Masters of Horror Read Online Free PDF Page B

time.
     
    “ Base.”
     
    He reached his hands up toward Dwayne’s head.
     
    Dwayne backed away and fell over. The guy dropped to his knees beside Dwayne and gnashed his teeth at him, reached for his head and…
     
    Dwayne yelled hoarsely: “Jim, help me, man!” This wasn’t the way to die. Not this way. Uh-uh, no.
     
    Jim hesitated. Then he fired the .45 at the naked guy. Blam . The flash strobe lighting up the yard for a tenth of a second, a flame licking out, the dead man staggering—
     
    Oh yes, Dwayne knew it was a dead man.
     
    Staggering, turning toward Jim, all his movements like flinches. The dead man with a hole right through its heart.
     
    Jim felt unreal, looking at the walking dead man. Like he should lean back in his chair and reach for the popcorn and just let things happen on a screen. He fought the feeling, thinking: this is happening to me. Aiming the gun this time as the corpse came at him, aiming at the dead man’s head. Blam , flash, right between the eyes. It went down like a puppet with its strings cut.
     
    Then it started thrashing, kind of floppy-sideways on the ground, like a landed fish. Making sputtering sounds, shit and blood running down its leg from its butt. One of its eyes swelling up, popping out with yellow and red fluid, as it began to crawl with one arm, pulling itself toward them.
     
    “ Base,” it rasped. “Crack. Rock. Silver top. Base.”
     
    There were three more coming around the other corner of the house. Two more on the street, coming down the sidewalk. Mostly naked. One of them didn’t have any eyes, and it had a rusty piece of metal through its middle, its head moving hurky-jerky. All of them coming toward Jim and Dwayne.
     
    One of them was carrying Joleen’s head. Her head raggedly torn off at the neck. Holding her head up to its face, biting into Joleen’s forehead. The naked men coming at them sniffing, snuffling…
     
    Dwayne and Jim ran up the stairs, into the house.
     
    Both of them yelling the same thing so much in synch it sounded rehearsed: “FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUCK!”
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    10:35 P.M.
     
     
     
    They found two freshly killed women in the front hall, one with her head missing, the other one with her head only half attached. The top gone from that head. Scooped out. Part of the brain. Just part of it. They only wanted…
     
    Jim threw up in the pipe room. Samson’s body was curled up in one corner, a puddle still spreading out from it, Ramon dead beside it, face down. The back of his head gone. One of the naked guys was clawing feebly at a closet door. Strings of entrails had dragged behind it, leaving a rancid trail on the floor, the top of its head shot off. It was scraping like a cat at the closet door, and they could hear someone sobbing in there, someone hiding in the dark closet.
     
    The naked bulb lit the room brightly, every corner of it. Stark and sharp.
     
    Jim straightened up, feeling like he was going to hyperventilate, and walked over to the crawling thing at the closet door (thinking about what it was, with quiet amazement: a human being gone literally rotten, dead meat dragged around by hunger like an empty cart dragged by a rabid horse. It was entropy that could feel hunger; scraping at the door in a tape loop of robotic stupidity, a thing that had once been a person, someone whose picture had appeared in some high school year book…) and shot it twice in the back of the head, near the spine. It twitched and slumped, then started moving again—but weak now, like a dying roach. Probably have to incinerate the son of a bitch to really kill him , Jim thought.
     
    Feeling numb, Jim dragged it away by the ankle and shoved it in the bathroom, crammed a board under the doorknob to lock the thing in. It made faint scrabbling sounds behind the door.
     
    Jim went back to the closet. It was a long way across the little room. “Come on out, man, I shot the fucking thing,” Jim said to the guy in the