Dead Horizon Read Free Page A

His fists went through dead flesh and lodged into sticky viscera. Dead hands groped him, tore at his clothes, and dug at his flesh.
    They were all over Billy Ray too, ripping at his clothes, chewing his flesh—the girl with the strap-on dildo was fucking him in the ass. There had to be something ironic about that.
    There were too many for Wyatt to fight. He fell to the ground. A maggot-infested pussy, all greenish-gray with little bugs scampering in and out of the ragged, rotting folds, descended on him.
    Wyatt gave up then. His jeans were ripped down, and something cold and clammy settled over his dick. A pair of dead lips. A sharp pain tore through him and he knew for sure his dick was dinner.
    The dead were coming.
    If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em was all Wyatt could think, and he began to devour the rotten pussy as the corpses devoured him.
     
     
     

Dead and Living in Whitechapel
     
     
     
    Cecil Whitley justified the murders several ways. First, he did all of his work in the East End of London, a section of town dilapidated and fraught with poverty and disease. Second, he only took the lives of women who had nothing to look forward to but social ostracism anyway, and thus, he was actually doing them a service. Third, and most important, Cecil killed so that his brother Edward could continue to live.
    Edward Whitley, in contrast to the desperate prostitutes whose pitiful lives Cecil took, was a once-respected surgeon who’d made it his life’s work to eradicate disease and decay in the human body and to one day do away with death altogether. Edward had traveled to many parts of the world in search of what he fondly referred to as “the big cure.” He’d left no stone unturned in his quest for everlasting life, and when all medical and scientific avenues had been exhausted, Edward sought answers in the remote jungles of Africa.
    There he learned the secrets of dark magic.
    Edward had often talked to Cecil for hours at a time about the dark magic of a lost African civilization inhabiting a part of the continent known as the Land of the Forever Living. It had taken Edward a year to find this lost civilization, after which he’d spent two years learning the secrets of eternal life.
    Edward’s failing health began within a year of his arrival back to London. He grew paler as the days passed. Eventually, he died in his sleep.
    Cecil, who had always held his older brother in high esteem, barely coped with the loss. When he stumbled upon a sample of the elixir Edward had brought back from Africa, Cecil administered it to Edward, believing all Edward had told him about the power of the elixir to be true.
    Later that night Edward walked again.
    * * *
    By late August of 1888 Edward was quite unmanageable. He wandered around in circles in his room, occasionally throwing himself against the walls. Some of the skin on his face and hands had begun to slough away, and one eye drooped from its socket, held in place by a gummy strand of optic nerve. His color was no good either, even for a reanimated corpse.
    Cecil knew the problem. The ritual responsible for Edward’s rebirth called for a specific sort of flesh—human flesh— and there was just one way Cecil knew to come into possession of such a thing.
    He did not fancy the thought, but he loved his brother, who had once done so much for others, and in the end he decided to do what was best for Edward. It would be easy enough.
    He donned a black overcoat and slipped a dagger into an inside pocket, then he found the black bag once used by Edward in his medical duties.
    A cold, light rain had fallen intermittently throughout the evening, and now a thick fog draped the glistening black cobblestone streets.
    Cecil knew these streets well. The money his family had once had was no longer available. Now Cecil and Edward lived in the squalor of the East End. Cecil knew every nook and cranny, every shortcut, and when the constables made their rounds, slipping through the