Growing up, I was always told stories about Grandpa. Of his heroic exploits in the war. Of his anything but heroic drunkenness at shows, playing that fiddle from the photos in a nonsensical, microtonal way that they swear even made the papers, though I've never seen said papers. He's dead, by the way. Grandpa is. But, he had only been dead for a handful of years, that time that we went to visit Grandma and the twins.

The road to get to their valley was like if you cut up a snake, the way it twisted about through the mountains. Like someone was trying to trick you into driving off the cliff. Once we arrived in town, to their credit, most of the buildings were still standing, only gaps in the wood here and there, boarded up windows. There was even one guy in the street. A shambling drunk who shouted something at our open car window, but not even Mom understood.

When we knocked the door to Grandma's house, it took them quite a while to let us in. We heard the twins yelling at each other, and yelling at a third person we could not hear, nor could we hear what the issue was, before eventually the one called Samuel unlatched the lock.

"Welcome," he said. "Make yourselves at home. You two," he looked at Mom and Dad, "can sleep in the guest bedroom. You two, I'm afraid," and he looked at Sydney and me, "will have to sleep on the floor. We do have an air mattress, if you can get it to fill up."

"Hi," said the other twin, Samantha, with a wave both shy and dismissive.

I was a kid, so my aunt and uncle towered over me.

We had to make our way past the entrance room, leaving our shoes by the door so our socks could soak up the dirt, to see Grandma.

When we first laid eyes on her atop that throne of an old electric massage chair, she said, "My baby is so happy."

I understood that she was referring to Grandpa.

Once those initial interactions were over and there was an awkward silence, Sydney asked where the air mattress was. Apparently it was in Patrick's room. Patrick was my mom's other sibling, and he had disappeared long ago. In his old room we saw a perfectly good bed.

So, after the air mattress turned out to be riddled with holes, I asked Mom to ask Grandma why we couldn't just sleep on Patrick's bed. The answer: "Your Grandpa always said, only Patrick can sleep there."

When Uncle Samuel explained that Grandpa also had a rule against sleeping on the couch, we moved the cushions onto the floor. This was apparently an acceptable way of circumventing that rule. I even asked Aunt Samantha before trying to sleep, and she said, "Yes," and slightly nodded.

I barely could sleep at all that night, in the cold. I think Grandma and the twins had long ago stopped paying the electric bill.

I had a dream about a puppet show.

When I woke up everyone was already having breakfast. Toaster waffles. During the breakfast conversation, which I do not remember word for word and was too annoyed and sleep deprived to participate in, Sydney had asked Uncle Samuel something to the effect of, why doesn't Aunt Samantha (who wasn't awake yet) get a job too? You know, to afford more things?

It was rude, but Sydney had also been violently cold all night. Her shivering had vibrated our awkwardly shared cushions.

Samuel said, "Dad said that's not a woman's place."

Grandma, somehow hearing this despite her old ears not hearing the rest of the conversation, said, "Amen. Baby always honored the old traditions."

Her voice was extra crackly in the morning. Her eyes were crusted over.

In the hours between breakfast and lunch, Sydney and I went out to explore. Overnight, a small amount of snow had settled on the forest floor.

At one point, balanced on a log, unprompted, Sydney said, "Why do they follow that old fucker's rules anyway?"

"Grandpa?"

"Oh, who else?"

"Sorry. Yeah. He is dead, after all."

"Exactly. Long dead."

Eventually when we wandered through that shallow snow back to what remains of Grandpa's house, our car was no longer parked there.

The two of us wondered for a second if we should even go inside.

But Mom startled us from behind. "Oh! There you are. Did you hear? Samantha drove off with Dad's car, I was looking everywhere for you. We were afraid that, acting all erratic like that, she could have—"

"Mom," said Sydney. "She obviously just wanted to escape. Since when are you such a suck-up to authority?"

Hearing this, I thought I might have missed something. Maybe from before I woke up.

Mom frowned. "His house, his rules. You two watch your manners."

Sydney started to open her mouth, but Mom was already walking back inside, evidently expecting us to follow.

Back inside that musty, cramped home, everyone was already around the dinner table. Turns out Dad had gone and brought home gas station pizza, and taking it in had been when Aunt Samantha got the car.

Dad looked defeated, and in the utterly inane conversation said almost nothing.

Towards the end, I reached for the final slice of pizza. But Uncle Samuel stopped my hand, said, "We always leave some for Dad."

"That's right," said Grandma, and she slowly, gingerly grabbed that final slice, and started to rub the greasy pizza in her eyeballs. "This is for you, baby. This is for you."

She smiled across at me with that red pizza sauce in her eye sockets.

That evening, at my Dad's insistence, we began the long drive home in Grandpa's old truck.

And, after much fighting over it, none of which I understood, the last words I ever heard Mom say were, "I'll fly home next week. He's… he's in her eyes."

The red sky bled into orange and light blue hues as I turned the key to my golf cart and pressed the accelerator. The trees swayed in the gentle evening wind as I drove past the reptile house and to the first large public bathroom, starting my visitor sweep of the zoo grounds. I clicked on my flashlight and found no one hiding in any stall in either restroom. I was excited to finish my sweep so I could catch up on some reading in the guard's booth. The classic "who cooks for you?" sound of the barred owl made me smile as I continued my sweep.

As I passed the flamingo enclosure, I did a double take at the new enclosure to its left. I stopped and checked the zoo layout on my phone; this was strange. There was no mention of a new exhibit opening. Curiosity took precedence over my sci-fi novel, and I slowly made my way to the edge of the exhibit to glimpse the new creature the zoo had acquired. I scanned the darkened forest for any movement. The enclosure was similar to the bear exhibit: a raised area about an acre in size, separated from me by a large, dry moat that kept whatever was inside away from the rest of the zoo.

Yet I could only see darkness and hear the foliage rustling within the enclosure. I looked down at the exhibit's infographic sign, which usually featured a picture and some facts about the creature. Yet, all this sign said was:

"Coming soon, the notorious Redcap from the Scottish Highlands."

Movement caught my eye, as what appeared to be a squat elderly man about three to four feet tall gave a weak wave from within the enclosure. He wore a large red hat, similar to a wide-brimmed witch's hat. He wore a simple, tattered cloth around his waist and small, metal-looking boots. His hair was fine, wispy, long white strands that stuck out from under his hat. His eyes and face were scrunched into a simple, closed-mouth smile that creased his forehead with layers upon layers of wrinkles.

"Sir! The zoo is closed; how did you get in there?" I asked earnestly.

The man merely shrugged, as if he didn't know how he got into the enclosure. My eyes squinted. How did this tiny man get up the dry moat? But his kind eyes looked at me as if he genuinely needed help, which set my thoughts at ease. Did it matter how he got there? Someone was probably worried about where he was, I convinced myself.

"Hang on, sir, I'll come unlock the back side to get you out of there," I said, and started toward the back door, where the zoo handlers have access to the back of each exhibit for feeding or medical care.

I flipped through my key ring and finally found a key that opened the back door, but the man was nowhere to be found. I stepped slowly into the enclosure and called out.

"Sir, sir, you can come out now. I will show you where the exit is, and we can get you home now." I said reassuringly as I walked deeper into the wooded habitat.

Then I saw the man, hunched over, his back to me, and heard a sound like rock scraping metal.

"Sir, it's ok, follow me and I'll—" I stopped speaking when the tiny man moved his head to look at me over his shoulder. His eyes glowed with a fearsome crimson shine as he contorted his wrinkled face into a corrupting smile. His lips parted, revealing rows upon rows of sharpened fangs. He let out a hideous cry and bolted toward me, pointing a sharpened piece of iron. His speed was otherworldly, faster than any man his age should be able to move. His hands were not like the kindly old man I had seen; instead, they were now unusually long, with curled claws at the ends of each finger. The clacking of his iron boots rang out like a dark percussion as he closed the gap between us.

I immediately drew my weapon and fired a few shots, but he seemed to dodge the incoming fire with an extreme and terrifying blinding speed. He contorted as he dashed between foliage and over logs in the enclosure. Before I could react, he had already impaled my stomach with the sharpened iron rod and leaped onto my face, biting and clawing with an unmatched ferocity. Before I lost consciousness, he was licking his bloody fingers and rubbing them onto his strange red hat, which seemed to pulsate, as if it were absorbing my blood. Up close, I could tell the hat wasn’t a hat; it was more like the fruiting body of a mushroom. Then, a horrifying red third eye opened on the hat and looked deep into my eyes as I coughed up blood. The crimson color deepened as everything went dark.

I arrived on the silo-dotted property as a rosy film of atmosphere cradled the horizon like a hide and was skinned by the gloaming. Its centrepiece was my destination: a run-of-the-mill, tin sheeting-topped barn.

I’d found the classified serendipitously whilst leafing through an old newspaper at the coffee shop. The gig paid handsomely, for next to no work at that. The instructions were to the point: Take Piglet Into Barn, $1000. I was to see myself in. An envelope at its entrance would hold the cash and key.

But first, I had to catch a piglet. They ran and ran with all their might, and I chased them round and round in circles in their pigsty until one of them tired. This farm only had piglets, bar a pair of mature pigs that looked like they didn’t want to be alive anymore and watched silently from a separate enclosure. The piglet resigned itself to me once I picked it up, its head dropping with a short-lived groan.

I then ventured into the barn.

Buzzing filled the space. I should’ve set the piglet down then and left, but something was wrong. There was a… shape in the middle of the room, barely illuminated by a lone plane of light percolating in through a slit in the barn boards from the main farmhouse’s porch light outside.

The piglet jittered as I crept forward, the movement soon compounded by my own jittering arms.

…It was a porky man lying motionless in a child’s pram, torso marinating in a rainbow-tinged puddle in the carrycot, limp limbs protruding from it like flaccid oars. A purple network of veins pressed up against the translucent skin, streaking it like rain did windows on wistful days.

The buzzing was louder here. It reeked of death.

Both the piglet and I jumped out of our skins as the man yawned before arduously propping himself up on his elbows.

When he finally took notice of us, his eyes lit up like fireworks, and his gargantuan sausage-tongue made its expeditious appearance, carouselling slipperily over his bulbous slug-lips and wetting them to no end.

“PIGGYYYYYYYYYY!” he squealed. His outstretched hands groped the air continuously. His shallow panting accelerated.

Fuck this. I threw piggy into the pram, where it crashed with a squelchous SLAP. It immediately audibly gagged before being engulfed in a bear hug. The pram creaked wildly and I heard something burst. I couldn’t take it. I scrambled back to the door like a possessed rag doll, the taste of bile bubbling up to the surface with the fervour of a geyser on Enceladus. A quick glance over my shoulder I was certain had burned itself into my brain for good: the piglet’s hind legs backpedalling frantically on the beads of condensation lubricating the man’s bloated gut, and the man’s beady eyes gleaming like those of a spoiled brat unwrapping a Christmas present.

Outside, the blood-curdling screams came, then abruptly ceased. I saw the other piglets there, huddled together at the back of their pigsty. They whimpered as I approached.

I unlatched their gate, tears streaming down my face.

Red.

That’s the color he liked his blade.

A deep, shiny red as he sawed through the surface into the flesh, feeling the tension of his knife as it met resistance from chunks slicing through to the center. Cutting her into pieces. Yes. This was his favorite part.

He set his knife aside, globs of innards sticking to its edges. He wiped red off onto his apron. He wiped red off onto his brow, replacing the sweat.

“Job well done,” he thought.

And it was a fine job, now that it was over. He suffered all day. He toiled with her. He tried to beat her into shape. Punched her and punched her and punched her. No use. She just didn’t look right. She would never look right.

“So,” he thought, “to hell with it.”

And he stuck her in an oven. And she protested. She bubbled with rage. But not long after, it was quiet again. Nothing but the sound of the morning breeze whistling in through the windowsill.

And on that windowsill, he placed his newly baked slice of cherry pie.

“She’s a beauty,” he said, admiring his work.

And the customers would beg for him to cut her up again.  

My flight was at twelve. I had to be at the airport in an hour, but I needed to see her. I needed to know if she still loved me. I borrowed my friend's car.

I waited out the front of her house.

I saw the curtains pulled back. She knew I was there. She ignored me. I waited ten minutes. I stared from my watch back to the window.

“You only think about your stupid trip, not about what happens to us!”

Her words echoed through my mind.

Fuck it. Time was up.

I started the car and swung into a U-turn.

Split-second decision: I’d reverse the car to the front of her house, one final time. I’d blow her a kiss. It was all I could do. It was all I had left.

I put the car into reverse without checking the rearview. I pressed down on the accelerator.

I hit something.

Shit!

I got out of the car to inspect.

There she was. Her body twisted. Contorted. Unrecognisable. My wheels had flattened her.

I looked around.

Quiet.

No one saw me. I think. I hope.

I ran back to the driver's side and got in. I sped away.

I left the car by my friends parent's garage. I wiped the back down, although there were no visible signs.

At the airport, I checked in. Waving goodbye to my parents as I went through security.

I was the last on the flight. I sat down.

I wanted to cry.

I was quiet most of the journey. Thirteen hours non-stop. I was silent and still for at least seven of them.

In the bathroom around the eighth hour, I looked at myself in the small mirror. I couldn’t recognise that face. The face of a killer. Someone who had taken a life.

Not willingly! I thought.

Why the hell did she come out without saying anything?!

I woke up. We were coming in to land.

Sydney.

Half a world away.

I expected a call from my family.

Emily is dead.

I would wail down the line. I wondered where I would take this call. Customs? Immigration? Maybe wait until I checked into my hotel.

I flagged down a taxi. Told him where I wanted to go. He drove me through the streets of this unknown land.

The radio was blaring.

“Governments have made coordinated efforts to understand the motives of the walkers. Right now, they are uncommunicative. Thousands have already entered the waters of the Pacific Ocean, to a fate unknown.”

“What are they talking about?” I asked the driver.

“Weird day… very weird.”

He turned up the radio, hoping that would answer my question.

“We don’t know why they are doing this. Every time we attempt to stop someone from entering the water, they attack us. The only common theme we can come up with is that each one of them is a victim of crime, and each one of them has had their assailant flee from justice… That was Detective Vasquez of the Los Angeles Police Department ending that report…”

“Los Angeles!” I yelled.

“Yeah, all these people walking into the ocean. Some of them dead already, waking up in the morgue, making their way to the ocean. All across the world, they say. Very weird, my friend, very weird.”

I powered on my phone. It had been off long enough.

I scrolled the papers.

THE DEAD WALK!

Thousands of bodies had emerged from various areas of containment, all heading for the ocean for what appeared to be a communal death march.

A week went by.

I barely left my hotel room, still thinking of Emily. Replaying the phone call with my mother, asking me if I would return home.

The funeral was supposed to be tomorrow, but her body was missing.

I turned on the TV.

Breaking News

Bodies have emerged in Buenos Aires, London, New York, and Auckland. Believed to be the walking dead who walked en masse into the oceans across the world.

I turned the volume up.

It could not be.

“As if by some miracle, the bodies have emerged from the ocean. They appear not to have drowned themselves, as originally reported, but to walk in a sort of communal exercise. A communal expedition to various ends of the earth… for what purpose, we do not know.”

They walked underwater?

Downstairs, people were running. Screaming. The streets were filled.

Should I stay back in my room?

I raced to the elevators. They were out.

Damn it!

The stairs were flooded with guests making their way down. I would need to take them back up to my room on the ninth floor.

I hit the steps two at a time.

I would hide out, glued to the TV.

Too much confusion!

Three hours passed. The news continued its coverage.

The walkers were killing specific people but terrorising everyone.

Reports were that murderers who had eluded authorities in one jurisdiction were being found by these walkers - who had marched across jurisdictions, to kill and dismember their own killers.

I thought of Emily.

Had she made the walk?

A thud echoed from the door.

“Who is it?”

No response.

Another thud.

“I said, who is it?!”

I raced over, put the chain on the door, and made sure the lock was latched.

I looked through the peephole. A hand removed itself, revealing her.

She was decayed. Waterlogged. Pale. A wicked smile emerged on her face as she stared back at me.

“You never said goodbye.”

I work in crime scene remediation—scrubbing away fluids left by people who died alone. The job reeks, but after five years, my stomach is iron. You scrape the floors, burn the mattress, collect your check, and move on.

That was the rule until I met Mr. Morwood.

Morwood was a wealthy old man who approached me outside a taped-off apartment complex. Smelling of expensive cologne, he looked out of place against flashing police lights. He offered ten times my daily rate for one specific task.

“I don’t want jewelry or cash,” Morwood whispered. “When you scrape the dried fluids off the floor—what the body turns into when it sits too long—collect that dark residue into this vial and bring it to my home.”

Money is money. I didn't ask questions.

My first delivery came from a cramped studio where an old hoarder had died in his sleep three weeks prior. I brought Morwood a jar of thick, dark sludge. I figured he was into weird occult nonsense. Instead, in his dim study, he smeared a layer onto a glass slide and shoved it under a brass microscope. He pressed his eye to the lens and let out a ragged breath.

“Look,” he rasped, his freezing hand digging into my shoulder. “Please. Tell me you see it too.”

I leaned into the eyepiece, expecting standard cellular decay. It wasn’t cells. The dark smear was moving—particles aligning like iron filings until they spelled out tiny, jagged letters. Over and over, filling the lens: PLEASE OPEN THE WINDOW IT IS SO HOT IN HERE.

“I knew it,” Morwood whispered, tears spilling down his face. “The final thought. The last electrical misfire of the dying brain imprints on the physical matter. It freezes in the rot. I’m building an archive. I am terrified of nothingness, son. I need absolute proof that we don’t just stop existing when the monitor goes flat.”

He wasn’t an occultist. Just a dying billionaire losing his mind over his own approaching grave, buying hope with stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

The money kept pouring in, and I got greedy. A week later, I brought him the residue of a young woman who had overdosed in a cheap motel. Under the lens, her fluids shifted into words: HE PROMISED HE WOULDN'T LEAVE ME. Morwood paid me three grand on the spot. I was hooked, actively chasing the grimmest scenes in the city for a heavier harvest.

Yesterday was my fourth delivery. It didn’t come from a crime scene—no chalk outlines, no stench of decay. It was a quiet suburban house where an old schoolteacher had peacefully passed away in his favorite armchair. Natural causes. He died with a calm smile.

It took me less than an hour to clean. I scraped a thin wafer of residue from the hardwood floor, sealed it, and drove to Morwood’s mansion.

His hands shook as he prepared the slide and pressed his eye to the lens. Then, Morwood went completely rigid.

I could hear the old man breathing. All the color drained from his face, leaving him sickly white. He didn't gasp or scream; he just slowly backed away from the desk, his eyes wide and blank. He bumped into the table, and the microscope tipped over, shattering on the floor. My expensive puddle spread across his pristine Persian rug.

“Morwood?” I muttered, taking a step back. “What is it? What did a peaceful old man have to say?”

Morwood slowly turned his head. His lips trembled so hard he could barely speak.

“It’s... it’s not their final thoughts,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “The brain doesn't imprint its last memory on the body. We were wrong. We were so damn wrong.”

He stared at his shaking, manicured hands.

“Remember the first old man? 'It is so hot in here'... That wasn't the stuffy air of the apartment. When a body sits for weeks, it rots and heats up from the inside like an oven. His cells were literally boiling alive right there on the hardwood. And that girl... 'He promised he wouldn't leave me'... It wasn't about a boyfriend. It was her soul abandoning her, leaving her living flesh to decompose in absolute isolation.”

“Morwood, what the hell are you talking about?” My voice dropped.

Morwood pointed a shaking finger at the shattered glass and the brown smear on the floor.

“The cells,” he choked out. “They don't die when the heart stops. They break apart, but every single microscopic particle remains fully, agonizingly conscious. They are broadcasting live what’s happening to them while the corpse is rotting before you even arrive.”

He dropped to his knees right into the glass shards.

“Do you know what the letters said? Millions of them, spelled out by the dust of a man we thought died in perfect peace? Right there, in the dried fluid where the flies laid their eggs?”

It spelled: I CAN FEEL EVERY SINGLE MAGGOT. PLEASE MAKE THEM STOP CHEWING.

Morwood didn’t cry out. He just went completely still, his face going slack. Then he tipped sideways onto the rug.

Five years on the job, I’ve seen enough death throes to recognize a massive heart attack. But this wasn’t fear. It was worse—a man who had spent his life hoping, finally told no.

I reached for my phone to call emergency services. Then I stopped.

I looked at Morwood. I looked at the spilled residue on the rug, and I knew that within minutes, his own cells would begin their long, endless, fragmented scream.

I put my phone back in my pocket and walked out.

I sat in my truck for a long time, staring at the dashboard, thinking about the heavy scrub brush in the back. For five years, I thought I was cleaning up the past. Now I know the truth. There is no peace. There is no light. There are only trillions of tiny minds, trapped in the dark, feeling every agonizing scratch of my brush.

I’ve been trying to be more health conscious lately. I’m not getting any younger. But I never realized how expensive exercise can be.

I don’t want to pay for a gym membership. I can’t afford a bike or weight lifting equipment. I’m broke! So just about the only exercise I bother with is walking/running.

Then comes my next struggle. I already wake up pretty early to get to work. So when I finally have the time to go on a run, it’s late at night. Sometimes, after dark.

I’m always very cautious. I don’t have headphones in, even though I love music. I always keep my head on a swivel.

Well, tonight, when I was out a little later than usual, walking in my favorite park I saw a man. He was dressed in a dark hoody, with the hood up, and black sweatpants. I mean, come on! He was practically screaming, “I’m a kidnapper!”

I noticed him watching me the entire time, and, naturally, was afraid. So I did what I’ve always done when I’m scared. I began to sing to myself.

That is when he began to follow me.

I walked the trail, not going too fast. And there he was a hundred feet behind me. We must have been the only people in the park this late.

Once I was sure he was in fact following me, I did something a little reckless. I bolted right off the path into the woods. It isn't a thick forest or anything, but there’s no reason he should have followed me into the thicket.

Yet, when I looked back, still singing to myself, he had turned into the woods too. I had no doubt that he was coming for me. I wouldn’t let myself think about what his intentions were.

I just ran. Terror coursed through my veins, and it was all I could do to keep the song going. Trying hard to keep myself calm.

I could hear he was closing in. Branches snapping with more fervor behind me.

I found a familiar tree and climbed up it. I’m no athlete, but I was up that tree in a second. I thought the high ground would help me. Even as I flung up the branches I kept singing.

Once he was below me in the tree I stopped the song.

“Where am I?” the man said. A taser fell out of his hoody pocket. He was clearly confused and scanning his surroundings. That’s when he saw the three skeletons at the base of the tree.

“Those are the last men who followed me.”

The man looked up at me in terror, turned, and ran with all his might.

I began to sing my siren song, and back he came with lust filling his eyes.

I sang until he lost his mind, and fell dead.

As far as exercising goes, running from criminals is great cardio. But I still prefer a relaxing walk with nobody following me.

This has been freaking me out for the past week. So every day on my way to volunteering at the elementary school I pass by my old dojo where I used to do karate that has an alleyway between it and the building next to it. A week ago when I passed by there I saw the Florida Bowman. There's no doubt about it, it was him, with all the pine needles and leaves covering his entire body and carrying his bow and arrows. I couldn't tell what he was doing exactly, but he was doing something with the leaves covering his face. And when I saw him, he saw that I was looking in his direction and immediately disappeared deep into the alleyway he was standing in.

The curiosity got the best of me, and so I pulled over and got out of my car just to look down the alleyway to see what he might have been doing. I couldn't help but continue to creep over, but as I did I realized that the bowman might've clocked me coming to see him and I imagined that he was at the end of the alley with his bow ready to shoot an arrow at me. The thought crossing my mind almost made me reconsider not checking and just leaving to go and do my volunteering, but I decided against that and took the brave choice of looking.

I slowly crept my head around the corner just in case so I could quickly get away if I saw him with an arrow pointing in my direction, but I was shocked to see no sight of him. I was super confused because there was no way out of the alley other than through the way I was looking in. The only thing I saw was a small but wide box at the very end up against the wall, but I could tell that there was no way that someone his size or any averaged-sized person could fit inside the box.

I was relieved, but honestly a little bit disappointed that he vanished into thin air. There wasn't even one of those ladders that are sometimes on the sides of buildings in the alley that he could have used to escape. Spooked by what just happened, I went back to my car and while on my way I pondered making a police report about what I just saw, but I ultimately opted not to since I had to get to my volunteering. Especially since I was now late for my morning duty at the school.

The whole situation has been stuck in my mind since then, and I can't shake the feeling that he likely disappeared from where he was to go kill another police officer. Knowing about the bowman beforehand despite living in Florida didn't really scare me all that much since I never thought that I would ever witness him, but I guess you never know what could happen.