Dead Friends

By Miles Hooper

What would drive you to kill your friends? What would drive your friends to kill you?

On graduation night of 2007, they were a tight-knit group of Phoenix suburb kids, ready to take the world by storm. Then came six years of recession, failure, and strained friendship.
It's now fall of 2013 and the estranged friends are called back together. They meet at a cabin tucked away in the woods of Northern Arizona. Their reconnection is a stinging reminder that their twenties were not what they had promised themselves. Over the course of their visit, it becomes clear that a surreptitious force is feeding their contempt for one another. What starts as a tepid reunion, free falls into a slaughtering of appendages and of congeniality.

 

Dead Friends is a macabre psychological horror story for anyone who has survived, or is currently living through, their twenties.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miles Hooper
• Release date: Feb 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201273804

Book preview

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A HORROR NOVEL BY

MILES HOOPER

Copyright © 2021 Miles Hooper

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9798747877160

Dead Friends is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

For more information on Miles Hooper, visit the website: www.mileshooper.com

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For anyone who has survived, or is currently living through, their twenties.

This book includes references to music listened to by the characters.

To follow along with the music, you can visit the Lockner Cabin playlist HERE.

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Aubrey, Shawn and Devan who read my drafts and then expressed encouragement and keen advice in shaping this story.

To Danny Ingrassia and Malice Ghoul for providing the macabre artwork you will find on the cover and within the book.

To Luke Malone for the slick graphic design of the book in all available formats.

To my editor, Caroline Knecht, who properly formatted the book and performed grammatical miracles.

Finally, to my wife Ashley who will never read this gruesome horror story, but will most likely appreciate this acknowledgment.

You can find more art by Danny Ingrassia and Malice Ghoul at:

@danny_ingrassia_art

and

@maliceghoul

PROLOGUE

July, 2010

Redburke, Northern Arizona

The needle traces across the grooves of vinyl, picking up a trace of blood with each rotation. The turntable and the stylus spread the blood in circular patterns across the disc. It’s an early eighties record player, silver and squat.

Crackling to life—a song starts. You Can Do Magic by America.

The turntable sits on a modest card table under a screened panel window. The screen is warping and curling outward in distress. Outside, a Jeep bumps along the road.

Paige Breskin, with straw blond hair and perpetual desperation in her eyes, bounds up the porch and through the front door of the cabin. She enters. She’s the sort of hopeful soul who always gives the homeless person in the parking lot a dollar.

Kyra! Paige shouts loud enough to be heard across the whole cabin space.

She competes with the music.

The living room is a wood-floored space, well-furnished and quaint. Paige looks across the room. On the opposite end is a bedroom door left half open. Next to it, a cast iron radiator and a square mid-century armchair. Hanging above the wall lives a framed map of a mountain range titled redburke. Against the wall adjacent to Paige at the door, is a seventies era couch of rust orange color. On either end of the couch are secondhand end tables that barely hold up.

Paige moves swiftly through the living room, toward the half open bedroom door on the opposite side. She quickly emerges back into the living room, eyeing the turntable. The blood catches her focus. She hurries, left now, through a doorway into a separate kitchen area.

A feeble voice calls out from a second bedroom room. Paige?

Paige runs from the kitchen, straight across the living room, to a second bedroom that is just past the window and front door. The record skips...to another spot, seemingly on its own. The circulating blood on the turntable drips off the side of the carousel.

In the second bedroom, Paige’s eyes move rapidly over a cityscape of neglected camping supplies and cardboard moving boxes. Installed in the corner is the cabin water heater. Standing—barely—in front of it is Kyra, neglected and bony with large doll eyes. Kyra would be only manic depressive if not also wrapped in self-imposed contradictions. Her sharp shoulders heave with each deep, undernourished breath.

I took the whole bottle, Paigey, Kyra states with a crackling rasp to her voice.

Paige goes red with tears of torment. Kyra...

As Paige approaches, Kyra shakes her head and wavers in her stance. She’s about to collapse. Paige shoves a few boxes out of the way. She’s at Kyra’s side before she falls. They collapse together into a kneel, and Paige cradles her.

Kyra...no. Kyra.

Kyra looks up at Paige, as if for the first time. Hey, Kyra coughs. Tell...him...

Paige nods in premature agreement.

Tell him you...did this.

Paige cannot comprehend. That cannot be it. She shakes Kyra. No. Kyra. No.

The music from the other room carries in.

Kyra’s eyes don’t go blank—they color over dark red, like empty glass spheres filling with red wine, or blood. Kyra’s lifeless face is fixed in a sly smirk. Paige collapses from her knees to her back, still cradling Kyra. She plunges into heaving sobs.

I can still help you. I...I can help you. Please.

CHAPTER 1

October, 2013

Redburke, Northern Arizona

PAIGE

Paige bites her lip and surveys the dirt road ahead of her, which disappears into the fortress of trees on either side. She paces with indecision, clenching her left hand into a fist to keep it from shaking. She scrapes at the chipped paint of her cell phone case, a faded Lisa Frank pink and purple pattern that resembles a decaying rainbow. Though daunting, the maze of ponderosa pines reaches out with an alluring scent that unlocks thoughts of Christmas and innocence.

It’s a trap.

Paige takes in the air with closed eyes. As she opens them, she steps a few paces forward, looking at her phone screen as if it were a map. She’s older now. Twenty-four. She hasn’t changed much in physique, but her hair is wrapped back in a messy knot. Rosy chipmunk cheeks and a face full of freckles that stand out against her pale complexion. She has the neck and arms of someone who was once heavier. She wears a pair of dark jeans she found on her floor. Maybe she had worn them once—no, twice—since they’d last been washed. Her gray T-shirt is clean.

One. Two, she murmurs. Each step is a number. Three...four.

The signal bars on her phone’s screen vanish. no signal, it declares.

Fuck.

She takes one step back. No change. Another step back. No change. Another step—one bar. Paige bites the inside of her cheek. Plenty to chew on with her chipmunk cheeks.

Paige taps out a text, then scans it to proofread. She rolls her eyes in disinterest of her own text. She sends it. The one bar labors. The phone dings as the screen reads, text sent. Paige takes three steps forward. no signal, just a skyline of ponderosa pines.

The open top Jeep is speckled with mud and coated in road dust. Perhaps a few days ago it was pristine and glimmering, the way that made people roll their eyes at the sight of a careless suburban girl driving an off-road vehicle. A melancholy folk song, Elliott Smith in style, hums over the silence of the forest.

Paige focuses on herself in the rearview mirror. Her gray eyes stare back at her. A strand of hair flaps in front of her face. She slides it back behind her ear.

Turning the ignition, the Jeep rattles on. It makes its way down the road that narrowly meanders through wall-to-wall forest. Paige doesn’t look back at the signal spot. She pays it as much attention as she pays the billowing dust kicking up behind the Jeep. She turns down a smaller path, winding toward a sign that reads, lockner cabin, town of redburke. A handwritten sign has been placed under that: closed for fire damage.

The Jeep slows to a stop just past a toolshed. It stands with smooth retail wooden surface with a size just smaller than an elevator. Paige shifts the Jeep to a halt. She takes a long breath as she looks at the cabin through her front windshield.

The pine smell is even more alluring now.

She acknowledges the radio as the sad folk song ends. She is compelled to tell it good job for its agreeable timing.

She turns the ignition off and slides out of the Jeep, shouldering a patchwork hemp purse. It’s the sort of purse the local college shop tells you is handcrafted in the mountains of Peru. Part of her knows the lie and doesn’t care.

Paige exits the Jeep and begins her approach to the cabin. She has the surreal feeling of walking into an old photo album full of memories. Each step is a hesitant one—she looks as if she could pivot in place and begin walking in the opposite direction at any moment. Not out of cowardice, but of good sense.

The cabin is a wooden structure propped up about four feet from its foundation, leaving a crawl space under the cabin where firewood, garden, and maintenance tools are kept. The entirety of the crawl space is blocked off and caged in by a wooden lattice skirting. Some of the lattice is decaying, some of it looks new.

The cabin has a sun-dried quality to every inch of its exterior. The Arizona summer sun has defiled its integrity.

A porch juts out, and wraps around two sides of the cabin. The two entrances are the front door, off the living room space, and a side door on the east side of the cabin, off the kitchen. A three-step staircase leads up to the front door. From anywhere else on the porch, one would have to jump over the wood railing to get to the ground.

Paige shuffles to a stop. She taps the side of her leg. Her fingers run along the denim outline of her phone in her pocket. She winces in regret; one of her supple chipmunk cheeks climbs her face as she squints in thought. She pivots to the east side of the cabin.

Beyond the eastern side of the porch, a weed field rambles on, nearly masking a perimeter fence a quarter mile out. From there, the weeds transform into a field that stretches out for a mile or so, until it squares up against the forest and a wall of trees that slope upward for miles, until they line the mountainside in the far distance.

All this, Paige can see from the eastern side of the porch. The mountain forest seems to smack her across the face with humility. Her pushed-up cheeks drop. She raises her eyebrows in vulnerability at the sight of the towering mountain.

She turns back to the front steps that lead up to the porch and the front door of the cabin. Her hands ride up across the splintered wood of the stair railing. It’s warm to the touch, having soaked up the sun.

The screen door nearly snaps off when Paige flings it open. Paige shoves her shoulder against the heavier front door behind it. Nothing.

Her key seems stuck in the lock, and the door has barely moved. She shoves her shoulder to the door again. It cries out, like wood cracking in half, as it gives way.

CRAIG

A suburban living room in a faux Southwest theme: adobe pots, Kokopelli figures. All the decor Arizona implants like. The house is messy enough to show it’s lived in, but presentable enough for a dinner party. Craig Breskin storms in, mimicking Godzilla. A toddler boy, with darker skin and a joyous smile, runs in the opposite direction. Craig chases him down, growling with each step. He is fit, with well-toned arms, a thick neck,