Forever After

6


Daytime television, where the banal, the pointless and the idiotic combine to create a torrid and unmemorable concoction of watered down humanity that isn’t fit to show to those who choose their TV time.

Angela Washington loved it. She loved the mindlessness of it all. The topics unfit for human consumption that became fantastical during the day when all the kids were at school and she could stand and do the ironing whilst looking down, in her own modest and introverted way, on those worse-off and less intelligent than her. It made her smile, even when she had nothing to do but housework, and that was the most important thing.

When the doorbell sounded she was still smiling. She put down the iron, still fizzing a vapored dragon breath into the already humid living room; untied her apron, tainted with trails of flour and eggs from cakes currently rising in the oven; checked her appearance in the mirror above the fireplace, flicking a saturated stray hair from her forehead; and went to answer the door, humming happily to herself.

She wasn’t expecting anyone but had a few friends and neighbours that liked to drop by unannounced.

Through the peephole she could see two figures standing at the door, their height and size seemingly uniformed. She sighed, anticipating salesmen or Jehovah's witnesses. She opened the door regardless, deciding it was too late to rudely turn her back, having exposed her silhouette through the smeared glass in the door panel.

The men at the door were wearing black suits, black ties, black shirts and black tinted sunglasses. Their arms were folded behind their backs in a formal manner.

“May I help you, gentlemen?” She couldn’t see any briefcases, bags or leaflets, but also couldn’t see their hands. Nor could she gather their intentions from their blank stares.

“Angela Washington?” One asked.

“Yes,” Angela answered politely.

The two men exchanged a blank stare and then looked back at Angela -- her left hand still lightly grasped the door frame, her right toyed with the back of her tight ponytail.

“May we come inside?” Two wondered.

Angela swapped a stare between the two men. “Why?” she inquired with a hint of curiosity.

“We have a few things we need to discuss,” he replied.

Angela ducked her head in between them and threw a gentle wave to her neighbour across the street, passing by with his small Jack Russell tugging mentally on the lead two feet in front of him. He threw a wave back and hollered a friendly greeting.

The two men watched the neighbour closely, only turning back to Angela when he had escorted the dog down the driveway and was trying to usher him into the house.

“What are you trying to sell?” Angela asked courteously.

They exchange a look again. The man on the right, the first to speak, turned around to make sure the neighbour had vanished inside with his ferrety canine.

He turned back. “Salvation,” he said darkly.

The curiosity on Angela's face trebled, there was barely a smile left to supplement her Stepford charm.

They stepped forward as one, pushing Angela back and barging roughly into the house. They slammed the door shut behind them and took up parallel positions in front of it.

Angela stumbled backwards across the hallway, almost losing her balance. She looked concerned. Her eyes were alive with terror.

“What do you want?” she begged. The fear was evident in her trembling voice; the smile had been wiped clean off her face.

“Your soul.”

They both produced pistols and whipped them in front of her. Aiming the menacing barrels at her tearful face.

She backed up until her ankles were restrained by the bottom step of a narrow staircase. “I don’t understand,” she trembled with quivering lips. She looked from gun to gun, barrel to barrel, dead face to dead face, horrified at what she saw.

There was a moment’s hesitancy in both men, they looked ready to pull the triggers but they paused, keeping the guns aimed at the shaking homemaker.

“Angela Washington?” One asked. “Aged forty-five. Housewife. Divorced. Three kids?”

“Yes! Yes!” Angela cried, throwing her hands into the air in maddening desperation. “What do you want? Please, what do you want from me?”

“I guess we were expecting a little more…” One replied, trailing off.

Angela was hysterical. “A little more?” she asked, something other than hysteria and fear crept into her voice and onto her face. Her trembling body became rigid; her frightened face took on a different emotion.

The two men looked at each other.

“Hair?” one of them asked.

The other nodded in agreement.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Angela screamed.

Again the intruders exchanged stares. This time they lowered their weapons and for a moment their concentration waned into curiosity.

“You think we’ve made a mistake?” One wondered softly.

Before Two could answer the question posed by his doppelgänger Angela launched herself at them both. Her face had been transformed in its entirety, the smiling mother of three was now a snarling animalistic killer bent on blood.

Her neatly arranged sparkling white teeth were hideously large, protruding through her snarling lips like the serrated edge on an unsheathed knife. Vicious claws, capable of opening a man like a tin can, dominated her delicate hands, hands that merely moments ago were baking cakes and ironing clothes.

She tackled one of the intruders, wrestling him violently to the floor, his head and back slammed against the carpeted foundation. His lungs heaved out every inch of air under Angela’s powerfully body which transformed by the second.

With a jaw still protruding from her neck as if being inflated from behind, she tried to take a bite out of his throat, succeeding only in tearing the fabric from his suit as he twisted away. He grasped her by the shoulders and tightened his grip on her flesh, but he could feel it growing in his palm, getting strong and stronger with each passing moment.

His hands slipped from her flesh, his body yielded against her sudden strength. She growled in excitement, a snarling hungry glimmer in eyes that still appeared human, but glowed with a monstrous radiance. She opened her mouth, eyed his throat and dove in for the kill.

A hissing sound preceded a barely audible thump and the beast jolted to a rigid stop, stuck atop the fallen intruder like a rigid cowboy on a beaten horse. A torrent of blood issued forth from an exit wound in the torso of the she-beast, spraying over the spectacled face of man in the black suit -- his sunglasses shielding the viscous crimson from his eyes.

The thing that had been Angela Washington jerked violently on the straddled man. She coughed a splutter of blood from her fearsome jaw, wheezed through damaged lungs, shuddered as her life-force spat out of every muscle, and then slumped forward, eclipsing the man beneath her.

There was a struggle, then Two managed to pull himself free, tossing Angela aside like a hefty, sluggish rag-doll. His colleague stood above the crumpled, muscular figure with his gun still raised.

“That was close,” Two said, scooping globs of blood from his face and flicking them onto the floor. The blood left a sickly sheen on his hand which he wiped onto the seat of his trousers with a grimace.

“Very,” One agreed. He lowered the gun that had blown a hole straight through Angela’s chest.

“Messy as well,” Two added, removing his sunglasses and using his sleeve to clear the sickly smears from the rims.

“I had no other choice.”

“You could have pushed her off first.”

One shrugged. “Perhaps,” he said unconvincingly. “I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted.”

“Send me the dry cleaning bill.”

“Will do.”

They stepped back and peered at the corpse. It was still recognisable as human, but only just. The transformation had been quick but it hadn’t finished, parts of Angela remained. Her stomach, partially clad with fragments of a pink blouse that her growing torso had all but destroyed, wasn’t hers but nor was it that of a beast. Her ears, hair and forehead had retained the style of the attractive single parent.

Angela twitched, still holding onto the last remnants of life. Her killers didn’t flinch.

“How long does it take for these things to fully transform do you think?” One asked as he surveyed the mismatch of human and beast.

Two shrugged unsurely. “We were warned they could turn quickly but beyond that...” he trailed off.

“You think we could bring down a fully formed one?”

“With those?” Two said, nodding to the gun in One’s hand. “Sure. Silver bullets seem to be working so far.”

“And if we run out?”

“Wooden stake?”

“Isn’t that vampires?”

Two shrugged his shoulders. “I’m sure we’d figure something out.”

“We could try normal bullets, see how they react,” One proposed.

“To what end?”

“I guess I just want to know.”

“And if they don’t work and keep coming? How are we going to stop them before they rip us apart?”

One thought about this for a moment and then shrugged. “Just a thought.”

Two removed a device from his chest pocket. He wiped away a drop of blood that had worked its way onto the screen.

Angela writhed, groaning in agony. Her body tried to transform and let go at the same time.

“Come on,” Two said. “We better finish up.”