I could’ve just gone straight home from work. Could’ve had a normal night—albeit a boring one. But one that wouldn’t have involved me getting speared through the chest, dying, and being brought back to life….If you can call this bizarre state of existence, “life.”
I was walking home from work when I saw a group of what I had initially thought to be teenagers loitering about in the park. I thought they were teenagers because, well, who else would be messing around in a public park at midnight, dressed in all-black and huddling in a circle. Teenagers—or cultists. Those are pretty much the only two plausibly qualifying groups. Having abandoned my teen years nearly a decade ago, I chose not to engage them; unsure of how to interact with modern teens, and knowing how cruel and needlessly mean-spirited they can be when they’re bored.
Walking past, I overhead someone scream, a girl’s voice ringing out shrilly into the dark, windless night. I slowed my pace but kept going, waiting for another, lighter scream or burst of laughter to indicate that she was alright; that she’d merely been startled or playfully spooked. But no lightly intoned follow-up came. Instead, she let out a croak, weak yet audible through the sonically dead-air. Following on the heels of this was a series of sounds, vaguely reminiscent of tree branches or twigs snapping in quick secession. Something about the noises set my nerves off, made the little hairs of my body stand on end; and I knew that the sounds had come from the breakage of bones.
Against my better judgement—given the dark, graven circumstances—I veered toward the park, toward the darkly enshrouded group at its center.
I came up on them with no announcement or forewarning, hoping that nothing too critically severe had been done to the woman. Two of the figures turned toward me, and my heart leapt in my chest upon seeing their faces. They were both pale, ghostly pallid in the soft light of the nearby lamp-post; with ghoulish, deeply sunken faces and eyes lights set of redly burning stars. On their strangely broad foreheads were symbols or sigils of some kind, blackly inscribed on—or burned into—the flesh. I’d never seen anything like them, and understood at once that the symbols were of a darkly occult nature. They both wore black, zipper-less hoodies and black polyester pants. The casual and non-descript attire was alarming, being suggestive of a deep comfort with ominously noctivagant activities.
The two who had turned to face me advanced, and I saw that each held a weapon: the left figure bearing a short-handed scythe, the other a spear, its shift black, its head an immaculately polished silver. Yes, the aforementioned spear. Before I could untangle my tongue enough to speak, the spear-wielder raised his weapon, drew his arm back, and then launched it right at me like an Olympic javelin.
Stunned from the bizarre, super-ominous sight, I was unable to move fast enough to dodge it; and the spear entered my chest just below my neck. I collapsed to my knees, and just as my fingers gripped the spear to confirm that it had actually penetrated my body, the scythe-wielder approached and, without ceremony, slashed the blade across my throat.
Tragically, I did not die. Or rather, I did, but was brought back to life, only to be subjected to a far more terrible fate.
The woman I’d heard scream then appeared, standing over me as my vision worked to refocus itself following a brief lapse into a Stygian darkness. I’d had no real sensation of “Death”, but knew that I’d somehow been brought back; anchored to life through some necromantic force or or cosmic agency. When my sight finally clarified, I gazed up at the woman and noticed with horror that her neck was broken; and that her entire outfit—a black hoodie, black pants, black boots—was stained with fresh blood. Her jet-black hair was tied into a ponytail, and it too dripped with the sanguine evidence of recent violence. Her face was pale, but not as pale as the other two, who stood by, waiting. A third figure came to stand beside her, the final member of the black-clad congregation. He, like his male cohorts, was weirdly, obscenely pale.
I finally realized then that none of them were actually teenagers. In fact, I couldn’t place their exact age; sensing both a youthful about them—at least in their outward appearance—and a subtle agedness that bespoke of decades, if not longer.
The woman looked me over a bit, as if examining whether or not I was in a good enough state for some purpose—even though she’d been the one to scream bloody murder. I tried to speak, but a gout of blood burst from my mouth, and I spent the next few moments sputtering unintelligibly. She waited for me to finish, and then gripped the spear-end protruding from my chest. Weakly, I tried to stop her, knowing what she was planning to do; but I couldn’t even muster the strength to raise my hand. With a quick jerk, she unsheathed the spear from my chest, and I wailed, really cried out in a long, sustained kinda way, as the most intense pain I’d ever felt erupted within my chest.
She tossed the spear back to its original owner, who caught it and wiped it clean of my blood with his sleeve. Turning back to me, the woman then gripped me by my throat and lifted me up; first to my feet, and then several inches more off the ground. Straining against her Herculean hold, I tried to comprehend what was happening, how this woman was holding me aloft with such ease; but her grip began to tighten, and my thoughts condensed and simplified into commands to breathe—and not shit myself. With eyes that were blacker than the star-less gulf above us, she watched me writhe, while the others stood around; apparently bored, by the looks of them. Just when I thought I’d die again, suffocated by this mysterious mistress of immortality, she let me go, and I fell to my hands and knees.
With that, she turned and started to walk away; and her murderous companions silently followed. Breathlessly, needing to know why, I called out to them demanding an answer—thankful that there wasn’t any wind to obstruct my pitifully weak voice. Cocking her head to the side but not stopping, she said, “Oh. You’re cured. You don’t have that sickness in you anymore. You’re immortal now. You’re welcome.”
Dumbfounded, I asked her what she meant, and just before she and her friends disappeared into the preternatural umbrage of the park’s trees, she responded, “Oh? You didn’t know? You had cancer, dude. So we killed you, killed the cancer, and brought you back. Now you’re good. Well, from now on you’ll have to routinely un-alive and reanimate yourself to stave off the necro-scourge like us (hence the screaming), but you’re good, otherwise. Chill.”
And she was right, I’d had no idea. I’d been feeling pretty off the last few weeks, but I figured that was just part of working the night shift at the town’s old chemical plant. Huh.