah, all creatures have some impact on their surroundings, but some take it up a notch, and we do so at an order of magnitude higher still. And we have gotten so good at it that we have managed to exist and thrive in places that would otherwise be inhospitable. We are outwardly adaptive and opportunistic to the point of being exploitative. We are the apex predators now.

Sabertooth cowering as drawn by Jennifer Weigel
Sabertooth cowering as drawn by Jennifer Weigel

We have forced many creatures into extinction, intentionally and not, and have sped up these effects enormously. The National Audobon Society chose the egret as its symbol after it made a comeback from being hunted to near extinction, and it was one of the lucky ones. Many weren’t so lucky, especially if they came in direct conflict with humans, such as wolves and the big cats who were in direct competition, or those who were really specialized in really specific niche circumstances that we pushed out of the way. And this is in only a very very limited scope of our earth’s history, and has since been even more ramped up with industrialization.

Humans female as drawn by Jennifer Weigel
Humans female as drawn by Jennifer Weigel

But humans aren’t all bad are we?

Depends on who you ask… We have created all sorts of incredible opportunities for some species too. Take mice for example. And coyotes. And kudzu. And a whole host of animals whom we’ve domesticated, some of whom wouldn’t have continued to exist otherwise or certainly wouldn’t exist in anything resembling their current forms. And the most massive extinctions occurred long before our arrival, when the earth was still forming and underwent rapid catastrophic changes and swings, decimating critters as they were trying to get a foothold. Nothing is constant except for change; that has always been true.

Wolf begging for cheezborger drawn by Jennifer Weigel
Wolf begging for cheezborger drawn by Jennifer Weigel

So it isn’t my goal to get all eco-con​scious and environmentalist here. Just that I feel if we are going to explore some of the more terrifying aspects of nature, we need to look in the mirror. Because if a consensus were taken right here, right now of all living beings globally as to what is among the most terrifying creatures among us, I’m sure we’d appear on that list.

If you enjoyed this closer-than-kissing-cousins segment of Nightmarish Nature on Horrifying Humans, please check out past segments:

Vampires Among Us

Perilous Parenting

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Freaky Fungus

Worrisome Wasps

Cannibalism

Terrifying Tardigrades

Reindeer Give Pause

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Komodo Dragons

Zombie Snails

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Original Creations

Werewolf-ing It Well, Part 3 by Jennifer Weigel

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Continuing our junkyard dawg werewolf story from the previous two St. Patrick’s Days… Here are Part 1 from 2022 and Part 2 from 2023 if you want to catch up.


Werewolf transformation digital art by Jennifer Weigel
Werewolf transformation digital art by Jennifer Weigel

So apparently it really was my lucky day at that suburban gas mart last St. Patrick’s Day. I got the mother lode of all Scratchers. I hit it big time. I had no real idea of what that meant, but it looked promising. Maybe I could get a Cadillac to tour Route 66 AND a cabin in the woods… But who was gonna drive?

Now apparently you can’t just cash these things in at the register. You have to mail them in or something. Why does life have to be so complicated? Anything involving those good for nothing mailmen has to be rigged or part of some larger conspiracy, I’m sure. But I pocketed my prize and made some plans. I couldn’t rely on old Sal not to just pocket my prize for himself; he wasn’t the sort that would let me have my dream. Or even understood that I had dreams beyond just chasing rabbits (though those are the best).

The next full moon I whined and howled at Sal to take me in to work with him. Sal just patted me on the head. Didn’t even offer a treat or nothing. Seriously, I had to get out of there, this suburban situation was the pits. I couldn’t do another year of it, watching my life tick away. So, when that didn’t work, I gently grabbed my Scratchers ticket like I was retrieving a very important slipper and slunk over and hid in his truck under that ratty blanket he kept in the back.

I managed to creep into the junkyard office and hide there while Sal was sleeping on the job. Those mastiffs nearly ratted me out, but fortunately they were chained up, and they weren’t all that bright anyway. Just growled a string of profanities at my cur form, like I hadn’t heard that before. Anyway, I waited it out and before long I heard Monty’s car pull up, rattling like the dilapidated Honda Civic held together with duct tape that it was. Sal’s truck pulled off, spitting gravel and exhaust in its wake as always.

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Dusk was setting in and I could feel the change starting. Nothing to do for it, guess I’d just have to run with it then. Monty had settled in as usual, watching bad porn and staring off into nothing. He still smelled like day old jelly donuts (the kind you can get a whole bag for $1) and coffee, as usual. Good boy Monty, how I’ve missed you and the occasional stale donut, even if it wasn’t a cookie. I approached him from behind and coughed.

Monty nearly leapt out of his skin. He blanched as if he’d seen a ghost before he managed to find his voice. “Shit, that wasn’t a dream,” he stammered, pointing. As he realized I meant him no harm, he regained his composure and even offered me a day-old jelly donut, which I accepted gratefully. I think he could tell that my tail would have been wagging if I’d still had one at that time.

“Lucky, what in all of hell are you doing here?” he asked, eyes still wide as saucers. “And for Christ’s sake, put on some pants.” He offered up the spare uniform that still just hung from the hook behind the door. I guess in my fervor to talk to him I’d forgotten to dress. Oops.

Werewolf transformation digital art by Jennifer Weigel
Werewolf transformation digital art by Jennifer Weigel

“Monty, old friend, I need a favor,” I barked. I handed him the Scratchers. His eyes grew wider.

“Shit, where’d you get this?” That’s a lot of money,” Monty exclaimed. “They’ve been looking for the winner of this one…”

“I’d stashed it in my hidey spot under the place where the carpet peels up after I got it… It’s our ticket out of here,” I retorted. “You don’t think I want to spend the rest of my days laying around suburbia with tightwad treat-skimping Sal do you?”

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“I suppose not,” Monty quipped. “But what’d you have in mind?”

“You and me, we could get a cabin in the woods, live off the land. Get out of this shit-hole. Hell, you could even get a real car, one of those big-boat Cadillacs with the wide tongue-lolling windows…”

“Um, you could do a lot more than that with this, but I catch your drift. And I want out of this hellhole too. But, like…? I mean, you aren’t gonna bite me or anything, or get all weird.” Monty fidgeted like he did when he was nervous. “I guess I knew but didn’t want to admit it – dude you’re a freak show.”

“Gee thanks. Trust me, being a dog is better any day except that you can’t drive or get your own treats and crap,” I retorted. “And if was gonna bite you I’d have done so a long time ago. It doesn’t work that way, anyway. Seriously, you don’t believe all that werewolf mumbo jumbo on Netflix too, do you?”

Werewolf transformation digital art by Jennifer Weigel
Werewolf transformation digital art by Jennifer Weigel

Monty shook his head tentatively. “I don’t really know what to believe. I mean, I guess I always knew you were like this, but I didn’t let it sink in.”

“Well, get over it and help me get my dream cabin,” I snipped. “Seriously don’t just stand there gawking all night; I put on clothes and everything. I only have tonight.”

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“You mean before you turn back into a dog?” Monty asked.

I nodded, still licking the jelly off my lips.

“But I thought werewolf changes happened every full moon,” Monty asked.

“I do, but these Scratchers change like the wind. We gotta cash in quick,” I growled. “And if you try to turn on me, I’ll hunt you down. That’s OUR ticket outta here.”

“No, no, I get it,” Monty said. “I’ll make good on it, I promise. I can follow up on the ticket first thing tomorrow; it says to mail it in or go to the courthouse or something. I’ll figure it out… I guess you can stay with me until we get it sorted, but you have to be really quiet about it. I’m not supposed to have pets in that crap apartment for all that a little dog hair would be an improvement.”

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Portrait of myself with dark makeup and crow skull headdress, backlit by the sun.
Portrait of myself with dark makeup and crow skull headdress, backlit by the sun.

Check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s writing here at Jennifer Weigel Words.

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Lighter than Dark

LTD: The Firing Squad

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So you’ve just gotten the pink slip.

Work is letting you go. Amidst all of the layoffs, you just didn’t make the cut. Well, I’m sorry to say, but it behooves you to go quietly. And quickly. Because you don’t want to stick around for the Firing Squad…

In fact, if your HR department is outsourced to one of those Eldritch contractors like so many are nowadays, get outta dodge NOW. Like seriously. Leave the lunch you brought in the fridge; leave the personal items in and on and around your desk. Hell, leave your coat and purse if you are not near them. You can get new ones. Maybe one of your ex-coworkers can help you retrieve your stuff later. Because you need to get out while the getting is still good.

The Firing Squad is coming.

And if they so much as see a pink slip anywhere in your immediate vicinity, it is complete and total annihilation…

Ready Aim Fire...  The Firing Squad appears digital art by Jennifer Weigel
Ready Aim Fire… The Firing Squad appears
Wing Shot...  The Firing Squad takes aim digital art by Jennifer Weigel
Wing Shot… The Firing Squad takes aim
Sharp Shooter...  You're a goner! digital art by Jennifer Weigel
Sharp Shooter… You’re a goner!

I warned you… Those Eldritch contractor HR departments mean business… It’s like going to the Library. Or making Jell-O.

Portrait of myself with dark makeup and crow skull headdress, backlit by the sun.
Portrait of myself with dark makeup and crow skull headdress, backlit by the sun.

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