Sunruined: Horror Stories by Andersen Prunty

the terror Charlie felt back at Hapsburg’s came back. The woman was almost right on him now and he saw that she wasn’t attractive at all. She was emaciated and deathly, tight brown mummified skin wrapped around her bones. Her hair hung in dirty strands and clumps. She smelled like decay. She stopped the carriage just in front of Charlie and turned to look at him. Her eyes were black sockets. Yellow pus oozed from her blunted, truncated nose. She put up a hand to one withered breast and lasciviously rolled her green tongue out to Charlie.
    Forgetting himself, he bent over the baby carriage to vomit. Inside was a stillborn, its purple body drawn up, an umbilical cord ascending to who knew where. Charlie let go with the puke, wanting only to be away, and felt the baby’s sinister soft stroking of his cheek.
    Charlie uprighted himself and took off running. He was only a couple of blocks from home. Ducking off into an alleyway between two shops, he pulled to a panting stop. Christ, he felt like he was dying.
    Looking up at the sky, he saw the sun desperately trying to break free from those heavy clouds, lining their contours with a glaring white gold.
    “What the hell are you trying to do to me!” he shouted. He didn’t know if he was yelling at God or Mother or his whole sad life. “What the fuck am I supposed to do?!” The amazing thing was that he felt capable of doing something, anything.
    He pulled a wine bottle out from his jacket. Rearing back his arm he threw it as high up in the air as he could, aiming it right at the clouds. He heard it pop on one of the roofs. Charlie imagined his blood spewing from the shattered dark green glass.
    “Why don’t you let the sun go, you little shits!”
    He threw the second bottle. “She could burn you up if she wanted to!” Charlie threw the third and then the fourth before he took off running back toward the house, chasing down the cloud shadows racing along the asphalt.
     
    6.
    Once back at the house, Charlie realized he didn’t want to go in. He thought it would be too much like walking willfully back into a coma. The inside of that house was a dense fog of twisted, half-remembered memories.
    Bracing himself, he opened the door, went in, and turned on all the lights.
    The place looked like a warzone. He was amazed he was able to wreak so much havoc in so short a time. Indescribable stains covered the floor, creating a sticky sheen. More stains were splashed upon the wall. A dank, heavy odor took his breath. Pizza boxes and junk food wrappers surrounded the coffee table and couch, some of them containing a decomposing mass of the original contents. The coffee table was covered in ash and cigarette stubs. A pile of empty wine bottles mounted itself against the back of the couch.
    “Christ,” Charlie muttered.
    It was at that point he knew what he had to do. He had to get out of Oretown. To stay there was a slow death. But there were other things he had to do first. Things that would free up his mind. First, he had to stop and think—where was he going to go?
    He went around behind the easy chair in the living room and grabbed his dad’s old Rand McNally road atlas. It was still there. It was amazing how little certain things changed over the years. Trying not to look around him, he took the atlas out onto the cement front porch and sat down on the top step.
    Age had turned the pages of the atlas yellow and crinkly. It carried a musty scent the fresh, damp air seemed to exorcise. Charlie didn’t know where to look first.
    He lit a cigarette and started at the beginning, reading the names of towns and cities in each state. Some of them he spoke half-aloud, rolling them around in his mouth to see how he liked the sound.
    He sat there for over an hour, hardly moving, letting those names and the abstracted topography of America silence the voices screaming up from his viscera. By the time he reached the end, he had it narrowed down to two places. Going by the names alone,