Chloe Rice was a human bat the night a man in overalls waltzed through the woods and Jake Jeffcoat lost it completely.
 
A year after volunteering at Myers Haunted Forest as a ticket ripper at the front gate, Chloe was promoted to actual forest duty; and not just the low-level witches that snuck around in the dark and were told to growl and hiss as customers groped their way through the tree-bracketed path, lit only by rows of tiny candles.
 
At age 10, Chloe began counting the years – sometimes months, sometimes days – until she could join the hundred or so volunteers at Myers Haunted Forest, an unholy nightmare of a wooded path in her hometown of Russellville.
 
At 14, the Myers organizers let her have a spot at the ticket booth, where a thousand people flowed the front gates made of bones covered in spider webs every Thursday, Friday and Saturday in October.
 
And this year, after coming to work early and staying late all 12 nights the previous October, the Myers powers that be had given Chloe a prime spot: She would be the human bat, dressed in all black, with wings and blood-drenched fangs, swinging down on fear-stricken wanderers from a bungee secured to a tree.
 
She’d swoop down upon the cowering hoards, screech a terrible bat screech in their faces, then fling right back up to her tree perch.
 
If the thrill of playing the human bat wasn’t enough – and it was, it most certainly was – Chloe also had a thirty-foot view of a Myers Forest highlight: The chainsaw chase.
 
She’d watch from up high while Susan Crabtree and Jake Jeffcoat slid their white hockey masks over their faces, burst out of a tiny wooden cabin nestled in the trees, and rev their chainsaws until the motors screamed and drowned out the cries of unsuspecting teenagers.
 
Everyone screamed. Even the packs of cool kids, tapping away at their phones and reminding each other that none of this – not even the deranged clown house – was even remotely scary. They screamed the loudest and ran the fastest, Chloe found.
 
The chains had been carefully stripped from each buzzing saw used in the forest, but the machines’ toothlessness didn’t matter. It was the sound that got you. It even sometimes startled Chloe, the human bat, before she made her jump.
 
Susan and Jake would laugh hysterically after groups fled toward the lagoon creatures that waited for them in the pond ahead.
 
“One guy wet himself,” Chloe heard Jake yell once. “I saw it. I swear.”
 
They weren’t supposed to touch the customers, but sometimes, in the upheaval that ensued, the harmless machine would brush against someone, and that someone would let out a genuine scream, the kind Chloe imagined people made when their basic instinct to stay alive kicked into overdrive.
 
Once a weekend, sometimes twice, a Myers visitor would lose his wits and flee toward the cabin while the rest of his petrified friends and family hustled down the dirt path, correctly.
 
It was late on a Saturday, no more than twenty minutes before Myers Haunted Forest shut its doors and filed its volunteer ghouls out of the thick woods, that Jake picked up the wrong chainsaw.
 
Myers Forest staff members, usually the adults in charge of everything, had to trim hanging branches a few times every year, hoping to avoid poked eyes and scratched faces as customers ran from unseen fiends circling them in the dark.
 
So Chloe wasn’t surprised when a man in overalls – he must have been playing a hillbilly in the forest’s terrifying backwoods scene – approached Jake and Susan, tipped his straw hat, and proceeded to trim a few stray branches with his chainsaw, a big, heavy one compared to Jake’s and Susan’s.
 
When he finished, the overall-wearing man pulled a piece of hay from his mouth and flicked it away. He looked up at the human bat, hiding in her tree, and smiled. Chloe thought he made a great murderous hillbilly. She smiled back.
 
Chloe heard the whispers of the next group just as the man slipped away, into the forest, away from the entrance. Odd, Chloe thought. She wondered why the hillbilly was empty handed, why he had no chainsaw.
 
It was too late.
 
Jake and Susan threw the cabin door open and ran toward the gathering of half a dozen teens and a few of their parents. The chainsaws wailed as the faceless duo revved the machines high above their heads. Two of the parents, for reasons Chloe Rice would never know, ran toward the chainsaw-wielding psychos.
 
“Get to the cabin!” the woman yelled to the man.
 
They were confused, Chloe knew. They didn’t see the dimly-lit path leading west, further into the woods. Jake brought his chainsaw down toward the befuddled intruders, and looked to pull back, but couldn’t. The chainsaw seemed too heavy for him. It wasn’t his, Chloe saw; it was the hillbilly’s – a real heavy-duty chainsaw.
 
With a chain.
 
The machine’s whirring teeth dug themselves deep into the man’s left arm. Jake’s gleaming white hockey mask was instantly covered in splattered red. It sprayed on Susan too, and she dove onto the leaf-covered ground.
 
Chloe felt her stomach somersault when Jake tried to yank the chainsaw loose, and instead, rammed it all the way through the poor man’s shoulder. His arm hit the ground with a thud.
 
The man screamed and screamed and screamed. Jake Jeffcoat just stood there, blood dripping off his hockey mask, arms at his sides, not saying anything, not running for help.
 
Chloe unsnapped the bungee from her costume and climbed down the makeshift ladder they made for the human bat. Before she got to the ground, Myers Forest staff members were sprinting through the woods, blindly following the screams of a one-armed man.
 
An hour passed, the forest was closed, and the man and his arm were shipped to the hospital. He lived.
 
Jake Jeffcoat, Chloe heard from school friends that winter, hadn’t said a word since grabbing the wrong chainsaw. Someone said Jake was classified as catatonic. Chloe looked it up. It meant exactly what she thought it did.
 
Chloe, a day after Myers Haunted Forest closed forever, had asked a Forest staff member, a guy named Rod, if the hillbilly character had ever apologized for leaving his chainsaw near the cabin.
 
“What hillbilly?” Rod, the staff guy, asked.
 
“The one who came from the backwoods scene to cut the branches,” Chloe said.
 
He waved his hand dismissively and walked away.
 
“We did away with the hillbilly scene this year.”

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©2011 C.D. Carter

Outside of his day job as an education reporter, C.D. Carter’s fascination with the macabre has led to a recent spate of short story horror writing, including “Ken’s Scoop,” a story published last fall by Death Head Grin (http://www.deathheadgrin.com/10_11/id226.html), and “Death on the News Feed,” as seen in Horror Bound Magazine (http://www.horrorbound.com/readarticle.php?article_id=217). He was also featured in Flashes in the Dark with, “A Cat and Its Boy.” (http://flashesinthedark.com/2011/05/19/a-cat-and-its-boy-by-cd-carter/). C.D. depends on horror-loving friends Pat and Mariel to tell him which story ideas should be explored and which should be buried and never spoken of again. He’s a sucker for any Halloween-related horror film and epically long novels by Stephen King and Peter Straub — authors who regularly ruin his sleep.

Brian’s wife had been kidnapped, and the kidnappers said they would kill her if he didn’t cooperate. He was told to meet them at an abandoned building in an old industrial part of town.

Most of the dark buildings he drove past had few windows unbroken.  Forgotten hulks, left abandoned years ago when the steel industry had closed down here. Finally he got to the entrance of the building he was told to meet them in. As he turned off his headlights the twenty foot tall metal doors slowly opened, rusted gears squealing in protest, as puffs of rust, and dirt, fell from disused tracks. The interior of the building was complete darkness. The instinct was to turn on some lights before pulling inside, but he had been warned not to do that. His wife had been missing for three days before they contacted him to set up this meeting, so who knew what condition she would be in. As the car slowly plunged into the darkness his stomach churned in fear, not for him, but for her, and what might have happened to her.

Two days ago they made first contact, late in the evening. He was home trying to call people who might know where his wife might be, because she had to be missing for at least 24 hours before the police would begin to investigate it. So far he had draw nothing but blanks. She left her waitressing job, was seen getting into her car and driving away, and then she vanished.

When he went to the door the full moon was behind the two men standing on the porch, and the light was burnt out.

Without opening the door he asked, “Can I help you?”

“Are you Brian Wingard?” a raspy voice asked. He couldn’t tell in the darkness which one of them had spoken.

“Yes, I am, who are you, and what do you want at this hour?”

One of them turned slightly towards the other, “Hour?”

The other ignored the question, “We are here about your wife Margaret.”

“What!! Is she alright? Has something happened to her?” he began to reach to open the door and stopped.

“She is alive,” the voice said, and both stood there unmoving in the darkness.

“Thank God, are you policemen?”

“No, we are something else.”

Brian pulled his hand back from the door again and tried to get a better look through the small window in the door, but the moonlight behind them made it impossible. The hats they wore hid their faces completely, and their long jackets, trench coats or dusters, revealed nothing about how they may be dressed. Both were the same height and build, twins of dark unknown, standing silently and patiently for him to do something.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“Your life for your wife’s.”

Stunned Brian stands there for a moment trying to figure out what that meant.

“I don’t understand. Why me, and why do you want my life?”

“You match the profile, and all of the scans indicate you’re a perfect fit. In fact you are the only match we have found in three years of searching.”
  

 “So you want to kill me for that!!” the two turn briefly towards each other and he catches a hint of mottled skin, saggy and yellowed.
 

“No, we want your life, not to take it” they both say as they face him again.

“What? Does that even mean?”

“We need to inhabit your body, or soon we will die. We become you, and you will still be alive as well, just unable to use your body. It will be ours.”

“What if I say no?”

“We will contact you tomorrow, if you do not agree by then we will terminate your wife and look for another. You have to do it willingly”

“I don’t need to think about it. What do I have to do?”

Once he was inside the doors rumbled shut behind him, and he was swallowed by the dark. Seconds later a face appeared by the driver’s side window, scaring the hell out of him. It was barely visible, but what he saw didn’t look good. The flesh around the eyes sagged, showing the tear ducts and the raw flesh beneath. The mouth hung slack, and all of the teeth were gone, leaving holes that seeped blood, and mixing with the saliva, trickled in crimson drops out of the corner of the mouth. The creature said nothing, just motioned for him to get out of the car. Brian got out slowly, and as he turned his back he popped a small pill into his mouth.

“Show me my wife before we do anything else.”

Silently the thing turned and shuffled into the darkness towards the back of the warehouse. It was obvious that something was wrong with the one he followed. One leg dragged as it walked, unable to lift it up with each step. The right arm swung uselessly at its side, and looking down he saw that the fingernails were missing, the flesh splitting at the fingertips exposing patches of bone. There was a smell like meat that has been left out in the hot sun a little too long, not rotten, but getting there quickly.

The darkness lifted a little and in the dim light he could see Glenda’s faint outline, tied to a large wood and steel chair. Relief rushed through him when he saw her glance up at him, fear in her eyes that turned to hope. Another one of the creatures stood directly behind her, it’s hands resting on the back of the chair.

“You need to release her first, and after you have done that I will let you have what you asked for. I need to see that she is safe though, or you’ll get nothing”

The one next to him gave a faint nod, and the one standing behind Glenda pulled out a large hunting knife, which gave Brian a scare, until he saw it used to cut her ropes. She jumped up, and ran over to him hugging him.

 “Thank God you’re here.”
 

“Glenda, you’ve got to leave now so that I can finish my business with these ’things’.”   She turned to leave but one of them stepped in front of her, and nodded it’s head, no.

“OK, fine do what you have to do, and then let her go.”
 

The one standing behind him reached out placing a hand on his shoulder. I think fog like liquid, pale yellow, flowed out of the hand, and as it flowed down his chest it sank into him. It felt like electric jolts running through him, making him twitch all over until it was done. He felt like he was looking out of his eyes from a distance as they turned to the second creature, nodding that it was OK. It stepped aside and Glenda moved around it heading towards the car. The second creature walked over and did the same thing to Brian that the first one had done.

Looking back Glenda say Brian stretching, with a big smile on his face and as he said, “Perfect!!”

Then a funny thing happened, his expression changed and he clutched at his chest, followed by dropping to the floor motionless, the smile gone. She turned and walked back to where he laid; eyes wide open, staring at her. She could see her reflection in his glassy eyes as she bent down to examine him. It looked like he had died from the transfer of the alien entities, and with no viable host anymore they left his body, as a thick puddle of yellow fluid that looked like puss, coming from the corner of his eyes and mouth. Once it formed on the ground it began to evaporate, and because she was so close she got a mouthful of its thick putrescence.

Standing, she tried to spit the foul taste out of her mouth, that is when she noticed a note sticking out of Brian’s shirt pocket. Being careful to keep her face turned away from the lingering vapors she pulled it out. Stepping away from him she unfolded the note.

“Glenda, it you’ve found this note I wanted to tell you that I love you, also that I may look dead, but I’m not. I contacted an old friend of mine who deals in exotic herbs, and other rare things. He gave me a special powder that is used in voodoo. It gives an appearance of death, and unless a doctor knows, even they can be fooled. The antidote is a small capsule of liquid in my pocket this note was in. Just squeeze a few drops into my mouth and in several minutes the effects will wear off. If you don’t find this note however, than I lose, and will surely be buried alive. Babe, it was worth the risk for you.  Love, Brian.”

Stunned she just stood there a few moments looking down at him, and noticed the lump in his pocket. Once again she bent down, cautious of any remaining vapors, and pulled the capsule out of his pocket. Holding it up she saw that there was a thick amber liquid inside. Leaning over by Brian’s ear she whispered, “Brian, I didn’t know how to tell you before. I’ve been having an affair, and this gives me a way to end our marriage, I’ll make sure you have a beautiful funeral though.”

Laughing she stood up, and walked over to the car. Inside was a cell phone, which she used to call 911.

“Hello, I need an ambulance; I think my husband had a heart attack. Please send someone here. I don’t know what to do!!” giving the general directions to the abandoned buildings she promises to wait in font, with her headlights on to help them find her. When she hung up she threw the capsule as far away as she could into the dark interior of the building, then she ate the note, just in case. It tasted bitter, but she rejoiced knowing she was free.

Starting up the car she began backing towards the closed doors, and suddenly went stiff, her foot slamming down on the gas pedal. The car rocketed towards the heavy metal doors, and hit them so hard that one fell partially off its runners, as it crumpled the trunk of the car. The impact threw her like a rag doll, and her head hit the windshield, leaving a spider web of cracks across its surface.

When they finally found her and Brian they thought she died from the accident and he had a heart attack. Brian forgot to be careful while handling the toxic powder, leaving traces on the note, and the capsule with the cure. The final touch had been the concentrated toxic vapors she inhaled as the aliens dissolved; leaving no trace they had ever existed.

She was right about one thing; it was a beautiful funeral…

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©2011 Neil Leckman