Free A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous by ed. Shane McKenzie

son’s attention; she struggled to make her legs move.
    But nothing worked.
    The hag suddenly pivoted, her black and red eyes fixing on the unsuspecting toddler. She bounded across the distance between them like some grotesque rabbit. His curls sprung when she grabbed him. His high-pitched wail of terror pierced Christine’s heart. In a single movement she cracked him in half like an egg. His juices flowed, his cries ceased.
    She lowered her horrible head to his back and with teeth as sharp as razors, tore away a chunk of fabric and innocent flesh. She spat it aside and ducked down again, ripping away pieces of his little body until she got to the good stuff, the marrow in his bones, the fluid from his severed spine. She drank it down with relish, her horrible lips wrapping greedily around the bone.
    Inside the house Christine found her voice. She screamed until her throat felt like it was going to bleed.
    A hand clamped over her mouth and she was dragged away from the window. She spun around to face her father. Tears streaked both their faces.
    “My baby!” she wailed. “What’s she doing to him?”
    Her legs went from under her and her father followed her to the ground, his arms gripping her tight with a strength that had not wasted along with his body.
    “You have to let him go,” he whispered, his voice cracking with emotion. “We must bear the sins of our forefathers. It is the burden of our town.”
    Christine hiccuped huge sobs that racked her body.
    “My baby,” she moaned, lying down on the floor and curling up in a protective ball while her father tried his best to soothe her through his own pain.
    How some things always stay the same. Just as people never asked where the newborn babies came from that were carted from that house long ago, now they turned a blind eye when the younger members of the community failed to show, their presence replaced by red rings around the eyes of their parents.
    Nothing much had changed in Murrins over the years; nothing much at all.

THE GREATEST SIN
    by Kevin Wallis
    L awrence opened his eyes into blackness.
    “Brooke?” His throat ached with the words. When only the rasping of his own breath replied, his chest tightened and a wave of terror descended. “Brooke!”
    “Here.” Her voice was steadier than his, but thick with her own fear. “I’m here, Lawrence.”
    His sigh sounded like a November gale in the silence. His wife’s form started to materialize several yards away as his vision fought the darkness. Realizing he was lying on his back, Lawrence tried to sit, but pain hammered his head and he fell back with a moan. He felt the back of his skull with a shaky hand and found a lump the size of a walnut. A crusty mass flaked beneath his touch. Dried blood, he assumed, and the darkness deepened at the thought.
    “What happened?” he asked. Brooke had always been the smart one. He prayed that strength would surface now. “Where the hell are we?”
    “No idea. But my head hurts like a bitch.”
    “Mine too.” Inhaling and holding his breath against the pain, Lawrence sat. His head threatened to drag him back to the deep, but he managed to get upright and suppress the dizziness. He dragged his hand across the ground towards his wife, needing to feel her skin, her hair, her breath. He shook his head, growled as the lump throbbed and stabbed, but managed to clear his sight enough to find her in the lessening dark; despite its dampness and palpable tremor, her hand had never felt so warm.
    “I feel dirt beneath us,” she said.
    The darkness had ebbed enough to allow Lawrence his first view of his surroundings, and his flesh chilled in the humid April night. They sat in a space the size of a child’s bedroom. An odor of wet earth saturated the already moist air, and a glimmer of moonshine flickering through a crack in the ceiling granted them just enough light by which to see. The four surrounding walls, either caked with or entirely comprised of mud, seemed to