The Odium of Fear Actualized

Posted on Mon Apr 8th, 2024 @ 4:15am by Killian Sutton & Calista Sutton
Edited on on Mon Apr 8th, 2024 @ 8:55pm

1,188 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Winter is Coming
Location: Outside Bangor, Farmhouse
Timeline: 5 September 2010 - 3:15 a.m.

Calista and Killian had spent the night on the first floor taking turns sleeping on the couch. Whatever the noise had been the night before, they hadn't been able to find a new set of batteries for the flashlight, nor had they been able to find flame for the oil lamp. It was just too dark in the crowded farmhouse to find anything useful.

They had found some cans of tuna to eat that thankfully had pull tabs on them, and some jars of jelly which would have been great on toast or bread of any kind if they hadn't been able to find anything that wasn't seemingly deformed.

Killian had taken the first shift guarding, so now it was Calista that was sitting on the edge of the small chair near the front door. They had closed up the doors in the middle of the night when the temperature had started falling drastically. While they had found one blanket on the back of the couch, it wasn't enough for the both of them, especially since one of them had to stand guard in case something shambled its way into the farmhouse or down the stairs from the things that went bump the night before.

Now that the sun was starting to rise, the sky was lightening every so slowly for the last couple of minutes. She knew that the sunrise would be imminent and would allow them to find the things that they were not able to find the night before.

She started looking around and opened up the front door again to get a slight breeze through the lower portion of the house. While she had partially started to become nose blind to the putrid smells, it was starting to build up again to the point that she was becoming ever so nauseous.

The front door creaked as she opened it and that made Killian bolt from the awkward position he was in on the small love seat type sofa in the front room there. "Everything okay?" he asked, quietly, tired etched the edges of his whispered voice.

"Yeah, just smells," she said as she finished propping the front door open so it wouldn't move again. She hadn't wanted it to creak so loudly and blamed the moisture from the rain the day before, and the night chill that took everything over.

He stretched as he stood. "Looks like dawn is coming," he said quietly.

"Hoping to find more food and figure out where the other items were that we were looking for last night, and then when the sun is up we can go figure out what's going on upstairs so that maybe we can find a safe haven for a couple of days to hatch out a new plan. I don't think we're going to get this lucky all the way back home," she commented quietly as he came over to hug her.

"I agree," he said, kissing her head gently. "We can't stay here, and if this is the worst thing that it could be, then we definitely want to get on the high ground or in a group of stable people that we could make camp with until we can get to where we need to go."

She leaned hard into him. "I wish that we hadn't lost the car. We'd have been able to get out of Maine at least if not down to Massachusetts before the car ran out of gas."

"We don't know that. We may have made it further or shorter. We're out of our element without our technology to drive us, and we lost our map with losing our car. All we can do is general geography and stay away from the populated areas. Let's go figure out what's going on upstairs, shall we?"

"Did you want to wait for the sun to rise?" she asked with a bit of trepidation in her voice.

Shaking his head he looked down at his wife. He was as scared as she seemed to be, but knew that it was smarter this way. "I think it's best that we go up now, before the sun wakes whatever is up there. This will give us a bit more of an element of surprise."

She grabbed the heavy flashlight and handed it to him and then took out her hatchet from the bag by the door, staged in case they needed to bolt in the middle of the night.

Killian took the flashlight as he didn't want to use what he had in his bag unless it was an emergency. This was at least good enough to bludgeon someone if he needed too.

They took the stairs quietly. Some of them creaked under their footfalls but for the most part it had been quiet as they crept upstairs to find out the source of the noise. There were four doors. One of them was open, and looked to be a bathroom with a small skylight and and window on the opposite side. Nothing seemed to be lurking there.

One of the doors was quiet narrow and would probably be a laundry closet, Killian thought, that left two other doors: one on the left, and one on the right.

He pointed to the right door first, as that seemed to have been where the noise had been the night before. He turned the knob as quietly and slowly as he could. Raising the heavy flashlight as the door opened. a black shadow bolted between his legs twirling him around.

Calista stiffled a cry out when she saw the small black cat darted between her husband's leg. She was about to scream when the realization had come out and was able to recover with enough time to swallow the scream.

Opening the door further, Killian stopped and dropped the flashlight on the floor. There on the bed in the room was what was an elderly lady, well what used to be one. He stopped Calista from coming forwards. "Nothing to be worried about. You don't want to see this," he said turning to block her vision of the half eaten face of the decaying body.

The room had definitely been the main source of the putrid smell in the house. Calista had stopped as Killian had stopped her and her very empty and hungry stomach was no longer wanting food and wanted to throw up again.

She joined the black cat down the stairs and slid open the slider to get the air into the house, leaving her husband to deal with whatever was up there.

Killian had walked in to the room after he verified that his wife had left to open to the two windows, one on each of the two walls on the other side of the corner bedroom. it would allow some of the smell to get out of the house. He definitely was going to go and find a shovel in the garage or at the barn to put her to rest as that was the only right thing for them to do having crashed there the night prior.

 

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