“The light,” it rasped, one hand shading its eyes.
I pulled the door partially shut. The shed sported one dusty, flyblown window half-hidden behind a rack of hanging tools. My gaze flickered to the garden hoe. Could I reach it without getting too close?
“Water?” The ratchety voice cracked on the second syllable.
Behind the shed was a faucet with a short length of hose that dripped continuously into the chicken’s water trough. Reaching into the cobwebbed corner above my head, my hand found the old dipper that had hung there since Adam was still clay. I held it up so the thing (he?) could see what I was doing.
When his eyes slid past the dipper toward mine, I shivered inside my windbreaker and backed out the way I’d come in. My better instincts kept telling me to drop the dipper and run, but he must have sensed something for all of a sudden the rough voice coughed: “Hurry. Please.”
Glancing toward the house to make sure my father wasn’t coming, I yanked the hose out of the metal watering trough and filled the bowl of the dipper as full as possible. I made sure to put the hose back into its guiding clamp to keep it from crimping, then I walked quickly back to the shed.
Squeezing though the gap again, I glanced into the corner.
It was empty.
“Hey . . .” My voice chirped like one of the chicks on its first day out of the nest.
YOU ARE READING
Chems ~ a short story (page one)
HorrorThe story of a boy who finds a chemical zombie hiding in the toolshed. The meeting will change his life, forever.
