Rise of the Mudmen Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  First Published in 2017

  To the drama kids who taught me

  BEFORE

  ALEX

  DAVID

  NICOLE

  KAITLYN

  DAY 1 - THE MORNING

  ALEX

  DAVID

  KAITLYN

  ALEX

  DAY 1 - THE AFTERNOON

  NICOLE

  ALEX

  KAITLYN

  DAY 1 - THE NIGHT

  NICOLE

  DAVID

  ALEX

  DAY 2 - THE MORNING

  NICOLE

  ALEX

  NICOLE

  DAVID

  DAY 2 - LATER

  ALEX

  DAVID

  ALEX

  KAITLYN

  DAY 3

  ALEX

  KAITLYN

  ALEX

  KAITLYN

  ALEX

  DAY 4

  ALEX

  KAITLYN

  ALEX

  NICOLE

  DAVID

  ALEX

  NICOLE

  ALEX

  DAY 5

  KAITLYN

  ALEX

  NICOLE

  KAITLYN

  DAVID

  NICOLE

  ALEX

  KAITLYN

  DAY 6

  KAITLYN

  ALEX

  KAITLYN

  NICOLE

  KAITLYN

  NICOLE

  KAITLYN

  NICOLE

  KAITLYN

  NICOLE

  KAITLYN

  ALEX

  NICOLE

  KAITLYN

  NICOLE

  ALEX

  NICOLE

  ALEX

  KAITLYN

  ALEX

  KAITLYN

  ALEX

  NICOLE

  DAY 7

  ALEX

  NICOLE

  ALEX

  DAY 8

  ALEX

  KAITLYN

  ALEX

  DAY 9

  ALEX

  DAVID

  ALEX

  KAITLYN

  DAY 10

  ALEX

  DAY 11: THE LAST DAY

  ALEX

  NICOLE

  DAY 11: THE LAST NIGHT

  ALEX

  NICOLE

  ALEX

  NICOLE

  ALEX

  AFTER

  ALEX

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About Third Person Press

  RISE OF THE MUDMEN

  a novel by

  JAMES FW THOMPSON

  First Published in 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by James FW Thompson

  Cover Artwork © 2017 by Nancy S.M. Waldman

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission from Third Person Press. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, entities or settings is entirely coincidental.

  Thompson, James FW, 1981-, author

  Rise of the Mudmen / James FW Thompson

  Third Person Press

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.thirdpersonpress.com

  Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada

  Rise of the Mudmen

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9936325-4-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9936325-5-6

  To the drama kids who taught me

  that you can accomplish amazing things

  at any age.

  BEFORE

  ALEX

  She ran, stumbling through the forest. Panic and freshly fallen snow tripped her, and it quickly became very clear she didn’t have a chance. Her life could be tracked in just a few terror-filled seconds.

  They were on her. First one, then two, and quickly six of them surrounded her. They stumbled and fell as much as she did, but it didn’t matter; they had the advantage. They were in control. They bore down gnashing at her, tearing her flesh as she writhed in fear and pain.

  Quickly the image of purity and serenity became a bloodbath. Her jerking motions only stopped as they yanked bloody, steaming pieces of her into their mouths. Their faces were stained red along with the snow-white ground. The only sounds were of their growling and chomping as sticky red tendons snapped from one creature to another. Between bites, one of them looked up, searching for something—perhaps their next kill; perhaps to find anyone who watched them as they fed; perhaps both.

  Just as suddenly as it began, it was over with a quick flip of the dial.

  “Hey,” Alex said, “I was watching that!”

  Shadow, his black lab, woke up with a jerk at the sudden noise. Alex had hoped she might take more of an interest in her canine relatives, but evidently the show was too long for her.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” his dad replied. “But it’s supper time, and I don’t want you getting any ideas.”

  Alex headed for the kitchen to set the table. “So you’re saying you don’t want to just tear a deer apart on the table?”

  His dad shook his head as he flipped through the channels looking for the news. “Naw, I’m okay with spaghetti.” He finally settled on a channel and looked to his son. “Why would they show something like that on TV anyway? That’s just…messy. A bit scary, don’t you think?”

  “Dad,” Alex said, rolling his eyes—a habit he had developed in the month since he’d turned fifteen. “It’s New Wilderness! Lorne Greene, talking about wolves. It’s educational.”

  “Uh huh,” his dad said, backing onto the couch. “It might be, but I’m already dealing with getting your sister to sleep, I don’t want to have to worry about you and your glomp, glomp, glomp.” He stomped around on the spot, grinning at Alex.

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” he said. “How about you, Mary? Do you have any idea what he is talking about?”

  Mary stared back at him and giggled as she kicked her short legs in her father’s arms.

  “Exactly,” Alex said, “no one knows what you’re talking about, Dad.”

  “Okay, whatever you say. Let me know when the table is set, all right? I’m going to catch some of the news.”

  Alex went into the kitchen without a reply. Shadow slumped off the couch and followed him, hoping for a treat before her own supper.

  Though he played it off as a joke, Alex didn’t like it when his dad brought them up. The mudmen. Years ago, he had a series of bad dreams: everyone turned into mud creatures who roamed the streets looking for other people to turn. They would eat them and spit them out as more mudmen. He had no idea where the idea originally came from, but his dad was convinced that it had come from an episode of Scooby-Doo and had therefore banned it from the house for a few months. Now whenever anything questionable was watched, his dad brought up the mudmen.

  Things like that bothered an eleven-year old, but that was four years ago. Now Alex felt he was practically an adult; he was above such things. The memory embarrassed him—partly because it was so silly to have such an irrational fear and partly because it still sent shivers through him when he pictured the creatures his mind had created.

  Though he viewed the idea as a part of his childhood, the worst instance of the mudmen haunting him had actually occurred almost a year and a half ago. May 20, 1985—V
ictoria Day. The day that his mother died.

  She left to get a few things at the grocery store—they were planning a barbeque with family friends to celebrate the long weekend. Evidently, someone else had decided to start celebrating early. She was killed instantly when a drunk driver blasted through a stop sign, into the other lane, and directly into her as she drove to the store.

  It made no sense. She was only gone for five minutes, maybe less. It was a safe area, only a few blocks from their house; they knew it well. It wasn’t a high traffic street. They barely ever passed anyone, just friendly people, waving to their neighbours as they coasted by. Plus, it was a beautiful, sunny day. Bad things didn’t happen on beautiful, sunny days. It didn’t make sense: his mother walked out the door and could never come back. He couldn’t even remember if he had said goodbye to her before she went out.

  As if the tragedy weren’t hard enough on his father, Alex could no longer stand to be alone. It felt less painful when there were other people around. His dad didn’t have to be as close if there were friends or other family around—of which there were plenty in the days following the accident. After a week, both Alex and his dad thought it was a good idea for him to go back to school. The two entered the building together to speak to Alex’s principal. Everything was very somber, but it seemed like the best decision.

  Back outside, as his dad was walking away, and before Alex knew what he was doing, he shouted at the top of his lungs, “I love you! Don’t go!” The panic in his voice brought stares from everyone around him in the crowded schoolyard. Suddenly he felt very isolated. His heart raced and he gasped for air. He tried to rush into the school, but in his panic, he couldn’t get the front door open. His best friends, Mark and Jeremy, tried to help, but Alex just shoved them away. Almost everyone else ignored the situation and Alex’s distress.

  Almost.

  Alex thought he had gotten past the problem almost entirely. He barely thought about the incident at school, or the accident, or the nightmares that came with it anymore. However, ever since then, Alex always had to know exactly where his father was. He would never allow it to happen that his father would simply not come back home to him.

  Pushing the thought aside, he set the table, listening to the sound of the news and his father talking to Mary as if she could understand the stories. “It just looks worse and worse every week down there, huh Mary?”

  His dad always watched the American news from Bangor, Maine. He watched local news too, but said the American news was more “current” because things always came to Cape Breton way later than anywhere else in the world. Plus, he said it was just more interesting. Alex didn’t get it. Nothing about the news was interesting. The only time he had spent more than a few fleeting seconds watching it was when it had ruined his birthday party earlier that year.

  The MacAulay’s had never been big on parties—in fact, Alex refused to celebrate his fourteenth birthday the September after his mother had died. It was something that she had always done with Alex; he thought doing it without her would be a disservice. He admitted his regret just before his father’s birthday the following January. His father offered to share his birthday and vowed to give Alex the best birthday celebration of his life on January 28, 1986.

  The day the Challenger exploded.

  They tried to pretend nothing had happened, but everyone was distracted by the disaster. After that, they were done with parties. Last month, for Alex’s fifteenth birthday, his dad took him and two of his friends to Simeon’s for dinner.

  Alex had never really been interested in the news prior to the Challenger disaster, but he avoided it like a disease after. There were updates on the story for weeks, constantly reminding him. Now he just avoided it out of habit.

  He knew he wasn’t missing much: wars in countries he had never heard of, diseases getting worse and spreading, economic recessions—whatever those were—and generally just more and more bad news. There was enough of that with his dad getting laid off from the steel plant and signs that things would only be getting worse around Cape Breton as he grew up.

  To him, the news was a reminder of what a great time it was to be alive.

  He yawned as he approached his school. He sat on the front step, barely able to keep his head from rolling sleepily out of his hands as he waited for his friends, Mark and Jeremy, to arrive.

  “My Uncle Steven said that it’s, like, something to do with AIDS,” Mark was saying as he and Jeremy arrived. The topic of AIDS had overtaken the junior high in previous months. Like most topics in the school that were considered ‘mature’, it seemed that most people had no idea what they were talking about.

  “Like…” Mark strained, trying to come up with a term so he would sound like an expert, “like … hyper-AIDS.”

  “Hyper-AIDS, huh?” Jeremy said skeptically. “I dunno. My cousin is in the army, and he never said anything about that. He’d know.” Jeremy was a notorious liar. Alex doubted he even had a cousin, let alone one who knew anything in the army.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Alex asked his friends as he shook the left-over sleep out of his head.

  Mark stopped and stared at Alex. “Something that was on the news. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Great,” Alex sighed. As much as he avoided the news, his friends had become engrossed in it in an effort to show how adult they were at the sophisticated age of fourteen. Alex was in no hurry to be an adult, despite being the oldest of the three.

  Mark smirked at Alex then to Jeremy. “Don’t worry, Alex. You’ll catch up some day.”

  Jeremy snorted out a chuckle as they dropped their book bags and sat with him.

  “Anyway,” Mark continued, “it just said that it happens fast and that people are disappearing.”

  “Yeah,” Jeremy said with a nod. “That sounds like AIDS to me.”

  “Oh yeah?” Alex finally decided to enter the conversation. “In what way does that sound like Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome?”

  Jeremy stared at him blankly. “What?”

  “And, checkmate,” Alex said with a grin. Mark gave him a high five. Clearly, they were on a higher level of intelligence than their dumber friend. He was just lucky that he memorized the medical term from a poster that hung in the hall outside of his French class. He had to do something other than learn French, after all.

  Alex seized the moment to change the subject: a movie that he had watched over the weekend. Normally he would have watched it with his friends, but this one was the ASN Saturday Late Night Movie which started at midnight and didn’t end until 2:00; he had fallen asleep before it ended. It was called The Thing. His dad had watched it when he was a kid—only that was a different movie. This one was a re-make, and it seemed to only loosely fit the description his dad had given him. The special effects were amazing—watching people shift into horrible, twisted monsters—but they actually had scared him. Not that he would admit he was scared to his friends. Ironically, another fear soon became obvious.

  “Oh hey, Alec!”

  Jared Flemming had started picking on Alex when he moved to his new elementary in third grade. Tripping him, stealing his change, calling him names. It stopped when Jared entered junior high, leaving Alex behind. When Alex moved up, he feared that the relationship would start over anew, but aside from a few sideways glances, Jared had left him alone. Alex let himself hope that he had changed.

  Then came Alex’s breakdown in front of the school. Most people ignored it. A few people—Alex’s friends and teachers—helped. Jared just took it all in. And laughed. He actually got sent home on a three-day suspension for it. When Alex was finally ready to come back to school, Jared was more than ready to welcome him back. The difference was that now, instead of tripping Alex or stealing his change, he attacked him mentally.

  “Where’s Daddy at today, Alec?” or “Why don’t you run home to Mommy, Alec—oh, never mind!” became his usual greetings.

  Jared always called him Alec, pushing th
e hard ‘c,’ as if something so trivial would bother Alex.

  It bothered him immensely.

  But that was when Jared was still in the same school. This year he was in high school at the Academy, and Alex had almost two blissful, Jared-free months of Grade 9 so far. Apparently, it was too good to last.

  Alex wanted to say something, but he couldn’t. He was just that little third grader again. Fortunately, Mark understood the situation. “Come on,” he said standing up. “I wanna ask you guys about my science fair project.”

  Jeremy followed along, keeping his eyes on Jared and his cronies. He, too, had been bullied by the older boys, but now they just ignored him.

  Alex stayed glued to his spot on the steps, his breathing audible.

  “Alex?” Mark finally got his attention. “You coming?”

  “Huh?” Alex said, making Jared and his friends laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m coming.” He stood, even though his legs had suddenly turned to rubber.

  Jared continued staring at the boys, smiling. “Science fair, huh?” His friends chuckled quietly to themselves as they waited for the punchline. “You kids really know how to party.”

  As the older boys walked away, Jared called over his shoulder: “You know what, boys? I like this route. I think we’ll take it every day from now on.” He turned and looked straight into Alex’s eyes. “See you tomorrow, Alec! Say hi to your mommy for me!”

  They took all his friends. They took everyone on his street. They took everyone he knew. They all became mud monsters who just wanted to eat. They looked more real now.

  For the most part, the creatures were faceless when they turned. Just horrific masses with gaping maws full of jagged teeth. Three faces stayed, though. He recognized three of the mudmen. They had teamed up against him and they would find him because they knew him far too well.

  One was Jared.

  As they got closer, details of their muddy faces became more and more clear.

  One was his father.

  The sounds of their sloppy breath filled his ears. He wanted to scream but he couldn’t. There was no air in his chest.

  One was his mother.

  He woke up with a scream.

  A quick glance at his alarm clock told him it was 3:45AM. “Crap,” he said, hearing his dad’s footsteps approaching.

  His bedroom door slowly opened. “What happened? Everything okay?” his dad asked, a combination of sleepiness and panic in his voice.