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    Hunger and other stories of horror
    Hunger and other stories of horror
    Hunger and other stories of horror
    Ebook120 pages1 hour

    Hunger and other stories of horror

    By Marc Colten

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    About this ebook

    What do you do when you find yourself trapped in a mausoleum? How would you explain yourself to the judge of the damned? Think you'd be lucky to be rescued by a beautiful woman in the desert? Eleven short stories about the horrors lurking just out of sight.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMarc Colten
    Release dateJun 30, 2012
    ISBN9781476224565
    Hunger and other stories of horror
    Author

    Marc Colten

    Marc Colten was born in 1950 in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York. His was influenced by the Cold War and the divisiveness of the Viet-Nam war. His literary influences were the novels of George Orwell and John LeCarre and the short stories of Saki and John Collier.

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      Book preview

      Hunger and other stories of horror - Marc Colten

      Hunger

      and Other Stories of Horror

      by Marc Colten

      Copyright 2012

      Cover Art: Death Walks the Earth, Marc Colten 1990

      Smashwords Edition

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Stories

      Hunger

      Last Rites

      An Act of Mercy

      Touche

      Smith's Hammer

      Triangles

      Desert Flower

      And Where is That Amontillado?

      Blood Oath

      Critters

      Going Down?

      Hunger

      She stood just outside the gaping hole that had been the doorway to the tenement. Of the four streetlights that one once illuminated the corner only one was still working, its yellow light casting her shadow across the brick wall of the building. It hadn’t been a bad building for the first seventy five years, but the last fifty had seen it deteriorate until it was only sporadically occupied. In the last ten years there had been only the occasional squatter, but there were no people living inside now.

      Her arms were crossed under her breasts, showcasing her marketable assets. She looked right and left, right and left, right and left. She had nothing but time. It was her usual spot, convenient to public transportation which could be counted on to disgorge a few people each hour through the night. She was invisible to the cleaning ladies and the women who worked the late shift at convenience stores. The men looked her over and most went home to their wives. They thought it would be nice but didn’t want to risk arriving home smelling of another woman.

      Across the street a young man stopped. He was on his way home. He had already cashed his paycheck and was mad as hell at the huge chunk the guy behind the bulletproof plastic had taken for the service, just because he was too poor to have a bank account. He was mad at the world but there was nothing much he could do. Then he saw the woman. Tall and lean, not bad looking at all. Her breasts bulged out of her tube top and her skirt was so short that he could practically see what he was thinking of paying for. Sure, why not? He’d worked hard for his money and he wanted to get something out of it. Especially from a woman who couldn’t give him any shit.

      He looked both ways at the empty street, looking more for cops than for traffic, and crossed over to the woman. She stopped looking around and smiled, a little. She crooked her head towards the door and the man nodded. She backed into the doorway and the man, after another quick look around, followed her. He knew that the negotiations would take place out of sight. Payment would be in advance. He knew the rules.

      Once inside the doorway he had to look around for the woman. She should have been waiting just inside the building to do the deed but she was further inside, half hidden by the shadows. He took a step towards her, suddenly wary that she was leading him into a trap and thinking of backing out. Just as the shadows enveloped her there was a rush of air from inside the building that nearly knocked him off his feet. With the instincts that fail us each time he turned towards the rushing air instead of racing to the open door, but perhaps it was already too late. All he saw was the huge head rushing out of the darkness. And the teeth.

      It was a few minutes after the head retracted into the hollowed out basement that the woman was returned to her post. Her feet didn’t touch the ground until she was inches from the doorway and the tube that reached from the darkness to her back relaxed slightly and lowered her. A moment later she was back at her usual spot, scanning left and right for her next admirer.

      Return to Story List

      Last Rites

      Cathy Epstein could not resist relocating some of the floral offerings. Since some people had so many, while others seemed to have been forgotten, it didn’t seem wrong to take a few flowers from one to leave for someone else, at least those she could reach. It had never bothered Cathy that she was only five foot three, even when co-workers kidded her about it, but it made it tough to reach past the first few levels of caskets. She looked in vain for a ladder or step-stool and finally had to accept that those higher up in the mausoleum would have to do without.

      As she began strolling through the corridors, heading for the exit, she was unable to resist letting her fingers trace out the engraved names and dates and the sad little messages. So many Loving Fathers and Beloved Wives. The building was fairly new and she found no war veterans and few children in those poor sad little boxes behind the uniform marble plaques. She was so wrapped up in her reading that she didn’t notice the casket in the aisle before she tripped over it.

      There were three empty caskets removed from the bottom row and placed flat on the floor, their lids left open. For a desperate moment she hoped that she had stumbled on a pending funeral but there was no way to ignore the fact that caskets came filled but now the bodies were gone. Unless, she thought, the bodies had never been put in them, like at that crematorium in Georgia, and then someone found out and they came here and pulled them out and, finding them empty, left them there while they tracked down the wrongdoers. Yeah, that was it, because otherwise there were body snatchers running around who might not appreciate being caught in the act. She quickly detoured around the empty caskets but, as soon as she turned a corner, she found another empty casket and then another. It was months until Halloween and April Fools Day was the week before. What other reason could people have for stealing bodies?

      Hidden cameras, she thought, please let there be hidden cameras. I’ll sign any release so they can put me on TV for people to laugh at if only there are hidden cameras. She pulled back at the sound of footsteps. If the two men she saw, walking by in an intersecting corridor dressed in their Sabbath best, had ever worked in reality TV it must have been quite a while ago.

      The strength went out of her legs and she slid down against the wall. She turned and rested her cheek against the cool marble, hoping that it would clear her head. She had to get out of there. She had to reach the exit and get outside where she could start screaming uncontrollably. Unless the people she had seen, and the ones she now heard walking in the adjacent corridors, were outside as well. She had only seen a handful of empty caskets but, if there were more, if they were emptying out from the front and then back into the depths of the mausoleum, what hope was there? There had to be hidden cameras, or some student film group using unoccupied caskets and guys dressed as zombies. It simply wasn’t possible in her normal rational world for people to be leaving their caskets and walking around. Of course, that was it! How could a dead person, even if they could move, get the casket out of its container so they could exit? So this couldn’t be happening. Maybe it was a dream. Why not? It was all too strange to be real.

      She had no sooner worked up the courage to start creeping towards the exits when she saw how it was being done. Two men, perhaps the same two she had seen walking by, were pulling a casket from the bottom row in another corridor and opening the lid. If she believed, even a little, that there was a rational explanation for what she was seeing, why wouldn’t her legs move so she could step out and say something to them? The worst that could happen, under those circumstances, was to ruin a single take of their film. She could no longer wait to get outside. It was time to scream. She backed away from the action and, even as she felt the scream about to explode from her lungs, a hand was clamped over her mouth. It didn’t smell of rotting flesh but she knew when she saw the face of the decaying corpse holding her down the last thread of her sanity would snap.

      Don’t make a sound, the man whispered in her ear. If you scream they’ll be all over us. Just back up and follow me.

      She couldn’t move. It didn’t make sense that a reanimated corpse would be whispering in her ear, but it made as much sense as the dead men and women methodically opening caskets to free the others.

      I’m not one of them, the man whispered. He loosened his grip enough for her to

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