There on a barstool harder than concrete I sat, sipping on my cranberry-but-mostly-vodka and unable, no matter what I tried, to shake off the chill that skittered across my thighs and the nape of my neck.

Flipping up my jacket collar, rubbing my hands against my jeans hard enough to start a brush fire – nothing worked. It was one of the first truly chilly days of autumn, and I was in Annapolis, where the breeze from the Chesapeake can freeze you where you stand, even in October.

Maybe that explained it. Maybe it didn’t.

My wife and her friends had taken me to the state capitol’s downtown bar scene for something they called a ghost hunting bar crawl. Both the hunting and the crawling were for losers, I had told my wife, Melissa. Combining them was some award-winning achievement in loser dome.

“Then you’re uninvited,” she spat back at me when we parked in Annapolis. “I forgot how much you hate fun.”

Melissa told me to park my fun-hating hind parts at the Maryland Tavern, a cramped little restaurant with an even smaller bar that would serve as the last stop on the five-bar crawl, where a tour guide would tell the gullible pack of beer gulpers how so-and-so had died some terrible or heroic or ironic death way back when everyone was under five feet tall and dead by forty.

It was October, a week before Halloween. People wanted to hear this stuff. They ate it up, and I can only suppose the alcohol made the otherworldly fictions go down smooth.

I ducked into the dank bar, the Maryland Tavern, and took inthe must that permeated the place before plopping down next to a girl dressed for Miami in July and her boyfriend from the nearby Naval Academy. He clearly liked the unsubtle reminder of South Florida in the summer, and she clearly liked his uniform, impeccably white down to the shoes.

They left a minute later.

I sat there, wriggling on the hardwood barstool, seeking some basic level of comfort, when the chill first came. It started on my left thigh, and spread to my right. I rubbed my left leg lazily, wondering if it had lost circulation, when I felt the same cold – even colder, maybe – sweep across the back of my neck.

Had the Navy man or his lady friend pressed an ice cube against my neck in some strange drunken prank? I turned and found nothing but a coat closet made probably three hundred years ago, for those tiny Colonial people who died early.

I ordered my drink – the cranberry and vodka – and watched the elderly bartender pair a splash of the red stuff with a glassful of the clear stuff. I sipped it and winced. The bartender cracked a crusty smile.

It was then that the chill returned. The bartender, wiping down plates, saw me rub the nape of my neck. Again, our eyes met and he smiled. The geezer muttered something indeterminable, and I thought it might’ve been a name, a name with two parts.

“Huh?” I said.

 “Nothin’,” he responded, and shuffled away.

Half an hour passed before the Maryland Tavern’s bar doorswung open and slammed against the worn brick wall, and there, at the top of three concrete stairs, were the boozing brood of paranormal investigators: Melissa, her two friends, and eight others who had shelled out thirty-five bucks a pop for this kind re-telling of campfire stories.

My dear wife was still pissed. She sat three stools away.

“Here at the historic Maryland Tavern,” began the tourguide, a dark-haired college girl with wild eyes, “there’ve been dozens – nay, hundreds! – of eerily similar reports from beyond.”

 The inebriated crew ate it up; they hung on the guide’severy syllable.

“Up above this little establishment,” the tour guide said, pointing and looking at – beyond – the ceiling, “was once Annapolis’s most famous brothel. Men arriving at the nearby docks, after months at sea, would race each other to the tavern.” I felt the iciness spread across my legs again. Instead of rubbing the chill, I gulped my drink.

“And these sailors, they’d all ask for the same girl,” theguide said. “They’d request Marybeth Parker, a gorgeous nineteen-year-old girl whose mother had run the brothel for many, many years.”

“One day, after falling in love with a merchant from Spain,Marybeth asked her mother to release her from her duties at the tavern. The mother, wanting anything but to lose her best earner, said no, a resounding no. Eventually, Marybeth Parker refused to accept any more clients, and instead, reserved her bed for the man she loved.”

“One night, while entertaining her lover” – the guide used air quotes; her customers snickered – “the … ahem … activity became so rigorousthat unbelieving bar patrons watched as Marybeth’s bed came crashing through the bar’s ceiling. Both Marybeth and her lover were found impaled on a bedpost.”

 The crowd gasped. So did I.

“The corpses of Marybeth and her lovely Spaniard were face toface, the bedpost shoved through their bodies, searching each other’s eyes,”the tour guide said. I nearly toppled off my barstool this time – the cold didn’t just touch my neck, it rubbed across it, back and forth.

“And ever since,” the guide continued somberly, “untold scores of men here at this bar, at this tavern, in this city, have told storiesof Marybeth Parker. Not of seeing her, no – but of feeling her.”

 “Like she did during her time here, before her gruesome death, Marybeth sits on the laps of her potential customers, and wraps her arm, ever so gently, around the backs of their necks.”

________________________________

©2011 C.D. Carter

Between his full-time job as an education reporter in Washington, D.C., and his freelance gigs for local magazines, C.D. Carter has written tales of the macabre for a host of horror publications, including Dark Moon Digest, Flashes in the Dark, SNM Horror, Static Movement, Lost Souls Magazine, and Death Head Grin. Much of Carter’s short-story horror is based on the life of a journalist in the big city, while others are musings that become, with a little, work, short stories. Carter credits his wife, Melissa, for green-lighting his best ideas, and telling him which stories should be buried and left for dead.

The part of Mariel Franco’s brain that had lied dormant, the part that would tell her to kill or be killed, was awake for the first time in her thirty years, and she liked it very much.

Among the firing synapses that preached survival at any cost was a thought, pulsating like a war drum.

 
Get to the compound, she thought over and over, like an incantation. Gotta get to the compound.

 
Like most modern brains, Mariel’s had never been triggered by the perpetual lumbering threats roaming her neighborhood. It’s funny, she thought, what two days cooped up in a pitch-black walk-in closet listening to the growling and footsteps of the freshly undead will do to brain chemistry.

 
Mariel Franco, a registered nurse, avid hockey fan, a sucker for kittens, pugs and baby otters, and a genuinely nice person, didn’t just want to survive in a mad dash from the closet to her car to the compound. She wanted to kill stuff – kill them.

 
Gotta get to the compound.

 
She had joked, over drinks andzombie movies with friends, that the gargantuan house – three houses fused to each other,actually – would make the perfect base in the case of a zombiepocalypse, asthey called it. It was funny back then; not so much now.

The unfolded metal hangers felt good in her hands; Mariel felt the blood run out of her knuckles when she clutched her weapons.

These former people, not quite dead and impossibly alive, had been clumping around her house for forty-eight hours. The undead, apparently, were terrible hunters – when they found the closet door locked, they just shuffled away. They stepped clumsily too, for which Mariel was grateful. She waited for one to approach the door.

Like a sprinter responding to the pop of a starting gun, Mariel heard the smack of an undead foot outside the door, and sprung forward. Before the door had swung all the way open, the clothes hanger was sunk three inches into the one remaining eye of a woman whose face had very little skin, and whose teeth grinned a skeleton’s smile.

It wailed. An ungodly noise pierced Mariel’s eardrums, so just for the annoyance of it all, she leaned back and kicked the thing in the chest. Her foot went right through. The woman-thing fell to pieces. That scream, somehow, continued.
 
Racing down the stairs now, both hangers were put to use as Mariel jammed them into the back of a man-thing’s neck. It shrieked and reached for its throat. Mariel grabbed the side of its head, tried to ignore the slime that covered it, and smashed its cranium into the stairway wall. It busted on impact.

 
Mariel’s hangers gouged into another undead thing’s neck at the front door. Flailing and screaming that god-awful screech, the thing – a teenage girl with blood-drenched blond highlights in her hair – swiped at Mariel and nicked her elbow. It hurt. Mariel heard herself scream. Then she punched the girl-thing in the nose, shattering it. It collapsed toward the open front door. Mariel put the thing’s head next to the doorframe and threw the heavy, wooden front door as hard as she could. This one burst like a piñata.

 
Gotta get to the compound.Gotta get to the…

 
Mariel, outside now, ran past her car when she saw the little red Civic flipped on its side, the undead rooting around for nothing in particular.
 
They spotted her, and when their sewage-green eyes met hers, she felt nothing but hatred. Mariel shifted throughher emotions, her nerve endings firing furiously, and confirmed that she was fear free.

 
She smiled.
 
But the odds of taking on a dozen undead, no matter how wide a grin, weren’t good, so Mariel took off toward the nearby county storage lot. Her legs were numb. She ran at a pace that alarmed her at first, then thrilled her. In two motions, she was over the county’s barbwire-less fence and running to the cache of snowplows. Mariel parted withher trusty clothes hangers, grabbed the snowplow door and yanked it open.

The plow’s key glinted from itsill-conceived hiding spot, tucked halfway into the driver side sun visor.

Gotta get to the compound.Gotta get to…

The hulking blue truck barreled through the fence a minute later, and after a few guesses, Mariel found the button that lowered the plow.

Mariel mowed down the undead if they were anywhere near the two-lane connector road she traversed. They shrieked,they ran from the purring snowplow, and they broke apart when the plow’s sharp edge hit them at forty miles per hour. Hot tears of laughter ran down Mariel’s face. It was quite possibly the most fun she had ever had.
 
That ended when the county’s snowplow, unused for six months, ran out of gas and sputtered to the roadside. She hopped out, and looking behind her, wished she had kept her unfolded hangers.

 A mob of undead shambled down theroad. One of them screamed with what sounded like excitement when Mariel disembarked the snowplow.

A hand waved from atop the middle part of the compound structure and once again, Mariel sprinted faster than she thought possible. The people-things picked up their pace – a few even ran. Mariel hadn’t known they could do that.

 
Gotta get to the compound.Gotta get…

Her legs’ piston-like pumping wasn’t enough. A hand squeezed her shoulder. Mariel, out of the corner of her eye that had been crying with laughter five minutes earlier, saw the yellowed, sagging face of a man without a nose and long gray hair flowing behind him.
 
Mariel didn’t even have time to slap the undead hand away. Something zipped past her head – she felt the wind on her cheek. The old man-thing’s scream was interrupted by the deep gargle of blood. A bullet had sliced directly through the center of his dirty green eyes.

More bullets flew from the compound’s rooftop, whizzing past Mariel and killing the starving fiends, if thatwas possible. Mariel ran harder now, and her eyes, once more, were brimming with tears, these of the joyous variety. Screaming bullets coming from one side,decomposing killing machines coming from the other, and Mariel Franco had never been happier.

 
She had gotten to the compound.
_________________________

©2011 C.D. Carter

Between his full-time job as an education reporter in Washington, D.C., and his freelance gigs for local magazines, C.D. Carter has written tales of the macabre for a host of horror publications, including Dark Moon Digest, Flashes in the Dark, SNM Horror, Static Movement, Lost Souls Magazine, and Death Head Grin. Much of Carter’s short-story horror is based on the life of a journalist in the big city, while others are musings that become, with a little, work, short stories. Carter credits his wife, Melissa, for green-lighting his best ideas, and telling him which stories should be buried and left for dead.