I got yer Tufo here! Tufo, Tufo, Tufo! Get it while it’s hot…cause the temperature, she is dropping.
Through My Baby’s Eyes
Mark Tufo
PART 3
“Rachel? Is that you? Come here, you’re really creeping me out if that’s you.” Rachel wasn’t past a good practical joke but she wouldn’t get up this early to pull one off. Definitely not 3:33 am, I looked back to the microwave clock. It had yet to dawn on me that this was the exact time I’d awoken to get the baby. Not normally a big deal, clocks are always off by a few minutes within any normal household. This wasn’t a normal household though, not when it came to the time. Rachel was obsessed to the point where medication may have been a good idea. Once a week she would reset each clock and make sure they were all at the same time. She would say time is too precious to waste. Once I had responded and told her she was wasting time making sure all the clocks were the same. That didn’t go over so good. I let her compulsion continue unhindered from there on out.
Rachel did not come out of the shadows but that didn’t stop Jared, his gaze was darting around the room like he was watching a group of swallows swoop and rise.
“Something sure is interesting to you isn’t it.” I was looking at the same vantage point as he was. I thought (hoped) it was my shadow playing along the wall or something as inane as that. “Alright this is crazy let’s just get you fed so I can get back to sleep and dream crazy stuff not live it.”
I went to pick him up, I noticed a tiny reflection in his left eye go from right to left. I spun quickly with him in my hands. Whatever it was, it was fast and it was gone.
“What the hell?” If I thought a finger of fear had ran up the length of me before this was an entire palm print now. “This is just the effects of sleep deprivation Mercury just keep your shit together.” I was physically shaking, fear had rooted itself deep into my psyche and it wasn’t going to release itself any time soon. “This another legacy of yours, dear old dad?” When my father had passed on his genetic material to create me, he had also passed on some of the poisoning in his blood, I’d suffered from various medical conditions my entire life, had I in turn passed this legacy on? The doctors had assured us this would not be the case, but they didn’t call it ‘practicing medicine’ for nothing. Was what I thought a figure behind me actually a mote on Jared’s eyes? My heart sank to think of the conditions he might have to go through as he grew up. It was a short-lived concern.
Jared was pulling on my shirt trying to get his head up over my shoulder, he was looking at something again. For a moment it looked like we were ballroom dancing as I would continually spin around looking to find what he was actually seeing. Not once did I ever catch a glimpse, Rachel was fast but not this fast and even our cat Patches when she was alive wasn’t this quick. She’d died the summer before, choked on a cherry pop-tart of all things. We found her after visiting Rachel’s parents for the day, the tinfoil packet had been dragged out of the pantry and torn into. More likely she died from the foil I suppose, although the cherry flavor could have done her in as well.
I stopped twirling when I began to feel light-headed and there was a good chance the both of us were going to end up on the floor. I decided to instead stare into Jared’s eyes, the images were still there and actually began to take on definition, these were no motes, or a stray hair in his field of vision, he was seeing something and I was watching him do it. At first it was one incredibly thin tall man, he was immediately flanked by two smaller and even thinner figures so thin in fact it was difficult to call them humanoid. My chest felt like it had been shoved in a vise and someone was slowly cranking the handle placing more and more pressure against my chest. Adrenaline thudded through my veins I could feel it chugging through my system like a runaway train. The reflections were getting bigger, meaning they were getting closer. I resisted with every fiber of my being from turning around, I was certain that to do so would have them manifest themselves into my reality and I could not allow that.
Jared’s cooing stopped as the figures got closer, their approach from wherever they were coming from was much greater than the fifteen feet it would have taken to traverse the kitchen. How far would a demon travel to gather up a soul or two? I heard a splatter on the floor, I looked down to see that a large puddle of blood had accumulated, with my free hand I touched my face, my nose was bleeding profusely. I couldn’t have cared less, my only worry was that I might potentially slip in it when I tried to get us as far away from this portal of evil as possible.
I pulled my gaze away from the pool of red lined with a silvery substance to look back into my baby’s eyes. It was too late, the shadow man had come close enough that his face had begun to take definition, although to call that asymmetrical scarred assemblage of human parts a face was like calling a spider a swan. The face came to rest over my right shoulder, when that cavernous mouth wrought with black pearl nails for teeth opened and yawed I don’t know what happened first, the snapping of my mind or the stopping of my heart beat. Rachel found me the next morning dead on the kitchen floor I had been clutching the nursery blanket I would have wrapped Jared in had he not been a still born.
* * * * *
The stench of frozen rotted meat is in the air! Welcome to the Winter of Zombie Blog Tour 2014, with 10 of the best zombie authors spreading the disease in the month of November.
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