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Day 17

The darkness within the building, even with the daylight pouring in through the windows, was intimidating.

Edgar took point, carefully stepping on the layer of broken glass in an attempt to muffle as much of the crunching as he could. There was little to be done and he paused, frustrated. He finally gave up and made his way toward the carpeted floor, wincing at the sound of glass beneath his heavy feet.

The store had the scent of mold and mildew. Edgar watched a light cloud of spores and dust puff into the air as he stepped onto the carpet. Dani and Jimmy entered and the three of them overlooked the darkened store. Many of the shelves were bare from a combination of looting or spillage onto the aisles.

Jimmy grabbed one of the carts and wriggled it from the collection between the entrance and exit doors. The sound of clashing metal gave everyone pause. They all held their breath, wary of any telltale moans of the undead, but heard nothing in response. Jimmy shrugged and grabbed another two carts from the tangled rows.

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He rolled the cart slightly, making sure the wheels weren’t jammed. He looked at Dani and Edgar. “I figure we can load up everything we can, fill the car, and then stash these elsewhere. Sound good?”

“That can work. Just grab anything helpful,” Dani added.

Edgar took one of the carts which looked overly small compared to him. Not that he was incredibly tall, but his thick frame tended to dwarf anything near him. He began to wheel his cart away but turned back to Dani and Jimmy.

“I’m going to hit the food area. See what canned stuff is left.”

Jimmy nodded. “I’ll go to the pharmacy and see what is left.”

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Dani began to roll her cart down one of the aisles. “I’m going to poke around in the stockroom, then. Maybe that didn’t get hit as hard by scavengers.”

“Wish we had some walkies or something,” Edgar added.

Dani nodded. “There may be some in the back. We’ll see.”

The three survivors wheeled off in search of supplies.

Jimmy grabbed everything he felt was potentially useful from the shelves leading toward the pharmacy itself. It was mostly off-the-shelf supplies and medications. He weighed the importance of antacids in his mind, shrugged, and threw the few remaining bottles into the cart. He had also found a pair of canvas totes in the seasonal aisle on the way and had them slung over his shoulder. He could stand to carry a couple of bags of goods if the cart proved too full.

Given the state of the store that was unlikely. Pickings were slim. Bandages, cough medicine, and typical cabinet supplies were certainly diminished. Painkillers were virtually non-existent. He did manage to find a couple of bottles of aspirin and some ointments. Anything at this point was a stroke of luck.

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He paused for a moment, looking over the meager haul. What Jimmy hoped was that he could convince Edgar of the plan to stay in Emmett. The idea of heading to San Diego was a lost cause. It had to be. Maybe enough supplies would convince him to stick around.

He stopped pushing the cart when the wheel hit a metal shelf that had been pried from the shelving unit. The clang made him wince, but he heard nothing after. He bent down to clear the shelf and caught a glimpse of a feral cat resting on a bottom shelf, hiding between a couple of bottles of hydrogen peroxide.

“Hey, how are you, little guy?”

He set the loose shelf against the unit and turned his attention back to the cat. “You gonna help me out?”

The cat’s eyes were wide. Clearly, the world had not been kind to it since the dead rose. Jimmy wondered if the ghouls were eating animals. He hadn’t seen anything like that, yet, but it was always possible.

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He shook his head. He didn’t want to consider it.

He thought for a moment about trying to take the cat with him. There was no point, not now. Maybe he’d bring a towel and a plastic carrier from the storage units next time he came back to the store. Not that there’d be a guarantee the cat would be there, though.

He sighed, clicked his tongue, and gently reached for a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. The cat yelped and hissed, swiping at his hand but missing. Jimmy instinctively retracted his hand. There was no sense in dipping into the peroxide, yet. 

He extended his sneaker out toward the bottle and knocked it onto the ground. The cat lept out from the shelf and darted down the aisle with a dramatic howl, knocking down a wire rack as it rounded a corner. The rack clattered loudly as it hit a shelf and then the floor.

“Goddamn it.”

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He shrugged and grabbed the peroxide bottles, placing them in the cart.

Edgar dutifully grabbed whatever dented can he could find. Any box, plastic bottle, crinkling package, and aluminum case found its way into his cart. And yet his cart was maybe half full by an optimistic estimate. Still, it was more food he had seen in days, and if most of it was good they’d eat well with a little rationing. Not that he had intended to stay all that long. He’d already begun earmarking his haul for stuff he could take with him on the road.

Jimmy was adamant about sticking around town; San Diego was a “kill box,” he argued. Edgar wondered what the skinny redheaded fuck knew about “kill boxes.” Edgar’s Papá had been in Desert Storm. He’d seen some real shit. Edgar knew more about the idea of a kill box second-hand than his tweaker friend ever did.

Edgar peered down at a burn-mark on his hand. He knew a lot about the results of a kill box, he thought. His papá’s anger was an example. That was why San Diego was important. Papá was there, with Mamá, Ttía, Abuela, Angel, Mari, Maria… La Familia. They were around. Papá had to keep them safe. He was a tough son of a bitch.

Edgar grabbed a couple of likely stale single-serving bags of tortilla chips from a pile of broken bags and loose chips. A nearby rat squeaked as he ripped the bag away. Edgar snorted. “Good times for you, eh?”

The rat did not respond.

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He wheeled his cart further into the next aisle, which seemed to be sodas and drinks. There weren’t many cases and bottles left.

Edgar agreed that there was some sense in Jimmy’s plan. The storage facility had proven pretty safe and there was certainly room enough. The plan to reinforce it also seemed like a good idea. But that was fine for everyone else. They didn’t have their own people waiting for them.

Edgar paused for a moment, staring at a can of soda that was standing alone on a shelf, a thin layer of dust dulling the shiny aluminum top. What was it about the soda? He stared at the can a moment longer and realized he had seen it just a few minutes ago in the car. It had tumbled out of the bag in the passenger seat and onto the floorboard. It remained there, undisturbed for weeks next to the thrashing, undead mother.

He thought about the car, what the woman’s final moments must have been like, and the baby in the back. He could have sworn he’d seen something move under the overturned child’s seat. Edgar’s breath caught in his throat for a moment and he let out an ugly half-choked gasp. He felt tears coming on and quickly wiped his eyes with his massive forearm. He punched himself in the side of his head for good measure.

“No llorar.”

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The stockroom seemed mostly untouched. Most of what was inside were still packaged as it had been when they arrived. Dani was excited about the potential of it all. They could come back with one of the moving trucks.

The small forklift also seemed promising. Maybe that could be useful. She had no idea if it ran on gas or electricity, but the ability to move large things around might make it easier to build a reinforced wall at the storage yard. This trip turned out to be a lot more successful than she had hoped. It was just a matter of planning.

The thunk of a cardboard box onto the concrete floor broke Dani’s concentration. She spied the box, slightly bent and battered, and looked up the high shelves that made up the wall of the storeroom. On the second tier, maybe about eight feet from the ground, she spied the source of the disturbance. A wide-eyed woman and a teenage girl stared at her. The girl’s brow was furrowed in concern while the mother’s eyes were shockingly wide and bloodshot.

Dani raised her hands up in a peaceful gesture, but did not release the poker. “Holy shit, are you two… okay?”

Neither responded. Dani looked into the mother’s eyes and tried to follow her gaze. Dani hadn’t noticed anything alarming until she felt the weight of the fireplace poker in her own hand.

“Oh, right,” she whispered.

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Dani bent down, placing the poker on the ground and scooting it ahead of her with her foot. The scraping of the metal on the concrete was uncomfortable in the echoing stockroom. “Look, I am just here on a supply run. Do you need help? Do you have someplace to go? My name is Danielle, but you can call me Dani.”

Dani waited for a response. The girl looked at her mother for a moment, who sighed and finally blinked.

The girl spoke first, her voice was low and hoarse. “We’re trapped here. There’s one of those things in the store and my mom’s leg is really hurt.”

Dani glanced around the stockroom. “I haven’t seen anything? Maybe it wandered off? How long have you two been in here?”

“I think about an hour,” the woman replied.

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Dani kept her distance, not wanting to intimidate them. She raised her hands up in an open gesture like she was surrendering. “Where did you last see it?”

“There’s an office, around the corner,” the girl whispered.

Dani peered behind her and saw the corner that led to the presumed office. She turned back to the two women and held her finger to her lips to signal them to keep quiet. She picked up the poker from the concrete as carefully as she could. She was worried about the noise that she had already made, surely if something was there, it was alert by now.

She sighed and started toward the corner. The loading doors ahead rattled slightly, probably from the wind. Or maybe a ravenous ghoul just on the other side.

It was hard to tell these days.

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The Dead Life is a Haunted MTL original fiction series.

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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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