Death Shadows: The Flesh Eaters of Skid Row

By K.G. Godel

On a sunny morning three homeless residents of an abandoned industrial park discover the corpse of a man lying on the pavement with a notebook of strange physics formulas. To the horror of the surviving witness, touching the remains causes two of them to instantly disintegrate into skeletons, their flesh chewed off the bone in seconds. Soon, a pair of drug dealers, two prostitutes and their pimp, three college students, a real estate agent and his assistant, and other vagrants of the inner city slum converge on the desolate territory and make the terrible discovery that they cannot leave. Any attempt to cross the shadows that ring the outermost boundary of the city block leads to instant death, for invisible monsters lurk in the absence of light along the decrepit buildings and fences, devouring those who try to flee.
To add to their dread, they only have until the setting of the sun to find a way to escape, before the entire territory of their phantom prison is swept over with the fatal darkness

• Language: English
• Publisher: K.G. Godel
• Release date: Mar 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463125410

K.G. Godel

K. G. Godel resides in British Columbia, Canada.

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Death Shadows

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This is a work of a fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional. Any similarity to actual persons or events, past or present, is purely coincidental.

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Death Shadows

The Flesh Eaters of Skid Row

1

9: 25 AM

The man laying face down on the concrete was etched by the ascending sun in a shroud of shadows; the creeping silhouette was the only component of the lifeless figure that remained capable of animation.

Morning light could take the dirt and ugliness of mundane reality and bath it in a glowing halo, but even without a dead body decorating its barren surface, the industrial park on the east side of the city was a formidable challenge for the golden lamp of the sky. The hard, rough assemblies of cement and steel, the grime of metropolitan trash, and the dull hopeless monotony of abandoned civilization could not be rendered beautiful under any lighting source except that of a purging fire.

The site was a square in formation and measuring a city block, approximately two football fields side by side, closed off by the sheer walls of decrepit buildings or eight-foot fences covered in graffiti, while isolated clusters of debris were scattered across the vast concrete plain like ghost towns in a desert. A few rusted vehicles, obsolete manufacturing machinery, and tire mounds littered the Wasteland, as it was popularly nicknamed. It had an undistinguished history of muggings, drug overdoses, gang beatings and reprisal attacks, indecent exposure, murder, and every other depravity routinely exhibited in the urban forest.

The vagrants with a shred of dignity shunned the habitat, as it was notorious for being devoid of sustenance and an oasis of misery.

The park’s long-term residents were of a less finicky and more desperate class of urban homeless. None were under thirty and all were too weak to compete with the aggressive bums lording over the best territory blocks away.

The fort-like area might have been impoverished, but they had it to themselves, excusing the occasional gang member or drug dealer who chanced upon it before discerning it to be a badlands of reject humanity that they were eager to flee. The wide field of concrete with a few patches of wretched vegetation poking from the cracks could reach Sahara-worthy temperatures by mid-afternoon, and the narrow shaded portions along the perimeter would get nearly as unpleasant due to the dry hot winds frequently drifting across it. The regular inhabitants sought cooler environs before one o’clock.

Luther the professor Morgan wiggled out from the cardboard sarcophagus he called his bedroom, stretched his aching limbs, and then took a deep breath. Sunshine and fresh air (relatively speaking) were two commodities that remained without a price tag, and these days he fully appreciated both. The forty-seven year-old hardly remembered the time when he took them for granted and cherished things that were far less important in life.

He observed another resident Carl, lounging in his ancient and torn army tent, tinkering with an old portable radio.

Morning Carl, he said.

I can’t get any goddamn stations, mumbled his fifty-five year old neighbor. Static on every freaking channel.

The professor spotted his other neighbor Frank rising from his own domicile, a makeshift bunker affixed to the posterior door of an unoccupied building.

Well another beautiful morning, Luther announced amicably. He shuffled to his feet and walked over to the nearest garbage can. With dainty handling he scrutinized the contents.

What’s for breakfast? Let’s see here…Half a rotten banana, a sandwich…

A soda can caught his attention. He shook it, the splashing sound within indicated a quantity of drinkable liquid.

Warm beverage. That’ll do.

As Morgan took a swig of the sour-tasting fluid, he saw Frank wobbling on unsteady legs into the main section of the industrial park. The vagrant was pushing sixty-five and hard of hearing. His blood-shot eyes had seen it all: pick-pocketing, carjacking, and every kind of street abuse from rape to homicide.

Hey Frank, where you heading? he shouted after him.

Gonna see what’s in the cans behind the restaurant, his neighbor answered with a hoarse cough interspersed between the words. They had a junior league party last night. I can smell those juicy leftovers.

Save me a dessert! his dumpster-diving cohort replied jokingly.

Ok doke professor, Frank waved good-naturedly.

The professor was a name Morgan preferred his homeless comrades would not use, but he understood it was meant as endearment as much as a teasing reminder of his fallen economic rank. He did not speak like the typical street survivor. His vocabulary was extensive and he could shape words in ways that mystified his simple companions. Over time, Morgan had learned to suppress his tendencies for verbal complexity, shrewdly detecting when he had said something that soared up and beyond the heads in his open air classroom.

Frank walked towards a recess which bordered an exit to the street.

He stopped in his tracks midway across the barrens and declared in surprise, What the hell?

Luther lazily glanced his way. Frank was looking down at something on the bare concrete. He thought it had to be impressive to stir curiosity in the old bum.

What is it?

There’s a guy here.

Not particularly impressive an answer, Morgan thought. Street dwellers were well known to plant themselves anywhere they felt like it, especially when inebriated. He took a guess, Who? Jerry?

No, was Frank’s stern response. He’s younger. He isn’t moving…I think he’s dead.

Morgan became intrigued. A well-to do corpse in the street was not in itself a unique occurrence in the city, but inside the Wasteland was far less common.