A Nightmare Reborn Ch. 03

He pictured the parents going to see what was wrong with their children and finding them bloody and diced in their soft little beds. The screams and the anguish that would follow would be like a fine wine, though it had been years since Krueger had actually tasted a fine wine. But more importantly, they would be scared. And where they were fearful there was a door into their dreams. And were there were dreams there was power. And then they would pay... oh, how they were going to pay.

Freddy licked his bladed fingers clean and went to collect the remainders of his flock.

***

Mickey slowly came around, his vision blurred and limited. After a disorienting moment of vertigo, he realized the entire van was on its side. His head throbbed mercilessly as he tried to move. Tom was on top of him and dripping some godforsaken warm fluid on him. Mickey pushed at him, trying to wedge his way out. As he worked his body back and forth, he suddenly looked down past his shoulder.

"Nicole?" he croaked.

No answer.

"Nicole, baby talk to me," Mickey managed and shoved Tom's body away into a heap against the up righted floorboard. Tom's destroyed face seemed to be looking at him despite the fact that his eyes were gone. The dead boy's sightless stare was full of accusation, as though angry at him for having survived the wreck. Mickey shuddered and turned, his head spinning and flashing with stars as he re-orientated himself, and found he was actually lying on top of Nicole. At first, he didn't think anything was wrong beyond she wasn't talking.

"Nicole, are you okay?" He shook her shoulders and then found out why she hadn't responded. It wasn't so much that she was unconscious or that she had taken a blow to her larynx or couldn't breathe. Indeed, this were all conditions that could have been applied to her had her head still been attached to her neck.

"No no no," Mickey wheezed as he looked at the grounded out stump that had once been his girlfriend's neck. The stump was topped with gristly ends, trailing veins and drizzling, churned meat. The window below was broken out and he realized her head had probably been grounded off into hamburger between the weight of the people above her and the road beneath.

"Help!" Mickey called frantically as he tried to pull himself up, panic seizing his mind. He grabbed the back of the seat in front of him and pulled. The fabric was saturated with blood and dribbled the red fluid as he squeezed. He finally up righted himself inside the side-lying van, being careful not to step on Nicole or Tom's bodies. He fought off the urge to vomit as the stench of urine, bile and burned rubber reached his nose in a disgusting wisp.

He looked at his teammates; all of them piled to the left side of the van in a mangled bloody heap and all of them very much dead as far as he could tell. He looked to the front of the van, and beyond the mound of twisted bodies he could the see the road illuminated by the headlights. He worked his way around the rear seat back, deciding he couldn't crawl over the bodies to go out the front. He grabbed the door handle and was relieved to find it opening easily. The door swung wide and slammed to the ground with a resounding bang.

Mickey tumbled out of the wreck and onto the pavement. The night air filled his nose and he breathed deep. He rolled over onto his stomach and pressed his face against the cool blacktop. He could smell fuel and the burned rubber still, but he could handle that over the more organic aromas in the van. He looked down and saw a red streak underneath under his hands, wet and shining in the moonlight. It almost looked like black ink had been smeared down the road behind them in a wide line. Mickey sat up and looked to the van, where the wet ink line disappeared under the wreck.

"Oh fuck," he cried and jumped back. The remains of Nicole's head were trailed behind in the skid marks of the van. He could see bits of flesh and clumps of dark hair embedded in the road. He wiped his hands on his white shirt and stood there for moment, shouting and cleaning himself off.

"Mickey," came a weak voice.

He almost jumped out his skin as he turned and saw Mike staggering from around the front of the van. He was as bloodied as Mickey, but he was up and walking and that meant he wasn't the sole survivor anymore. Mickey rushed to Mike and grabbed him, trying to support the older man's weight. His brown hair was slick with blood, his face bruised and swollen.

"What the fuck happened, Mike?"

"Man in the road," he grimaced, "In the middle of the damn road."

Mickey looked around, "Where?"

"Not sure now..." Mike's eyes couldn't adjust, blurry and out of focus as he and Mickey limped away from the van.

"Some guy caused the wreck?" Mickey asked Mike, his head swimming in anger.

They sat down on the side of the road, exhausted and shell-shocked. Mickey thought back to the moments before the accident, to just before Tom had started screaming. No, maybe a guy in the road didn't cause the accident. Tom had shouted out a name before he exploded, some weird name that had rang a bell in his mind but couldn't quite be remembered.

"Freddy Krueger," he whispered suddenly.

"What?" Mike grunted as he laid down on his back.

"Tom shouted that name out before he started bleeding," Mickey remembered.

"Bleeding?" Mike frowned, and then remembered. He had seen someone bleeding. In fact, all of them looked they were being murdered right there in the van before he turned around and saw the man with that white face in the road, "I remember-"

Mike didn't finish his sentence as slow, methodical footsteps crunched in the gravel beside road a few feet down from them. Mickey turned his head slowly and saw a tall figure walking towards them. A fire had caught on the undercarriage of the van and was silhouetting the shape walking towards them. Mickey saw wild hair and what he was sure the blank white pale expression of a mask. The eyes were dark and empty as it stepped up to them, taking time and wasting no effort.

"Hello?" Mike asked and sat up.

The figure only stood before them and looked down. Now that he close enough, Mickey could see that he was indeed wearing a mask. It was ghostly simple, the mouth expressionless and the glittering eyes behind the latex devoid of life. Moonlight cast an eerie glow over the man's face, lighting up the pallid mask and contrasting his dark, winded hair. He wore a dark blue set of coveralls, smudged with grease and maybe some other, more viscous fluid. Heavy boots rested in the gravel as his hand came up and revealed a huge kitchen knife, the blade at least twelve inches long. It glimmered in the full moon light as he raised it high.

"What the fuck?" Mike scowled and then shouted, "Mickey run!"

The knife swooped down and hissed through the air. It landed in the forehead plate of Mike's skull and split the bone beneath in a mighty crack. Mike trembled and convulsed on the end of the blade like a fish on a prong, and the killer steadied himself against his violent jerks and spasms. Mickey rolled away, eyes wide and ready to scream as he stood up on wobbly legs.

The man in the mask lifted Mike up by his knife, the blade still deeply rooted in his head. Mike gurgled and shook as his body was caught in its death throes. Mickey was amazed by the strength the killer had to accomplish lifting a heavy man like Mike into the air by just one arm and a knife. Finally, Mike's boots stopped clicking together and his body fell silently limp, now hanging in the air like a rag doll. Faster than Mickey could follow, the killer whipped the knife out of Mike's forehead and the body fell to the ground in crumpled heap.

The killer turned and looked at Mickey silently, contemplating him as though he couldn't decide in which manner to kill him. Mickey could only stand there, frozen in time and space as the world went quiet. He felt his hand twitch as the man walked towards him, so slowly and purposefully, the knife pointed down and raised in the air, his thick wild hair blowing in the night breeze as van burned in the background.

"Not yet," Mickey cried as his paralysis broke, "Don't kill me man!"

He turned to run

***

If there was one thing Officer Sean Renaud hated more than pulling a dog watch, it was pulling a dull and utterly boring dog watch. He sat in the passenger seat of the Springwood Police Department cruiser leaning against the door, his face resting heavily in his hand. He rubbed his dark eyes and looked at the clock on the dashboard. The shift had started at ten that night and had been dragging along at a mind-numbing pace. It was only a few minutes after midnight with six hours left to go. He yawned broadly and looked over at his partner.

"Don," he said, "what the fuck are we doing out here?"

Don Frank, his partner since Sean transferred from the Chicago Metro Unit, regarded him with a shrug, "You'd think I'd have an answer for that."

"This road goes nowhere, man. I'll bet we end up in Elm Wood before we see anything more criminal that a lost motorist taking piss on the side of the road," Sean sighed and looked out the window. The cornfields that spanned the seventeen miles between Springwood and Elm Grove blurred by in the misty early morning hours. The world was still shaded a dark blue while the waning full moon beamed down it's spectral light. Sean had been used to not seeing very many stars during his time in Chicago. Smog and fucked up air quality usually blotted out all but the most brightly burning stars and occasionally a planet or two.

Ever since he had moved to Springwood two years ago, he had been taken with the view of the night sky. The town was large but not much more developed beyond a very small city if one wanted to be ambitious in appraisal. Thus, the smog here was about as thick as the reason for them to be out here on Saxon Avenue patrolling a god forsaken stretch of road that no one drove down anyway. Lately though, it seemed the stars were slowly blinking out, fading away into the dark. He hadn't really noticed it until tonight, now that he had time to ponder it.

"When I got here," Sean frowned, "There were stars everywhere. Now, I can't see shit. Ever since a few months ago, its like a veil dropped over the city."

"Strange shit is always a foot in Springwood, Sean," Don said and then looked over at his friend, "Didn't you come out for peace and quiet?"

"I got tired of getting shot at," Sean laughed, "Cops aren't popular anymore, man. You know that."

"Depends on where you live," Don observed.

"Yeah, here Springwood you're all saints. But where I come from, cops are the bad guys as much as drug dealers and murderers. Common folk get cynical."

"So how did you last so long?"

Sean smirked. "I'm a wise black man, my friend. I let my white brothers go first."

"Asshole," Don flipped him off.

"Whatever," Sean laughed and felt around his jacket pockets for a moment, "Ah shit, man..."

"What?"

Sean kicked the floorboard. "I forgot my damn smokes."

"I got you covered," Don reached into his jacket and pulled out a pack of Camel Lights. He handed them to Sean and said, "I'm a smart white man, dog. I know my black brothers will forget their smokes."

"Dog?" Sean pulled one of the cigarettes out and flipped his Zippo lighter on, "Are you trying to use slang?"

Don shrugged. "What? It doesn't work for me?"

"It works for you like rap worked for Vanilla Ice."

"That's cold," Don laughed, "You're saying we white people can't use slang?"

Sean looked at Don, eyes wide with amusement. "How many brothers do you see chattin' up Oakie at a Garth Brooks concert?"

"Touché."

"Damn straight," Sean inhaled deeply and let the smoke fill his lungs, "Nothing racial about it. We all got our own thing, that's all."

There was a moment of silence as they continued down the road. Sean rolled down the window more to let his smoke vent a little more quickly. He flicked a few ashes out the window and watched in the side mirror as the burned bright for a moment in the air, swirling and flying haphazardly in the wake of the cruiser before snuffing out. He scratched his well-trimmed goatee and took another drag, looking up at the sky.

Still no stars.

"So, if we all got our own thing," Don pondered as he ran a hand over his bald pate, "Then why don't all black people talk slang?"

"You ignorant mother fucker," Sean laughed, "It's the difference between a Harvard grad and a man who dropped out in the eighth grade."

"So, a good example would be Colin Powell versus, say P. Diddle?"

"P. Diddy," Sean corrected, "And yes, that works."

Don nodded and smiled to himself, "Did he drop out in the eighth grade?"

"I don't know," Sean shrugged, "For as many times as that asshole has been in court it wouldn't surprise me."

Don laughed.

"Albert Einstein versus Gomer Pyle?" Sean offered.

"Leave Pyle out of this," Don said and then stopped mid-laugh. He muttered, "What the fuck?"

Sean looked to his friend and saw his eyes wide open, looking straight ahead. Sean turned and saw beyond the window of the rapidly slowly cruiser. A van was burning in the middle of the road, blocking both lanes and completely flat on its side. Don flipped on the lights and the night was light up with red and blue flashes as they rolled to a stop twenty feet away from the wreck. Sean breathed deeply as Don picked up the radio and called in the accident.

"Central this is six-Baker-six," Don spoke clearly into the radio, "We have an eleven-eighty about seven miles south of Springwood on Saxon Avenue. Request eleven-forty-one and report eleven-seventy-one, over."

"Understood, six-Baker-six" came the crackling and distorted response from the station, "Investigate and report back, over."

"Ten-four, over and out." Don clipped the radio back into place. He flipped on the take down lights and the powerful overhead spotlights that sat in the light bar with the wigs and wags further illuminated the night.

Sean opened his door and stepped out, his boots clicking against the blacktop as he walked around the front of the cruiser. He unzipped his jacket and un-holstered his Sig-9 millimeter automatic. He checked his magazine and chambered a round. He flipped the safety off and squeezed the grip of the handle. He waited in front of the cruiser as Don checked his sidearm and joined him. They stood there for a moment, listening for signs of yelling or the sounds of an impending explosion. Sean took another drag on his smoke.

"You gonna put that out?" Don asked as they walked towards the wreck.

"Yep," Sean nodded and pitched the butt away and behind him.

"Hey," Don whispered as they approached the van, "I got a question."

"What?"

"Why do they call them wigs and wags?"

"What?"

Don shrugged, his eyes locked on the van, "Wigs and wags, the red and blue lights we use."

Sean gave a Don an incredulous sideways glance, "What?"

Don looked thoughtful for a moment, and then, "What?"

"One wigs and one wags, get it?"

Don was quiet for a moment, the only sound that of smoldering metal and popping glass. He finally said, "That's stupid."

"Shut up the fuck up."

The van was a complete loss, and if anyone was inside, they were fucked. Both officers had known that from the moment they saw the wreck. The heat was intense as they rounded the wreckage, keeping their distance, arms up to protect their faces. The tires were burning now, still spinning under the remaining momentum of the crash. Debris was scattered all over the road, glass crunching under their boots as they turned on their flashlights and looked around.

"Sweet Jesus," Sean said under his breath and then shouted, "Hello?"

"Anyone in there?" Don yelled, his voice echoing through the cornfield.

No response. But then, they didn't expect a reply.

They came around the bumper of the van and found only more shattered glass. A long line from underneath the grounded side of the van stretched back at least thirty yards down the road and into the shadows. The moonlight had illuminated the landscape and allowed for an eerie night vision. Sean knelt down and touched the black fluid on the road, rubbing it together between his fingers. He put his fingers under the beam of the flashlight, expecting to see oil or some other engine fluid and instead found crimson blood.

"Ah shit," he cringed and wiped his fingers on the road, "Fucking blood."

"What the blue hell happened?" Don flashed his around.

Sean looked back at the van and noticed the back doors were open. He walked over to the doors and flashed his light inside as best he could, the fire consuming the interior rapidly. He could smell the strange meaty stench of burning human flesh. Underneath that aroma was unmistakable stench of burning hair. He covered his nose and mouth, pointing down at the ground, "Someone walked out."

"How do you know?" Don asked, coming closer and then waving his hand in front of his face as he got a whiff what was cooking in the van.

"Door is open," Sean said.

"Could've opened in the wreck..."Don guessed and then spoke into his shoulder mounted radio, "Dispatch, this is six-baker-six out on Saxon, we have multiple ten-fifty-four-Ds, over."

After a moment, "Six-Baker-six received and understood. Emergency crews are on their way, over."

"Ten-four."

"Okay Colombo, then explain the bloody size elevens leading away to the side of the road," Sean couldn't stomach being that close to the van anymore. He followed the bloody prints and then saw a brief set other prints running along side. Don noticed them too.

"Two survivors," he said and looked around, "But where are they?"

"Couldn't have gone far," Sean shook his head and then nearly jumped out of his boots as something came crashing out of the cornfield behind them.

"Help me!"

They swiveled and drew their guns, their eyes fixed and fingers resting on the triggers. A bloody kid came barreling out the field, eyes the size of dinner plates and nearly tripping over himself as he ran up the small embankment of the drainage ditch and onto the road. Sean noticed his pants were unzipped and damn near falling down as he ran to them, screaming and babbling like a maniac. Sean lowered his gun, but motioned for Don to keep his ready. He grabbed the kid by the shoulders as he haphazardly ran over to them and said, "Hold up! You okay?"

"He's after me!"

"Kid, get a fucking grip!" Sean shouted and shook him a little, "What happened? Were you in the van?"

"Fucker with a big knife," the kid screamed, "Killed Mike! Run!"

Don looked at Sean with a disbelieving cock of his brow. Sean shrugged. The kid was probably so shook up from the wreck he couldn't even see straight. He looked back at the burning wreck and realized that some of the people in there were probably his friends. Sean took a deep breath as he struggled with the kid. He'd probably be a little goofy too if he had just been through what this guy had just been through.

"Okay slow down," Don said firmly yet softly, "Calm down a little."

"He's coming!" the kid screeched, scared out his mind. Sean looked around for anyone that might be coming up on them and saw no one.

"Okay, get him to the car," he told Don.

But Don was looking beyond him to the side of the road where Mickey and Mike had been sitting earlier. Don's jaw dropped open, his eyes wide with utter shock. Sean looked at him, and then turned to see what the big deal was. At first, he didn't even see what Don was gawking at as he quickly scanned the shadows of the roadside. And then, he saw the mile marker post. It was stained red and now protruding up from the midsection of a dead man. Sean shined his light on the corpse and was greeted with the gristly remains of several ravaged internal organs clinging wetly to the metal of the marker. The man's lifeless eyes looked at them in a dead stare.