Tag: story

The Patient (Short Story – 100 Prompts)

Maeryn4 Comments

In the tiny one story home, the sound of big band jazz music can be heard everywhere. It would actually be enjoyable if it wasn’t for the fact that it was the exact same songs that have played on repeat every single day for the last four years. Add to that the ever present sound of all the medical devices beeping and pinging out of sync with the music and you have a recipe for madness.

When Ella had first seen the advertisement for the job, she thought it was a dream come true. Home health nurse wanted for elderly patient, M-F 8am-5pm. After working 12 hour shifts plus overtime at the county hospital, it sounded like nirvana. All she had to do was take care of one patient while the family member was at work. The patient, Maude, had been in a coma for several years and during the interview her daughter Violet told Ella that all she was required to do was to make sure that the medical equipment was functioning properly, change out the nutrient and fluid bags once a day, and keep Maude’s music playing. Ella had asked about bathing and moving the patient, but Violet said she takes care of that at night.

“What kind of music does she like,” Ella asked, trying not to let her excitement show too much over finding such an easy gig.

“Only big band music. I’ve got a few CDs loaded into the player, you just need to be ready to start it over as soon as it ends. If there’s no music playing, her blood pressure sky rockets. It really keeps her calm.”

In the beginning, Ella sat mostly by Maude’s bedside, talking and reading to her. She only left the room to use the bathroom, grab some food for herself, or to answer the doorbell, which was always the mailwoman who had been on this route for 20 years asking how Maude was doing. “The same- unresponsive but her vitals are good.” Aside from being in a coma, Maude was perfectly healthy for a 78 year old. It’s apparent that she was never a pretty woman, even in her youth. Every time Ella looks at her, she is reminded of the witch from Snow White, which is probably why the house is occasionally under attack by the neighborhood kids screaming “witch” and hurling eggs. The few times this happened, Ella took it upon herself to hose the evidence away before Violet came home; she didn’t want to upset her.

Through her first year working there, Ella familiarized herself with the house, reading some of Maude’s own books to her; the ones in English anyway. Half of the bookshelves in Maude’s room were filled with what looked like really old cookbooks in a foreign language she didn’t recognize. She knew Violet had a bit of an accent she couldn’t place so she assumed these books were from wherever Maude had emigrated.

Ella was very content in her job, even if there wasn’t much to do. It wasn’t until the end of her second year she started to feel restless and bored. She had read through her ‘I’ll get to it eventually’ book pile and was tired of trying to read gossip magazines to Maude. Her time during the day began to be more in front of the TV and less in Maude’s room, rationalizing it to herself that Maude didn’t even know she was there. She always made sure that the music was playing and to check on her once every hour. But over time those hourly checks became every two hours, then every three, then twice a shift. As long as the CDs were playing and the beeping sounded normal, she knew everything was fine.

By her fourth year, Ella had settled into her routine of watching morning talk shows, then checking on Maude, then back onto the couch for daytime TV, including her soaps. One morning, after a particularly long night out with friends, she got to the house sure that she still reeked of wine. After a check on Maude and grabbing some water and aspirin, she laid down on the couch and fell asleep. A few hours later, the quickened beeping of the instruments woke her. It took her groggy brain longer than it should have to realize the music wasn’t playing. Ella scrambled off the couch and ran down the hall to see that although Maude looked the same, the devices around her were sped up almost double time. The dinging and beeping was almost as frantic as Ella as she pushed the buttons on the player to restart disc 1. Within seconds of the first few notes the beeping slowed to a normal pace. Guiltily, she spent the rest of the day next to Maude’s bed reading to her. The next day is when the trouble began.

It had started normal enough, saying good-bye to Violet, checking on Maude’s devices and nutrient bags, grabbing herself breakfast and sitting down to watch Good Morning America. It was sometime during the segment on a water-skiing squirrel she got a chill that sent goosebumps down her spine. It felt as if someone was standing just out of her peripheral vision staring at her. No one was there, obviously, but she got up to check on Maude, finding her exactly where she should be, all her equipment working normally. The whole rest of the day she couldn’t shake her feeling of being watched. That eerie feeling lasted a week and then worsened the following week with a constant dread in the pit of her stomach. Ella found herself sitting on the edge of the couch most days, looking at the TV but not really watching it, trying to convince herself that everything was all in her head and nothing was wrong. It was when she began to hear her name being whispered that she really started to freak out.

The first time it happened she ran into Maude’s room and stood in the doorway staring at the unconscious woman on the bed, convinced that somehow she was faking and was the one who had called her name. Movement just outside the window caught her eye and she threw open the dusty old crocheted curtains to see the mailwoman looking at her from the sidewalk twenty feet away. Is it possible she was just at the window and ran over there? No, she isn’t fast enough. Who was just here looking in? No one, there was no one here, you’re imagining things. Ella’s mind ran a mile a minute and she gave an insincere wave to the mail woman before drawing the curtains closed. Satisfied that Maude was still in her coma and not the source of the whispers, Ella made her way back out to the living room. She stood in the middle of the room, unsure of what to do with herself when she caught a snippet of dialogue from the soap on TV. “It was a ghost–” the show continued it’s ridiculous storyline, but hearing that word sent a fresh chill down her spine and made all her hair stand up.

A ghost? Could a ghost be responsible for everything I’m experiencing? She knew it all started with the lapse in the music, was the music somehow keeping a ghost at bay? It seemed ludicrous and if you had told her this scenario a year ago, Ella would be the first to tell you how crazy you sounded. But here she was, fully sane and considering a ghost. After talking with a friend that night, she bought a sage smudge stick to cleanse the house the next day. After Violet left, Ella lit the stick and walked slowly through the house, wafting it’s smoke into every corner, nook, and cranny, just as the saleswoman at the metaphysical shop told her to. An hour later, the whole house had been cleansed and she sat down on the couch relieved. For the first time in weeks she was able to actually watch TV, it was a news report on the massive thunderstorms that were going to hit very soon. Blackouts were a very real possibility during these storms, but thankfully Violet had all of the medical equipment connected to a backup generator that would kick in if the power went out.

And it did within an hour of the news broadcast, yet the beeping and big band played on. Between the lights being out and the storm clouds blocking out any hint of the sun, the house was pitch black. Ella grabbed the flashlight from the kitchen and made her way to the bedroom to check on Maude. The beam of the flashlight illuminated the instrument panels first and when everything checked out she turned to leave when the light from her flashlight fell onto the floor. She had never seen it before because it was always so dark but illuminated in the flashlight’s bright beam was paint on the hardwood flooring underneath Maude’s bed. Ella got down on all fours to check it out and she saw that the entire space underneath the bed was painted with symbols. She scratched at the one closest to her and the old paint flaked up easily under her nails.

As she pushed herself back up, the feeling of dread crept back in. It’s just because the power is out and this storm is making everything seem really creepy and there’s creepy symbols painted on the floor. There’s not actually anything wrong, you’re just freaking yourself out. And yet she hurried out of the room to grab another sage stick from her purse.

She dug through her large tote bag on the kitchen table and, unable to find what she was looking for, she dumped the entire contents of the bag out, spilling them on the table and floor. Lightning flashed and lit the house up for a fraction of a second before the BOOM of the thunder. In that fraction of a second she saw the sage stick on the linoleum floor next to some wadded up tissues and an old lipstick she forgot she even had. She dove for the bundle of herbs, somehow so sure that this would fix everything. Still on her knees, she tried to light the smudge stick when she realized it. She didn’t even know when it had stopped, but it had. The house was completely silent; no beeping, no alarms, and no music. And there, just at the edge of her vision, somebody was standing there watching her.

Fear jolted through her and she threw her whole body backwards and hit the kitchen cabinets behind her, she used them for leverage and pulled her body up. It was too dark to see clearly, but when another crack of lightning lit up the room, she saw everything… and wished she hadn’t. Maude stood in the entryway between the kitchen and the living room. She looked exactly how Ella pictured she would, except for the eerie grin on her face. The tubes that had sustained her in the coma now dragged behind her on the floor, dripping whatever substances they contained, and her body seemed stronger and less frail now than it had over the past four years. And then there was her eyes, they were yellow and had slit-like pupils like a cat.

With no warning, Ella was lifted in the air by an unseen force and dropped hard onto the kitchen floor. Blood immediately spurted from her nose and mouth, her tongue probed and found at least two broken teeth. But she didn’t have long to think about the pain before she was thrown hard to her right and into the stove, shattering the glass front and creating a thousand small cuts all over her body. Throughout it all, Maude hadn’t moved a muscle, except her eyes, which mimicked Ella’s movement as she was flung around the room twice more.

Ella lay mangled on the kitchen floor, blood pooling around her from countless injuries. The pain was too much to bear and she could feel her vision fading. With the last seconds of her life ticking away, Ella could only watch as Maude turned and walked to the front door, which swung open on it’s own as she got near. A flash of lightning outside briefly lit up the porch, where the mail woman waited, drenched and kneeling as if in praise of her former patient.

“Finally, it begins…”

All short stories in the “100 prompts” tag will be written using the flash fiction prompts list on Eva Deverell’s Creative Writing Blog.  They will all be stand-alone short stories unless otherwise noted. Check out the Story Index for more. (Image is from: Here)

This story was written using Prompt # 39: “She’d been coming here every day for four years, and there was never any work to do.”

They’re Just Like Us (Part 3)

Maeryn12 Comments

Read Part 1 and Part 2

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Hollywood got it all wrong, you know. They don’t crave brains, they crave any living flesh. And they’re not slow, shuffling mindless creatures either. They’re fast, fast and clever, which makes them formidable monsters. I wouldn’t exactly call them “smart” though; if they were smart, they would know that pretty much every house has people in it. I think of them more like sharks- if not in the CDC’s captivity, they prowl their territory until they see food and then they are vicious and relentless trying to get it. You know those sharks that adapted to hunt from directly below and jump straight out of the water to catch the seals? The undead are like that.

We moved our arsenal to my parents room. It feels safer to have yet another door between us and them. On a new moon night, you try to keep your house looking as empty and lifeless as possible. If they know you’re in there, they’ll do anything to get in; so we keep all the lights off, sit on the floor next to the bed, and try to distract ourselves by playing go-fish by the dim light of one tiny candle we have lit. Far in the distance, the CDC helicopters, armed with the largest guns they could gather, circle the containment center at The Wall in case of a break-out. 

It’s around midnight when we hear it, the first sounds that tell us that the CDC failed to get all of the undead. Those sounds which tell us it’s going to be a long and stressful night waiting for sunrise. Whatever is happening doesn’t sound like it’s too far to us, and the sound of gunshots are unmistakeable. With a quick puff, the candle is extinguished and the cards that were in our hands have been abandoned and replaced with whatever gun was closest to us. 

Crouching low, we make our way over to the barred window, my mom pushes it up to open it just a few inches, so we can better hear what’s going on outside. Through the crack a gentle breeze floats in, the calmness of it so contradictory to what is happening a few blocks away. A few minutes of non-stop gunfire goes by before all is quiet again. Although we don’t say anything, I know my mom is wondering the same thing, who died to cause it to stop? Did the undead make it inside and kill the living? Or did the living people manage to get the head shot that causes final death for the undead? 

Another cool breeze pushes it’s way inside and instead of bringing noise with it, it brings pollen which causes a loud sneeze to erupt from deep within me. The noise is so loud and startling in the pregnant silence that it causes my mom to jump at the sound. I mouth a few “i’m sorry’s” to her as she composes herself and stares out the window, waiting to see if any nearby undead may have heard that.

Every breath feels like an eternity as we peer through the window, watching for any sign of movement. Ten long minutes pass before we are finally able to relax a little. I lay my handgun in my lap and stretch my fingers, trying to relieve the cramps from holding the gun in a vice-like grip for so long. 

My mom maintains her guard position at the still cracked window, keeping her eyes and ears peeled for any sign that the undead are making their way up our street. I crawl my way back over to the bed and grab a book I had tossed on it when we made camp earlier that night. When she breaks off her vigil and catches my eye, I shake the small box of matches and she nods, a wordless gesture of permission. She feels it’s safe enough for me to fire up the tea light candle to read by. 

In the bouncing candlelight, the words swim on the page in front of me. It takes me hours to read a few paragraphs. I’m staring at them but my mind isn’t absorbing them. My mind keeps drifting to the violent sounds from earlier, to what my life would be like if the dead never rose, to Tim, to life outside the wall. I finally give up and close the book, shoving it under the bed in disgust and frustration.

The green illuminated numbers scream 5:27 at me from across the room. One more hour until sunrise, and things have been quiet for hours. We may be in the clear, I think. 

A scream cuts through the night. 

Fuck.

My mom hasn’t moved from the window since the sneeze but I can see her whole body tense at the sound. I grab a gun and make my way back over next to her. We both know it- that the scream was the sound of the undead, frustrated and hungry. And it was close. 

I stare so intently out into the darkness that my eyes quickly begin to feel fatigued and dry. I blink away the discomfort and check the clock again. 6:01. I blink a few more times, pushing through the exhaustion and try to refocus them outside and that’s when I see it. The one thing you don’t want to see on a new moon night. 

A horde.

That’s the only word I could possibly use to describe it. At least 20 undead are moving in a group down the street, walking slowly with their gray eyes scanning wildly around them for any sign of movement that could mean a quick meal. And they spot it at Mrs. Gunderson’s house across the street and three houses down. She must have pulled a curtain back to watch the horde and they caught it. 

More shrieks erupt as they race across her lawn to the front of her house. From our vantage point, we watch as their rotten fingers try to pry off the metal shutters, probing for any weakness in her defenses that could get them through the front door and on top of their meal. 

If her shutters can hold out another 32 minutes, she’ll be safe. But that is a long time against a horde. 

While some of them work on her front door, others split into groups and try to pry the shutters off her windows. They hiss and shriek and make guttural noises as they work. One of them grabs a rock and begins smashing at the bolts holding a corner in place. In the darkness this sends a tiny shower of sparks with each hit. 

It’s 19 minutes until sunrise when their effort pays off and the shutter over the front window begins to peel away. The groups all converge on the tiny breach and every hand begins working at it, trying to pull it open enough that they can pass through. 

And that’s when I feel the tingle in my nose again. No, no, no, no, please god no. Fucking pollen! I press my non-gun hand to my face, trying to smother the feeling, but it’s coming.

My sudden movement got my mom’s attention and her face contorts into pure terror as she realizes what’s about to happen. She drops her shotgun and tries to shut the window but it’s too late. 

My sneeze booms throughout the room and the silence that follows is deafening.  My mom is frozen on her knees with her fingers pressed to the window frame ready to close it but not actually closing it. As soon as I recover, I follow mom’s stare to the horde and see that every single gray eye is fixed on our house. 

Those few seconds that follow, nobody moves at all: my mom, me, the horde. It’s as if you can see their thought process, continue working on the shutter or take a crack at the new food source. All at once they decided and charge down the street, directly to our front door. 

BOOM! 

The banging they make on the front door shakes the entire house. My intestines feel like they’re in knots. They’re directly below our window so we can’t really see them, but we can hear and feel them. Our reinforced front door is holding but we scramble and grab the rest of our guns and lay them out around us on the floor, facing the bedroom door, ready for anyone that makes their way inside. 

I have so much adrenaline coursing through my body that my fingers tingle as I fumble with my handgun. 

“Mom?” my voice trembles, but hers is rock steady as she replies. 

“We’ll be fine, honey. There’s only 15 more minutes until sunrise. That door can hold out for 15 minutes.” She must be terrified too but she isn’t showing it and I love her even more right then. 

BOOM! 

BOOM!

BOOM!

Every bang sends my heart into my throat. There’s too many of them, they’re going to get in. Sweat beads up on my forehead. My breath is coming in quick pants. I feel like I’m going to pee myself or hurl. 

Then the banging slows and there’s a different sound that replaces it. The window is still cracked open behind us and we can hear their snarls and grunts and somehow they sound as if they’re getting closer. 

We spin around just in time to see dead fingers grabbing at the windowsill between the bars. Two seconds later the gray eyes pop up over the edge, frantic and hungry. With no hesitation, mom grabs a 2×4 and shoves it through the open gap, pushing the head back. He loses his grip on the sill and tumbles backwards down the pile of undead that he climbed up. 

Ten minutes. Please. Just ten more minutes.

In no time, another face appears in its place, another undead made his way to the top of the pile, trying desperately to get to us. He makes it higher than the last one.

I aim the gun but can’t pull the trigger. I don’t know his name, but I recognize him from the restaurant- cheeseburger, medium rare, salad instead of fries. In mere minutes, he’ll be back to normal. I can’t end his life now. Mom tries the 2×4 trick again, but he somehow manages to grab it and yank it out of her hands and out the window. I hear it thunk on our walkway below. 

With one hand, he’s got a firm grip on the iron bars across the window, with the other, he balls it up and slams it through the window, shattering the glass and sending it spilling into the room.  

“Please stop!” I scream at him even though I know he won’t respond, not yet. The sky is getting lighter behind him. Any minute now he’s going to snap out of it and be himself again, but right this second his free arm is through the bars trying to grab us. My mom aims her shotgun at his head, finger hovering over the trigger. “Mom, no! Wait!” 

His fingertips graze the end of the barrel just as she fires. He managed to move it just enough that instead of the headshot she was going for, a chunk of his forearm and elbow are blown off, falling to the carpeted floor with a sickening sound. The shot throws off his balance and he falls back but manages to keep his grip around the bars. With what remains of his arm, he shoved it through the bars again, trying to get at us with his stump. 

With one last shriek, his face changes from the monster it just was to the face I know, only now it’s clouded with confusion. The pile below that was holding him up collapses as they all return to their normal state and his face disappears from the window, leaving just his arm on our floor. 

My mom lets out the breath she’s been holding for who knows how long as we set our guns down in the warm orange glow of the morning sun. Then the air raid siren sounds again alerting the townspeople of sunrise. 

Read Part 4

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Short Story – 100 Prompts)

Maeryn6 Comments

 The mug shattered on the tile floor, splashes of tea lightly stained the robin’s egg blue chairs and walls.  She stood, chest heaving, face red in anger, with her hand still in a claw shape from when she hurled the mug to the ground.  

His gentle voice broke the silence of the restaurant. “Honey…” That one small word had broken her trance.  She met his sympathetic gaze, seated across the table with his hands still cupped around his intact mug.   

Shame flooded every thought in her brain as she looked around at all the horrified guests.  How could she have let herself get so angry so quick?  They had come to the city for a nice day out.  Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  It was something she had talked about for years, having breakfast at Tiffany’s, and they had finally made reservations and done it. 

Earlier that morning she pulled out her pearls and a black dress; if she was finally doing this, she was doing it right. She and her husband had one of their best mornings ever, no fighting or complaining, he had done everything she could have wanted him to do without her even asking.  They had taken the train into New York and had some of the best conversations they’d had in years.  To be honest, things had been rough for a while, they had been drifting apart without even realizing it.  

Without looking at the waitress, the source of her former anger, she quickly dropped to her knees and began picking up pieces of broken ceramic.  The waitress and other staff quickly took over as she mumbled an apology.  “We’ll take the check whenever you have a second,” her voice was low, sad and ashamed, and cracked lightly.  

She could feel the tears welling up in her. Something she had wanted to do for years would now be a tarnished memory.  All because the waitress asked if they were almost finished. In the moment it seemed such an insult, how dare they rush her, don’t they know how long she had been wanting to do this? They hurried to pay, left an extremely generous tip, and practically ran outside onto the busy New York street. 

He pulled her in for a kiss and with a smile reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulling out a slip of paper and a pen. With exaggerated movements, he drew a long line across an item on the list.  “Don’t worry, honey, the doctor said six months. We’ll come back when we finish the rest of the list.”  

All short stories in the “100 prompts” tag will be written using the flash fiction prompts list on Eva Deverell’s Creative Writing Blog.  They will all be stand-alone short stories unless otherwise noted. Check out the Story Index for more. (Image is from: Here)

This story was written using Prompt # 55: “I wanted to stand and fight. He just wanted to finish his tea.”

They’re Just Like Us (Part 1)

Maeryn8 Comments

His dead eyes search me hungrily as I approach.  The festering wound on his head looks purplish in the lights.  I snake my way through the room- around chairs and bodies, an obstacle course of stuff- knowing the whole time that my path is leading me right to him.  And he knows it.  If he was still alive, he’d probably be salivating right now.

I see more of them enter through a door over to my right.  A group of three: pale and lifeless skin, limbs hanging limply, their hair patchy from it falling out in clumps.  The group lock eyes on a friend of mine and advance but I can’t worry about that now.  My only concern is him and his hunger.  I shift my glance back to him and it’s apparent his gaze never left me.  I steady my nerves as I approach, deftly maneuvering the congested space between us. 

Five feet away.  Four.  Three. Two.

One.

Breathe.

“Here’s your mozzarella sticks, Howard.”

He absentmindedly touches his once-fatal head wound, “You’re a godsend Maggie!  I’m starving!”

A smile is stretched across my face yet his words send a chill up my spine.  It’s been a year since the dead began to rise. We still don’t know why they came back, but here they are.  Their personalities are just as they were in life, however their bodies are decayed.  Autopsy incisions have split open, faces are partially decomposed, and they have eyes that are gray with cataracts but somehow can still convey emotions. 

I make my way over to the hostess stand and the group of three undead that had entered our restaurant to be seated.  I tell her I’ve got table 12 open and she grabs their menus and leads them to my section.

It’s an especially busy night tonight but tomorrow will be a different story.  Tomorrow is the new moon.  And everything changes with the new moon.

Read Part 2