October 17th

Tina kissed the stranger, hoping her husband wouldn't come home. She hadn't seen the man to whom she was married in several days, but this wasn't unusual. She took the stranger into the bedroom, where an unpleasant surprise awaited following their sexual actions. She was a murderess, a black widow of sorts, and over a dozen bodies lay on the bottom of the lake behind her house. She would stab this man, cut him into pieces, and bag up the body parts. As they made out on the bed, slowly pulling the clothes off one another, something banged on the door. It wasn't so much a knock as much as somebody pounding, demanding entrance.

"Shit," she said. "It's my husband."

"You're married?"

"Oh, come on. A girl's got to get laid, and I ain't getting nothing from him."

"Do I need to hide?" he asked.

"You need to sneak out the back."

"How am I getting home?" he asked. "I rode with you, and we're out in the middle of nowhere."

"Not my problem, but you'll be facing a shotgun if you don't get out of here."

The door burst open, and somebody headed straight for the bedroom. The stranger tried escaping out the window, when the intruder stood in the bedroom doorway. It was not her husband. She did not know who it was. The person stood there, staring in the darkness, not moving. He smelled like death, and she could see water dripping off his clothes and pooling on the ground around him. The man stepped forward, and she screamed. He wasn't, couldn't, be human. She recognized a tattoo on one of the arms, but the creature's chest was darker, a different pigmentation. She knew the pieces making up this monstrosity, she had known all of them for a night. Different arms, different legs, a different head — they were all there, a little of each, somehow held together and moving towards her. She reached beneath the mattress and grabbed a knife hidden there. She knew better than to attack this monster. It was already dead. Instead, she ran towards the other man, the one who would have been the next victim. He stood there frozen, staring at the creature. She stabbed him in the arm, pulled him out of the window, and shoved him towards the wet, muddy monster. As she escaped through the window, she could hear the man screaming, heard the sound of flesh ripping and tearing, could hear blood drizzling to the ground, and then his voice no longer echoing into the night. She climbed into her truck. On the passenger seat sat a pumpkin. In it was carved a man lumbering like a zombie, wet seaweed hanging from his limbs, water dripping and forming a pool at his feet. She picked up the pumpkin and tossed this out the window before driving off into the night.

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