Dark Tales from the Crow Kitchen

By Angela Miller

A collection of my short stories varying from Horror through Sci-fi to dark Fairy Tales. From deals with the devil to zombies and many unusual tales in between, there should be something for most readers here! These stories in this anthology represent many years of work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781291973518

Angela Miller

ANGELA MILLER is a literary agent based in New York City and the owner of Consider Bardwell Farm in Vermont. Her cheeses are featured on the menus of some of the finest restaurants in the country, including The French Laundry, Per Se, Daniel, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and Jean Georges. Consider Bardwell Farm has won several prestigious awards from the American Cheese Society. Read her blog at considerbardwellfarm.com and follow her on Facebook/ConsiderBardwellFarm and on Twitter/considercheese.

Book preview

Dark Tales from the Crow Kitchen

Dark Tales From The Crow Kitchen

by

Angela Miller

© 2014 Angela Miller

Contents

End Of The Line… A zombie tale

Twenty Seven …  A deal with the devil

Space Command…. A near future nightmare

Humanity…. A reminder of our human nature

Magpie…. A dark fairy tale

Cyberpunk Vignette…. Short, sweet revenge

End of the Line

She stared at the wall in front of her.  It was almost ten feet high, nearly double her own height, and it was blocking her path.  She could hear Them behind her, hear the swish-swish of Their shuffling steps on the broken and dusty tarmac of the broad alleyway she had just run along.  She had time,  but not much, before They would catch her.  Taking a quick glance over her shoulder, she backed up a number of steps and then took a running leap at the wall.  The surface was broken and uneven, She hung in the air for a couple of heartbeats, her feet scrabbling for a purchase, then finding it she leapt again, using nothing more than half a brick and coursing adrenaline as a springboard, and her hands caught on the top of the wall.  Panting, she heaved herself upwards to peer over the wall. As her brain registered what her eyes were seeing, a curse escaped her mouth and her heart sank. 

The yard beyond had once been a train yard, but it had been abandoned long before the world went to shit and there were no trains or carriages. Now there were  just rail tracks overgrown by weeds and patches of oily gravel were the weeds wouldn't grow.  There were sheds and and warehouses dotted around the edges of the yard, and tall, rusting chain fences designed to keep out thieves and kids with aerosol cans.  But the wide space of the train yard wasn't empty, oh no.  It was teeming with Them.  They were milling about aimlessly, most long beyond the pale eyes and grey faces of the freshly infected.  There were those so long gone they crawled along the gravelly ground, pulling themselves by their hands or pushing with their feet.  Most of the hideous, decaying faces had skin that was leathery and black, stretched taut over skulls that showed through in places.  Only a small number had any more hair than lank clumps that hung, twisted and brittle, from their heads.  Many were naked, and those that weren't their clothes were so torn and rotted that they might as well have been naked. Some didn't even have eyes any more. They were stumbling and milling around the wreckage of a survivor camp that had presumably found safety for a while behind those chain fences, but had eventually been over run.  All that was left were the shells of a dozen vehicles, mostly big RV's and SUV's, and the bleached cloth and rusted poles of maybe another dozen tents.  It had been a sizeable camp.

The swish-swish behind her grew louder, drawing her back to her current predicament and she hauled herself up onto the top of the narrow wall.  To her left, it ran to meet the side of a large warehouse, the top of the wall being uninterrupted as it ran over a large set of double doors that would have once opened onto the train yard.  To her right, it kept on for another 20 or so feet before meeting the top of the chain fence.  She glanced over to the sloping roof of the warehouse, estimating whether she could make the climb up the drain pipe from the top the wall safely. 

An eruption of groaning from below told her that They had finally reached the wall and were trying desperately to reach up to her.  She didn't look down, she just ran along the top of the wall for the drain pipe and tested it quickly to see if it would take her weight.  It seemed to hold.  A glance to her left and she saw the waving arms of her pursuers, a glance to the right and she saw the first inklings of recognition from the ones inside the train yard.  It would be a bad idea to fall.  She took a deep breath, rolled her shoulders, then gripped the drain pipe with both hands and feet and slowly started to climb it.  About a quarter of the way up it began to creak ominously, so she moved her hands and feet faster.  At halfway, there was a wrenching noise and she could feel the drain pipe beginning to come away from the wall.  Her hands and feet blurred with desperation.  She was three quarters of the way up when it finally gave with a screech of tearing metal.  With her heart pounding,  she looked back over her shoulder to see Them waiting below for her as she rushed towards them.  The wall was slightly to her left and she was going to fall into the outstretched hands of the naked, rotted ones from the train yard.  With a roar of exasperation, she twisted and leapt for the narrow top of the wall, throwing herself backwards from the falling drain pipe. Somehow she landed with one foot on the wall.  The other, unfortunately,  was caught on fresh air and for a heart stopping moment she was overbalancing and pitching backwards with her arms pin-wheeling.  She threw her weight forward, letting her other foot slip off the wall, and made a wild grab for the top of it.  Something slimy and horrible grasped at one of her feet and she kicked back as hard as she could, then dragged herself back up onto the wall before anything else could touch her.  She breathed a sigh of relief as she got to her feet.

There was only one other way to go now, along the wall, then over the top of the fence and down into a brick wall yard behind a small warehouse about 40 feet away.  There were none of Them to be seen in that small yard.   There was a steel tube forming the top of the frame of the fence, one that was wide enough so that walking across the top of it wouldn't be as bad as walking a tight rope.  Just.  She told herself that she could make it if she focused hard, so she blanked out Them and Their moaning cries as they tried to reach for her, and thought only about jumping down into that yard just a few feet away. She gulped in a few huffing breaths to slow her hammering heart and then stepped lightly onto the top of the fence. She slowly spread her arms out to balance herself before she took her second step, her eyes fixed on a spot a couple of feet in front of her.  She allowed herself to develop tunnel vision, blanking out everything except for those few feet, and walked quickly along the top of the fence, not letting her weight rest in one spot too long. Then the empty yard was to her right, and so with a sigh of relief, she leaped down onto the top of some  garbage sheds.  There was a horrible splintering sound, and she found herself balancing precariously above a sudden yawning, jagged hole in the low sloped roof.  Through the hole she could see a skip that was full of twisted, rotting corpses.  The smell that assaulted her was enough to have her choking even with senses that had been dulled by exposure to Them for so long.  With one hand covering her mouth she made yet another desperate leap from where she stood to the ground, crying out in pain for half a second before she smothered it because the impact jolted  through her shins.  She hauled herself upwards, looking warily around.  Nothing in the yard moved, except for the breeze stirring the branches of a sickly looking tree with leaves that were paling prematurely under the hot summer sun. 

Across the yard, a door was hanging on it's hinges revealing a glimpse of the warehouse beyond.  Machines, big machines with taught cables stretching up towards the ceiling, and sheets of dried brown blood on the walls.  She couldn't imagine what had happened in there, but she guessed was about to find out.  She needed supplies, desperately, and since the building seemed empty of Them, she would have to check inside to see what she could find.  She moved quickly, ignoring the aftershocks of pain running through her shins.  She had learned to be afraid of open spaces and wouldn't linger where she felt exposed.

It wasn't a warehouse, it was a small textile factory.  The cables belonged to the looms and the blood to the splattered corpses that had at some point been fed into the looms.  Perhaps it had been someone's desperate attempt to clear Them out of the factory.  Everything was dry and desiccated in the summer heat, and the smell in the air was old and had had time to lose some of the acrid bite of the corpses outside.  If this had been the site of someone's last stand, it had been some weeks ago.    She picked her way through the dried gore, ignored the flies that buzzed lazily in the hot air and headed for a staircase that lead up from the factory floor.  She didn't look back as she climbed the stairs, she couldn't really stomach the view.  The door at the top of the stores was metal and the bar across it was stiff.  It wouldn't budge when she pushed it, so she grabbed a fire extinguisher from the rail of the stair case and knocked the bar loose with that.  She winced at the noise as it rang out through the deserted factory, and she risked a look over her shoulder.  After a few tense moments waiting, she realised only the flies were moving on the factory floor, and they were also pretty much the only source of sound, apart from the creek of the breeze through the building.  She kicked the door open, keeping a hold of the fire extinguisher,  and went through without a backward glance so that her brain could be as free from the grizzly image of that factory floor as quickly as possible.  The door led straight outside onto a flat part of the roof with a view back over the train yard.  To the right there were rooftops spread out along in a row, each rooftop practically touching the next because along this part of the industrial estate the buildings were crowded close together.  There's a corpse slumped over something, facing the train yard, a corpse with a huge bullet wound in the back of it's skull.  It's been here a while, backed in the sun and gone leathery.  There no telling if it was a man or a woman with so little left of it's skull and it's body bent over.  She approached it gingerly, curious and repelled at the same time.  The corpse wore a pale brown jacket, blue jeans and black boots.  This close she could see the butt of a rifle tangled with it's crumpled legs.  Licking her lips in distaste she reached forward and pulled at the shoulder of the corpse, attempting to peel it away from the rifle.  The dried sinews of it's muscles held it in a rigid pose, so it didn't budge.  She swallowed the bile that was starting to rise from her stomach and crouched down beside it.  She grasped the butt of the rifle and made to wrench it loose from the corpse's clutches, but instead managed to knock it over, so that it flopped away from where the low wall was propping it up.  It landed with a dry crunch that sounded very far removed from human and revealed the still intact white teeth clenched around the barrel of the rifle. 

She pulled her hand away from her mouth were it had leaped to cover the small squeal that escaped her mouth when the corpse fell.  Licking her lips, she crouched forward and reached for the rifle again, occupying her brain with a prayer that it still had bullets left.  She ignored the sound of the barrel sliding gratingly out from between the corpse's teeth and slowly pulled the rifle towards herself.  Where the corpse's curled and desiccated fingers clasped around the trigger, there was a splintering wrench as she pulled the rifle free.  As soon as she had it in her grasp she slid the clip free and checked it.  Empty, shit useless idiot kept the last bullet for himself, she cursed the corpse, then felt a wash of guilt.

She got to her feet, clutching the rifle in both hands and turned to look about, eyes scouring the rooftop for ammunition, or anything, that she could use.  Nothing, and nothing worth looking at beyond the rooftop either, only the empty yard of the factory and the train yard with Them milling aimlessly, waiting for something to rouse them.  Her eyes looked anywhere but down at the corpse at her feet as she rode out the guilt, and they finally fell on a couple of thin planks that spanned the gap between the factory and the building next door.  Preferring not to return to the factory below, she crossed the planks and found her way into the next building, clutching the rifle.  Just in case.

This building was a depot full of ravaged courier trucks.  Ripped packaging lay in heaped piles, boxes discarded and polystyrene chips were scattered all over the floor in  drifts of artificial snow.  The big doors were shuttered down, and as she crept cautiously across the depot floor, she saw no sign of Them having ever broken into the building.  No blood, no corpses and the wreckage looked like the work of desperate people trying to find something to help their survival.  She made her way to an open door that she could see led to some office space.  People had hid in here, lived in here and then fled from here, leaving behind a trail of sleeping bags, clothes and sentimental possessions that weren't worth more than their lives.  Instinct told her that there would be nothing useful left behind, but hope made her scour the place anyway, still clutching the rifle.  Still just in case.  She could at least hit things with the butt of it.

Back to the roof, safer than the streets and she could see a trail across several rooftops running along the same long, straight Industrial estate road that lead to the edge of the estate and the road back towards the city centre.  She had to keep moving and looking, find somewhere she could sleep when she couldn't stave it off any more, and hope that she would find some food along the way. 

It was a long afternoon, running the rooftops and checking the buildings to find each one in turn ravaged and raped by desperate survivors and Them alike.  She ditched the rifle after it became more of a hassle to carry than it could be worth. There was no ammunition for it anywhere in any of the buildings.  Her energy levels began to wane and the cramps she was growing used to returned as gnawing hunger set in.  The heat was stifling and the stench of decay everywhere high as They were meandering the streets below and in several of the buildings she had found piles of Them left by people who had passed by some time ago.

Finally she came to the end of the street.  The only way was down, but across the road was a gas station with a shop.  Maybe she could find something there.  They were spread thinly here, mostly a little further up the road from the gas station.  If she was quick she could get into the shop, if there was something she could break the lock with.  She glanced around and saw an old tire iron lying on the ground in the station forecourt.  It would have to do since there would be no time to look for anything else.

The next job was to figure out a route down to the ground that would be quick and quiet, so as to draw as little of Their attention as she could.  She peered over the edge of the building, and saw a side door below her at street level, which would mean going back into the building she had just scoured.  The other alternative was to climb down the drain pipe that led from the roof to the ground.  Thinking back to her earlier close shave with a drain pipe, she decided to at least check and see if she could find the door.  She'd found the building was empty, it seemed to be some kind of bakery, with the offices upstairs, but no useful supplies could be found  in the whole building because it had been gutted and ripped apart inside at some point.  She remembered the rumours of looting gangs in the early days and guessed it had been hit by one of them.  She made her way back down through the building, picking her way through the debris, until she came to the corridor where the side-door was.  It was a heavy metal fire door, the kind with an iron bar that had to be pushed up to open it.  The iron bar had been broken, twisted and smashed with something heavy, so that the door was effectively barred.  She thought for a second about forcing it open, but then she realised the noise would bring Them stumbling her way in droves.  With a sigh, she realised it would have to be the drain pipe.  She hoped to fuck it was strong this time, her growing tiredness and hunger would slow her reactions crucially