• Lodin sighed as he saved his latest edit. He had been writing for the better half of the day, and had seen the sun set long ago. The novelist sat back and finished off his drink before stretching his shoulders. This part of the story had taken a bit more work then usual, due to a violent heightening of imagination. Such a curse would usually be welcome to a dark tale, but wielding it has taken a tax on the young author.

    Glancing at the screen, and then towards his bed, he decided to call it quits for the night. His pillow beckoned like a soft siren, and his will was naught against its charm. His eyes struggled to stay shut when he blinked, and thus he soon found himself embracing his sheets, not recalling the walk over to them in the slightest.

    Then the silence hit, like an avalanche. His calm heartbeat was quick to break it, however, before consuming it, and shouting it back through his body. Blood ran through his ears like a waterfall, casting a background to his cardiac rhythm. These drums warded off sleep unlike any drug, and despite his intentions there was no path to rest tonight.

    Again.

    Holding his knees to his chest, Lodin tried to focus on the shadows surrounding his bed. The endless but heavy energy of sleeplessness was lifting him back to dreadful inactivity. He mulled over his current location for a moment, and stepped onto the floor as he discovered his newly parched throat. A glass of water was only a kitchen away, and it's not like he had anything else to do in his current state.

    The darkness held no resistance to his shambling body, and he meandered with but a single eye open towards the faucet. Swaying in his idle stance, the writer fetched a glass from his cupboard and held it beneath the flowing water, and watched the dark coagulation fill the container.

    He paused for a moment and focused through the half-full glass of water, then shook his head before gulping down the crisp, cold liquid. Too much thinking, not enough sleep. A trick of the light, or lack thereof. He concentrated on the fading chill through his body, and promptly lost himself in the temporal ocean.

    Lodin was quick to read but slow to realize the words weren't in his mind, and it took several chapters before he noticed he was reviewing his story. A brief worry melted as he pondered how he got from his kitchen to his computer, but it was soon vapor as the screen demanded his attentions. He was once again succumbing to his insomnia, and as if by some automatic hand went back to his work.

    ***

    Logan Knight sighed from his perch in the windowsill of the apartment, the full moon casting a contrast across his bold features. A haze drifted from the cigarette he lazily held between his fingers, before being quickly dispersed by an exhalement of smoke from the man's lungs. His gray eyes watched the horizon with what could only have been described as smoldering hope.

    Moans and bellows echoed up from the street below. Primal frustration called the curious undead from all around as the zombies and ghouls failed terrifically at reaching the still-dripping corpses of Knight's brief comrades. They would have wanted it like this, he told himself - getting their revenge in the most destructive way possible.

    He watched the puddles of petrol glow in the moonlight. The overturned cars and bent fencing created a wonderful container for trapping an ever growing number of flesh-craving monstrosities. Those who still bear clothes had long since dirtied them with flammable filth, and their naked brethren were suitably tinder. Cigarettes could only last so long, but still longer than Knight's patience.

    One last drag, and the survivor flicked the wrapped tobacco embers out over the street beneath him. A street saturated with gasoline, populated with trapped zombies, and the last stand of a handful of folks who were in the wrong city at the wrong time. A handful of folks who now dangle above a crazed crowd of death, leaking the last of their body's blood upon those who should not be.

    An aura of flame spread swiftly under the feet of the now twice damned. It was like a dragon's maw slowly opening to swallow the roadway whole. A dull roar and hiss steamed from the thousands of licking tongues now, precluding the sudden moment when the wyrm would breathe. For when it did, everything beneath Logan Knight was engulfed in a furious heat that only demons would care to match.

    The consequences of such an act had been previously thought through to a certain degree by the chef in question. Preparing the bait - further mutilating the bodies of former allies - was a necessary evil in order to survive. The undead would come from blocks away to get a taste of liquid life. The containers of gasoline would detonate from the fire and perhaps catch the attention of choppers in the distance. The smell of burning human flesh would permeate the city, and aid in Knight's escape as a distraction to the monsters.

    But the resulting scream, from when scores upon scores of hungered souls cry out in suffering, is something which scars the very core of one's soul. Echoing and reverberating, the screeches of agony leaped into the sky off the straight angles of abandoned buildings. Knight's eyes widened and his heart quickened from the sheer force of the sound, and his skin was soon textured from the chills.

    Clutching his ears, Knight ducked into the darkened room escape the cries. He slammed the windowpane down and locked it out of instinctual fright, a slight beading of sweat forming around his forehead and neck. He didn't know it then, but he would never be able to forget the noise he had orchestrated that night, and it would haunt him until his last day.

    ***

    Jerking his head off the desk, Lodin's eyes were alert with surprise. He could hear the screams coming from outside his home. The drapes waved in the night breeze and displayed wicked silhouettes of terrors peeking within. His clammy skin told him the temperature was much cooler than what he remembered, but was then quite warm. His heartbeat next caught his attention, and brought him back to reality, and to the wails of the alarm clock shrieking at him from his room.

    With a heavy, shaking breath he looked at the early morning time as he snuffed the sound. He struggled for the moment to recall why he had set his alarm so early, and soon remembered the book signing he agreed to do down in the city. He sighed, rubbing his arms as he remembered the soul shattering screams. The yawn came and went, and he started to get ready for his last day as a writer.