The two men who had been left behind – Whiskey and Levi, were two very mismatched men. Levi was a short and scrawny boy who looked no older than seventeen, with matted hair that might have had a colour other than black if the dirt was washed out. He carried a rotten old rifle and had a rusted bowie knife shoved in his belt. Whiskey was a head taller than Levi, and looked about twenty years older, with a bulging beer belly and a drunkard’s nose, he had a fireman’s axe propped on his shoulder.
As soon as the rest of the gang had departed, Whiskey filled another cup of moonshine for himself and plopped down into a chair by the fireplace.
“Aren’t we gonna’ look for the girl? I’d like to get my hands on her before we take her back to Jack.” Levi smirked, baring his yellow, rotting teeth. I shuddered at the thought.
“We tore the house apart already, she’s probably gone off into the woods. We’ll sit around for a few hours and tell Jack we couldn’t find her.” Whiskey said as he took a deep drink.
“Good, I’ll probably have a chance against a scrawny kid and a bloated fat drunk if I can sneak out of here.” I mumbled to myself as I watched the camera feeds. I checked the store of guns that was in the bunker and found a shotgun that I figured would suit my purposes. I loaded it and tucked a few extra shells into my pockets, propping the gun against the ladder that led back up to the house.
I opened a few cans of food that looked appealing and settled down to a quick meal as I watched the two men. Levi wandered aimlessly through the house, picking over the ruins of last night’s destruction. He found a few pieces of my uncle’s clothes and exchanged them for his threadbare garb, looking at himself smugly in a standing mirror. Whiskey never stirred from his spot in his chair except to refill his cup or gorge himself on eggs and meat from the fridge. Luckily, Levi eventually got bored of scavenging and decided to start drinking too.
I sat motionless in the bunker for hours as the two men got steadily more intoxicated. I had turned my chair away from the monitors for a moment and started to pace back and forth across the room, when a tidal wave of sorrow and fear crashed into me and I began to weep profusely. I was scared of these men, I was sad for my uncle, and I was scared to die. I must have cried for an hour, slumped against the wall of the bunker, when finally the tears subsided on their own and were replaced with a burning, seething hatred for the men above me and what they had done.
“Heir to the Kozlowski’s.” I said to myself, as I checked the monitors to ensure the two men were still where I’d last seen them. Confirming that, I slung the shotgun on my back and began to climb the ladder – hand over hand, time to do or die. Opening the secret passage I had fallen through proved to be the harder part, as I groped along the wall in the darkness for some kind of switch or button that would let me out. It took a solid five minutes of scrabbling, but finally my hand caught on some tiny switch, and the door began to slide open.
I winced as the door caught on the remnants of the wardrobe that had concealed it, and sent some planks clattering to the floor. “Shit shit shit” I mumbled to myself and held my breath – swinging the shotgun into my hands and pointing it towards the door. I stood still as a statue for an eternity before I finally began to hear slow steps echoing in the hallway.
“I think it were this one.” I heard Levi mumble to himself through the door, and the creak of hinges told me he had opened the door across the hall. My heart began to beat furiously in my chest and my hands became slick with sweat as I waited… waited… while I heard the boy picking through the other room. He muttered something under his breath, and I heard his footsteps again, approaching my door. I didn’t want to give him time to even see me, and as soon as the hinges of the door in front of me began to creak, I pulled the trigger and the shotgun let out a deafening roar, a dozen splintered holes appearing on the door in front of me.
An ear-piercing shriek came from the other side of the door, and the sound of a body crashing to the floor. “If I ever get home I’m going to be fucking deaf.” I said to myself with a nervous smile. I racked the shotgun and opened the bedroom door inwards, revealing Levi slumped against the far wall of the hallway – fear and pain in his eyes. The shot had caught him everywhere from the knees to the stomach, and he was bleeding from a dozen or more holes, and covered in splinters from the door.
It’s hard to imagine how you’ll ever act in a situation like this, but without even thinking, I bent over the kid and stuck my middle finger up right in front of his face, giving him the biggest smile I could manage as I shook my finger in his face. He merely moaned and squirmed away from me.
“Now the fat one.” I said as I turned and slowly made my way down the hall, heart still pounding, and gun held out in front of me. I reached the top of the stairs and looked down to see that the chair where Whiskey had sat was now empty. I only had a second to be confused before a huge meaty arm wrapped around my neck and I was tackled to the ground, my breath going out of me as I hit the floor.
I clawed at the arm and tried to bite my way out, the shotgun thrown from my hands, but it proved to be useless – Whiskey was too huge. He wrestled my arms behind my back and zip tied my hands together, along with my ankles. I had given up at that point, knowing there was nothing I could do. Whiskey stood up, out of breath, and picked his axe up from the floor.
“She shot me!” Levi cried from the hallway, his face was pale as a ghost.
“Obviously.” Whiskey said as he lumbered towards the scrawny kid.
“What are we gonna’ do?” Levi asked, panic in his voice.
“We?” Whiskey asked, as he swung the big fireman’s axe around in a wide arc and brought it down unto Levi’s chest. The boy let out a shriek as he saw the axe coming, which turned into a gurgle as the life left him. I can still hear the sickening crunch sound his ribs made as the axe was wrenched free.
“Your shot was too low – makes a man suffer to die from a hit like that.” Whiskey grunted as he walked back towards me. “Don’t give me no more problems and we should get back to Jack just fine.”
Whiskey took my shotgun from the floor and hung it off his shoulder. He found a coil of rope somewhere in the house and looped one end around my neck, tying the other off on his belt. He cut the ties on my ankle and lifted me to my feet, tugging the rope to make me follow him. Whiskey let out a deep bellied chuckle. “Always wanted me a dog, I did. Ha ha!”
We walked for hours through the woods, our pace was slow with Whiskey leading the way, but we finally reached a truck that had been parked deep in the forest, on a trail that I didn’t recognize. Whiskey helped me into the back seat of the truck, and the engine roared to life as we set off down the trail. It may have been the exhaustion of the day, or the bumping and rocking of the truck, but I fell asleep almost instantly.
It was a deep, dreamless sleep, but when I opened my eyes, my current situation rushed back upon me. I was laying on an old pallet that had a blanket thrown on top of it, in a ragged shed that appeared to be built out of random lumber and sheet metal. I was still tied to a hook on the wall, but my hands had been cut free at least. I couldn’t tell what time it was, but it was daytime. My captors were murmuring and muttering outside, and I heard the slam of vehicle doors and the sounds of barrels and bottles being moved and shunted around.
“We’re gonna be rich!” Shouted one of the voices from outside, followed by a chorus of agreement and a few laughs. I heard the sound of a bottle being uncorked, and the cracking of a fire, but aside from a few slits in the walls of my shed, I had no way to see what was going on outside.
I understand now why people say they fear the unknown – if my captors had just told me what they were going to do to me, I feel like I would have been less afraid. The fact I was simply locked in a shed and tied to the wall made my head swim with horrible ideas of what fate might have in store for me. Evidently, fate had nothing in store for me that night – as the men simply drank and sat around the fire late into the night. Hours later, who knows what time it was, the shed door opened, and a small plastic bag was thrown in that contained a few crackers and an opened can of soup.
It’s safe to say that I’ve never felt terror like I felt that night, but little did I know that wasn’t even the worst of it. I was laying on the pallet, struggling to find a way to lay down that was at least somewhat comfortable, when a shout from outside caught my attention – the men were arguing about something and shouting incoherently, the only words I could make out being “who’s there?”
A gunshot broke the commotion, and a crashing and snapping sound came from the treeline around the camp. Not knowing whether or not I would ever have another chance of getting out, I worked furiously at untying the rope around my neck – what the point was of tying me up when my hands were free I never knew. I got the rope off quickly as the sounds of combat from outside grew louder and louder – gunshots kept ringing, and I heard my shotgun go off. Someone screamed and I heard Jack loudly bellow for someone to “shoot the damned thing.”
I figured at that time that a bear had gotten into the camp or something, and I threw my weight against the door, which held, but I saw the hinges coming loose. It was lucky for me that the shed was so poorly built, as another shock with my shoulder sent the door crashing to the ground. The camp was chaos, men were running with weapons, shouts and shots were ringing out, but I paid it all little attention as I ran to the truck we had arrived in parked at the edge of the camp. I jumped into the drivers seat and almost shouted with joy as I realized the keys were still there.
I turned the keys, and the truck roared to life. But when the headlights came on… the lights illuminated blood. Blood, everywhere. Two bodies lay near the fire, looking as though they had almost been ripped in half. I caught a glimpse of Jack o’ Spades at the edge of the headlight beams, with some sort of… human… thing clinging to him, and biting into his neck, where blood was spurting into the air. I felt sick and was almost paralyzed with awe, but I slammed the truck into reverse and began to back up, when the thing on top of Jack sat up and stared right at me. My scream filled the truck.
It was Uncle Koz. Blood soaked his face and his whole body. His clothing was ripped and torn everywhere as if he had been running through the woods for days. A horrible wound had ripped him from below his ribs to just below his navel, and it looked as though some of his guts were hanging out. Flesh had been ripped and torn, and was a bizarre shade of grey, but his eyes… god, his eyes were pure white, as if they had rolled back into his head. He stood up from the body, looking straight at me, and slowly reached out an arm towards me in the truck, as he shambled a few steps towards me.
Another gunshot echoed through the night, and ripped straight through Koz’s chest, which drew uncles… or… that things attention. His head snapped in the direction the shot had come from and he sprinted towards the shooter, teeth bared and bloody. Without thinking, I floored the truck into reverse and whipped it around, speeding out of the camp as fast as I dared to drive on the forest roads in the middle of the night, the sounds of shouting and screaming fading behind me.
I drove through the twisting forest road all night long, no clue where I was or where I was going. As the rosy fingers of dawn began to creep over the horizon, I finally reached a highway. What highway it was I had no clue, but I drove in stunned silence until I found a truck stop and asked where I was. The attendant looked at me like I was a ghost as I stood there, and he explained where I was and asked if I was okay. I replied with a simple, “yes.” And left.
It took me the rest of the day to get back home to my apartment, that I shambled into and collapsed on my bed – waking up almost sixteen hours later. I felt completely shattered inside, and I told my family that I had gotten into a car accident and Uncle Koz had loaned me a truck. Somehow, I returned to regular life – I put on a smile but inside I was a mess. It’s been that way the past three years. Every once in a while, my family would ask how Uncle Koz was, and I always told them that last time I had seen him, he was fine. He never made it around to any family gatherings anymore, but nobody seemed to mind, Until last week that was.
Last week, my parents received a phone call from a police station far up north – Uncle Koz was dead. His bones had been found by some hikers deep in the woods and had matched dental records of Koz that had been in a national database. They sent us the bones and we had a small funeral in the city – all his brothers and sisters and all my cousins in attendance. As we were sitting eating sandwiches and drinking coffee after the service, my dad came up to me and produced a letter from his pocket.
“Uncle Koz never left a will, but he gave me this letter about ten years ago – he told me to give it to you once he was dead. Don’t worry, I never opened it.” My dad smiled a sad smile and handed me the letter.
I didn’t read it until I was home. Inside was a set of keys – the keys to the cabin. He said that even at fifteen he knew I would be the one to take over for him, and mentioned that by now, I had probably learned all of his secrets and knew what I needed to do. For the family name, it said.
I had a new car by this point, and I was out of school. I told my work I needed a week off to help settle a family estate, and I took off towards the north to visit the cabin one last time. I at least owed Uncle Koz that, for saving my life and all. It was emotionally draining the whole way there, and physically draining to clear the unused roads that led to the cabin. I finally arrived and smiled at my old car still parked outside, rusted and grown over with weeds.
The cabin was run down, overgrown, and it looked as though a number of animals had lived here over the years. It was a sad sight, but three years of grief had blunted my emotions somewhat. I shed a few tears as I tried to tidy up a few things in the ransacked house, which hadn’t been touched since Jack and his gang had trashed it years before. Blood was still splattered all over the great room floor, and the back door was still kicked in. I spent the night in my old room – scared, sad, but strangely happy.
As I mentioned at the start of this, I don’t expect to be alive much longer. I’ve rolled as many barrels of unmixed moonshine into the house as I possible could. I’ve soaked it into the floors, the walls, and dumped litres of it around the doors. The barrels that I didn’t need, I’ve piled up near the fireplace, ready to become a raging inferno when the need arises. You might ask why I would burn down the cabin that my Uncle Koz spent so long building, and that we have so many happy memories in.
Well – the one thing that I never found in the house that by all rights should still have been there, was Levi’s body. Last night I merely heard prowling around the house. But now… tonight, I’ve seen them on the edges of the trees, ducking in and out of bushes – Levi with his shattered chest, Jack with his throat torn out, Whiskey with an arm lopped off, and the others with mortal wounds of their own. Their flesh is rotten, their eyes are white as snow, and their teeth are black with ancient blood.
I guess sometimes the dead can’t die if they have unfinished business. But tonight, I hope to prove that the living don’t die when they have unfinished business either. I’ve taken as many of my uncle’s guns from the bunker that I could possibly use. The moonshine makes this whole house a bonfire waiting to happen, and I don’t plan on dying until every single one of those monsters in the woods is burned to cinders. I’m Hannah Kozlowski, heir of the family, and I’m about to kill some fucking monsters.