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

haven’t even touched you, yet you faint while I am speaking to you. And rest assured, I have no plans for your…nose.”
    He opened his eyes, meant to tell the giant to go to Hell, leave them alone, fuck off, but his voice dribbled from his mouth as incoherent nonsense. The thing in the robes stood over him. Brooke’s leg, gray and bare and severed at the hip, hung from its hand.
    The thing followed Lawrence’s gaze, then tossed the leg into the dirt. “Unnecessary,” it said. “Unaesthetic.”
    Rage engulfed him, obliterated any desire for self-preservation. He saw only Brooke, his still and forever Brooke, and prayed for death’s reunion. He growled as he lunged; his fingers found his kidnapper’s neck and squeezed. It felt like squeezing lumber. The thing laughed, like gravel crunching underfoot.
    “Let’s stop the charade, Mr. Lawrence. Do you remember your sins?”
    “I didn’t do anything to you!” He abandoned the fruitless attempt at choking his enemy and, realizing that his feet were unchained, leapt towards its face and groped for the hood. If he was to die, he would see the face of his killer.
    The thing grabbed Lawrence’s arm. It twisted its wrist, and Lawrence’s forearm snapped in the middle and burst through his skin like a baby elephant’s trunk. He wailed, clutched the break. His vision blurred as if challenging the reality of his arm’s new angles.
    “Your attacks were becoming tiresome,” the thing said. It grabbed Lawrence by the hair and strode towards the door of the mud room. Lawrence’s healthy hand left the wreckage of the fracture and grabbed the beast’s wrist, trying to alleviate the agony in his scalp. Like a parent dragging an irate child in the midst of a tantrum, the giant took Lawrence from his prison and showed him a glimpse of Hell.
    “This is the price for your sins,” it said, and raised Lawrence by the hair until his feet dangled from the ground. Lawrence thrashed in terror, the pain in his head forgotten before the scene in front of him.
    They stood in a forest. The moon shone full and heavy, illuminating every ghastly detail. Trees dotted the landscape, and they screamed in silent agony. Faces blended into the bark, blemishes in each trunk describing mouths full of soundless shrieks, eyes of the blackest fear. Hundreds of trees, hundreds of bodies, still but alive, flesh made wood, begging yet reverent to their master as it carried Lawrence into their midst. A maple the size of a teenage girl wept sap as they passed. An oak with a linebacker’s girth glared with crooked knotholes and offered unheard prayers with a furry mouth. A cone of fungus hung from a conifer and fit its grimacing face like a beard. Lawrence went slack, dangled, his protruding radius bouncing painlessly off his captor’s robes, his fight lost among the human dead and the thriving flora.
    “Your kind sins against my bride with never a moment to consider her love for you, never a thought for the grace of her soul.” The beast lowered Lawrence to the ground, still grasping a clawful of hair, and dragged him deeper into the human forest. “You set up camps to praise the gift of her vastness, to cheer your own courage for daring to sleep without electricity and shelter. Yet you continue to cut, and hack, and saw at her bones. Your garbage sinks into her flesh and poisons her veins. You rob her waters of their creations, and litter her air in toxins and smoke.”
    The thing picked Lawrence up once more and turned him to within inches of its obscure face. An earthy odor emanated from the shadows, a green and blooming smell that nearly dragged a mirthless laugh from Lawrence. The wind groaned through the bodies as if dreading the moments to come.
    “And you burn her limbs with smoldering embers.”
    With a snap and a crack, its free arm broke, bent, and pulled back its hood. Lawrence cackled with lunatic terror.
    Eyes as black and deep as wormholes glared, gauged, judged. Its flesh was cracked