Cannibal Corpse, M/C

It ran on and on like that, page after page. There was no doubt in his mind what it all meant: this was some sort of experimental station where victims of the Outbreak were brought for medical and biological study. After the worms started raining from the sky and the countryside was overrun with the living dead, the healthy ones ran east so nobody would have known about this place or objected to what they were doing here. The compound was a concentration camp of sorts.

Slaughter was going to leave the room when he noticed the circuit breaker door. It was partially open. There were dozens of breaker switches for the different rooms and buildings, outside security lights, etc. At the top were two red switches. One said generator and the other said battery.

For the hell of it he flicked generator but there was nothing.

When he flicked battery the lights came on.

“Still got a charge,” he said under his breath.

Which gave him an idea. There was a TV and DVD unit on a stand in the corner. Using a rag he found in the desk, he wiped the dust from them. He turned on the DVD player and got a green light. The TV came on with a field of static. He chose a DVD at random from the case and put it in the player. After more static, he watched images of worms that were being cultivated, dissected, held out for inspection wriggling in forceps, then a series of microscopic images which must have been tissue samples and sectioned worms. There was no sound, which made it all kind of eerie. The video kept pixilating randomly and it went back to static…then, for just an instant, like some kind of flashing subliminal sort of thing, he saw a face…then he saw it again.

Then nothing but static.

He stood there, feeling a worming unease in his belly. It was surely nothing, yet that unease was growing and he could not adequately understand why the face disturbed him so much. Only that it did. His belly flipped over. A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead.

He knew he hadn’t imagined it. When he closed his eyes, the image was still burned onto his retinas: a man in a black hat whose face was an almost violent shade of lunar white, a cratered/pockmarked face with brilliant pink eyes staring out.

Swallowing, Slaughter backed the DVD up to the worms and played it through the static. No face. Nothing. He tried it again and then three more times after that.

No face.

Maybe it was an optical illusion, man.

But he did not believe that.

He tried another DVD. Blank. Then another. About halfway through, things stared to heat up and get interesting.

Of course, that was purely subjective.

Because what Slaughter saw was sickening.

The video showed an Asian girl of maybe ten or eleven who was without a doubt one of the newly risen judging from her stark gray-white complexion and vacant, shining eyes like pools of gasoline. She appeared to be tied to a chair. There were several gaping holes in her face that were acrawl with maggots. She was opening and closing her mouth as if she was speaking and Slaughter was glad there was no audio. Her face and throat were bulging from some sort of motion beneath and if he wondered what that might be, he didn’t have to wonder long because what was nesting inside her started coming out in a writhing, almost liquid profusion: worms. Not maggots. Maggots would have been pretty pedestrian. No, these were the fleshy red worms that fell from the sky and reanimated the dead. They came out of her nostrils like snotty ribbons of red licorice and slithered from her ears like scarlet snakes. They were huge and bloated unlike any he had seen before.

The girl offered the camera a cadaverous smile and more of the worms came pouring out of her mouth in a slimy, stringy bile and by then she was shuddering and contorting, her flesh cracking open and spilling an oozing tide of the things that swarmed over her, coiling and undulant, until she became just a hothouse gush of putrescent infestation that existed only to birth the worms in ever-increasing numbers.

It was hideous.

As he made to shut it off, that face, that ghoulish white face with the pink eyes, flashed across the screen three more times. He knew he had seen it. He backed the video up but it was not there. It was just not there. His unease grew. He began to get the most unsettling feeling that something was going on, something of a personal nature. Something intended for him and him alone.

Slaughter killed the video.

That was enough.

If that face was intended for you then what the hell does it mean? What can it mean?

He watched two more videos but saw nothing. Nothing at all. He stood there, balanced between belief and skepticism, between sanity and a yawning black pit of madness.

He refused to think about it anymore. The girl. He thought about that girl on the video.