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It was the summer of 1978, the air was a sticky blanket only severed by rare gusts of a cold blowing breeze. Autumn was coming, but summer was refusing to let go. Like a hangnail clinging to one’s tearing skin. Like a shackle. The world was a slow crawl, and the need for adventure called to Ellen like a siren’s song.
“Now… Let’s see if we’ve got everything,” Ellen said, packing the already full picnic basket as tightly as she could, “Twinkies? Blech. I hate Twinkies. Salt? Yep. Pepper? Yep. Hot dogs… Egg salad… Milk… Napkins… Do you have the sandwiches, Bruce?”
“I sure do,” he replied, sliding the sandwiches into a small bag and tossing them to her, “Catch!”
Catching the peanut-butter-and-jellies with ease, she scoffed, “Three sandwiches? You pig!”
“Oh come on!”
Ellen looked at the spread of food out on the table, and met Bruce’s lopsided brown-eyed grin. “What’re these?” She asked, picking up one of the small stones Bruce had left next to the Twinkies.
“Arrowheads!” Bruce replied, “Found ‘em right outside.”
“Really?”
“Yep, this whole area used to be native tribes’ land,” Bruce said, running his fingers across the pointed ridge of the arrowhead.
“Think there’s more of these?” Ellen asked, taking the tinier and pointier arrowhead and holding it gently in the palm of her hand.
“I’d be surprised if there wasn’t,” Bruce smiled, “Let’s get going and see if we find some.”
Ellen nodded, taking the overflowing picnic basket in her arms. She barely noticed leaving the arrowhead on the table. “Come on, Scott! Shelly! We’re going on a picnic!”
“Oh gee whiz, Ellen!” Scott called from the room over, “I’ve got her right where I want her! Seven spaces in front of the boardwalk!”
“Tycoons don’t go on picnics!” Shelly chimed in, handing Scott another stack of colored paper money.
Ellen didn’t know why Scott and Shelly had even bothered coming along. It was supposed to be a fun weekend out in nature, camping, exploring, enjoying the very last of the warm weather. So far, the pair of Shelly and Scott had spent the entire morning holed up inside playing Monopoly, and doing absolutely nothing to help her with the picnic they’d all been planning.
“C’mon, please?”
“Oh shaddup!” Scott said, fanning a fat pile of 500-dollar cards, “We’ll catch up to you eventually, I’ve got to win first! I’ve never lost a game of Monopoly, and I bet on my life I’m not losing today!”
“Let’s go!” Bruce said, holding the door open for anyone to come along, urging Ellen to hurry up.
“Suit yourself, but you’re really gonna miss a good time,” Ellen said, already out the door.
The topaz sun gnawed at the clouds as the wind whistled across the field, bounding and leaping. Ellen and Bruce, holding hands and talking to nobody in particular, paved a path through the seas of tall yellow grass. A path nobody had walked for a hundred years, and perhaps nobody would walk it ever again. Huge hawks circled overhead, undoubtedly watching the throes of little silk bluebirds that hopped and danced between the branches of the green trees.
The whole world was alive and colorful, and right at Ellen’s fingertips.
“Wanna hear something interesting?” Bruce asked.
A smile crept across Ellen’s lips, “For a change, you mean?”
“Oh, very funny,” he shook his head, “How about something spooky?”
“Bruce,” She said, “I’m not scared of anything.”
“Yeah? I just thought you’d want to know the place you picked to set up camp is an old burial ground.”
Ellen stopped dead in her tracks, “How do you know that?”
“I’m an old Boy Scout, it’s my duty to know,” Bruce lied. “You should be very careful, this place is very sacred and holy-,”
“And it comes with a curse too, I’m sure?” Ellen teased.
“As a matter of fact it does!” He added, spinning his tall tale as tight as it could go.
“Are you serious?” She asked, the bit of playfulness leaving her voice for a quiet second.
“Of course! But don’t worry about it at all Ellen,” Bruce said, putting his arm around her shoulder, “I can protect you.”
“You? Protect me? Ha!” She laughed.
“Well! Yeah!” Answered Bruce, more than a little flustered.
She chuckled as she skipped away, and slowly the skipping turned to a jog and the chuckling to a mad din. Even quicker, the jog turned to a sprint and the wild laughter into a cacophony of howls. Bruce could hardly keep up with her.
He never could.
By the time the pair had reached the wooded clearing they’d chosen for their lunch, the both of them were royally exhausted. Ellen was mostly finished sneering at him for his former comment, but that certainly didn’t stop her from taking a small jab at his ego any time she could manage. The ivory bedsheets that made up the mock picnic blanket were soon stained with bits of strawberry juice and dots of grape jelly as Bruce worked relentlessly, and unsuccessfully, at starting a fire for the hot dogs. All he’d managed to do was to dig a fairly nice pit, but with every match that refused to light the tinder pile, more and more swears were uttered under his breath. After a good run of nothing, he joined Ellen on the picnic blanket. Defeated.
“Here, let me try,” Ellen said, clambering to her feet and stealing the matchbox from Bruce’s pocket.
“It’s no use, the ground must be wet over there or something,” Bruce mumbled.
Ellen shifted the tinder, and immediately recoiled as she felt her hand abruptly hit something cold and hard.
“Bruce?” She called, “What do you think this is?”
A pointed dagger, made of a jet stone. It was roughly as long as Ellen’s forearm, with a wooden handle and carvings down the length of it.
“It’s a ritual dagger,” Bruce said, wide-eyed, “How on earth do you think it got there?”
“Maybe it was that curse,” Ellen answered. “Maybe a vengeful spirit is hellbent on not letting you roast those hot dogs.”
“Yeah? And how do you know that?” Bruce challenged.
“I’m an old Girl Scout,” Ellen mocked, “It’s my duty to know.”
The longer Bruce held the dagger, the harder the wind howled. A warning that cried out over the trees and plains, and across the endless grey sky. A warning neither of them heard.
“This probably came from the tribe that lived here,” Bruce said, “Maybe it was buried with their medicine man, as a tool to use in the next life.”
“You don’t think it’s weird we’re having a picnic over someone’s dead body?” Ellen asked, moving back to the blanket and lying down.
“Nah, all that’s left now is some old bones and the ghosts that protect the medicine man for all eternity,” Bruce said, stretching out next to Ellen on the messy picnic blanket.
“Oh hold me, I’m so scared,” Ellen smiled, resting her head on Bruce’s chest.
She didn’t remember falling asleep.
When she woke up, the sun had dipped low into the trees. No more bluebirds fluttered through the branches. The wind raked through the forest, crying and wailing, and Bruce was nowhere to be found.
“Bruce?”
Ellen rubbed her eyes as she stumbled to her feet. The previously lifeless campfire roared, the blaze dancing in the gusts of breathing wind. It called her like a beacon, and moving closer, she saw a dark shape painted in the trees.
“Bruce? Please, I was joking,” she said, moving closer, “Where did you go?”
When the object came into full focus, Ellen froze in her tracks. She couldn’t breathe. Hanging from the branches of an old dead ash tree, was Bruce.
“…Bruce? Are you okay? …You’re scaring me.”
She took a few more hopeful steps before she saw the fresh red blood dripping from his face. Bruce was dead. His arms and legs were strewn into the tree branches like a sinister marionette, a pinocchio boy made of flesh so desperately wanting to become one with the wood bark of the tree. One of his eyes had been torn from the socket, and laid idle on the leaf-covered soil, and far more of his intestines had been ripped out than stayed in, as evident by the slowly slipping pile of entrails dripping from branch to branch.
“Oh god no!”
Whatever did this to him was still there, she could feel it.
The wind screamed as Ellen ran as fast as she could muster. Her legs felt like cement, her mind was shouting as loudly as it could. The sunny meadows and endless golden fields became a raging tempest of tall weeds. The cabin rose over the hill like a monster with glaring windows for eyes and a thrashing porch-swing tongue. In every tree she imagined the limp body of Bruce, in the shadowy-painted landscape she could imagine the trees reaching down and tearing open his body with the spindly dead branches. She could hear his dying screams, carried on the wind.
Calling her name, knowing she wouldn’t help.
She wouldn’t do anything.
“Please let me in! Scott! Shelly! Please!” Ellen cried, tripping over her feet climbing up the rickety cabin steps. “Please!” Tears streamed down her face as she slammed her fists into the cabin door.
She could feel something close, something chasing. Fear overwhelmed her like a blanket on a fire, any sense of curiosity gone, she wouldn’t dare look back upon the creature. The spirit. She could hear it breathing.
“Let me in!” She fumbled with the ring of keys, tears blinding her vision.
She was going to die.
The door opened with a creaking sigh, a disgruntled Scott standing like a tower before her, a concerned Shelly flanking him.
“Ellen, what’s-,” Scott started to say.
“He’s dead!” She scrambled inside, breathing heavy. “He’s dead, it killed him-,”
Only as Scott closed the door behind her did she catch a glimpse of what she’d been running from. Nothing. The sky was clear, the bluebirds were flitting through the woolen clouds, there was nothing chasing her. There was nothing different at all. It looked exactly the same as when she’d left the cabin that morning. All the same except Bruce, who was rotting away in the forest, alone.
“Who’s dead? What’s going on?” Scott took the crying mess of Ellen, holding her firmly by the shoulders. “Shelly, go get her a glass of water or something. Come on, you’re okay. Where’s Bruce?”
“Dead!” She exclaimed, “Bruce is dead, I saw him! He was attacked and-,”
“Slower Ellen, you’re going a mile a minute,” Scott said, “Let’s start from the beginning. What happened?”
“We went to have the picnic, and Bruce and I were joking around right?” Her voice faltered at his name, “He was messing with me, trying to scare me, and he said there was this curse… and… and when I woke up, he was strung up in a tree, his… his… guts were all just everywhere and-,”
“Ellen honey, he was probably just playing a trick on you-,” Shelly interjected, handing Ellen a glass of lukewarm tap water which she refused to drink.
“No!” Ellen interrupted, “It was real!”
“You said it yourself, he was trying to scare you,” Scott agreed, “Look, I’ll go get Bruce and tell him he went way too far with this whole damn thing. You and Shelly stay here, and I’ll be back in fifteen minutes tops.”
“No, don’t go!” Ellen said, “What if it-,”
“What if what?”
“What if it attacks you too?”
“I’m not afraid of ghost stories Ellen,” Scott said.
The door closed behind him like a lid on a coffin. Ellen practically saw the nails being hammered into the rotting wood, sealing his fate. She was lifeless, a cold, frozen shell of a person, icy fear running through her veins where her blood used to be. A drumming, screeching wail instead of a mind.
All she could do was wait.
“Just sit still,” Shelly said, leading her over to the motheaten couch, “I’ll get you something to eat,” Walking off she added with a warm smile, “I’ll bet you twenty dollars that Bruce and Scott will come walking through the door in about thirty seconds, laughing their heads off.”
She nodded, not bothering to try and reply. She counted to thirty. They were still gone. Counted to a hundred. Shelly brought her another glass of water, a little bowl of potato chips, and a Twinkie. Six hundred. Scott should have come back.
It was clear that Shelly’s positive demeanor was slowly cracking off, and every second the girls sat in silence was another whisper that maybe Scott had met the same fate as Bruce. But Bruce was okay, right? It was only a joke, right? Trying to scare Ellen into his arms?
“They should be back by now,” Ellen murmured. She’d curled herself against one of the pillows on the couch, wrapped in a cloak of shadowy air, her eyes wild and large. “Where are they, Shelly?”
Shelly tried not to pay any mind, “They’re probably just gathering the picnic basket and blanket…,” her voice trailed off.
Ellen wasn’t listening. Her own sense of ringing and screaming terror filled every crevice of her mind. Like vomit pooling in the divets of the floor. Like smears of blood running down the knots of a tree trunk, and down the scared face of Bruce.
The sun had set. Scott had been gone for more than half an hour. Ellen had stopped counting ages ago. The howling gale still rattled at the windows, shaking the glass and jiggling the door handle. The choking darkness beyond the cabin’s light allowed the girls’ minds to wander. To twist their situation into the most macabre possible. The crushing fear was overwhelmingly loud in a room where no one dare spoke louder than a whisper.
“Ellen, I put food on the stove for you-,”
“Don’t leave me here,” Ellen pleaded, “Shelly, you can’t-,”
“…I want you to wait here, and I’m going out for a look,” Shelly said, moving to the door.
“No, you can’t!”
Shelly sighed, “Then come with me,”
Heat-lightning flashed outside as Ellen took Shelly’s hand. The two of them walked slowly to the cabin’s door.
“I’ll just be a second,” Shelly said, taking a flashlight that belonged to Scott off the little table near the door, “Don’t worry.”
That was the last thing she’d ever say.
She gave Ellen a brave smile as she opened the door, dead before seeing what lied behind it. In the gaping maw of the cabin, stood what used to be Bruce, the ritual dagger raised above his head. It came down with a sickening crack, right into poor Shelly’s skull. Blood poured out of her mouth and down her pink plaid shirt, her eyes were lifeless and lolling. Bruce growled, turning to Ellen, his ribcage exposed and glinting shards of white bone shining in the light of the storm. He tore the dagger from Shelly, falling with a gross thud as she hit the wooden porch. She stared blankly at Ellen, Bruce snarling.
Adrenaline coursing through her chest, Ellen slammed and bolted the door, locking the monster outside. That couldn't keep him out for long. She’d seen what he did to Shelly… and she knew she was next. She needed to fight back. As far as Ellen knew, there weren’t any weapons in the cabin, it belonged to Scott’s family. Oh, and Scott… She hoped his death was as quick as Shelly’s had been. She made a silent promise she wouldn’t die the same way.
Running to the kitchen, her mind reeled. That morning, she’d never imagined her boyfriend would die, and would never in a million years have imagined that he’d come back from beyond the grave. She’d kill him for good, so he could rest in peace. At least, that’s what she had to do to convince herself to take the butcher’s knife off the knifeblock. She secured it in one of her belt loops as she grabbed a matching steak knife, she couldn’t be too careful.
Ellen slumped against the row of cabinets as the growing storm outside shook the windows and doors. She prayed to whatever god was listening that it was the storm, and not more of those things that had taken Bruce. She’d never heard of anything like it, people rising from the dead and being turned into rotting creatures filled with bloodlust. Not outside horror movies and campfire stories. And those were made to scare children, not her.
She was not scared.
But when the kitchen door’s handle rattled, she screamed. He was outside. He was going to open that door and gut her like a fish, with the jagged ritual dagger. Bruce, her Bruce , was going to cut her throat.
When the door swung open with a wild crack of lightning, Ellen’s scream turned into a determined battle cry. Using the steak knife and every ounce of courage she had, she rushed at the monster, tackling him to the ground. She’d stabbed him four times before she realized what she’d done.
“No! No, oh my god, no!” Ellen wailed.
Scott lay wounded on the floor, his blood pooling in the wrinkles between the linoleum tiles. “Ellen…,”
“No, no don’t say anything,” Ellen cried, “Scott, I’m so sorry, I-,”
“I saw it too,” Scott wheezed, “I saw Bruce…”
“Please don’t talk, you’re losing more blood,” Ellen said, holding a dish towel on his bleeding stomach and neck.
“You’ve gotta listen to me, Ellen, that thing isn’t Bruce… Not anymore,” He said, little droplets of red spit leaking out the sides of his lips, “The gun… It’s in the cellar.”
Lightning flashed again, and a dark shadow stood looking in the chittering windows. The creature, growling and animalistic, with his wild eyes, one completely gouged and missing, staring unseeingly forward, inspecting every possible way into the cabin. Ellen and Scott were trapped. Rats in a cage to the rabid jaws of Bruce.
“The door…,” Scott said, struggling for air.
The kitchen door was wide open, flapping in the wind. Ellen saw the inky outline of Bruce against the swirling clouds, shambling closer and closer to the open door. Tripping over Scott’s leg, which was cut up from thorns and brambles, Ellen stumbled to the door. Attempting to lock the door against the howling wind proved to be more of a challenge then she’d thought. She could hear Bruce outside, snarling. Lightning flashed again, and Ellen’s face was barely a foot away from Bruce’s, if it was even still a face. His skin was being pulled from his skull, and a sickening smell of rotting flesh permeated the air.
She barely managed to latch the door. Bruce howled along with the screaming storm, the sound of sharp, bony nails, could be heard tearing at the splintering door.
“Go!” Scott struggled to say, pointing to the latched fruit cellar.
Ellen nodded. Unlocking the fruit cellar as fast as she could, and rushing down the stairs, she could hear the crash of breaking glass. The shotgun was mounted on the wall, as she searched for shells, the cellar door slammed shut, leaving her in the suffocating blackness. Scott screamed, but was immediately cut short. A moment later, everything was quiet again, save for the gross rasping of the monster.
It felt like it took hours for her eyes to adjust, though she knew it could have only been flashing seconds. The cellar was a prison cell of muddy black walls and piles of storage boxes and shelves. Her imagination sneered, turning every open book to a face full of teeth, every box of clothes to a writhing pit of adders. Wading through the choking dark, she tried every drawer or box she could find. There was a box of shells on the bookshelf, only five shots left. She’d do her best to make them count.
She could hear Bruce shuffling around upstairs. His steps were short and lurching, as if one leg was longer than the other. She needed to get out of the cabin, Bruce had his car keys, and she’d ridden with him, so her only hope for escape was to take Scott’s car. He wouldn’t be needing it, and she didn’t want to risk running through the woods again.
Loading the shotgun and swinging it around to her back, she crawled up the cellar stairs on all fours, trying to be as quiet as possible. She couldn’t hear any footsteps, so carefully she lifted the cellar’s hatch, the cabin’s lights erupting. As she slinked out of the cellar, gun in her hands, the cabin was completely still, save for the flapping curtains wrapped around the broken window. Scott lay underneath the window, a trail of fresh blood made it clear he’d been dragged several feet, and the ritual dagger laid stuck between Scott’s eyes. Why would Bruce just leave it there?
“Oh, Scotty…” She murmured, backing away from the still-warm body, “I’m so sorry Scott. I’m sorry for all of this, it was all my idea-,”
Ragged breathing down her neck violently pulled her from the quicksand of guilt. Bruce roared as Ellen spun on her heels and fired the shotgun, the slug missing by a mile, and busting out another window. Her ears were ringing, and Bruce paid no mind to the blast, ripping the dagger from where it lay in Scott’s face, and slowly backing Ellen against the kitchen counter.
“You have violated the ancient ways, and so must die to join us,” said Bruce, his voice a deep gurgle.
He tore the shotgun from Ellen’s arms, and bent the barrel with ease. Now all she had left was the butcher’s knife, and against the inhuman strength that Bruce now possessed, a desperate hope for survival… And the food Shelly had left on the stove.
The pan of hot soup hit Bruce head-on, and while it might not have done much to harm the undead, it certainly delayed him. Ellen scurried away as Bruce writhed under the heat. Her escape was short-lived. As Bruce roared with the crash of thunder, and slammed her head into the table that just that morning, they both stood around laughing. She couldn’t recognize him anymore, Scott was right. That thing wasn’t Bruce.
“You will suffer and join us!” His breath was humid and smelled of hundreds of years of decay, he held the dagger over his head and sealed Ellen’s fate.
“I’m not ready to die!” She screamed, taking the knife from her belt.
As Bruce swung down with the ritual dagger, Ellen countered, cutting up with the blade of the butcher’s knife. Bruce’s right hand had practically been cut off. The monster looked at the flailing chunk of his arm, and then back at Ellen. With an awful, devilish smile, he took a bite from his hand. Gnawing it off at the wrist, with a gross crepitating noise. Blood ran down the sides of his mouth, and he seemed to relish in the pain it caused. The hand and the dagger fell to the ground in a horrible wet thud.
He snarled with a terrible grin, “You will join us now.”
He took her by the neck. Squeezing the very life out of her eyes with every second. As Ellen struggled to breathe, she slowly sank to her knees. Her life flashed between the dark spots forming in her vision. She saw her mother, her father. She saw her sixth birthday, with a strawberry cake made by her grandmother. She saw when she’d gotten a puppy, a little beagle she’d named Lady. It was all so fast, but she felt like she saw every moment for the first time again, she could feel her soul slowly tearing away from her body. She saw when she first met Bruce, the smiling boy who eventually asked her to prom.
That boy was dead.
And she refused to die next.
Ellen crumpled to the ground, lying beside the severed hand which was still tightly grasping the ritual dagger.
“Join us,” he growled.
“Never!” With her last bit of strength, she took the hand, the dagger, and stabbed downward into Bruce’s spine. He wailed in pain as the wind screamed outside, the storm writhing along with the monster. Chunks of blackened, oozing blood bubbled from the wound.
Ellen struggled to her feet, breathing heavy as her vision cleared. She’d done it. She was free. Bruce howled and shrieked, but he was dead. There was no way anything, monster or otherwise, could survive losing so much blood. And yet Ellen watched in horror as Bruce rose from the ground like a marionette, and shambled back towards her.
“No, this isn’t happening… no more!” She didn’t have the ritual dagger, that was stuck snugly in a still burbling spine. She didn’t have the kitchen knife, that was laying in the kitchen with Scotty. She didn’t have the butcher’s knife either, which she must have dropped when her head hit the table. Not to mention the shotgun, bent into a horseshoe. She had so narrowly escaped fate, and now she was thrown back to the snapping jaws of the wolves. There had to be something else she could use. She had to kill him for good, make sure he could never come back.
“Join us!”
Scott’s axe. It was by the fireplace, behind Bruce, but she could reach it. She had to. Running as quickly as she could, she dodged past Bruce’s swiping claws and grabbed the firewood axe. Holding the reassuring weight in her hand, she watched as Bruce stumbled closer, until he was only an arms reach away. Swinging the axe in wild fury, her blade met its mark.
“Die! Die!! Die!!! ” A grisly eruption of organ tissue, splintered bones, and chunky black blood were all that was left of him. Ellen, exhausted, sat lifeless beside the corpse, sobbing. This had all been her fault. Her idea. She’d dragged them out here to go camping with her. She’d killed them too.
“I’m so sorry… I didn’t mean to,” tears ran down her cheeks as her pleas were heard by no one but the storm outside, “I… this was supposed to be fun. I… I just wanted to go on a picnic.”
Lightning tore through the sky again. Something moved in the kitchen. Writhed.
“This was going to be fun… going on a picnic…,”
It saw her there, tears ripping down her cheeks, blood covering her striped shirt. It grinned.
“I’m sorry… I’m sorry… Shelly, Scotty… Oh Bruce, I love you…,”
It would kill her too.