The Monster Apocalypse Read online

  Her hands were sweating so much she didn’t think she’d be able to grab the keys off the ground, but she did. She stood back up and turned around quickly to see the zombie mere inches behind her.

  She stuck the key into the key hole, but she was too late. The zombie grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him.

  “Mmmm!” he shouted.

  “No! No, please!”

  A giant blade came down from behind and severed the zombie’s left arm clean off from the rest of its body.

  Tessa stared in awe and surprise. The zombie looked down, confused at its missing arm.

  Then the blade came down again, sideways this time, and cut the creature’s head clean off.

  Tessa screamed as buckets of green goop squirted out the top of its neck and splattered against her face, like Nickelodeon slime. She felt some of it hit her tongue, and she promptly closed her mouth, wiped the odorous substance from her lips, and stepped back, just as the zombie’s body collapsed to the ground, to reveal a tall, pale figure standing behind it.

  “Oh thank God,” Tessa said. “That thing was going to kill me. Thank you, thank you, thank—”

  “Here, get inside,” the man said. “Hurry. There’s more of them out there.”

  Tessa didn’t even think twice; she turned the key and opened her front door. She and the stranger charged into the house, and Tessa closed the door and locked it tight. She immediately pressed her desecrated face against it and looked through the keyhole.

  “I don’t see any more of them coming,” she said. She waited for the stranger to say something, but she didn’t hear a thing. She turned around. “Mister?” He was gone. “Where’d you go?”

  The entrance hallway was dead silent, like the man had been a figment of her imagination. Tessa had her crazy moments, but she didn’t think herself to be crazy enough to create people in her own mind. She stepped into the kitchen, then the living room, just in time for the stranger to appear to her left.

  “Oh,” Tessa said. “Sorry. I thought you were going to stay at the front door.”

  The man didn’t seem interested in what she had to say. He looked panicked, like he was in the midst of an investigation. Tessa noticed for the first time the heavy blackness in the fellow’s eyes.

  “I had a question for you, Ms. Skar,” he said. “Have you seen a boy named Paul around here?”

  “Paul?” Of any questions this man may have asked, she didn’t expect that one. “He’s an exchange student staying with me at the moment. Wait. How did you know my name—”

  The man grinned. “Are you serious? An exchange student?”

  “I’m sorry. Who are you?”

  He stepped toward Tessa. He laughed for a few seconds, but then his demeanor turned chilly. She was surprised to see his old-fashioned top hat stay so firm on his head. “I’m Paul’s father. And I’m looking for him.”

  “You’re what?”

  “Where is he?”

  Tessa was so taken aback she couldn’t speak for a moment. But then: “He’s golfing. With my daughter.”

  “Where?”

  “Macabre Golf Course. It’s over by their high school.” She shrugged and shook her head. “I’m sorry. Did you come all the way from Germany?”

  He didn’t answer her. The man had found what he was looking for. He turned around and headed for the front door.

  “Hey! Wait! You can’t just leave!”

  The man didn’t say a word. He didn’t acknowledge her, didn’t want to partake in any more conversation.

  “I said, stop!” Tessa screamed.

  And he did. He stood in the entryway, looking out toward the archaic black hearse in the distance.

  Tessa crossed her arms. “Can you at least tell me your name?”

  The man took a step back, and smiled. “Sure can,” he said, deeply, almost in a whisper. “The name’s Droz.”

  “Jaws? What?”

  “No. Droz.” He turned around, opened his mouth wide, and let his fangs appear. “But Jaws works, too.”

  He pulled Tessa close to his chest and sunk his teeth down deep into her neck. She didn’t even have a chance to scream.

  She tried to fight him away, push against his face, kick him in the shins. But his grip was so tight she couldn’t move a muscle.

  She thought of her son, Justin. She thought of her daughter, Brin. When an early image of Kristopher entered her mind, one of him waving at her from a serene beach at the far end of the world, a tear slowly trickled down her cheek.

  And then all went quiet for Tessa Skar.

  Chapter One

  After Ash landed on the soft bed and bounced to the hard floor surface, the most natural thought of all entered his mind: that he really needed to pee.

  But he stood up, stepped forward, and looked inside the miniscule bathroom to confirm what he had seen from the portal opening: a toilet-sized hole merely cut into wood. He didn’t see a way to flush, or any source of running water. It didn’t look like a device from a poor house or even a jail cell; it looked like an artifact from a hundred years ago.

  He needed to further explore the bedroom and try to find someone to talk to, most especially Mr. Barker, but first he had to take care of business: he happily peed into the hole.

  Ash zipped up his pants and re-entered the bedroom. The bed was tiny and clean, and the small window in the corner looked out on a town drenched in darkness. Ash wasn’t certain he had fallen through a time portal, but he was sure about one thing: he had come across something monumental only seen in his favorite science fiction movies. Even if he hadn’t gone back in time, he had fallen into something that wasn’t Grisly, Nevada; the bathroom was questionable, but it had also been the middle of the day back where he was, and now it was mysteriously night-time.

  He walked up to the window to look out, when he heard footsteps coming down the hallway beyond the bedroom door. He looked for a place to hide, but to no avail; he couldn’t even fit under the bed.

  The old man walked into the room before Ash had a chance to dash for an exit, but Ash didn’t care; he needed answers, and he needed them now. The plump man, wearing a pair of black trousers, stumbled inside, his hair slicked back with grease and his foot-long moustache stretching seemingly all the way up to the ceiling. He hummed to himself as he closed the door behind him. He tossed an object back and forth in his hands, something pink and tennis ball-shaped, something slimy.

  The man set the cane against his bed and started to disrobe.

  But he didn’t get very far. His attention turned to Ash.

  “Hello, good sir,” Ash said from the corner of the room. “Would you mind telling me what year it is?”

  Ash expected the man to run the other way screaming, but the man just stayed put and stared, more perplexed than anything else. “What are you doing in my bedroom?” The man had a thick British accent.

  “I’m very sorry about that, but I just needed to ask—”

  “And what kind of clothes are you wearing, young man?”

  Ash looked down at his get-up: a green-and-red sweater, yellow shorts, run-down tennis shoes. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Sorry about the way I look. I was playing golf a little bit earlier with my friends. I’m not very good at it, so I needed a wardrobe that provided a distraction.” The man continued to stare at him, his eyebrows narrowed. Ash cleared his throat. “Sir, please. Can you tell me what year I’m in?”

  Still no answer. The man’s demeanor changed to anger. Ash wondered if he should make a run for it. He thought the old man might try to shoot him. That is, if they had guns in whatever time period he had stepped into.

  “I’m assuming I’m in London?”

  “Get out of my home,” he said. “You hear me? Get out—”

  The slimy object between his hands slipped through his fingers and landed with an icky splash against the wood floorboards below. A little bit of blood squirted out of the object. Ash stepped forward to see that it was a kidney.

  “I’ll just,” Ash sa
id, trying not to scream. “I’ll just be going then.” He started tiptoeing toward the exit door.

  The old man didn’t lunge for him; he didn’t even seem capable of doing so. Instead he just kept his focus on Ash, his visage turning increasingly eerie.

  Ash was almost to the door, when his back caught the edge of a desk.

  “Oww,” he said, and turned around. “That hurt—”

  Ash looked down at the table to see a letter written in red ink. At the top right were the words, FROM HELL. At the bottom were the words, SIGNED, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.

  “Oh no,” he whispered. He turned back around to face the creep, who had stepped closer to him.

  Ash had always found Johnny Depp to be an overrated actor. The only Academy Award nomination he felt he truly deserved was for his work in Edward Scissorhands—and he didn’t even get nominated for that one. He thought the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were beneath his talent, and that his latest collaborations with the once brilliant Tim Burton needed to cease.

  But he had liked that movie, From Hell.

  “Holy crap!” Ash shouted. “You’re Jack the Ripper!”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You’re infamous! At least, you will be. I did think you’d be a little younger. You look a hundred years old. How are you even able to walk, let alone gut and kill all those women—”

  The old man had a grip on Ash’s neck before he could finish his sentence. He pushed Ash back against the desk and slammed his head against the wall.

  “Who are you?” the old man asked. “Where have you come from?”

  “I… can’t… breathe…”

  “Who sent you here? Was it that damn Detective Abberline? I can’t get him off my back!”

  “Abberline… that’s right! That was his name—”

  “What?”

  “The character… Johnny Depp played in the movie… about you…”

  “The movie? What? What’s a movie?”

  Now Ash’s demeanor was the one that started to change. His eyes opened wide; he started gritting his teeth. He pulled the old killer’s hands away from his neck.

  “Movies… are what… I live for… you asshole!”

  Ash leaned all the way back against the desk, swung his legs up from under, and kicked the man in the chest. The man stumbled backward and slipped on the kidney, crashing down against the floorboards and knocking his bowling ball of a head against the corner of the bedframe. He slumped forward and passed out.

  “Wow,” Ash said. “I just killed Jack the Ripper.” He nodded his head and planted his hands against his hips. He surveyed the room, then loudly chuckled. “Cool!”

  He leaped over the man’s legs and headed for the bedroom door. He stepped out of the room, only for a second, before he tiptoed back in and snatched the FROM HELL letter from the table, folded it up neatly into eights, and placed it in his pants pocket.

  He slammed the door behind him and entered a faintly lit room that looked like a morgue, with only a faint amount of light illuminating what looked to be the legs of a corpse. The smell was nauseating, so wretched he felt vomit inching up his esophagus. He had a bad headache already from the trip through the time portal. Now he really thought he was going to puke.

  He looked one more time at the shadowed corpse. He wanted to investigate, help London’s finest solve the crime of the millennium. But he didn’t stay to play detective. That was Johnny Depp’s job.

  Ash passed through two long, dark hallways, bumped his head against a brick wall, then kicked open a wooden door and sprawled out on a dirt trail under the clear night sky. He tried to swallow it down but couldn’t, and upchucked all over the ground.

  He wiped his mouth. “Oh gross,” he said. “Shouldn’t have had those eggs this morning.”

  Ash didn’t go anywhere for a second; he just looked away from the product of his nausea and stared up at the stars. They were no different from how they looked back home. But then he heard the sound of hooves and immediately rolled to his right. A carriage passed him by, and mud splattered all over him.

  “My sweater,” Ash whispered under his breath, then stood up, brushed the brown gunk away from his face and wardrobe, and peered down the trail to see the carriage come to a stop.

  He was surrounded by tall, thick walls of brick, and flaming torches up all around him. Another carriage passed him by, and this time he was ready: he jumped out of the way and tried to blend in with the crowd ahead. He wished he had dressed in something more appropriate before he fell through the supposed time portal, but he hadn’t thought it all through. He mushed the mud all over his wardrobe, trying his best to make his wardrobe not look so twenty-first century.

  Everyone wore suits and dresses. Ash passed by children in black coats and caps straight out of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, women wearing ball gowns normally suited for Scarlett O’Hara, medium-sized men with beards and moustaches that looked like they belonged in a BBC miniseries. He spread a little of the mud above his lips to give others the impression he had a moustache, as if he was Groucho Marx himself.

  “Step right up!” an abnormally small middle-aged man yelled in a high-pitched voice up ahead. He stood up on a stool and waved a cane around. “Step right up! Come see the freaks of nature! We have all the freaks in the world! Right here! Right now! On this night! For a limited time only!”

  Ash’s jaw dropped so far to the ground, more mud hit his chin. “Oh, holy shit.”

  “Step right up! Step right up! We got every freak for the imagination! We have the bearded lady, the conjoined triplets, the mule-faced abomination, the armless, legless wonders of the world!”

  Ash pushed past a couple of kids in front of him and tried to get closer to the carnival show spokesman. He passed by a few ladies, but then got stuck behind a man tall enough to be auditioning for another spot in the freak show extravaganza.

  “And tonight, for the first time ever, we have a new addition to our show! If you can stand it, if you can try not to scream, we dare you, we invite you, to feast your eyes on the amazing, the incredible, wolf man!”

  Ash knew he didn’t have time to see an old-fashioned, real life freak show, that he needed to focus on finding Mr. Barker and getting back home, but he couldn’t resist. Before he could even try to turn around, his face was pressed against the main curtain.

  But before he stepped inside, a cane whipped him on the back. He stumbled backward and turned to his right.

  “Ah, ah, ah,” the eccentric host to the carnival of horrors said to Ash, waving his fingers at him. “You can’t go in if you don’t pay, little one!”

  “Little one?” Ash shook his head, then grabbed for his wallet from his back pocket. “Say, could I ask you a question?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Is the Elephant Man in there?”

  “The what?”

  “Or how about Anthony Hopkins?”

  “I can’t hear you, boy.”

  Ash dug some quarters and dimes out of his wallet and dropped them into the showman’s hands. The small man stared down at the twenty-first century American coins not happy or confused, but with a blank expression.

  “Oh? Is that not enough?” Ash searched through his wallet for more cash. He grabbed a crinkled one-dollar-bill and dropped it in the man’s hands. “There.”

  Again, the showman had no expression.

  Ash sighed. He shook his head overdramatically and set a five-dollar-bill in the man’s hands. “Fine. But that’s it. No more!” He started walking toward the curtain.

  “Young man, wait, I don’t know what—”

  Ash stopped and turned to the man one more time. “Oh, one last question. What year is it?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The year?”

  The showman just shrugged. He turned to all the people waiting in line, smiled, then leaned back over to Ash. “It’s 1885, smart alec. Now move along. You’re holding up the crowd—”

  “1885? Are you serious?”

 
“Excuse me?”

  “That’s the same year as Back to the Future 3!”

  “Go! Just go!” The man kicked Ash’s rear end and sent him sailing against the curtain, past the curtain, into the darkened rooms of the carnival showcase.

  Ash pushed himself up and brushed the dirt off his hands, even though he was still covered in mud. He turned to his left to see a group of six or seven people ogling a figure in a cage. Upon close inspection, Ash saw a freak who was freakishly thin, with bony arms and legs, and a face smaller than a potato.

  “Oh, gross,” Ash said.

  “Did you say something?” a polite, overdressed woman said in front of him.

  “Nothing. Do you think any of these people lived long enough to be in Tod Browning’s movie from 1932?”

  She craned her neck and gave Ash a strange look. “I don’t believe I understand.”

  “Oh. That’s right. I just learned this from Jack the Ripper! You guys don’t even know what movies are yet. Where’s Thomas Edison when you need him?”

  A large flame erupted from a jail cell to the right, so Ash continued on his way. He passed by the conjoined triplets, the legless man, a woman so mortifying he felt some more vomit surge up his esophagus.

  He stepped farther back into the maze of freakazoid wonders, only to find one final room, and one final set of audience members ready to see the newest and greatest attraction. Above all the caps and bonnets and top hats was a sign that said in big, bold letters: THE WOLF MAN.

  “It can’t be,” Ash said with a snicker. “Lon Chaney, Jr. hasn’t even been born yet.”

  A few people looked back at him with confusion, but quickly turned their attentions back to the closed curtain.

  Ash saw a wooden stepstool in front of the curtain, so he thought that the middle-aged showman would return for another dramatic speech. But instead, an even tinier man, this one no more than two feet high, crawled up to the top of the stepstool and waved not a long silver cane, but a candy cane.

  “Step right up! Step right up! As close as you can! Do not be frightened. And do your best not to scream. Our newest addition to our showcase has made the lighthearted faint, and the hardhearted squeal with glee! Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, sisters and uncles and second cousins, I give you… the wolf man!”