Has everybody been having a good Horror Month so far? Got your costumes ready? Not to brag, but mine’s been ready since September. Yeah, I’m cool.

Creeping and crawling our way through the spooky season, I’m sure we’re all having a great time eating up as much horror media as possible. I know I am. So, why not eat up some more of my horror?

That’s right folks, I’ve got some more flash that none of you asked for!

This one was originally intended to be another Fusion Flash like the other week, but it morphed into something else while I was writing it, so this is just some good ol’ horror. It’s a little similar to something I wrote two weeks ago, a flash piece I called Stephen Is Okay, but this one is a slightly different flavor, I think. But hey- if Stephen King can write 40 books where the main character is a writer from Maine, I can write two flash pieces about combat trauma.

Choke

I blinked, and the ground beneath me seemed to shudder, almost throwing me off my feet.

I managed to steady myself as the scene around me began to take form. I figured this had to be the final test, or at least close to it. Dr. Jenks had promised nothing in here could actually hurt me, that it was all a product of the simulation being plugged into my head.

But the bleeding slash in my left tricep suggested otherwise. It stung like hell.

The pixels of the simulation finished loading, and I looked out upon a…

Wait, really?

A house. At night. The windows were broken and boarded over, weeds grew thick in the yard. The front door gaped halfway open, crooked on broken hinges. The roof on one side was caved in, moonlight streaming in through the splintered opening.

“Jenks,” I said, eyebrows raised. “Did you load the wrong simulation? This is a… a fuckin’ haunted house.”

Jenks’s voice came down on me from nowhere and everywhere, his words projected into my mind from his computer hookup. “This was not an error, Leon.”

I blew out a short laugh. “Jenks, I thought we were testing the injection. Superhuman reflexes, and all that?”

“That’s right, Leon,” the doctor said patiently. “But increased reflexes and a heightened combat ability aren’t the only valued attributes of our potential supersoldier. You also need to be able to face fear and overpower it.”

“You might want to change your simulation then. I’m not afraid of ghosts.”

“What makes you think ghosts are my test for you?”

I had no response to that, and Dr. Jenks spoke no more. I could almost feel him watching me on his screens, waiting for me to start moving.

I shrugged. If he wanted to waste time on something goofy like this, it wasn’t my concern. I was just his lab rat.

The rotting porch steps creaked as I climbed them, my army-issue combat boots thunking down loudly in the quiet echo of the empty night. My KA-BAR rested assuredly on my belt, the only weapon I had been allowed for these tests. The goal was to create a soldier that would require the barest of resources to inflict the most damage.

So far, I had demolished everything set in my path. A haunted house was a joke. During my deployment, I’d seen kids blown up in the streets in Afghanistan, seen starving toddlers gnawing on dismembered limbs for sustenance.

Nothing scared you after seeing things like that.

I passed through the frame of the front door and stepped inside the house.

I looked around, inspecting the bleak interior. It was a very detailed simulation, and it had covered every sense. Well, except taste. But I wasn’t about to try licking anything in here.

The bottom floor of the house was all one room, mold-covered couches and shattered wooden tables scattered across the floor. A woven rug stained with chunky blood lay gathering dust in the center of the room. In fact, everything was coated in dust. I sneezed despite myself.

He really thought of everything, I marveled. The previous tests had been good simulations, but they hadn’t contained this level of detail.

I suddenly realized I could smell the reek of this place.

It was a sickly sweet stench, and I recognized it at once. The rich, cloying stench of rotting bodies. I knew it well.

It brought me back in my memories for just a moment. The compound we’d sent nerve gas into three days before. We’d had to wait until the area was safe, since there was a supply order mixup and we didn’t have any masks. Three days those people had been dead in there, rotting in the heat of the desert climate. By the time we swept through, looking for guns, information, communications, they were bloated and various shades of green, purple, or blue. The air was full of their dying bowel excretions, the smell of their sweet rot. Many of them still had their eyes open, and glassy though they were, I felt they tracked my movements through the rooms like the goddamned Mona Lisa.

The smell in this simulation, in Jenks’s stupid haunted house, was the exact same smell. Like he’d plucked it out of my memories and dropped it in his little funhouse.

The memories turned my skin cold and clammy. I felt my heart speed up, even faster than its 200bpm it’d been pumping since the injection. There was a weird sensation that was like my stomach dropping down to the floor, like when a plane first leaves the ground.

“Jenks,” I called out, straining to keep my voice light and free of tremors. “This is ridiculous. Let’s do a real test now. Give me another tank to disable or something.”

 Jenks didn’t respond. That bastard.

“You really want to waste all this money on some stupid kiddie-“

I stopped as the words died in my mouth.

One of the moldy couches about ten feet to my left seemed to shudder and breathe, like the cushions were coming to life. It was dark, the only light was the moonlight streaming in through the destroyed windows. It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing.

Lifting itself from the couch was a girl. The girl. The one I’d found in the women’s room in that compound we gassed.

She’d been curled into a ball. Her sweet, dead stench had filled the room, clinging to the white linoleum. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, and she wore sensible pumps and a long skirt.

Just some secretary or assistant, she’d been. Just at work, like every other day. She might not have even known she worked for terrorists. She’d been fixing her makeup in the bathroom one minute, then gassed to death the next.

When I had nightmares of that sweep, it wasn’t the rotting terrorists that followed me, asked me why I’d killed them, even though I hadn’t been the one to set the gas.

It was that girl. Just a secretary.

And here she was, twenty years later, still dead and bloated when she should’ve been only dusty bones. She peeled herself off the moldy couch and lifted her head, a filthy hijab stained with old vomit holding her hair in its embrace.

This can’t be part of the simulation, I thought. Jenks never heard about the secretary in the bathroom. There’s no possible way he’d know about her.

She was real. A real ghost. Not a simulation.

I choked on the air in my lungs, stumbling backward. I reached for the door, but just as the old doorknob was in my reach, it swung closed on its own with a resounding boom, the crooked hinges suddenly straight.

I turned back to the girl. She was on her feet now, and her glassy eyes were trained directly on me.

Then tears rolled down her rotting green cheek, the craters of flesh eaten away catching the salty liquid as it rolled into them.

“Why did you kill me, Leon?” she rasped, her voice thick with the fluid of her rotting insides.

I stood frozen, helpless, paralyzed. I could barely respond.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

Then she was standing before me. My eyes were pulled to hers, the fuzzy haze that had fallen over her irises, obscuring their chocolatey brown hue, boring into my own eyes, which were stinging with the tears of utter terror.

“I choked on your poison,” she said, her voice bubbling up through her throat as if from underwater. “Now you will choke.”

And then her hands were on my throat, and I could feel the wet, sticky skin melting from her decaying fingers as she choked me, and I only stood there, completely immobile. First there was pressure in my lungs, then I began to panic. Pain took over, and I felt something in my throat snap under the unearthly pressure of her horrible fingers. Her head twitched to one side and her rotting hijab came unwrapped, falling to the floor, exposing a nest of dense black hair that crawled with a lively nest of maggots. Some fell, catching in the long tresses of her newly freed hair.

My stomach turned itself inside out, and I would’ve vomited if my throat wasn’t being crushed shut by those dead hands.

“Choke,” she rasped, and the breath that came from her mouth, so close to me now, smelled like every graveyard in the world combined together. My eyes watered and more vomit climbed its way up my throat, only to be stopped by her vice-grip hands, like a kink in a hose.

Then my air truly ran out, and I was gone.

#

I didn’t notice the state Leon was in at first.

I’d been too busy pounding my fists on my keyboard. My visual feed had gone black as soon as Leon entered my haunted house. I knew smashing another keyboard to pieces wouldn’t bring the display back, but I was enraged. Leon was the first to test this new simulation, and now I had been blinded for some reason.

Eventually, the smell caught my attention. It was coming from Leon, still seated in the testing chair.

Green and orange vomit leaked slowly from the corners of his mouth. His face was blue, as if he’d been choking on it, but he wasn’t moving.

“Leon!” I shouted, then pressed the intercom button on my desk phone. “This is Dr. Jenks. I need medical in the sim lab, now!”

I didn’t wait for a response. I jumped up from my chair, knocking it loudly to the floor in my haste to get to Leon.

I quickly unstrapped the harness that held him in place, ripping the sim diodes from his skull. His body sagged as it lost the support of the harness, and I wrapped my arms around him, taking his weight onto me.

I lowered him out of the chair and down to the lab floor, where I laid him on his side, like one was supposed to do to seizing patients so they didn’t choke on their vomit.

But Leon wasn’t seizing. He was still.

“Leon?” I whispered in fear and horror.

With a shaking hand, I lifted two fingers and placed them on his neck, feeling for a pulse.

I felt nothing.

But I saw something. Under my fingers. Blue and purple blotches.

They lined his neck, and I could clearly make out the shapes of fingers.

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I know it’s not the most amazing thing ever, but it felt good to write. Nothing like some good rot to get the stomach churning.

Thank you for reading, and happy Horror Month!

Veteran Crisis Line: Call 988 and press 1. Combat trauma is real, and PTSD is real. If you’re a veteran suffering from the effects of PTSD or anxiety, know that you aren’t alone and your experience matters.

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