‘Flatbellies,’ a short horror story

Photo courtesy of ph under the auspices of a Creative Commons license.

Introduction to “Flatbellies”

I have long wanted to write a horror story about creatures washed ashore during the storm surge of a hurricane.

I’ve experienced several hurricanes myself, though I’ve never witnessed a storm surge. You’d have to be near the shoreline to see that, and anybody near a shoreline during a hurricane has more things to worry about than looking for strange creatures tossed ashore. Storm surge is the most lethal and destructive aspect of a hurricane.

I have, however, witnessed the aftermath of storm surge. Hurricanes are good at washing seashells ashore, many of which we’ve never seen before because they exist in waters too deep for the average beachgoer. Sometimes, also, a strange sea creature will join that colorful collection of shells, washed ashore by the turbulent tides of storm.

So it is not a far reach to suppose that a monster, or monsters, could also be carried into our midst by a tropical cyclone, and that this journey is part of their reproductive cycle … a chilling thought, there, as they rely on human beings for their … food.

My friend Debbie, who worked at the Mobile Press-Register in Mobile, Ala., mentioned to me she was looking for a Halloween story to publish in her Halloween day feature section. So I wrote this story for her.

I wanted the story to feel like a local legend, an apocryphal tale related to children on Halloween night, after the candy had been sampled, the scary movies watched, and all the little ghouls and goblins lying down to sleep.

Beware the hurricanes, my little ones, because when the storm water sweeps in it brings with it some unwelcome visitors … who might just take a young boy or girl with them, back into the briny deeps.

Beware the flatbellies!

—

FLATBELLIES

Amy Martin, hands on hips, gave her brother what she hoped was a look of smoldering contempt and declared, “Congratulations, wise guy. Your children won’t go to sleep for approximately the rest of their lives.”

A jack-o-lantern leered from the corner of the living room with a flickering, gape-toothed grin. Black crepe paper bats, hanging from the ceiling by threads, twirled slowly as the Mobile, Ala., night eased through the window screen, carrying with it the wet odor of dew-soaked grass, half-chewed bubblegum, and scorched pumpkin carcass. The doorbell had not rung in a good two hours. Trick-or-treating was over for this year.

Amy’s brother, Ben, hoisted himself from the couch with an amiable grunt and hit the power button on the TV remote, cutting off Jamie Lee Curtis in mid-scream. The room fell dark. He growled playfully and wrapped his arms around Amy as she collected Atomic Fireball and Sweet Tarts wrappers from the coffee table. She couldn’t help but giggle.

“Honestly, Ben. ‘Mall of the Dead?’ ’’ she chided. “The mannequins come to life and eat the shoppers? Couldn’t you tell them a Halloween story that wouldn’t damage their brains? Something with Casper, the friendly ghost?”

Upstairs, they could hear Ben’s wife, Laurie, speaking softly to the boys, Nathan and Adam, who had tearfully departed the living room with a promise to never, ever let their parents take them to the mall again, not even if Britney Spears was giving a free concert in the food court.

“When I was a kid the mannequins ate little boys!” Ben announced, thumping his chest with in a pompous affect. “And we liked it!”

Amy rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, your lurid story even spooked me. I’m not so sure about trying on that outfit I had in mind for my classes.” In fact, she’d moved to Mobile this past July after having lived in Biloxi, Miss., for most of the past decade. A teaching position at McGill-Toolin had suddenly become available and she jumped at the chance to put her degree in education to work.

Ben popped the jack-o-lantern’s top and blew out the candle, releasing a plume of curling white candle smoke that framed his face, giving it a weird, almost spectral appearance. He blew air from his nose and stood back, shaking away the smell. Finally, he said, “It isn’t the plastic dummies in the Tommy Hilfiger knits I’d worry about, if I were you. It’s The Flatbellies.”

Amy ambled out of the living room, a wad of candy wrappers crushed in her palm. Upstairs, Laurie was still calming the boys. She’d have a thing or two to say to Ben when she came down.

“Flatbellies? What’s that supposed to mean?” Amy called from the kitchen. “Are you implying my stomach is no longer flat?”

Ben chuckled in the dark. “No, dummy. But you live in Fairhope, don’t you?”

Yes, she did. She’d found a nice two-bedroom apartment at a fairly cheap price. It would do until she decided the job agreed with her, or she agreed with the job.

“That means you have to cross the Bayway every day,” he continued. “Tell me something. Do you ever cross it at night?”

She dumped the wrappers into the trash. “Of course. How do you think I’ll get home tonight?”

“And as you’re crossing the bridge, do you ever look out into the bay?”

“Why would I do that?” she huffed. “It’s dark out there.”

“Not entirely,” he said. “There are lights out there.”

“Flounderers, maybe,” she answered uncertainly.

From the kitchen, she could see him shaking his head. “Maybe. Or. …”

“Or?”

“Or Joe Tully,” he finished.

“I suppose there’s a story behind this,” Amy sighed. She fished a Diet Coke from the refrigerator. Maybe she should make popcorn to go along with the yarn-spinning about to commence.

“Joe Tully was a professional fisherman who lived in the back bayous all his life,” Ben began. “He was married and had a little girl. To pay the rent he operated a couple of shrimp boats, and a couple of oyster boats to boot, though the oysters you tonged from the bay, even back then, weren’t fit to eat. Still, you could find some good beds where the creeks fed into the bayous and kept the bottom fairly clean.

“But what Joe really enjoyed was taking people out on sport fishing expeditions.”

Amy cracked open the Diet Coke. She began snooping through the cabinet for a package of microwaveable popcorn.

“Mostly these were lawyers from Montgomery and Birmingham who wanted to prowl the gulf where they could hook a big marlin or a sail. Joe had bought himself a good-sized Rampage sportfisher, which was his pride and joy, though it was mostly owned by the bank. Still, he was one of those rare individuals who gets to do what he loves for a career. Just think, Amy: The man was paid for having fun all day. Wouldn’t that be the life?”

Well, she didn’t think teaching Shakespeare and gerunds was all that bad, but she understood his point.

“But like a lot of fishermen, poor old Tully fell on hard times – between the sea turtle people and the catch-limit people and the bankers calling in their loans and even the pollution regulators, it looked like Tully would have to pack in his gear, sell the boats and take up real estate. And just when things didn’t seem like they could get any worse, Hurricane Frederick came barging up the gulf, with Mobile smack dab in the crosshairs. That’s when a strange and possibly miraculous event took place.”

Amy closed the cabinet and began opening drawers. “Yes?” she asked absently.

“Hours before the storm hit, a mysterious fellow appeared at Joe’s dock. Dressed from head to toe in Eddie Bauer gear – and that was back when an Eddie Bauer goose down jacket could set you back half a year’s discretionary income. The fellow handed Joe a cashier’s check for a million bucks and said the money was his. All he had to do was take this fellow out on the bay – during Hurricane Frederick.”

“He must have been nuts,” Amy observed, rooting through packages of gravy mix, chili seasoning and hot chocolate in search of a single Orville Redenbacher’s envelope.

“Oh, it gets better,” Ben continued. “He wanted to go in one of Tully’s oyster boats.”

Amy stopped. That was crazy.

“He told Tully he was searching for a rare creature that appears only during hurricanes. It’s carried shoreward from the ocean bottom and uses the storm surge to push it into the shallow, inland waters – see, it’s not a strong swimmer at all, sort of like a jellyfish. But if it gets into those shallow waters it tends to stay there, where it breeds and … well, I don’t know how to say this.”

Amy rolled her eyes. “You’ve already terrified the kids. You might as well finish off the adults.”

Ben paused, allowing the silence to ratchet up the tension. And then he said in an ominously quiet voice, “It feeds on people.”

“I thought those were called ‘gold-diggers,’ ’’ Amy snickered.

“It pulls them off the beach, or from their cars on bridges, or out of boats, and carries them down to the bottom, where it slowly drains the fluid from their bodies, like a vampire.”

Amy curled her lip in disgust. “What planet do you come from?”

He held up his hands. “I’m not joking! How do you think all those people in Galveston died during the big storm of 1900?”

“You’re insane!” she declared. “Sometimes I wonder if we’re actually related to one another.”

“That’s what Joe Tully said. He told the man he was out of his mind, that when Frederick rolled in there’d be a 20-foot storm surge and half the city might go under. Two men in the middle of Mobile Bay in an oyster tonger wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving, monsters or no monsters, and a million dollars wouldn’t do anybody any good after that, except maybe their heirs – and that’s when Joe’s eyes lit up. Because while he was prepared to work the rest of his life to pay off his debts, there was no reason his wife and little girl had to suffer for his foolishness. Maybe if he and this stranger went out into the bay and got themselves killed, his family could pay off the house and the Rampage, and start a new life in the company of somebody who was a little more responsible with his business sense. So in a dramatic about-face, Joe told the man shoot yes, he’d do it. They ran the guy’s million-dollar check by Joe’s house (Joe didn’t say a word to his wife, Elaine, about what they were doing), packed their gear aboard the biggest tonger Joe had in his inventory, the one with the brand-new Evinrude, and set out into the stormy night.

“It was bad. Worse than can be described. The power had gone off and there was no light at all, anywhere. You tend to forget how dark it can be at night when there aren’t any lights for miles around. They plowed through waves that were 10 feet tall. Whitecaps kept sloshing over the bow, and Joe had the stranger bailing with an old Folgers coffee can just to keep the gunwales from swamping. The wind howled, and once ever so often something would flap by in the dark, a hostage to that evil wind. Joe struggled to keep the bow pointed into the waves and hoped they could keep the boat afloat until the eye of Frederick came in.

“They made it across the flats, which were under 12 feet of water, and headed out toward the bridge. There was already debris floating in the bay – broken-up docks, Dumpsters, you name it. About that time, the man started screaming about something and reached for his gear. He unpacked a long, stainless steel flounder gig. And then he scrambled up on the bow, where the search light was mounted.

“He hit the switch.”

By this time Amy had stopped searching for the popcorn. The story had actually become interesting. She waited, and when Ben said nothing, she prompted him with an impatient, “Well?”

“Well, at first Joe couldn’t see anything,” Ben continued in a near whisper. “Just sheets of rain and spray from the storm. But then, he spotted something in the water. Something that was moving.

“Something that was swimming toward the light.”

Amy felt a cool patch of gooseflesh begin to tingle at the base of her neck.

“He couldn’t make out what it was. But as it came closer, he began to see, and that’s when he began to wonder what brand of insanity had compelled him to come out here, and how he wished to God he were safely back ashore with his wife and daughter, listening to the storm swirl around them from the safety of their boarded-up house, the million dollars be damned.

“The thing in the water – it was as big as a man, with rudimentary arms and legs. But it was flat, and fishbelly white, like a flounder, with great, big staring eyes, side by side against a flat spatula of skull. And there, in the middle of its head, was a sucking mouth, like a lamprey’s, full of sharp bristles. Joe could picture this thing slithering from the water and battening onto him like a tick, or a leech, then dragging him out of the boat and hauling him down to the turbid depths of Mobile Bay, where he would remain forever.

“The man at the bow prepared to hurl his gig when suddenly, a wave caused the boat to lurch, and the searchlight beam played across the surface of the bay.

“Joe saw hundreds of the things out there, as far as the beam could reach into the howling dark. Their eyes caught the light and threw back a magenta glow, and their expressions were shot through with the remorseless hunger of a parasite. They stared without blinking, as if transfixed, and their obscene mouths opened and closed in a grotesque parody of feeding.

“The stranger shouted, ‘Too many of them! They’re attracted to the light – we must shut off the light. We must get out of here! They’ll kill us and overrun the entire Mobile Bay estuary by morning!”

In his mind’s eye, Joe could see these creatures lurking in the quiet, shallow bayous that lined the bay. He could see them creeping from the water at night to haul away some poor soul who had gone outside to see what the dog was barking at.

He could see his wife, Elaine, and their daughter, peeking from the living room window as something concealed in shadow, something flat and horrible, waited for one of them to open the door.

“Joe shouted back at the man, ‘We’re not going anywhere! If they’re attracted to light then we’ll stay here with our searchlight until after the storm surge passes, so they’ll stay with us and not hit the shallows north of here. Then the damn things can float back out into the gulf when the tide goes down!’ ’’

By this time Laurie had come downstairs. She took up a spot next to Amy in the kitchen and listened.

“The stranger freaked and tried to gig ol’ Joe, but right at that moment one of those things reached over the side and yanked him by the ankle, and the man tumbled into the bay. Joe throttled up the Evinrude and tried to swing around to grab the man, but he could see nothing was to be done – a swarm of The Flatbellies had him and were carrying him below. So Joe motored over to the bridge and moored to one of the pilings, leaving lots of slack in the line, and there he stayed, with the search light shining directly into the water. Those things surrounded the boat and tried to climb aboard, but Joe fought them using the flounder gig, and finally a paddle, and after an hour of battling and bailing, it was almost a relief to Joe when he looked south of the bridge and saw a mountain of shrieking water bearing down on him. Frederick’s storm surge had roared in.

“Joe had hoped to provide for his family by dying out there on the water, but now his only hope was that he save them from an evil far worse than a few debts.

“The next morning, when the inspectors for the Alabama Department of Transportation checked the bridge, they found his boat hanging from one of the support columns. Its searchlight was still shining in the water.

“And to this day, when people drive over the Bayway crossing Mobile Bay at night, and they see lights out there on the water, some of them who’ve heard this story wonder if Joe Tully still isn’t out there, protecting his family from whatever creepy thing might be slithering along the bottom, heading for the flats north of the bridge.

“It makes you wonder, too, doesn’t it?” Ben finished mysteriously.

Laurie looked at Amy with a puzzled expression. She said, “Did your mother drop him on his head when he was a child?”

That night, driving back to Fairhope, Amy kept her eyes straight ahead as she crossed the bridge that spanned Mobile Bay.

But it didn’t do any good. A car was parked in the breakdown lane with its lights on.

Nobody was inside.

Amy didn’t stop. She kept driving, hoping the needle on the fuel gauge would not touch E, or that a Check Engine light would come on, or any of the hundreds of things that could go wrong with a car would go wrong at that exact moment. She did not know what she would do if that were to happen.

Except that she would turn off the headlights. And NOT open the door.

And hope that somewhere, out on those marshy black flats, a searchlight would appear.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Courtesy of Public Domain Pictures under the auspices of a Creative Commons license.

Introduction to “I Am Running”

In 1969 my parents decided to leave our safely suburban, three-bedroom, two-bath house for a dumpy little place with one bathroom and no air-conditioning that was one block off the water in another part of town.

This was one of those marriage-crisis changes so they were willing to settle for less in order to expedite the move. (As an aside, let me assure you – the approach solved nothing.)

Nobody asked me how I felt about leaving our comfortable home and my tight group of friends for a falling-down dump with a gigantic yard and bazillions of trees. If they had, I would have told them I hated the idea.

When I say the yard was gigantic, I mean it was HUGE, almost the size of a football field. The previous owners must have been raised in a garbage dump because the condition of the house and lot were beyond horrible. The back yard was littered with mounds of leaves so large they could be mistaken for middens, an open cesspool, a junked car, a rusted-out swing set, humps of burned materials, broken glass, bricks and cement blocks galore … and trees. Every make and model of tree imaginable, from water oaks to hickories, magnolias, longleaf pines and white laurels. At one point I counted the trees in the front and back yard – there were over 50.

It took us years to get that place in shape, and it was years of back-breaking work. Dad and I cut down more trees than I can count, and Dad was not a fan of tree stumps, so the tree removal began with us digging around the trunk at the ground level until a large crater had been excavated. Then we would cut the roots, one by one, until the tree threatened to topple. Dad would tie it off to keep it from falling on the house and we’d begin whittling away on the taproot until the tree fell.

We did all this with a bow saw, ax and hatchet. Dad refused to pay good money for a chainsaw.

Even after Dad felt he had removed enough trees, there was the raking. Dad required that the yard be as clean as the floor in the house, which meant days and days of raking and hauling leaves. It was a never-ending chore because we had a mix of tree species in the yard and none were synchronized with the others. The water oaks, for instance, suffered a massive leaf-fall in the spring, though they shed year-round. The hickories dropped their fluffy leaves in December and January. The magnolias shed all year long and their leaves, big as dinner plates, needed to be picked up lest they cover the grass and kill it.

I can’t count the number of times I raked my parents’ and now my yard, but I do know the job, if worked at on an all-day basis, could be finished in three or four days. That’s a LOT of leaves!

And during that mind-numbing drudgery the idea for this story emerged.

I think I might have grown batty after all that raking, hauling and dumping leaves by the side of the road for the city to pick up, followed by more raking and hauling and dumping. The monotony of it, the mind-numbing sameness and exhaustive physical effort, were killing more brain cells than the imported beer I would drink in my early 20s while partying with my friends after work.

So this story emerged. During my youth in the ’60s I had been a UFO enthusiast. I had even tried to replicate some of the UFO photos I saw in magazines by throwing a garbage can lid in the air and snapping photos of it with my little Kodak box camera. So the idea of a UFO landing in the back yard at night to disgorge aliens who looked like, what else?, my nemesis at the moment, the hated leaves, was not a far stretch.

This story is a trifle. It is not meant to change worlds or alter the universe in any way. It is a relic of my youth, when to save my brain from the boredom of performing the dull physical labor of raking and hauling leaves out of the yard, I sought to entertain myself by spinning a ridiculous yarn.

Think about it the next time you are outside, rake in hand, preparing to wage war with those naked trees who left their summer clothes lying about.

I AM RUNNING

Version 1

It is Tuesday night and very cold.

I am watching “Maude.” “Maude” is my favorite program, because I like to see her smite people down with her tongue. “Maude” is a very dominating woman. I like the way she says what she thinks and stands up for what she believes. My former wife was like that; I am like that, and let me tell you, two people like that just cannot live under the same roof. Life is, uh, how do you say, el disgusto?

I am not watching “Maude.” It is not a matter of preference, you see. The TV cable has gone off. I am very angry. I would call the TV cable company and raise hell, but I cannot, because whenever the cable goes off the air, their telephone goes off the hook.

Angry, I am turning off the TV. Augghh! The silence is killing me. I must turn on the radio to preserve my sanity. Ah? What wonderful – noise? The radio is not working. All I am hearing is static, even though I am turning the channel all the way across the receiving band.

The dog is barking. I cannot imagine what he would bark at before running to hide. He must be barking at a leaf. The past few days, he has worked up the courage to bark at leaves. He is a very peculiar dog, very peculiar indeed.

The dog is persisting in his barking. What is causing this outburst? An army of leaves? Perhaps they are trying to kill him. I wish they would hurry. I suppose to better my curiosity, I best go see what he is barking at. I have never seen an army of leaves.

The electricity is going – it is gone. Perhaps the wind blew down a line. It is certainly blowing enough leaves down. An army of them. It must be terrifically cold outside, with the wind blowing so ferociously. Perhaps it is not the wind’s fault for the lack of electricity here. Perhaps it is the army of leaves, trying to cut me off from the rest of the world. First, they will kill my dog, then come for me. I suppose I better check on the situation.

This is very peculiar. It is night, and the electricity is off, yet there is a glow coming through the window. I am astonished! What could the source of the glow be?

I am amazed! A strange, saucer-shaped vehicle is landing in my back yard. It is large, approximately 30 feet in diameter, with a ring encircling its girth. It glows yellow then a shade of white washes over it. It is coming down through my personal forest of trees, to land in a clear area. It makes not a sound. It is very peculiar. I wonder what manner of creature is piloting the vessel? Perhaps it is a secret government project. I would not put such an unscrupulous deed past the scoundrels in Washington. Maybe it is a Soviet spacecraft, or Chinese, or French, or Japanese, or Icelandic!

I have stepped into the bitter cold of the outdoors. I am sick of peering at this object from the kitchen window. Foolishly, I am standing here without my camera. I will be labeled a crackpot. I have gone out the back door, threaded my way into the unraked leaves of my back yard. The wind is gusting, yet I do not feel the cold. This object is extremely interesting. I must get closer for a better look.

Yes, I believe this vessel to definitely be of extraterrestrial origin.

It is landing – has landed, on four stilt-like legs. It continues to be silent, and the pulsing color has also ceased. It certainly is a unique craft. There are absolutely no seams on its exterior, anywhere. Very peculiar indeed.

This must be the culprit, the agent responsible for the TV cable blackout, the radio static, and the electrical failure. I am ashamed of myself, thinking of a leaf army. Very ashamed, indeed! ’Twas such an absurd notion, only a product of my imagination. I cannot recall seriously considering the hypothesis! But even suspecting such a notion! Preposterous. I have a much more rational explanation! A flying saucer is the cause of these domestic idiosyncrasies.

Oh dear! I am terribly excited. A hatch is opening. To think, I will be the first human ever to communicate with a being from outer space, unless of course, it is a government project. It is more than I can fathom.

A creature is emerging. It is certainly far from being human. It is a thin looking organism, flat with veins like a – like a leaf! Astounding! That is a perfect analogy! This being resembles a leaf! A leaf with legs!

He is approaching me. Should I run or stand my ground. My heart is beating at an excessive rate, I might add. I am staying here.

“Earthman, I am a representative of the Leaf Army. We have come for your dog.”

My dog? What could they possibly want with my dog. The leaf man is snatching up my dog – he is now leveling some sort of instrument at my dog. He is killing my dog.

Oh God! The Leaf Army! My dog, then me.

The leaf man is looking at me strangely.

I am considering the notion of running.

I am running.

I AM RUNNING

Version 2

It is a Tuesday evening. The wind is gusting vehemently from the north, and I fear for my comfort tonight because of a chill that is accompanying the gale.

I am watching the “Naomi Winters Show” on television. It is a disgusting form of entertainment, but unfortunately, due to the lack of any competition worth my while, I find myself staring at it every Tuesday night. I suppose I could listen to the radio, but the notion of having my sensibilities assaulted by what the radio media call music does not appear to me. Books are vapid beyond description. I have found it not within my capacity to successfully read a book through its entirety. In fact, now that I think about it, there is hardly anything that appeals to me. It is a wonder I have not gone completely insane (if I am not already).

Naomi Winters is an interesting character, despite the medium by which she is presented. You see, she has such forceful character. I once enjoyed watching her smite down people with her tongue. My wife also found great delight in this. In fact, my wife admired Ms. Winters to the extent of assuming the star’s personal habits and characteristics. Soon, she became unbearable. For example, on one occasion I distinctly remember asking her the common, everyday question, “What’s for dinner?” She quickly replied, “Food.” Of course, it is with my capabilities to bear out these occasional idiosyncrasies, but when she began to abuse them, I settled for a divorce. You may think me to be a bit drastic, but, naturally, you did not have to live with the poor, deranged woman.

However, in getting back to the present, I am not watching the “Naomi Winters Show.” It is not a matter of preferences. You see, the television cable has gone off the air. This does not surprise me. On every occasion available, the cable goes off. When the wind blows, it goes off. When a drop of rain touches any component of its system, it goes off. If, by some method beyond the scope of man’s comprehension, it detects a cloud in the sky, the cable goes off. I could even go so far as to say it goes off when a storm that is part of a television program flashes upon the screen.

Nevertheless, it is off, and there is nothing I can do. I would phone the cable company, but every time the system is disabled, as if by magic, their telephone is likewise disabled. I suppose from now on I will be forced to tally up the number of hours I go without television (due to their inferior equipment), and deduct an appropriate amount from their bill. That would certainly inspire them to strive for better service to their customers, if not better excuses.

I am disgusted with the television. I would turn it off, but the ensuing silence would prove to be a cure worse than the disease. Of course, I could always listen to the radio. It would certainly prove to be more entertaining than watching a thousand bumblebees a’crossing the old cathode. Yes, yes. I have succumbed to that decision.

I am turning off the TV, and am turning on the radio. What? What is this? The blasting of guitars and ear drum-pounding percussions are not issuing forth from the speaker as I previously anticipated. I am listening to nothing but static, even though I try every conceivable station in reach. Static! Nothing but static! This is indeed peculiar.

I am now turning off the radio and – wait! Yes! I don’t believe it! My dog is barking! Yes, I do believe my dog is barking! This is a noteworthy fact because, you see, my dog is the epitome of cowardice. He mortally fears all manner of living creature, and holds a regard for me slightly tainted by respect and blended with pure, unadulterated terror. He has never been one to bark, but just recently, he has mustered the courage to bark at leaves. Leaves of all things! When this trait first became apparent, I used to enjoy hid daily concerts. Obviously sensing my pleasure over his new found ability, he pursued it to the extreme, and his hourly assaults upon my sanity and the sanity of my neighbors forced me to invoke stern countermeasures. He then became very well behaved with regard to his barking. Only when an array of leaves would find it within their pleasure to overwhelm my lawn would he bark. I cannot really blame him for despising leaves. He is using a logic he wouldn’t understand, but one that I comprehend only too fully. I cannot tolerate a messy lawn. Each fall, when the annual leaf-raking endurance test comes about, I arm myself with a mighty rake and a voracious garbage can that cannot wait to wolf down the loathsome corpses. But do you think for one moment this deters the little bastards? Of course not. They come sweeping in with the vengeance of a kamikaze, and as dreadful as I appear, it does nothing to alter their course. I retaliate with quick, hard strokes of the rake as the wind, their instrument of reinforcement, plays havoc with my orderly assault. I have begun to believe that the domestic leaf possesses intelligence undetectable by men. Leaves are, of course, masters of the subtle tortures, and each autumn when their supply of nutrients is cut off, they choose their victims and attack. We have nothing to fear from the Chinese or the Russians. The war to be fought is from within, and it will not be a war of men against men. It will be a war of men against the leaf, and I know who will emerge victorious.

My dog continues to bark. I would investigate, but who wants to see more leaves falling? Especially since I just finished raking the back yard yesterday (my blisters will attest to that). An army of leaves must be falling, or my dog would not find it worthwhile to risk barking for such an extended interval. Perhaps they have worked out a new battle plan against me. Attrition. Or maybe they have decided it best to harass me by denying me my television viewing or radio listening. I can see how they could conceivably interfere with the TV cable, but I cannot account for the radio. The little demons might go so far as to kill my dog (probably frighten him to death), then come for me. That would certainly be hilarious. I can envision them now, marching to the front door, demanding entrance. Then I attack with my rake and they scatter … and cut me off from the safety of my house … and begin to overwhelm me … what nonsense!

The electricity is going … it is gone. This has really gotten out of hand. First, my television is interrupted. Then the radio is blacked out, and now the electricity has gone. And besides all of this, that damn dog is still barking. I believe I will brave the cold long enough to discipline him, then I will investigate the possibility of a blown fuse, and then see if I can raise some hell on the telephone for awhile.

This is very strange. I have walked into the back room where the door is, and even though my house is without electricity, there is a glowing emanating from outside. There are no streetlights in the vicinity, or houses or any other source of light (I live in a secluded area). And besides, this is a pale blue radiance, the likes of which I have never seen.

The dog is still barking. Perhaps the source of this light is also the cause of his agitation. I must investigate, for the sake of my curiosity. I must investigate.

This is incredible! This is absolutely fantastic! I do not believe my eyes! After peering through the window, I am witnessing the most mind-bending spectacle imaginable! There is some sort of aircraft landing in the back yard. At least I think it is an aircraft. For all I know it might be a spacecraft. It certain is on unconventional construction. It glows with a light shade of blue and violet, and is roughly spherical with a ring around its girth. Its appearance is comparable to that of the planet Saturn. It is descending very slowly, and is silent. Verry silent. I can hear the wind gusting, yet not a sound escapes this craft.

The dog has now retreated to the back step and his voice is gone. I believe he is paralyzed with fear.

Horrors upon horrors! Something terrible has occurred! It is so horrid that I can scarcely find the words to describe it! This alleged denizen of the interstellar deep has landed his spacecraft on my prime chinaberry tree. The poor thing was only two years old, and was a gift from my dear departed mother. I had nursed it from the time it was a seedling, and was hoping it might bear fruit next year. I shall certainly demand reimbursement from the occupants of this vehicle, along with an explanation accounting for their actions. Most certainly I shall!

Enough of this. I do not intend to dwell on the loss of a tree. I must obtain a closer look at this vehicle which now rests on my property. I am at the door but it refuses to open. Something has jammed it. Upon investigating I discover the agent responsible. It is my dog, who is now in a state comparable to that of rigor mortis. He has frozen rigidly against the frame and refuses to budge. I am kicking the door and he gives way, screaming in terror has he scrambled for his house. Now that he has been re-animated and driven from the door, I am allowed free access to the outside.

It is very cold and I am without a coat, but this face does not press against my mind. Even though Jack Frost is molesting me, I am totally absorbed by this curious vehicle who, by chance, has selected my yard for an appropriate landing area.

This is all very peculiar indeed. The craft is completely seamless, and resembling nothing ever conceived on this planet. Of course, it might prove to be a government secret project. I would not put such a devious plot past those scoundrels in Washington. It might perhaps be an aircraft of Soviet origin. That would certainly be a fine prize. I can see the government now, sending hundreds of men … with tanks … and machine guns … and all of them tearing up my precious flower beds and grass! They wouldn’t dare!

Great God almighty! A portal is opening! A door is opening! They are going to come out! Good heavens! Will they be human, or something else? I am wondering if I ought to stay – I am staying! This is an opportunity too fabulous to pass by. Imagine me, the first human being to communicate with an alien intelligence (if that is what they are).

Good lord! One of them has come out! Not one but two! Merciful heaven, they are aliens! They do not in the slightest way resemble humans! They are wide but thin, like sheets of paper, and veritably transparent, to the point of allowing me to see their inner system of veins and organs. I cannot really describe these creatures. If only there was something I could compare them – why, could they? Yes! That is it! A leaf! They resemble leaves! A simple, common, ordinary leaf! This is amazing (and notoriously ironic). Who would think that an alien species, the first of which I have had the opportunity to meet, would have the same phenotype as my age-old nemeses?

The alien is walking toward me. He steps lightly through the leaves scattered about the yard, as if not wanting to disturb those who rest in peace. It is very strange that I should think of it that way. His companion awaits him back at the spacecraft.

“Hello, Earth vermin,” he is saying with a sweet, trilling voice. “I hope it is not beyond the scope of your reasoning capabilities to deduce why we have come.”

For one so frail and ridiculous looking, her certainly sports a conduct unbecoming his appearance. I have decided that it is within my best interests to attempt a parley with this pre-compost ingredient.

“Let me see … I suppose you have arrived on this planet to enlighten we lowly Earth vermin to your way of life. I also assume you will extend to us an invitation to join your probable interstellar empire, once we have mastered your scientific techniques.” A rather stereotyped, baseless assumption, but somehow appropriate.

“How incredibly stupid of you, Earth vermin. Naturally, we have come for your dog. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Your dog, idiot!”

My dog? What on earth could he possibly want with my dog?

“For no reason on Earth, I can assure you.”

I am stunned. These creatures are capable of reading one’s thoughts.

“I was wondering when your low level intelligence would detect our talent.”

This is very confusing. I do not know which way to turn. First he wants my dog and now he is performing telepathic magic tricks. This entire meeting has ominous overtones to it.

“Telepathy is not magic, and I resent being called ‘pre-compost material’ by you a few moments earlier. That is no way to speak of the dead.”

“I apologize for the affront, but why have you come here?”

“Stupid Earth vermin! We have come to invade your planet, and exterminate your race. It is as simple as that. We had been searching for an area to base our operation, when one of our people overheard your mention of a leaf army. Naturally, this attracted us, because by coincidence, we are called the Army of Lief. After listening to your thoughts for a short time, we realized that you were not thinking of us but of some fear-inspired fantasy, brought about by the strange effects our ship’s engine was having on certain devices in your home. However, we thought it would be rather amusing to introduce ourselves in this manner. Don’t you think it is amusing?”

“Not particularly. Besides, it is still unclear to me what dealings you have with my dog.”

The alien is looking at me like the scum he thinks I am. “The key to that is in something you were thinking only minutes ago, before we arrived.”

I am scanning my memory, but I don’t – just one moment! I now remember what I said before. Could this be the key? The little demons might go so far as to kill my dog and come for me. Good God, I believe it is!

“You are correct, Earth vermin. And now, shall I fulfill that prophecy?”

The creature has turned and is now retrieving the dog from his place of concealment. The dog is, of course, howling in terror, and for good reason too for the alien has leveled some sort of weapon at him. The dog’s pitiful canine shrieks had suddenly increased until I – they have stopped. He is dead. The dog is dead. They have killed him.

The alien is now staring at me strangely. I believe I see anticipation in his eyes. He is raising his weapon.

I am considering the notion of running.

I am running.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image courtesy of Public Domain Pictures.

Introduction to “I Feel My Body Grow”

The genesis of this story was simple: I wanted to sell a story to “100 Wicked Little Witch Stories.”

During the ‘90s writer and editor Stefan Dziemianowicz helmed a number of anthologies for Barnes & Noble, all of them centered around extremely short stories. Seems publishers love short shorts, and I’m not sure if that’s because they can get more in each books or that readers prefer very short stories. As a reader I have no druthers either way, though I will pause before committing to a novelette or novella. I didn’t read Stephen King’s “The Mist” for many years because of that bias.

When I discovered Dziemianowicz was editing a book of witch stories I sat down to come up with something that would fit his premise. I knew nothing about witches except what I’ve seen in movies or TV. I knew a couple of people who claimed to be but their witchhood had less to do with eye of newt and hair of bat but the whole Mother Earth and Gaia thing, which I dismissed as a New Age hippie trend that would fade from popularity in a couple of years.

What I wanted was a witch for the modern ages, maybe not an evil witch but certainly one who was vengeful. I came up with just such a creature:

Cancer.

Cancer is the modern scourge. We think of it as evil though it has no conscious intent – it merely is.

But I asked myself: What if it did have conscious intent?

“I Feel My Body Grow” is the result.

This is a creepy story and when I re-read it recently I was gratified to see it holds up really well, from 1995 to this writing in 2023. I think it would make a terrific short feature, in a horror anthology movie like “Tales from the Crypt” or “Twilight Zone.”

I don’t believe “I Feel My Body Grow” will leave you lying awake tonight, jumping at every sound your house makes in the cooling dark. I do hope it stays with you.

—

I FEEL MY BODY GROW

She touches them, and I feel my body grow.

A man with eyes like polished knobs of bone, who stands behind a counter, trembling, the exertion of life a tension ringing through him. A hairless pupa of a child, wrapped in hospital sheets, quietly and almost lovingly feeding on itself to death. A woman dressed in white, starched and straight and sure of most things, the way women who know the tides of emotion are sure of most things.

She touches them all, and I feel my body grow.

But somehow, over the lifetimes, I still ache at the thought of her. I see my thoughts of her rising above the black chasm of all evil things that have come to pass, and somehow, I still ache at the thought of her. It is a thrall of some kind, I am sure, as sure of it as the woman in starched white is sure of most things, and I pray to be released from this thrall of sickness.

A thrall. That is what this is. Surely, it is not –

She touches a young man who is bright with life and love, and I feel my body growing, cell by twisted cell. I feel it growing through the man, a sharp angle of darkness, and soon he too will feel it, awakening one night in an astonished sweat, a dream of sickness spinning out of his mind that does not evaporate in the light of day.

A sickness. Inflicted by her, from the moment I saw her those lifetimes ago, a shy young woman dressed in simple black and white, her hair a primal darkness wrapped about her head like a coiled snake, her eyes without depth, her cheekbones and the ridge of her jawline smoothed to soft yet strong angles. Her beauty suggested intelligence and spirit, and I could not help but notice … and admire. Inflicted by her, surely. Inflicted, inflicted, inflicted –

She touches the frail hand of an elderly woman who is lying in a plump bed, surrounded by cats and photographs of loved ones and lilac cachets.

I feel my body growing. Horribly, I feel it.

Everything about her, magical. Her laughter, like wind blowing through the strings of a musical instrument; her manner, so comfortably alluring … I could not help myself.

Inflicted, and afflicted. My wife’s gaze lingering a moment too long, I sensed she heard my thoughts the way a woman who has lived with a man for many years can sense the drift of his heart. And I, too, could feel the anger growing within my wife, could feel the coolness of her shadow falling over me as I sought through prayer and meditation to rid myself of the growing sickness within.

She touches a little girl, and I feel my body growing.

Inflicted, inflicted, inflicted – through the fields I tended and the drawing of water from the stream and the recitations of prayer at Sabbath services. Everywhere and everything, I saw her face and heard her laughter and wondered and worried and prayed.
She touches and touches and touches and my body grows, bloated and monstrous and twisted, my body grows.

A thrall, then. It had to be. Nothing else could have brought me to such spiritual ruin. Nothing else could have forced me to forsake my teachings, my faith, my devotion to the laws by which we all lived. Nothing else could have driven me to follow her into the field that final night, to … to take her, her coy overtures giving way to a pretense of terror as I ripped at her clothes … my God, how could I have done it?

A thrall. It had to be. A thrall of sickness.

She touches a woman dark of hair and thin of face, a woman so much like herself, laughing and beautiful and innocent – no, it cannot be innocence! – and I feel my body grow. Against my will, it grows, and it grows to disfigure and kill. The idea of innocence sends a special knife through me, and everything that has happened before and since focuses into sharp relief, as one of the photographs people frame and hang on their walls in this lifetime, and I feel my body twisting and hurting and the unmerciful evidence of memory.

My wife. It was she who said the word.

Witch.

She touches every child in a classroom, where outside, men wearing masks are ripping fibers from a wall.

And it was I who stood before her as she coughed amid the stinking, pitch-soaked timbers, her hands and feet bound to the stake, her terrified eyes darting from mine to the men who held the torches. It was I who pronounced the sentence, choking the words out, my throat so tight I could barely breath but a greater terror falling upon me from the angry stares of the townspeople gathered ‘round for the coming spectacle.

It was I who told her that by the laws of our community, she might have one question answered before the sentence was carried out.

And so she asked me, in a voice so small I leaned closer to hear her.

She asked me how I wanted to die.

Within the Lord’s embrace, I told her, speaking in a powerful and righteous voice, despite my fear. My fear. She sensed it, and she asked me again. How did I want to die?

I felt myself frowning at her, unprepared and apprehensive, and then I answered again: within the Lord’s embrace.

She stared at me a long moment, her gaze clear and strong. And then she asked me again, the tone of her voice insisting I tell the truth: How did I want to die?
Her words seemed to reach within, to grasp my heart and squeeze it, as if she were testing for ripeness, and in a moment that arrived and departed so quickly I could not be certain it had even come at all, I felt nothing but black, rancid loathing for myself, because for that sliver of a moment I asked myself: What if this disease of lust that had afflicted me were nothing more than a weakness of my conviction? What if this woman stood wrongly accused?

And I could not help but whisper:

If you are innocent, then let me live in misery for all eternity.

She touched me.

Somehow, she slipped her hand from the bindings and touched me, in the center of my chest, a touch as feathery and insubstantial as a dream of a touch. And as I staggered back, a warmth spreading along the curves of my ribs and sinking into all the secret places inside me, the men shouted angrily and hurled their torches into the timbers, drowning everything in a sudden roar of combustion.

She did not scream.

Afterwards, I could not remain for the reconsecration of the soil. I could not bear my wife’s smirking glances. I could not perform my devotions or say a prayer. Something had fallen over me, the sudden idea of innocence a black film that covered my skin and poisoned my blood and sank into my dreams, and it stained everything I believed in with a mark of hypocrisy, murder and despair.

Lurking beneath this, I would not admit at the time, was a memory of her, the eyes, the sharp cheekbones, the spirit. The memory always brought with it a wrenching of the heart, a sinking of the gut, a bonfire of hatred for myself and my glaring wife and the good people who somehow, some way, had forced me to do this thing.

Inflicted, inflicted, inflicted … yes. But now I was no longer sure. Had it been by my own hand?

I fell ill. A physical sickness, to match the infection that had claimed my soul. The warmth in my chest became a fire, and lesions ate my flesh. I did not seek relief through poultices or ecclesiastical ministrations. I did not do anything but wait.

Until she came for me. In the night, when I knew she would come, her dark, dark hair a penumbra of shadow floating around the sharp curve of her face, her body unmarked by fire or any other flaw. She came to me and took my hand and we left, floating through walls and trees and finally the sky itself.

She said to me: You will live forever.

Ah, my heart soared. I could not believe there was room within her for mercy, or forgiveness, but she spoke the words with such conviction and compassion that I believed her. I let go of the constraints that had held me, and I told her I loved her, and I would stay with her forever.

She did not reply.

But she led me to a village, much like my own, and she took me into a cottage where a family slept around the banked embers of a fire.

We watched them a moment. Then she whispered: Goodness, and evil, exist in every act. Only truth never changes.

And then she touched the father. She touched the mother. She touched the sleeping children.

I felt my body grow.

Horribly. I felt my body grow.

And it has grown. All the years, all the lifetimes, all the ages that have passed, my body has grown.

The world is different now, a loveless place that glitters with machines and science and godlessness. My body grows quickly now, metastasizing despite the radiation and chemotherapy these people use to kill it, the tumors an ever-ripening harvest of sickness and pain that will never know end.

But somehow, I still ache at thought of her. Rising above everything else, I still do.

A thrall, yes. But by my own hand? I will never know the truth.

As she touches them, and I feel my body grow.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

I’ve been holding off talking about our new tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico because I wanted to make sure it posed a legitimate threat to our part of the
Florida panhandle. That would now seem to be the case.

Tropical Storm Isiais ( ee-SIGH-ee-es ) is now in the southwest Gulf of Mexico with winds of 45 mph as of the 10 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 7 advisory. The cyclone is drifting east-northeast, but is expected to turn north-northeast tomorrow and intensify rapidly into a category 2 hurricane with winds of 110 mph. Some weakening is expected before landfall. Isiais could move ashore somewhere in the Pensacola Beach area.

This scenario is expected to play out Friday and Friday night.

If you haven’t prepared for a hurricane, today is the day to complete those preparations. Have gas in your car, and food and water at your residence. I’m not expecting a world-ending blow, but remember: It’s been years since a hurricane struck this area. We could see quite a few fallen trees, on the order of Hurricane Erin in 1995. Consequently, some areas could experience sustained periods of no electricity – that is if the storm tracks as expected. Changes are possible and even likely.

No need to panic. Calmly go about your preparations and complete them in a timely manner. Get your information from legitimate sources, like the National Hurricane Center and your local Emergency Management folks. Avoid the doomscrollers on the internet.

Hope for the best, but prepare for the alternative.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Warner Bros. / Legendary

“Digger” starring Tom Cruise as just‑giving‑you‑what‑you‑want oilman Digger; Riz Ahmed as there‑are‑such‑things‑as‑facts‑and‑reality scientist Ganesh; John Goodman as U.S. President Compson and Mother Earth; Sandra Huller as Emma, a person who can afford to be an environmentalist’ Jesse Plemons as a‑woe‑is‑me nepo baby Kenny; and others. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Written by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolas Giacobone. Scoreby Cosmo Sheldrake. Rated R. 2 hours, 9 minutes. Theatrical release.

Are there spoilers: You bet your high temperature hockey stick there are! The biggest one of ’em all is in the plot summary directly below, so read at your own risk.

Plot summary: Twenty-five years after a climate‑change catastrophe swatted northern Europe and Alaska, a play recalling the series of events that led to the tragedy is shown at a refurbished theater. The play’s culprit or hero – it depends on your political tastes – is Digger (Honeywell), an oilman.

Mladen’s take

“Mickey 17” (2025) is a political and social satire movie I want to like but can’t. “Digger,” now playing in theaters, is a political and social satire film I want to dislike but can’t.

Why?

First of all, it’s a helluva acting effort by Cruise. Had “Digger” been more straightforward – it takes a while to understand how the film will unfold to tell its story of consequential climate change impacts, political corruption, bullshit religion, and heartless accounting – Cruise would be a contender for a Best Actor Oscar nomination. There’s a small chance that he’ll get it anyway but no chance of a win because the film starts off, ah, weird and annoying‑ish. I got pissed when the movie shifted to make me think that Iceberg Judy never happened, that everything I was watching was just a schtick.

But where Cruise’s Digger and the film’s message converge to make clear points is very good and satisfying and, for me at least, edifying. What we get is a knowing encapsulation of how the wealthy and their politicians wrap the “truth” with warped realism, which is itself based on our – as in the whole of humanity – need for convenience and comfort.

There’s Digger telling a bunch of, I don’t know, European Union Parliament members that they’re as much at fault for the coastal cities of their countries getting wiped out as any oilman or oil company. Want affordable electricity and gasoline now? Ain’t no way to get it without extracting Black Gold from the Earth. And, I’m like sitting in my plastic and polyester clad theater seat made from oil in a large air conditioning auditorium watching a movie propelled at the two‑story screen by a large projector running on Alternating Current (generated by, what, natural gas or oil) and thinking to myself, “Yeah, I love driving my car.”

“Digger” also does a good job making the argument that science facts are immutable no matter how we “perceive” them. That point is made nicely, again and again, by Ahmed’s Ganesh, a nonwhite scientist whose nonwhiteness is used by a U.S. Army general to discredit the facts about what caused Iceberg Judy to calve, where the billions of tons of ice will go, and the damage it would cause when it hits the continental shelf in the Baltic Sea.

Another piece of fine acting is Goodman as President Compson. Compson is Trump‑like in several ways. He’s old and his health is deteriorating. At one point, Compson rants that him and the planet are one and that makes him the only person who has the right to make decisions on behalf of all mankind. The rant is terrific. When it strays toward blaming Russia for another supermassive iceberg, this one on its way to Alaska, Compson decides its time to nuke the commies. He’s deterred only when informed that he’d have to read the instructions that accompany the Nuclear Football. “Read?” spouts an indignant Compson. He is also disappointed that there isn’t an actual red launch button that he would push to let the missiles fly. Yeah, Trump to a tee. 

“Digger” is a solid B+ of political satire. The acting is good. Much of the writing is good. The score and the sound effects are top‑notch. The movie’s plot hits the mark. The problem is the gimmicky way, an after‑the‑fact play, that the story of the dangers of ignoring a warming planet is told.

Del’s take

The critics are tearing “Digger” apart.

The bean counters are declaring it the biggest flop of 2026.

They’re right. I predict “Digger” will fail, and it will fail spectacularly. Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures will never earn back a penny they spent on this film.

But not because it’s a bad movie.

Oh, the critics hate it. They’re saying Iñárritu is a bombastic narcissist and “Digger” is nothing more than a testament to a grandiose vision of his own importance.

Moviegoers will hate it – moviegoers in America, that is.

They’ll hate it because it doesn’t star a guy wearing spangly, shimmery spandex who shoots lightning bolts from his eyes. It’s not a cartoon about talking sloths who learn important lessons about sharing. It’s not a simple action movie, or comedy, or love story, or anything they can wrap their brains around without dislocating their neckbones.

It’s satire. Worse, it’s black satire, on the order of “Doctor Strangelove,” “Don’t Look Up,” and that blackest of black satire, “Being There.”

Americans don’t do satire. Americans want to be entertained, not edified. They want to leave the world behind for two hours and not think.

“Digger’s” towering flaw, however, is that it’s a two-hour lecture about climate change, and if Americans hate satire, they really hate satirical lectures about climate change. I should know. Now that I’m retired and don’t have to put on pants in the morning, I start my days with a walk at the local park, where I record rants for social media. Whenever I rant about climate change, I see the eyes of my audience rolling back in the sockets. “Engagement,” that carcinogenic metric of the 21^st century, goes circling down the toilet. Many Americans believe climate change is a hoax, thanks to that Imbecile in Chief in the White House. But even Americans who DO believe in climate change won’t watch a two-hour satirical lecture about it.

That’s a shame, because despite what the critics say, “Digger” is a pretty good movie.

Hell, I remember what the critics said about “The Terminator.” They hated it, just like they hated John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”

Now, both movies are considered classics.

“Digger” won’t be a classic, but it’s pretty good and you should see it – IN the movie theater, please. It makes two important points:

No. 1: You want our oil.

By that I mean you want your cars, your Big Macs, your iPhones, your AC, your Ozempic – hell, you want all that shit made from oil or because of oil, and you want it now. You may fuss about the manatees or how hot it was last summer, but by God you’re gonna have your Sea Ray and you’re gonna drive that motherfucker 60 mph across the bay and if you chop up a few manatees along the way, well, like Digger says, that’s the cost of doing business.

No. 2: In the end, most Americans will do nothing to change anything, because their outrage is strictly performative. The president steals $20 million from border security and memorial plaques for police officers, and spends it on ads glorifying himself, in flagrant violation of federal law? Fuss about it on social media and move along. And then, in November, vote for the candidate who promises lower gas prices.

Digger is the perfect antagonist for a group of people who believe nothing is real unless they see it on TV. Or the internet.

But don’t tell them that. They’d rather swallow the fiction of beer commercials and pickup trucks, which show hard-working, simple-living, sweat-of-the-brow bootstrappers who help little old ladies cross the street and go to church every Sunday before mowing the yard, washing the car and sitting down to a family dinner of pot roast and mashed potatoes.

The reality is far uglier, as are the prospects of climate change. But let’s not think about that because it’s icky. And besides, it might mean we actually have to do something.

I’m giving “Digger” an A-. The movie’s structure is weird and there are lulls in the pacing, but Tom Cruise is terrific and very much deserves an Oscar nomination. Goodman and Huller are also gold, though Huller’s part is much smaller. Guess I just like her. Riz Ahmed as the scientist torn between his job and the truth is also excellent. He deserves a supporting Oscar nom.

But “Digger” will fail – for all the wrong reasons, in my opinion.

Maybe when the ocean comes marching in, Americans will change their mind.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.

Photo courtesy of ph.

INTRODUCTION

I say this story was written in 1988 but don’t quote me on that.

It was written in the 1980s, of that I’m sure. It has the tone of my ’80s fiction – bleak sketches set in a rural back road or bar. I worked the night shift at the local newspaper and afterwards, we night-shifters would venture out in search of an inexpensive watering hole or, if not a bar, a convenience store with ice cold beer, and off we’d go, into the hinterlands, because it was there a beer-drinker was less likely to be pulled over by the boys with the blue-and-red lights atop their cars.

Out there in that rural dark – the real dark folks don’t see these days because cities are too damned illuminated – I found a mysterious tint to the world, what Yeats might have called that glowing afterimage of the realm which lies beside this one, visible only to young children who have not had their senses dulled by maturity and experience. Except this glow was of the darker variety, and I wonder if Yeats could have appreciated that, too, given his musings about the nature of the new messiah.

To me, there were mysteries to be discovered in the implacable dark of the countryside, mysteries to be glimpsed and felt, not articulated but sensed in the way you know to stay out of that abandoned house in the woods, the one that looks something terrible might have happened there decades ago, resulting in it being scorned by humanity. Your ability to sense hidden dangers depended on your willingness to believe.

Which is what this short story is about.

When I was a kid there was mystery in the world, things we did not understand and places we had not seen. But we wondered about them. There might be jungles and dinosaurs on the Venus, or spindly, water-starved creatures on the surface of Mars. Who knew what lay in that jungle heart of darkness, or the deepest ocean trench? Were flying saucers winging overhead, always when we’d left the damn camera sitting on the table by the front door?

But as time went by and we learned more, the world began to shrink and the mystery fade, replaced with cold facts (or hot facts in the case of Venus, a roasting hell hole of carbon dioxide). Poor Mars became an icy desert with air so thin there might as well not be any. Flying saucers became swamp gas and ocean trenches are filled with nothing but silt and a scattering of weird, glow-in-the-dark shrimp.

Think “Excaliber,” and the world of magic giving way to the world of men.

I liked the world better when I didn’t know so much about it, just as I liked my friends better when their thoughts weren’t paraded across a glaring panoply of social media. Didn’t we get along better before we found out so-and-so voted for that evil bastard Trump?

The lack of knowing every stinking detail about every stinking thing – and the curious imaginings that filled in those gaps – made life so much more magically delicious, to borrow a breakfast cereal jingle. And that’s what this story is about, in a darkly roundabout way.

Maybe there’s still a bit of mystery – and magic – left in the world.

Lord, I hope so.

—

ANIMAL

Earl’s Tavern and Package Store. It was the last place Billy Stafford wanted to be.

He took in the bar with a sullen stare. Most nights he’d have been happy to stop off at Earl’s, knock back a couple of long-necked Buds and crook quarters from the high school kids who weren’t supposed to be there shooting pool. He worked the graveyard shift at John Sandusky’s BP station, and it was SOP to wheel in the big racks of recaps and the cartons of motor oil, lock up the pumps and the front door, then shag ass for Earl’s.

But not tonight.

Not when he had the carb rebuild staring him in the face at eight the next morning. Christ, he hated carbs – especially the ones greasy thick with buildup in just the right places to bugger up the works. And you don’t rebuild scummy carburetors when it pains you to bend over and your skull is throbbing and the taste of stale cigarettes and too many beers keeps coming back up on you until the really sweaty part of the afternoon.

Which was the shape he’d be in tomorrow if he stayed here much longer. Listening to Bob Decker.

He’d all but finished hosing off the concrete around the pumps and was thinking he might make a clean getaway when the office phone rang. He hadn’t wanted to answer it, but he knew sometimes Sandusky called a little before midnight to make sure whoever was on the clock didn’t close up early – “We ain’t no all-nighter, but by God we’ll keep ’er open to midnight,” Sandusky was always preaching.

Only it had been Bob. Drunk. His day off, and he’d been sniffing the cork so to speak, and now he wanted company because he had lots on his mind, and couldn’t Billy drop by Earl’s for a couple of brews? C’mon, Billy Boy. Be a sport.

“Sorry, buddy,” Billy had told him. “I’m broke and I gotta carb to do first thing.”

“One – one beer. That’s all. And I’m buyin’.”

There was no point arguing. Bob was drunk. “OK man. Half an hour.”

That had been an hour ago.

One beer had become two, then three, and Bob had gone on and on, cheerfully flipping dollar bills to the empty-headed brunette behind the bar. Earl’s was dark tonight, a humid kind of dark – like somebody’s basement. It was sparsely populated. Three men were sitting at the other end of the bar, giving the brunette a hard time in a friendly way. They didn’t look familiar to Billy. He’d given them a thorough looking over in his search for some excuse to get up and leave.

“‘Course,” Bob was pawing at his shoulder, his hand as insistently nagging as his voice, “I s’pose you don’t think much about that, do you?”

“About what?”

“About whatever’s out in that lake.”

“What lake?”

Bob sighed. “That lake over in England. Scotland. Goddamned Lock Nesh. Got ’em a monster over there. I even saw a picture of it.”

Billy fingered the rim of his Budweiser bottle. The men across the way were laughing loudly and whispering things to the barmaid Billy couldn’t hear. She tittered. The men gobbled laughter again.

“Betcha don’t think much about that.”

Billy started to say he didn’t but remembered that come tomorrow, a monster of a headache would be pounding against the walls of his skull if he didn’t lay off the brew and get some shut-eye. But Bob didn’t wait for an answer.

“I do. I think about that stuff.”

The barmaid shrieked, a sound like a nail file sawing through a Coke bottle, and said breathlessly, “An animal? What kind of animal?” Bill caught a fragment of the man’s reply – ”out in my Jeep” – and then Bob shoved an elbow into his ribs and slumped heavily to the bar, his eyes rotating in the sockets as if he were too sickly drunk to turn his head to face Bill.

“It’s the same – with flying saucers. An’ Big Shot …” He frowned. “Big Foot. And those damned yetis and giant squid that crawl up outta the ocean and grab boats. They pick sailors off the boats like flies on shit … and swallow ‘em up, one by one.”

Billy turned away. He’d never seen Bob like this. Drunk, sure. But not incoherent. All this babbling about sea monsters and flying saucers. Bob had always been sort of a square peg back in high school. He got along OK with most people. But he’d been a thinker who made straight A’s on his report card, and that put distance between him and everybody else. Later on, when they’d needed an accountant at the only place in town that passed for industry, the Texas Instruments plant out by the old railroad spur, Bob Decker was the man they hired.

But this was not Bob Decker.

Snatches of words drifted to their side of the bar. The barmaid was saying, “Oh, go get it. I want to see it.” The men were sniggering. One of them warned her, “It might bite!” and the barmaid uttered a tiny, squeeze-toy cry of terror. The man in the middle stood and shouted, “All right then. But I warned you fair and square.” The other two chortled. He strode across the carpet for the door. He got it open, turned and winked, then stepped outside. The door clicked shut behind him.

Bob pawed Billy’s arm and whispered, “I guess you think I’m nuts, huh?”

Billy said, “No. I think you’re drunk.”

Bob shook his head and almost knocked over his beer. He steadied the bottle. “It ain’t the beer talkin’, Billy. It’s what I’ve been thinking.”

The door swung open abruptly and the man came through. He had a burlap bag in one hand. His other hand was hidden inside the bag. He bugged out his eyes at the barmaid; his friends snickered.

Bob said, “When I was a kid my mom gave me this coloring book, you see, and it had this puzzle where you had to find the elephants in the picture – hidden in the picture – ”

The man sat down heavily at the bar, an inscrutable smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. The barmaid stepped back, uttering a cartoon chipmunk giggle.

“I spotted ’em right away, but Dad couldn’t. Couldn’t find a damn one of ’em. No sir.”

The fellow sitting on the far right leaned and peeked inside the bag. His face wrinkled into a grimace. He pushed a tentative finger inside then snatched it out, his grimace deepening into a thing of pain, and he hissed, “Goddamn sonovabitch bit me!” The barmaid stepped back. Again, the nervous laugh.

“Here’s my dad, see, and he’s got a mortgage payment and two car payments – no, no, that old Dodge was paid for outright – but he had groceries and utilities and insurance and clothes and everything it takes to keep a family going, and just when I’d begun to think he was the smartest sumbitch in the whole world for being able to do all that, I find out he can’t see an elephant hidden in an 8-year-old’s coloring book.”

Billy cleared his throat. This was ridiculous. He couldn’t fathom what long-winded point Bob was leading up to. He only wanted to be back at the boarding house, in his bed.

The man squeezed the bag hard against the hemisphere of his beer gut. Something seemed to wriggle inside. Billy wondered what the hell he had in there – if, in fact, he had anything. Billy doubted it was a wild animal. The man’s grin was too conniving, too shit-eating, and his friends were yukking it up as if they’d seen him pull this trick many, many times before.

“It’s a part of growing up, I s’pose,” Bob said absently. His stare was cemented on nothing in particular. “A kid is able to believe all kinds of things. You see what I’m getting at?”

No, Billy thought.

“A kid doesn’t have to see something for himself to believe it. Like Santa. The Easter bunny. And that goes the same for monsters in the closet.” He looked Billy straight in the eye. “You ever think there was a monster in your closet, Billy Boy?”

Billy shook his head. No monsters in the closet. But there was the crawlspace … the door with the latch he wouldn’t go near. …

Bob took a long pull on his beer. He used his sleeve to wipe his mouth. “Of course you did. Every kid does. You never saw a monster in the closet, but when your mom turned out the lights and closed the door and suddenly the only thing you could hear in the whole world was the sound of your heart trying to jump out of your chest, you damn well didn’t need to see nothing to know there was a damn monster in the closet.

“That’s what they call faith.”

Bob’s voice had taken on the urgent, roller-coaster cadence of a TV evangelist. He wasn’t slurring his words so much anymore. He seemed seized with purpose.

“The kids, Billy Boy. They don’t have any problem believing in things you can’t see, but by God they know they’re there. Good and bad things.”

Across the bar, the men had become strangely silent. The barmaid was approaching them … carefully. The bag was on the bar top. The man kept his hand inside it.

“But when you get older, you stop believing in those things. A part of you seems to pass away, and it’s like switching from stereo to mono. Suddenly, there’s no mystery left. Plenty of good and bad to be found, but all the mystery is gone and everything seems flat and ordinary.”

The barmaid was standing opposite the men. She said, “You won’t let it bite me, willya?”

“That’s when you gotta tote that barge and lift that pail, Billy boy. You gotta get yourself a job so you can pay the rent and put steaks on the table and keep the kids in Nike hightops, and once a year you and the old lady and the kids load up the stationwagon and shag it for Epcot Center. What a life.”

Billy stared across the bar with a vengeance. He didn’t want to look at Bob. The sound of his voice alone was enough to set a person’s teeth on edge, not to mention the topic of conversation.

“Sure. OK.” Bob mumbled. “So I like to think there might be little green men out there, or apes hiding in the Oregon backwoods. Seems kinda childish, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. Flying saucers, sea monsters. Those are my elephants in the puzzle and monsters in the closet. They make the world seem special, that there are still things I don’t understand and have to take on faith.”

The man jerked his hand out of the bag. The waitress went as rigid as a slab of ice, a sawed-off cry of terror twitching out of her throat.

“You have to believe in some things, Billy boy, because when you stop it’s nothing but watching TV and getting drunk, and you end up wondering where all the money went and what happened to all those years you thought you had … you stop living.”

It was a puppet. A damned puppet, one of those Muppets, Billy thought. Bert or Ernie. The one with bushy eyebrows.

The other men were cawing loudly. The one with the puppet made snarling noises as he opened its mouth and made to bite the barmaid, who was tittering in the throaty way people who’d almost pissed their drawers from a bad scare titter.

Bob tapped two fingers on Billy’s wrist. Billy swiveled in his seat. Bob was hunched over the bar, but looked more alert than at any other time that night. He pointed to the barmaid, his face desperately serious. “Like her, Billy. You gotta believe.”

Billy nodded. It was a gesture he’d learned a long time ago. It didn’t convey agreement. It meant, Yes, I know my friend is plastered and it’s way past bedtime and I’ve got that frigging carb to rebuild first thing in the morning, and why the hell don’t I just stand up and walk, for Christ’s sake? He looked at his watch. Both hands were on the two.

So he stood. He flipped a one – it was all he had – onto the bar top. “I’ll tell you what I do believe,” he said. “I believe you could use a ride home.”

Bob scowled and waved him away. “I’m gonna close ‘er down tonight, Billy boy. Don’t need to get up tomorrow. Got some comp-time owed me. If I’m too skunked to drive, I’ll sleep it off in the car.”

Muffled snorts carried across the room, and then Billy distinctly heard the big man bray, “Got me another animal out in the Jeep. A flesh-and-blood, real animal.”

“Oooh, I want to see it,” the barmaid purred. She had the puppet in her arms and was stroking its head, as if it were somebody’s cat.

“I dunno. This sucker is pretty awful. Part grizzly bear and part octopus – ”

The others sniggered like coughing lawnmower engines.

“ – part God-only-knows-what. Had to give it both barrels of No. 4 shot to make it stay dead, and I’m gonna sell it to the government for a million dollars.”

The barmaid hopped once, twice. “I want to see it.”

“I dunno. …”

Billy slapped Bob’s back and said, “Stay off the roads, pal.” He made his way across the room quickly, before Bob had a chance to remember any more words of wisdom. He had his hand on the doorknob when he heard Bob call to him. A little shudder of dread shook him. The others, he saw, had paused to stare. Bob was leaning waaay back in his chair.

“Remember what I said, OK?”

Billy offered him a mock salute, then stepped outside.

The cool air washed over him, blowing away the odor of cigarettes and spilled beer. He felt his thoughts begin to congeal. Time to go home. Get some sleep. Lock the front door, or there’d be hell to pay the next morning. Drink a few glasses of water and taken an aspirin before turning in.

Get some sleep. …

A big CJ-7 was parked by the front door. He had to practically climb over the thing’s bumper to get around it. He guessed it belonged to the big guy.

You gotta believe.

Billy blew air out of his cheeks with an explosive snort and shook his head. Old Bob, the square peg. Martians and sea monsters, for God’s sake. Billy knew what life was about. He knew damn well what it was about because he’d been doing it the past 23 years. Life was working your butt off so you could play – unless you had carburetors to rebuild the next morning. Life was pulling down $5.65 an hour – better than what a lot of people were doing. It was paying your own way and drinking with the boys and maybe shooting the shit with that little number at the Circle K, maybe doing more than that if you played your cards right.

That’s what life was about. Not kiddie nightmares about monsters in the closet, for God’s sake. The only monsters Billy ever saw were monsters of the two-legged variety, and that, too, was what life was all about, because when you grew up you had to put all those childhood fantasies behind you – the good and the bad. There was no such thing as monsters … just as there was no such thing as fairy tales.

No such thing as monsters. No such things as dreams come true.

He edged between the CJ and an old LTD next to it. His Nova was parked across the lot so some asshole wouldn’t ding the door. He was halfway across the lot when the sound hit him. It was not so much a sound as a dull, shuddering throb that he felt rather than heard. It started at the base of his skull and worked its way down the bumps of his spine, scraping the bones together. It was a foghorn moan of agony and, he couldn’t help but believe, anger.

It was coming from the CJ.

He stopped dead on the asphalt. He was unable to work his legs, and the breath lodged in his throat like dried cement. He thought he saw something move inside the Jeep, against the uncertain neon light of the Earl’s sign above the front door. He squinted. The Jeep seemed to jiggle on its springs. And then a heavy cable of dark uncurled along the plastic sheeting of the rear window panel, and the entire window was thrown into eclipse as something big gathered itself inside the Jeep, something bigger than a man and very much alive … maybe something that had taken both barrels of No. 4 shot and hadn’t stayed dead after all and now was half out of its mind with pain. …

A single claw divided the Jeep’s canvas top, cutting it as neatly as a letter opener. Something began to probe at the opening, to nuzzle its way out. Something strangely serpentine.

 – part grizzly bear and part octopus –

Something with suckers the size of teacups.

 – you gotta believe –

A storm of whickering tentacles exploded inside the Jeep, claw tips slicing into the canvas and plastic and twanging loudly against bare metal, like a nest of live wires.

Billy turned away. His brain seemed to float in his skull, as if it had been disconnected from his body. He felt like a spectator to some grim horror-movie scene.

He walked to his car, quietly. Once inside, he closed the door and locked it. His first thought was to start the engine and idle out of the parking lot like he’d done a hundred times before. No such thing as monsters.

His second thought landed on the pistol in the glove box.

Sandusky had given it to him, those many moons ago when he’d started working at the station, filling gas tanks and checking oil and taking cash from people as part of Sandusky’s weird insistence in returning the word “service” to the phrase “service station.” Sandusky had given him the snub-nosed .38 Smith and Wesson, which he’d kept in his glove box since moving up to mechanic, because there were people who were too greedy or lazy or desperate to earn their way in the world through the salt of their own sweat, and if Sandusky – or anybody who worked for him – could put in an honest 10 hours a day for an honest buck, no two-bit hood with a hogleg was going to take that away from him – not without a fight, anyway.

No such thing as monsters.

Billy started the Nova. He backed it into a half U, shifted into drive and idled toward the Jeep. He stopped. The Jeep looked like any other Jeep that might have been parked at Earl’s, its owner inside sucking down long-necked Budweisers and crooking games of pool from teenagers who really weren’t supposed to be in there.

Monsters.

Everything looked familiar and ordinary … and tomorrow morning he had that carb to rebuild and he needed to remember the water and aspirin, and he needed to remember to lock the front door or there’d be hell to pay. …

He opened the glove box. He pulled the Smith and Wesson from the leather holster. He checked the cylinder. Fully loaded … six 110-grain high-power hollow tips. Monster killers. It was against the law to carry a concealed firearm … funny how he’d never worried too much about that.

He climbed out of the Nova. Whatever was in the Jeep had quieted down, but he could still see it there, a dark shape against the light, like the suggestion of something horrible lurking in the closet after the lights had been turned out.

No such thing as monsters, Bob, old buddy. Just the two-legged variety.

He drew a bead on the shape and fired. Everything happened very quickly: The muzzle flash was lightning to the gunshot’s clap of thunder, and the thing inside the Jeep uttered a bone-grinding wail of agony and began to thrash insanely and Billy emptied the cylinder into the thing with five more ruthless pulls on the trigger. …

The door to Earl’s banged open and people were barging out, the big guy and his pals, the barmaid, and finally Bob.

“It wasn’t dead,” Billy said quietly, his ears ringing, his thoughts dreamily disconnected from the words. “It wasn’t dead yet.”

The big guy stared into the Jeep and ran a hand over his head. He looked pissed. “Goddamn thing,” he muttered. “Trashed my rig pretty good. It wasn’t even a grown one.”

Then Billy heard the distant warble of a police siren, and saw that Bob was smiling like a kid on Christmas morning, and heard him say something about coming back inside for another beer, that nothing else was important right now. They had a lot more to talk about.

Billy thought a moment. And then he sighed and headed for the door.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Sony

“Resident Evil” Starring Austin Abrams as Bryan, Zach Cherry as Carl, Kali Reis as Maxine, and others. Directed by Zach Cregger. Written by Zach Cregger and Shay Hatten. Score by Zach Cregger, Hays Holladay and Ryan Holladay. 1 hour, 35 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release.

Plot summary: A medical courier assigned to deliver a mysterious package to winter‑bound Raccoon City General Hospital finds himself trapped in a zombie apocalypse.

Spoilers: Oh, what the hell. Why not?

Del’s take

This is not Milla Jojovich’s “Resident Evil.”

This is Zach Cregger’s “Resident Evil,” and with it, Cregger, who also directed the well‑regarded “Weapons” and “Barbarian,” makes a clean break from its predecessor’s franchise, offering a lean, wry action horror story deserving of a franchise of its own.

Cregger is a one-man band – he not only directs “Resident Evil” but co-wrote the screenplay and even had a hand in crafting the Ennio Morricone‑like score. The result is a movie that feels very different from the Jojovich films. This story is much more personal and accessible. You suffer right along with Bryan (Austin Abrams) as he shambles from one plot complication to the next.

The story takes place in a single night. Bryan is assigned to deliver a high-priority medical package to Raccoon City General Hospital, which is socked in by a winter storm. As he is driving up an icy mountain road, Bryan collides with a woman who stumbles into his path. He helps the injured woman into his car and is driving her to help when he’s stopped by a law enforcement officer who agrees to carry the woman in his cruiser as he “escorts” Bryan to the hospital. Minutes later the cruiser crashes. When Bryan goes to help, he discovers the lawman is dead and the woman is nowhere to be found – until she reappears, hungry for human flesh. From that point events careen downhill in an ever‑escalating story arc of tension and violence.

There’s much to like here. As in the Jojovich films, “Resident Evil” is based on the video game of the same name. I haven’t played the game but I understand it’s broken down into levels of difficulty – complete the tasks on one level and players get to advance to the next. Cregger’s “Resident Evil” is structured the same way. As Bryan successfully avoids death in one situation he flees to the next, which presents him with even more complicated threats to his existence. What that does is create an ever-escalating cycle of tension.

That tension is leavened by a wry, often funny script that presents Bryan as a relatable everyman who’s been thrown into a horrible situation and just wants to complete his assignment, i.e. “mission,” so he can go home and continue an argument with his girlfriend over whether she should continue or abort her pregnancy. As each plot complication draws him farther away from the idea that he’ll ever make it back home, Bryan becomes more desperate, and his actions more reckless, until nothing remains except his overwhelming desire to deliver the package to Raccoon City General.

The cinematography is often striking, with long, beautiful shots of a snowcapped landscapes at night, completely isolated and reminiscent of “The Shining” and “Let the Right One In.” And the sparse, menacing score seems inspired by Morricone’s soundtrack for another snowbound epic, “The Thing.”

What really makes the film work is Austin Abrams, whose honest and visceral portrayal of Bryan makes him instantly likeable, and better, worthy of our sympathy. Bryan isn’t a superman who can take a bullet to the arm and still save the day. He’s a regular guy, like you and me, who finds a way to survive despite increasingly desperate odds. You’ll want him to live because he deserves to live.

My only gripe with “Resident Evil” is that it loses some of its visual and emotional authenticity in the third act and lapses into more familiar, Hollywood-style monster movie territory. CGI-saturated scenes and too-good-to-be-true outcomes diminish the story’s believability. And, of course, there’s the ending that serves only to advertise an inevitable sequel. That was a disappointment for me.

Still, “Resident Evil” is a terrific 95 minutes of entertainment, created by an up‑and‑coming directorial talent. It’s gory and violent, but it’s also fun.

I’m giving it a B+. Just like last week’s “Hope,” it’s not a perfect movie, but it has a lot going for it. If you’re a fan of video games and horror movies, “Resident Evil” is made for you.

Mladen’s take

Another horror movie, Del?

Ain’t there enough horror in the real world to satisfy your appetite for the macabre (e.g., MAGA, social media, influencers, AI, genome manipulation, inheritance, dog lovers); the disgusting (e.g., MAGA, social media, influencers, AI, genome manipulation, inheritance, dog lovers); and the absurd (e.g., MAGA, social media, influencers, AI, genome manipulation, inheritance, dog lovers)?

No? Well, then, maybe your goal was to distract me from all of the above by suggesting we review “Resident Evil.” That was awfully nice of you because it worked.

Compared to the degeneracy of mankind, the tumbling mass of aggregated, partially consumed and regurgitated, bloodied, disfigured, raggedy, and mindless corpses chasing our regular‑guy hero in “Resident Evil” is a relief.

It also helped that Bryan said “fuck,” oh, 200 times in the movie to demonstrate all sorts of emotions. There’s the “fuck” of disbelief. There’s the “fuck” of exasperation. There’s the “fuck” of resignation and there’s the “fuck” of hope, just to name a few of the ways “fuck” can be used tactically. In fact, as I’ve always admonished my children, “fuck” must not be used as a common word. “Fuck” has a purpose and that function is a one‑word route, coupled with facial expressions, that tells the story of the human condition. Fuck, mankind is doomed because we have no self‑control, show no restraint, and line‑up behind buffoons ready to greet the new day with another shrug of the shoulders as Earth adjusts to get rid off us altogether. In the last sentence, as a demonstration, I used “fuck” to convey disbelief.

Del complimented the atmospherics in “Resident Evil.” I wholeheartedly agree. It is a pretty film at times, even if the pine forest or open field covered in snow is CGI. Del also complimented the movie’s score. I agree there, too. It was “The Thing”‑like. And to be “The Thing”‑like in any way is good. That film was made some 46 years ago. It remains in the Top 3 of the best horror sci-fi recorded on cellulose. It’s terrific from top to bottom with one of the best Top 3 endings of any movie … ever.

If “Resident Evil” has a weakness, it’s that Milla Jojovich is not in it. Among all the – what are they called, Easter eggs? – in the film, a bit of homage to Alice Abernathy would’ve been nice.

Still, holy moly, what an effort. Grotesque and gross. Funny and dire. Plausible and unrealistic (see No. 5 in my list above of the macabre, disgusting, and absurd to understand why). I couldn’t get enough of zombies jumping from tall buildings to bomb Bryan. Sure, it has been done before, “The Matrix Resurrections” (2021) comes to mind, but who cares? The zombie barrage is a hoot. Their softened bodies splatter but have enough mass to make the parked cars they hit rock on their suspensions. Jolly great scene.

There’s no question that the movie is derived from a video game franchise. Though technically “Resident Evil” is a third‑person shooter game, there a several scenes in the film that reminded me of a couple of “Doom” movies and the video games. Here and there, the audience gets a viewpoint from the perspective of a GoPro attached to the receiver of a double‑barrel shot gun. Loved it. Very first‑person shooter, it is.

Del is right. “Resident Evil” is a B+. However, unless you have a stout home theater set‑up driving a bunch of speakers – no, shitty little soundbars will not suffice – see this film in a theater. The soundscape, both its score and sound effects, are terrific. They are as critical to “Resident Evil” as Bryan’s unfortunate exposure to gene engineering.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.

Introduction to “Lighting the Corpses”

I don’t remember what went into the creation of this story.

I was in the throes of love withdrawal.

I was angry and wanted to hit back at the world.

I was beginning to find my feet as a writer.

I wanted to sell a story to the Horror Writers Association anthology “Robert Bloch’s Pyschos.” So “Lighting the Corpses” came to pass.

(By the way, I hate that title. I went with it because I couldn’t think of something better.)

This story is a tad overwritten but reading it all these years later, I’m surprised at how good it is. I mean, it’s really good. It works on multiple levels and I’m happy with it.

That’s all. A brief introduction.

Except this – I hope you’re happy with it too.

—

LIGHTING THE CORPSES

Searching, searching, Zeke roared across the night, pausing only to burn a man and watch him die.

So easy, now, in the focus of his rage. So viciously fun. But he couldn’t linger too long. He had others to burn. And one, a very special man Zeke called “Father Baptist,” a man who could not wait Zeke’s tenuous grasp on this world, would burn cell by cell, molecule by molecule, down to the ash of his soul.

Once Zeke found him.

Like this man, who was dying slowly and horribly as Zeke watched him, on the sidewalk outside Zeke’s old apartment. Zeke had come here hoping to find Father Baptist gloating over his crime, but the apartment had been empty. Instead, he’d seen this man. A 53-year-old CPA, divorced a year-and-a-half, who was slowly losing touch with his life for the want of companionship. The man was loitering on the sidewalk, two doors down from his own unit, hoping the woman in 3F would open her door and step outside. If she did, he’d talk to her a moment, just a moment, and not ask her for a date – he wanted to do this thing gradually – and build on the innocence of another encounter tomorrow. He wanted to believe he was an attractive and witty and intelligent man, and he wanted to believe she would recognize those qualities in him, and he wanted to believe she would be the solution to his loneliness.

Zeke could see it. He could see it all, as if it had been printed in careful block letters on a third-grader’s blue-ruled writing pad. He could see into the man’s heart.

And this is how Zeke burned the man:

You are a fat, over-the-hill, dumb bastard, and you’re gonna be alone until you finally get sick of it and ram the business end of a 9mm up your trap and pull the trigger.

Zeke chuckled as the man suddenly frowned, unsure of himself, and turned, shuffling unsteadily to his apartment, one hand lightly brushing the wall and dragging a little, as if he were about to faint and wanted to catch himself. The man saw himself differently now. Gone was the hope he might have a chance at this woman, or any other woman. His hair seemed to bleach gray as Zeke watched; his stomach sagged over his belt and his spine softened and he aged to death in an instant, the flesh sliding from his bones in slippery, wet clumps of despair.

The man went back into his apartment. Six months from now, on a night that would have no end, the man would load three hollow-tipped bullets into the clip of a Reuger. …

Zeke smiled. So easy, now, in the focus of his rage.

So easy, now that Zeke was dead.

 —

Fire.

Fire was the great reducer, making everything simple, a brief rage of combustion and then a satisfied ash that could be reduced further to a mere black mark, a scar of carbon that said nothing more than something was burned by somebody.

Zeke likes fire.

He likes his fires.

A pile of leaves raked into the gutter. A candle made from melted crayons. His sister’s Barbie Beauty Salon, spirited out of the house and into a weedy lot down the street as she and Mom sit in the pediatrician’s waiting room to have a fake pearl tweezered out of her ear, stupid brat.

Zeke likes his fires. They say to him: Something was burned by Zeke. A nightmare, scorched from memory.

If Father knew, if Father knew, if Father knew … oh God, if Father knew.

And Zeke likes that, too.

 —

Zeke roared across the night, stopping at a convenience store he’d stopped at weeks ago, hoping Father Baptist would be there, reliving his own torment or renewing his hatred. The store was closed and vacant and dark. A large patch of floor tiles by the counter had been scraped up. Zeke remembered why.

Zeke had always wanted to put the match to somebody. Sidle next to them, unnoticed, as they picked through undercooked scrambled eggs and grease-soaked fingers of sausage at a Shoney’s breakfast bar, for instance, and scrape the business end of a kitchen match against the zipper of his Levis and touch the flame to the trailing edge of their shirt sleeve and watch the whole works go up in a cough of combustion, their sudden intake of breath and their screams tickling that part of his brain no other act of pleasure ever touched. …

Zeke chuckled and did not hear himself. He never heard sounds now – the crack of a jalousie window as he worked the pane from its frame, the breaking-bone sound of a door jamb being chiseled away from a deadbolt. He could no longer taste the bitter highball of perfume and sweat; he could not feel a woman’s fingernails digging trails of fire across his cheek, the vibrating spasms of her throat shaking loose with a scream as he ripped her panties from her thighs. …

But he could see, the living people around him and the fears about themselves that secretly ate out the center of their lives. The deadness in them. They were corpses of hope and self-delusion and fantasy. Touch a flame to those things and you burned off the good parts about themselves people so desperately needed to believe and you uncovered the real person hiding inside, a tight little cinder of terror.

But there would be no second burning at the convenience store. Nobody was home, not even a security guard to keep away the curious from the scene of Zeke’s final crime.

Certainly not Father Baptist.

 —

It is time to burn something again.

Mom and his sister are gone somewhere. They’re gone a lot after Father gets home from work. Funny, how they’re gone so much after Father gets home from work.

Now Zeke is going somewhere too. The weedy lot. To burn something. He has one of Father’s empty Falstaff beer cans, filled with charcoal starter, and a book of matches. Maybe he will burn the lot, or write his name in flames.

Maybe he will make an effigy of Father in twigs and leaves and burn that.

But he will burn something.

He is walking away from the house, the beer can hidden in front of his thigh, when he hears the front door bang open and a deep voice boom across the yard, “Where are you going?”

Instantly, his heart becomes a slab of meat in his chest.

“Just down the street,” he squeaks out.

“Come here,” his father commands.

He pivots to the left and sets down the beer can behind the bole of a pine tree.

“And bring that with you,” Father says.

The slab of meat in his chest rots in a way he can feel throughout his body. He trudges back to the house, feeling as though he his walking to his execution.

 —

Zeke roared. He dipped briefly at the hospital to see if Father Baptist had burned himself. While there he paused to show a 9-year-old girl that she would not beat the cancer spreading through her rickety bones, and for good measure he showed the girl’s mother that yes, it was true, she really was to blame for what had happened to her daughter. The girl became a skeleton before Zeke’s eyes. The mother grew fangs and began to eat herself, ripping chunks of flesh from her arms, her calfs, and swallowed them in bloody lumps.

Zeke crossed the interstate and torched a truck driver with the realization that he’d failed as a medical student and there was never, ever any chance he’d pass his GRE for that master’s in counseling. The trucker became a cloud of fly-blown ash.

He torched a waitress who had dreams of becoming a model. He torched a would-be jet jockey. And the pale little man who looked like a boy and rocked himself to sleep with idiotic visions of becoming a golf pro – Zeke lit him up with a bolt of self-doubt and the man-boy popped like a 100-watt bulb.

They were all dead. Burned out and dead.

Except Father Baptist.

 —

Father sniffs the can. His nose wrinkles.

“There’s something in there,” Zeke offers meekly, “but I wasn’t going to drink it.”

“Empty your pockets,” Father whispers. Zeke’s stomach drops a couple of notches, because the matches are in his pocket, and Father is not stupid.

And because he knows his father will search his pockets anyway, no matter what Zeke does to satisfy him or please him, Father will search his pockets because he is speaking in the doctor whisper he uses to search Zeke for cancer the way every good father searches his son, or the policeman whisper he uses to search Zeke for concealed drugs, or the coach whisper when he must check to make sure Zeke is still a boy and didn’t change into a girl overnight, so Father will search his pockets and then search beneath his T-shirt and then into his Fruit of the Looms and then. …

The whisper is strangely hoarse, coming from deep within the voice box, and it is all rattly and trembly as if Father were afraid of something.

“What’s this?” Father says, producing the matches as if he had just performed a magic trick. “Let’s see now … lighter fluid and matches. Were you planning to have a barbecue?”

Zeke stares at the floor, not saying anything.

So Father says, “Let’s see what else you’re hiding.”

 —

Dead.

It was a stupid thing, really. After being so careful for so many months, Zeke had screwed up. Once. Just once.

The cops had given him a name: “The Backroads Killer,” because he worked the rural roads, the isolated house trailers, the yuppie castles in the woods with satellite dishes aimed through gaps in the trees and BMWs parked beneath enclosed patios. “The Backroads Killer.” A joke to Zeke. Cops always named criminals they couldn’t catch, as if a name implied mystical abilities. The cops hadn’t caught Zeke.

But Father Baptist had.

Zeke had been careful. Pantyhose over his head, the car parked off in the distance, that sort of thing. But he’d screwed up with the girl at the convenience store at that intersection between two state roads, the intersection giving a reason, he guessed, for the convenience store and a boarded-up John Deere distributorship. That and a traffic light that blinked yellow for one direction and red for the other, and you had what passed for a “town.”

Zeke could have continued on to the farmhouses and shanties he knew were hidden in the woods downroad, or he could have turned left or right. But he’d stopped, there where the roads intersected like the crosshairs in the scope of some celestial hunting rifle.

The girl behind the counter was pretty and nervous and he liked them that way, and he liked her, and he liked dragging her by the hair of the head to the storage room at the back of the building, her screaming and crying and the way she knocked over the stacked six-packs of Evian only inflaming his lust. She begged him not to hurt her and she told him her father was a minister at the Klamath Briggs Baptist Church and how could he do this to a minister’s daughter, but it was afterwards, as he was wiping off his dick on her shredded blouse, that she turned mean and said she’d have the law on him and there were a hundred men in the community, her father included, who would track him down and cut off his balls, and that she hoped the video camera had gotten a good picture of him.

Video camera.

God, that had pissed him off. A video camera, a fucking video camera. How could he have been so stupid?

He stalked out into the store and found the camera, hidden above the coolers so that it filmed anybody who came through the door. Jesus Christ! he swore. Stupid! He ripped the camera from its mount and smashed it against the floor, and at that moment the girl made a dash for the front door. A spike of anger shot through him, from his stomach into his throat, and he hurled himself at her, knocking her into the counter. He grabbed her by the side of the head and slammed her skull against the floor and bellowed at her to tell him where the recorder was, but all she did was whimper, the spittle bubbling between her lips like beer foam, so he pounded her head against the floor, again and again, then one more time.

Finally, he stopped. She was out. Her body was limp. Her hair had created Rorscach dragons and thalidomide bats in an orangish-red smear of blood on the dingy floor tiles.

He yanked a set of keys from her belt and went behind the counter, where the safe was hidden. The recorder was inside another locked box. When he popped the cassette, the breath rushed out of him in a relieved gush. For a moment, he considered simply taking the cassette with him, but as he went around the counter, past the magazine racks, he paused by the neat rows of Zippo lighter fluid cans. The idea alone suffused him with a kind of energy that transcended sexual pleasure.

He torched her. He left the cassette on her chest and doused her with three cans of lighter fluid and then set her off like a Fourth of July barbecue.

And as he shifted his car from reverse into drive and headed off down the yellow light-blinking road, his heart pulling in a multitude of directions, a white Ford turned into the parking lot.

A white Ford.

He’d forgotten about the white Ford as the days, then weeks went by after he’d burned up the clerk and then watched as his handiwork played on the six o’clock news and the local newspapers. He felt the secret swell of potency crest as the cops and state Department of Law Enforcement agents fumbled about, clueless as usual, and all the delicious details of those murderous minutes began to fall out of memory.

Zeke would have to do it all again.

But he never had the chance.

A knock on the door. A nervous peek through the Venetian blinds. A white Ford parked in the guest space in front of his apartment, too battered and rusted for a government car, or a cop’s. Zeke opened the door. A man in a red-and-blue flannel shirt, blue jeans, hiking boots – nothing special about him. Except his eyes. His eyes were so old, so filled with some emotion that had gone beyond hate that Zeke actually felt a tittering thrill of terror squiggle up his spine.

Then Zeke saw that the man was holding a gun.

The man said, “You do understand,” and pulled the trigger.

Zeke felt something – the bullet, a force, something so elemental that it couldn’t be resisted, slam him into the wall, and then the joints in his knees came unpinned and he slumped to the floor, waves of pain crashing over him and threatening to send him under.

The man loomed above him. He looked as big as God, but he looked meaner, crazier than any brimstone-preaching backwoods Baptist’s version of God. He’d put away the gun. Now he had a gallon can of gasoline. He was unscrewing the lid.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “All these weeks. I saw your car. After you, you – ” and his voice split into a sob, “killed my – my – daughter – ”

He splashed gasoline, and Zeke’s terror rose convulsively above the pain and he tried to crawl away, a hitching groan gurgling out of his throat. The man spilled a trail of gasoline to the door, tossed the can aside and fumbled a Bic butane lighter out of his jeans pocket.

“You force me to do this,” he said with a wistful smile. “But I want you to understand something.”

He spun the flint wheel.

“As a servant of God, I love you.”

Zeke roared.

 —

Father is searching and mumbling in his sweaty voice, “You could have something here or maybe something in here and it’s my responsibility to find out what’s going on, and if punishment is required then punishment it will be, because it’s my job to raise you right; you know that, don’t you? Don’t you? You’ve put me in this position – you’ve forced me to do this and I’m only doing what every good father should do. …”

Zeke is half-sitting, half-lying in the bathtub, his clothes tossed hurriedly on the bathroom floor, and Father is searching him, and Zeke’s mind is a blood blister hidden somewhere beneath a callus of fear and shame as he waits for Father to groan suddenly and twitch as if he were having a seizure and then finish his search. His father’s words sink into Zeke’s thoughts like thunder muffled by distance, and with some kind of fevered half-awareness Zeke knows a storm is out there and he must seek refuge, so he imagines a wall of fire rising all around him, a protective ceiling of flame that evaporates the rain and absorbs the lightning and scours clean the dirty, nasty things falling from the sky of Father’s eyes.

 —

Zeke roared across the night. Dead. Burned and dead and revived by his rage, a force of hatred now. He blew into the Klamath Briggs Baptist Church and burned each and every person there, from the matronly choir director who knew she would hear the angels sing when she went to her sweet bye-and-bye, to the church softball coach who lived alone and gave teen-age boys rides to games and someday planned to have a private session in the dugout with his 15-year-old star pitcher.

He torched them all, moving silently and invisibly through the pews, the back rooms, the musty basement stacks of hymnals and cheap Bibles that were passed out to the homeless. And as he drifted back upstairs and swept down the aisle, his rage gathered about him like cassock, he encountered an elderly couple who had just arrived, who had come looking for news after hearing the terrible story about Reverend Lockwood, and did the county jail allow visitors because they wanted to see him, to talk to him, to hear it from his own lips that he’d murdered that man because they just couldn’t believe it, they couldn’t.

The county jail. Zeke smiled. Then roared.

 —

The fire flickers and dies.

The search is over.

Father is saying, “This is your doing. You know that, don’t you? You were sneaking off to start a fire. Fires are bad things, and you should know that. I thought I’d taught you better than that, but apparently I haven’t. It’s my responsibility as your father to raise you right, to make sure you know the difference between good and bad. Fires are bad things and you were going to do a bad thing, and now I have to make sure you never do such a thing again. Until you demonstrate to me that I can trust you, I’ll have to search you every day. Do you understand? And I want you to realize that this is your doing, that you are forcing me to do this. If I were you, I’d be ashamed. I’d be very, very ashamed. I’d be so ashamed that I’d never breath a word of this to anyone, because if you do everybody will make fun of you, or worse, they’ll think you’re crazy and send you off to reform school or jail or the insane asylum. So if I were you I’d just keep my mouth shut, and as long as you keep your mouth shut, I’ll keep my mouth shut. Do you understand?”

Zeke nods. His thoughts are consumed by a single idea.

“I want you to understand something else, too,” Father says in a firm voice. “I want you to understand that I’m doing this because I love you. I really do.

“I love you.”

Zeke’s thoughts are consumed by a vision of fire.

 —

He burned them. Stupid wads of people, eaten alive with fear. He left a trail of fire across the land, and when he arrived at the jail it was like a hot breath of desert wind, stirring papers and swinging open doors shut and setting the overhead lamps to penduluming, so that surly deputies looked up with frowns and inmates tossed in their bunks or cut loose with inexplicable snarls. A deeper shade of gloom seemed to fall over the place.

Zeke drifted down the corridors. An embezzler was here, and a man who had grabbed a moneybag from a restaurant manager, and a man who’d beaten his wife, and a car thief, and even a couple of drunks.

He passed them by.

It was in the final cell, in the deepest recess of the building, that Zeke found his prize. Lying on a bunk, his hands behind his head, his eyes closed but his mind deliciously open, notions of God and sin and the frailty of human spirituality spinning in his absurd circle of thoughts. Zeke became a shadow beneath the bunk and listened to Father Baptist, the former father, the former emissary of piety and forgiveness, dance around the rotten core of doubt that lurked beneath everything he was telling himself.

Zeke sent inquiring tendrils of himself snaking up the bunk posts, pouring through the wire mesh that supported the mattress and curling beneath the sweat-soaked, olive-drab blanket that covered Father Baptist, and he took his time doing this because, like the man he’d torched back at his old apartment, he wanted it to be a gradual thing, a search across the night and now a slow, stealthy approach, building the anticipation to a climax that would surpass the hatred he felt for this man. He went patiently, parts of him sliding up the wall like a curtain being raised, flowing into then out of cracks and cemented joints between cinderblocks, and parts of him drooping from the ceiling in leechlike, squirming gobbets that slipped silently beneath Father Baptist’s flesh.

There.

Zeke could see it clearly. All the things this man had done to cover it up, and still, Zeke could see it, could touch it, could burn away the deeds and convictions this man had formed over his lifetime to bring the terror squirming to the surface, into the light of what passed for truth, everything else withering in the heat of awareness.

This is what Zeke told him: What you fear about yourself is true. You are your devil.

Zeke backed away.

The man’s eyelids snapped open. His muscles cinched into rigid cords, the way an epileptic’s body galvanizes during a seizure, and the humanity flowed out of his face, a cold shock of terror freezing his expression into a stare so blank, so devoid of any human quality that Zeke actually moved back another step, fascinated but at the same time a little apprehensive, the way he’d felt when he torched Father Baptist’s daughter and the fire began to spread to the counter and the surrounding racks of candy bars and potato chips.

Father Baptist’s hands crawled beetlelike to his chest, where his heart slammed against the walls of his ribs like a diesel engine torn loose from its mounts. Flames that only Zeke could see began to consume Father Baptist’s body, whipping higher, through the ceiling, wrapping into a funnel of heat that scoured the flesh from his bones and the bones from his soul and transformed the tiny room into a smelter from which a lifetime of pain began to melt and run. Zeke retreated to the opposite wall. The heat was too intense, the light too bright, and he looked away. But still, he loved it. He loved it more than the look on a woman’s face when he broke down her door, more than watching flames ripple across the prone body of the girl at the convenience store, more than any of the dumb bastards he’d torched tonight. This is what he’d waited for, the depths of this man’s convictions fueling the pyre of his doubt, and it was beyond anything he could call satisfaction to watch the need that had given purpose to this strange afterlife flame up with such cataclysmic agony. He settled into the pits in the cinderblock wall and shouted gleefully into the inferno, “How does it feel, you son-of-a-bitch? How does it feel for a man like you, a goddamned minister, to know the devil inside you?

“How does it feel to burn?”

The room winked black and a voice that sounded like a doctor’s voice as he searches a patient for cancer, a policeman’s voice as he frisks a suspect for drugs … or a father’s voice as he searches his son for matches, “It feels pretty good, Zeke.”

Visions of fire.

Zeke liked his fires.

Something was moving on the bunk. Something he couldn’t quite make out. Something plated over with snake scales and bristling with stingers, and it skewered Zeke with a ray’s tail that sent pulses of raw pain scalding through him, jerking him aloft, an acid tendril slithering into a hangman’s noose around his neck.

“I want you to understand something,” it whispered. It had Father Baptist’s eyes, but that was all, and when Zeke’s rabbiting gaze darted into them he saw fire that only a minister could imagine.

“You force me to do this,” it whispered again, wrapping him with more tendrils, and pulling him closer.

Then closer still.

“But I’m doing this because I love you,” it said.

“Yes,” Zeke whispered, understanding again the ragged agony of this peculiar love as it licked over him in a smear of pain, reducing everything to its most simple form, a black ash that said nothing more than: Something was burned here.

Zeke roared.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Forged Films, PM Entertainment & Neon

“Hope” starring Hwang Jung-min as our reluctant, somewhat mean hero and police chief Beom Seok; Hoyeon as the perky, cute, and balls‑to‑the‑wall rookie cop Sung Ae; Zo In‑sung as ridiculously indestructible Sung Ki; Eum Moon-suk as somewhat dimwitted but good shot Yang Bae; Alicia Vikander as spikey and now‑childless royal priestess J’aur; Micheal Fassbender as morphing royal lackey Ma’veyyo; and others. Directed and written by Na Hong-jin. Score by Michael Abels. 2 hours, 40 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release. Captions.

Plot summary:  South Korea in, oh, the 1980s, is invaded, though not by North Korea. The extraterrestrials were minding their own business, more or less, hunkered in a forest until one of their younglings disappears. Momma deploys a search party. The search party of humanoid creatures wastes a coastal village trying to find the not‑of‑this‑earth tyke. But not all humans are eviscerated. Some fight back, setting up a sequel.    

Spoilers: It’s tough to spoil this movie. You have to see it, to believe it.

Mladen’s take

“Hope” is an imaginative, bold, and compelling movie that fails for the silliest reason – poor editing. Did you catch the film’s run time in the opening info dump above? Two hours, 40 minutes.

The managing editor at the first daily newspaper where I was a reporter once told me that, sometimes, you have to kill the “babies” in your copy to make a story readable and interesting.

Well, that’s where the “Hope” director misfired. There is way too much of a couple of things happening in this film. He should’ve killed those babies, not matter how much he adored them. Why? Because they slowed the movie’s storytelling momentum.

The first baby that should’ve been trimmed in the film is its beginning. The dead bulls, people and then the assault on the hamlet of Hope is at least 15 minutes too long. Our villagers run around too much trying to find the critters that were the cause of all the blood on the walls and streets. There’s the scene of the accidental shooting of a human that could’ve been cut from the film completely, saving 5 minutes. Also significant time‑wasters are two prolonged chase scenes, one in the forest and one on a roadway. The effect on me, each time one of these scenes hit its enough‑already threshold – I hate to say this – was boredom.

At best, “Hope” should’ve been no more than a couple of ticks beyond 2 hours. Damn, the movie is just too long for the story it’s telling.

No doubt, Del will bemoan the shades of other movies that Hope seems to mimic. The movie has resemblance to the best South Korea monster flick so far made, “The Host” (2006). You may notice bits 2009’s “Avatar,” “A Quiet Place” (2018), and “Prometheus” (2012). Hell, there might even be a bit of 2015’s “Jupiter Ascending” or any other sci‑fi or monster movie were big critters squash human because they’re searching for their missing puppies, kittens, cubs, joeys, chicks, calves … whatever the hell alien babies are called. But who cares? All those are good movies. Why not shave a little from each to make such a wonderful, odd movie.

With all my bellyaching, why do I give “Hope” an A-. See the first paragraph.

This film must be watched to be appreciated, flaws and all. That you had to read captions to understand the dialogue bothered me not a whit.

It’s strange and a touch creepy. Wait until you see the faces of the aliens.

“Hope” is bloody and wistful.

“Hope” is down‑to‑earth and otherworldly, a point driven home at the end of the film, which brings me to my last point.

What I see in “Hope” is the South Korea version of “Dune.” Can’t wait for movies 2 and 3. What are the Gertu up to, anyway? How are humans going to foil their plan? Stay tuned. I am.

Del’s take

Mladen gives “Hope” an A- while devoting 99 percent of his review to fussing about the movie’s shortcomings? I believe that’s why God invented Aricept.

But I’m giving it an A- too because while “Hope” does have its problems, it’s one of the most audacious, unpredictable, edge-of-your-seat thrilling films I’ve seen in awhile. And yes, Mladen, it has the same bonkers, balls-to-the-wall creative vision of other really good South Korean monster flicks, like “The Host” and “Train to Busan.” Please sir, may I have more?

Is the movie too long? It sure is. I’m usually a fan of the slow-burn approach to building tension but “Hope” takes it to ridiculous excess. An hour into the movie and we still haven’t caught a glimpse of the monster. Plus, banter between the characters, which is supposed to be witty, goes on for too long, far past the point when it stops being funny.

Speaking of which, I had a hard time figuring out which genre “Hope” fit into. Was it a monster movie with elements of humor, or a comedy with elements of horror and science fiction? Nor am I a big fan of movies that dump a shitload of questions in the viewer’s lap and hint those questions might be answered in a sequel. “Hope” did that and yes, it was aggravating.

But, and this is an all-caps BUT, the virtues of “Hope” vastly outweigh its shortcomings.

It’s one of the most original movies you’ll see all year. Every time I thought I knew what director Na Hong-jin had in store for us, he delightfully surprised me. The movie’s frantic pacing makes it impossible not to watch and greatly complicated my two trips to the men’s room. Creature effects are bizarre and otherwordly. Special effects are pretty good, although there were a couple of scenes that tested my suspension of disbelief. The movie’s second and third acts aren’t as adrenalized as the first, but the momentum of that initial hour carried me through to the end and I didn’t mind the relative lull.

“Hope” is a raucously entertaining film that does not feel like its 2 hour, 40 minute runtime. Catch it in theaters because its scope was made for the big screen. I’m on board with a sequel, and this time I won’t drink two Diet Pepsi’s and a cup of Starbucks Decaf House Blend before heading to the theater.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.

A24

“Onslaught” Starring Adria Arjonna as Celeste, Dan Stevens as Hans Kammler, Eric Wareheim as Kovacks, Blake Kennedy as Daisy, Michael Biehn as Baylor, Rebecca Hall as Hanna Kammler, Drew Starkey as Cyrus and others. Written by Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard. Directed by Adam Wingard. 1 hour, 32 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release.

Plot summary: A former Army soldier battles a trio of murderous cyborgs who have escaped a secret corporate test facility.

Spoilers: Of course.

Del’s take

“Onslaught” is the little engine that couldn’t: Is it a grindhouse movie? A quirky, off‑kilter near‑comedy? A siege movie?

It’s none of them, actually. It tries, but fails, and you’ll walk out of the theater feeling the way you do when you leave a sushi restaurant – temporarily full but hungry for a cheeseburger.

The story is about Celeste (Adria Arjonna), an ex-soldier with a world-class case of PTSD who manages a run-down trailer park in the dusty wilds of New Mexico – I’m sorry, I meant “New America,” according to the Kumquat Infection’s latest missive. When she isn’t battling her ex for custody of their daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) she’s grappling with a pantheon of weirdoes living at the park – a cop who drives drunk and never pays his rent, a vet with a hard-on against the VA, an oversexed young couple with tattoos and loud motorcycles, and other members of the fringe who’ve escaped to the desert.

Meanwhile, at a nearby installation occupied by a military subcontractor, an insane, Nazi‑esque scientist by the name Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens) is testing his latest creation, an evil troika of ex-soldiers who’ve been modified with computer chips and prosthetics to become compassionless and unstoppable killing machines – in other words, Republicans. As luck would have it, something goes wrong (I didn’t say it was good luck) and the cyborgs escape to wreak havoc on the general population, first at a nearby truck stop, then on to the Windy Oasis Trailer Park. What they don’t know is that awaiting them at the park is another compassionless and unstoppable killing machine in the form of Celeste.

What follows is an orgy of not-very-creative bloodletting that would put Robert Rodriguez to shame, pretty much what you’d expect from a grindhouse-style movie. But there’s something off about “Onslaught” and I haven’t quite put my finger on it. It looks like a grindhouse film but wanders from its focus a little too much to be considered a grindhouse film. For instance, much attention is paid to the quirkiness of its characters (Kammler’s fetishistic sexual appetites and Cyrus’s [Drew Starkey] weird mannerisms), putting “Onslaught” within the orbit of movies like “Iron Sky.” Also, it takes too long and introduces too many subplots to be a siege movie. It’s as if director Wingard wanted it to belong to multiple genres simultaneously and ended up with a movie that belongs to none.

The characters are so thinly sketched I struggled to care about any of them. Celeste’s story is told through flashbacks and apart from one vignette, I couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened to her and what had scarred her, so her current bad luck didn’t resonate with me. The other characters, with the exception of Cyrus, are mere placeholders. Cyrus is not much more – he oscillates between amoral monster and somebody you could possibly have a beer with if you could get past the fact he kills people for a living.

“Onslaught’s” thesis statement – that America’s unholy alliance between government and corporations is transforming the country into a fascist state resembling Nazi Germany – is indifferently expressed. I don’t disagree with the idea but not much attention was paid to what could have been a much larger and more important movie message.

Overall, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before. I liked parts, thought other parts were stupid, and if you ask me for details a month from now I won’t be able to tell you any because the movie is pretty much forgettable.

I’m giving “Onslaught” a C+. I’m all for seeing movies in theaters – once again, Mladen and I were the only two members of the audience – but this one could have waited for streaming.

Mladen’s take

Meet Michael, Jason, and Freddy. No, not the slashers from “Halloween” (1978), “Friday the 13th” (1980), and “Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984) but the Michael‑, Jason‑, and Freddy‑wannabes in “Onslaught.”

Good God, there’s even a shot in “Onslaught” that shows The Frankensteinian Trio standing nearly shoulder‑to‑shoulder while silhouetted at the edge of the trailer park they’re about to annihilate. You could see their breaths as The Not‑Terminators scan the area through their glow‑in‑the‑dark eyeballs like the Furyan Riddick in “Pitch Black” (2000). The one in the middle is holding a cleaver the size of a surfboard. The one on the right, you guessed it, is wielding a chainsaw with a blade as long as my beautiful car. At least the one on the left is packing a SAW. Rat‑a‑tat, motherfucker.

What a crappy movie. Everything about “Onslaught” is derivative, including the notion of bringing soldiers back to life ala 1992’s “Universal Soldier.” The only things that get onslaught‑ed in “Onslaught” are good ideas for dystopian sci‑fi, originality, salient script writing, decency, and likeable characters. What a crappy movie.

“Onslaught” started with promise, if you’re captivated by strangeness as I am. The weirdness is the demented scientist, a third‑generation offspring from the Nazi Party scientists ferreted to America after World War II to help us prepare for World War III.

From the get-go amid the film’s rocking sound effects, rollicking score, and some decent songs, there’s Herr Kammler dropping to his knees to crawl to his wife. To do what? Lick Frau Kammler’s right foot. Come to think of it, maybe I’d lick the Frau’s foot, too, if she’s portrayed by Rebecca Hall, that is.

Unfortunately, after the opening scenes of austere landscapes, shotguns blowing away pumpkins, the wind howling, and the Frau Foot Incident, “Onslaught” degenerates toward, ah, degeneracy. Starkey’s Cyrus, some kind of government or corporate enforcer, is introduced via sadomasochism. Then, the squalid violence takes flight.

There they go, The Trio of Lobotomy, their uniforms ragged like zombie apparel or the ragers in “28 Days Later” (2002), blasting away folks at a truck stop after killing a bunch of private military contractors at a secret test facility in the middle of an arid land.

Frankly, I’m pissed. I suspect the screenwriters simply wanted to put to film a wad of pointless violence but had to disguise the pointlessness somehow. What was the schtick? That a corporation, in cahoots with a fascist U.S. government, is building soulless but fleshy human‑based automatons that kill anyone until commissioned to stop. Apparently, the Not‑Soldiers would be used to suppress civil disobedience and, I imagine, all other forms of disobedience, too.

I don’t know what A24 studio was thinking when it produced “Onslaught.” Everything the movie wants to be, assuming you can determine what that is, never happens. A24 must be embarrassed to list “Onslaught” as part of its portfolio when it includes such magnificent filmmaking as cerebral and transfixing “Ex Machina” (2015), 2019’s absurd and hallucinogenic “The Lighthouse,” and best picture winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022), which introduces us all to the simultaneity of events.

Yeah, “Onslaught” is a D because it would’ve been a much, much better film if it told a story rather than exposing us to a bunch of gratuitous blood splatter.            

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.