The August Editor's Pick Story is by
Jay Wilburn
Please feel free to email Jay at: writerjaywilburn@gmail.com
HATE
by Jay Wilburn
Dale Seethe couldn’t keep running. Even if he could, it wouldn’t matter because he had nowhere to go and no plan. Even if he did have a plan or the energy to keep going, he wasn’t fast enough to escape once the rage overtook them.
Something glass shattered above Dale’s head and rained shards down on him from the bottom level of the parking garage behind him. He wasn’t sure if it had been thrown from the street or dropped from over head. Either way, he had been spotted and he had to run again.
The fireworks were going off overhead, twenty-five thousand dollars worth of them. He knew because he had done the oppositional research. No one was watching the fireworks now. Members of both political parties were hunting.
He was the one who had prepared the transitional website. Virginia had been too close to call. But he took a chance and launched the site early, only to find that the state was called the other way. Too late, Dale realized that the state was miss-polled. The white male vote had been overrepresented.
Frantic, he had tried to pull the site back down and then the virus was released. It was meant to affect people, but it had backfired considerably in the mix up. The virus spread through the Internet and even flashed on the screens in the hotel just before the start of what would have been a very heartfelt concession speech.
The hotel ballroom was overtaken first and Dale barely escaped alive. The candidate and his wife had been chewed apart by their own supporters in the wake of the defeat.
So now he was running. He was barely on the sidewalk in front of the parking garage and back in stride when concrete exploded out from the third level. Railing and rebar flew loose and clattered across the curb and into the street. The back wheels of a car hanging out of the fissure continued to spin. Dale was rational enough to realize the driver stood no chance of leaping the gap to reach him, but he was afraid, so he ran anyway.
The car scraped through and fell nose first into the concrete gutter between the garage and the grass. The smashed engine block fit in the space, but the car’s fall was stopped by the windshield, roof, seats, and bodies inside. He could hear a baby screaming as the car tilted in the gutter and continued to crumple. The driver had sacrificed his family in a failed attempt to destroy Dale.
Dale kept running.
He heard another vehicle behind him before the headlights swung over him from the intersection. The red light from the signal reflected off the pavement and he could hear the new vehicle crossing traffic to chase him. He glanced back to see that it was a pick-up truck and something in the bed of the truck was on fire and spreading fast.
Probably one of our constituents. I wonder how that person got the virus. Had it broadcast on radio or was it seen on a smart phone?
He cried out loud, “Jesus, how are they recognizing me in the damned darkness? Am I giving off a smell?”
Dale crossed the street without looking. He raced past the corner of a building and then doubled back. He pressed himself into the space beside a steel grill and a gutter pipe on the building. The filth from years of overflow wiped onto his torn suit, but he didn’t notice anymore.
The pick-up truck rolled by, engulfed in flames. The driver was lost inside the raging inferno, but he just continued driving blindly in the same direction of his previous target. The truck careened off a lamppost and barreled down the street. Flame spilled off the truck and burned in globs on the street. One of the tires burst and left melted rubber scarring the path behind it.
He must have had something flammable in the vehicle before he ever started crashing into things.
An arm snaked out of the window behind the steel grating and a hand locked onto Dale’s shoulder, tearing the seam of his jacket. The arm cut itself on the broken glass of the window. He heard the woman screaming and cursing from inside as she clawed at his arm. He tried to pull away, but she held on and his muscles burned with lactic acid cramps.
He threw his weight to the side and pivoted on the gutter pipe. Her arm bent back the wrong way on the elbow and cracked. She growled as her broken arm was sliced on the glass, but she refused to let go of what she had locked onto through the tiny hole to the outside world. Dale backed away as she continued to call him names.
The rest of his sleeve ripped away at the seam and he pulled his arm right out of it. She continued to hold onto the empty sleeve as if she had something of substance. Her arm was broken in at least two places and she could no longer move it properly. She continued to struggle anyway as Dale ran away and left her with it.
He heard sirens in the distance, but he couldn’t tell where they were going. He also did not want to see what would happen when they found him.
He rounded a corner and then hugged the wall and froze. In the streetlight, he saw men looking around and at least one of them was looking in his direction, but he hadn’t been spotted in the shadows yet. Dale figured he was safe, because these men had already found a victim, another member of the opposing political party.
They were kicking and stomping on the man who was trying to crawl up the curb. One of the attackers grabbed two handfuls of hair on each side of the victim’s head and pulled in two different directions. The sound was like Velcro tearing, but there was another sound underneath it and just above the screams that sounded wet. Dale could see that the attacker’s hands came away with dark blood arcing out from the sections of scalp. The blood sprinkled the other men in the circle, but they did not react as if they noticed.
He slinked back around the corner and abandoned the victim. The tone of the screams changed suddenly, but Dale kept walking.
There were gunshots close by him. Dale lost count of how many as he ducked up an alley. He kept his eyes up at the roofs and windows as he passed under the fire escapes.
Suddenly pain overwhelmed him and he realized an attacker had found him. He was hit from the side and slammed into the brick wall. It was intense, but was not the hardest he had ever been hit. It wasn’t even the hardest he had been hit that night. He tried to shove back against the smaller man, but Dale’s expensive, Election Night shoes were sliding on the trash scattered in the narrow passage he had tried to thread to escape the trouble he had caused.
The man went for Dale’s eyes and left deep scratches along his face. Dale turned his head away from the toilet smell of his attacker’s breath more than the viciousness of the attack. The man clawed at his throat, but he fended him off.
He wasn’t expecting the knee in his gut. It wasn’t far above his groin and Dale felt the pain in places far away from where his was struck. The man grabbed for the throat and locked off Dale’s airway.
Dale drove his fists into the boney frame of the man. He wasn’t much of a fighter, but he knew how to aim his society rings into a dude’s ribs. He actually thought he saw dust coming off the man’s battered suit. He felt the bone under the skin when he struck. The street dweller didn’t react like the pain got through the anger infested in his brain.
A spotty tunnel began to close around the edges of Dale’s vision.
I need to learn when to give up once I’ve lost. This night was nothing, but bad moves. Where did this scumbag get the virus message from anyway?
“Don’t take away my rights, you lying liar man.”
The man’s mouth opened and Dale saw yellowed teeth filling his dying vision as they closed in on his face. He twisted to the side and felt air leak through the gap he created. The teeth grazed his cheek.
Dale braced his loafer flat against the brick behind him and pushed himself off the building. As they stumbled back across the alley, Dale worked his hands inside the man’s grasp and dragged the vagrant’s hands off the bruised flesh of his neck.
Dale pumped his legs and pressed the back of the man’s head into the brick as they hit. They bounced off and the guy was clawing and biting again. Dale shoved his palm under the guy’s greasy chin and turned him to the side. Dale stomped on the side of the man’s knees over and over as they collided with the dumpster.
The attacker snapped his teeth. “I’m going to eat your heart.”
Dale took hold of the back of the man’s head and drove his face into the ground. “I’ll feed your stinking teeth back to you first.”
The man scrambled up off the ground, howling. Dale struggled to keep hold of the guy’s back to keep the man’s front away from Dale’s face and body. The man got turned around anyway.
As they pawed at each other, they turned around in two full circles in the middle of the walkway. Past the dumpster from where Dale had entered, he saw shadows crossing the mouth of the alley on the sidewalk. Two of them stopped and turned in Dale’s direction.
Dale shoved the man into the space behind the dumpster. He held him against the wall.
“Hey, man, I got rights.”
Dale clapped his palm over the man’s mouth and nose. The man struggled, but Dale used his elbows to keep the man’s arms down.
He leaned out to peek around the dumpster. Others were still stalking back and forth by the opening. The light was low, but Dale could see blood and open wounds.
One woman dragged herself along the ground, her leg twisted behind her at an impossible angle. Half her clothing was burned away and her skin was peeled and raw underneath. She continued pulling herself along.
Two other shadows were standing silently at the head of the alley watching the space. They weren’t moving, but just waited for something.
The vagrant growled under Dale’s hand and hit the dumpster with one elbow. It made a loud pong.
“Just shut up, man. They’ll hear you.”
The two shapes were standing and staring, but still did not move. The woman on the ground turned her head to look as it wobbled on her scorched neck. She rolled slowly to her back, hissing with the effort. She leaned and grabbed hold of the straps on her boots to pull herself upright.
The man bit down on Dale’s palm. Dale’s fingers bent back and he screamed. The shapes at the end of the alley began walking forward. Others turned in the direction of Dale’s scream. He tried to pull his hand away, but the man wouldn’t release his bite.
Dale threw three punches into the man’s face and then drove his thumb into one eye socket. The man screamed and finally let go.
Dale stood up to run, but the man grabbed hold with both hands. Dale looked back and saw the mob running down the alley. He reached down and grabbed a chunk of brick.
The man begged. “Dude, you have to help me. Everyone’s gone crazy. I’m just trying to sleep out here and they started trying to beat me out of existence. I don’t know what’s going on. I thought you were one of them.”
Dale slammed the brick into the man’s face twice before he let go. He dropped it and started running just ahead of their hands behind him. A few dropped down and continued beating the man Dale left behind, but the rest continued to chase him in his battered suit.
Crossing a roadway into a park, Dale ran into a square. People on all sides turned and began to advance on him. They stepped out of tents and jumped off a stage up ahead.
“What the hell is this?” he called. The spaces around him began to fill as he trotted deeper into the square.
The first one to reach Dale was still carrying a sign. Dale didn’t bother to read it. He took a sharp swing and connected with the kid’s chin. The boy dropped immediately. Dale seized the sign and broke the poster board placard off the end.
The mob approached as Former Campaign Director Dale Seethe held out the sharp end of his two-by-two stake and waited for them to get close enough for him to hurt them.
“We should have campaigned more in Virginia,” he said as he slashed the air with the stake.
Jay Wilburn was a public school teacher for sixteen years. He left to care for his younger son and to be a full-time writer in beautiful Conway, South Carolina where he lives with his wife and two sons. He was featured in Best Horror of the Year Vol. 5 with editor Ellen Datlow. He has published many horror and speculative fiction stories.
His first novel, Loose Ends: A Zombie Novel, is available now. Time Eaters will be released by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing. He was a featured author with Hazardous Press at the 2013 World Horror Convention and a panelist on RULES OF THE GENRE. He was included in the limited edition Best of Dark Moon of Digest. He is a columnist for Dark Eclipse and for Revolt Daily.
Follow his many dark thoughts at
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@AmongTheZombies on Twitter
