Zombies Will Fall From the Sky

A few years back on Halloween, me and my friends got together to celebrate. It was recent, but I'd gotten into Wicca like my friend Jess had a couple years before, though I'd been researching it for far longer than I'd been interested in joining it, and we'd decided we would have the best Samhain ever.

Since my dad could care less if we ran around the woods at night or slept in the back yard, so long as we had a nice warm bonfire, everyone came over to my house, and we kicked off the night by walking around the neighborhood talking. It was fun to get everyone in the mood for a scary night, me and Jess telling stories about some of the crazy and scary things we'd seen in the neighborhood. Like that time we were swimming alone and saw a faceless woman in her backyard swimming pool. Or that time I'd seen some pale, dark haired, woman run down the driveway seconds before Jess left her house.

By the time we'd gotten to the edge of the woods we'd sufficiently freaked everyone out, everyone out but ourselves, there is. For some reason when someone first becomes Wiccan, they're overwhelmed with the strange sensation that scary stuff just can't touch them anymore, because now they're part of the things that scare normal people. At least, that explained Jess not being afraid. I'd been seeing freaky stuff my whole life, it was just an accepted part of my day if something weird happened. I wasn't afraid because I told myself that it those things wanted to hurt me, they could've done it a billion times over already.

Hunny, however, was terrified beyond all belief. She stood there, trembling, on the verge of tears, begging not to go in. So I stood up and offered her my protection, even at a time before the adorable kid had become my precious little sister. I gave her a flower from a tree to hang on to that I remember meaning protection in one of the spells I'd recently looked at, then I grasped her hand and held it tight and we started off on our walk.

It was dark in the woods, and the red clay was slightly damp from raining a couple days before, and we had to walk around large mud puddles a couple of times. It was a good place to be quiet and let the other's get freaked out even more. I remember thinking it was funny, not because they were scared, but because Jess wasn't. She was normally, for lack of a better term, a bit of a scardy cat about these things.

After walking a good way into the woods, I thought I saw something move off ahead, a bit off the path, but before I could mention it to Jess, I caught her looking at me with a bit of worry. Subtly we shifted closer and I jerked my head at it and she nodded, frowning. So, we both saw it... it wasn't an illusion...

On the outside we kept laughing and talking, stopping to show the group a small shrine I'd set up to the spirits of the area. We all stopped and said little prayers for the spirits, but I kept my eye down the path... I saw it move, shift... It was a weird shape, kind of like a weird tiger person, if I had to describe it simply. It was crouched down and looked like it might be a kind of leaf orange in the daylight, with these shadow stripes, but there were clearly these... big beefy arms and the shape was like a man hunched down, arms in front for balance. It was creepy, but whatever it was, it wasn't messing with us, but it was watching.

Gulping down my fear and doubt, I tucked away my adrenaline rush and reminded myself that if it wanted to hurt me, it could've done so already. Instead I moved up to Jess and whispered to her, both of us confirming that we were seeing the same thing; she looked over her shoulder to glace at it, and I saw her face pale. "It's moving closer..." She murmured softly, and my stomach felt chilly. I looked back quickly as well, and I saw that it had indeed crept closer, and even as I watched I saw the back legs shift forward and more weight get placed on one of the arms. No trick of the light then, it couldn't be... I saw the head tilt, felt the eyes make contact, and I looked ahead quickly.

"That's pretty much all of it," I said, hiding my fear. "We should be getting back for dinner." I announced, in an effort to get us all to leave slowly but quickly, and without giving it away. After all, they'd all met my dad's Girl-fiend, they'd know it would be a bad idea to make her start yelling at us because we missed dinner.

Relaxed now and laughing, the rest of the group began to file away, but Hunny stuck close to me, still scared, and held my hand, while Jess hang back with me. I tried to hide it, but I could see that Hunny noticed something was wrong. "What is it?" She asked, and nonchalantly and quietly, I reassured her it was nothing, just one of those things we saw all the time; but when I looked at Jess she nodded at me, face grim. Still following us then... I couldn't resist, I looked over my shoulder.

It was now on the path, closer than before, but still far enough back it was only a strange shape just where the path curved out of sight.

I shivered and looked ahead, and tried to keep the group from noticing. We would be fine, we just had to get out of there. We kept up the ruse for a good while, looking back to see it staying just at the edge where the path would curve out of sight around a bind, but after a while we looked back and it just wasn't there... I didn't feel relieved, though. I was still wary...

We made it out of the woods pretty safely and then went home and ate dinner, made by my dad's Girl-Fiend, and then we went out back to clear out a place to set up the tent in the little grove of trees in my back yard. We set up a fire and laid down every blanket and pillow that could be spared in the house, referred to as a pallet of doom, and then we set around so that Emmers and Jess could use their tarot cards to predict things or tell about past lives.

I remember being stupid and saying something to Emmers as a reply when she said that something always went wrong with her readings. I told her that made she and Jess could read the same thing and we'd compare, and she got really mad at me, "So Jess is right and I'm wrong?" I tried to explain I only meant that if she did read things funny sometimes, maybe if they predicted the same thing we could see the differences, but it didn't help...

After a while, Jess pulled out her ouji board and we started to play with that. It went alright for awhile, it was answering questions fine, but when someone asked me to ask who'd I'd one day marry, things got a little weird... It spelled out letters just fine, but it went to a G, and then a B, and then a Q... and then an I and an H... It just wasn't a name. For a few minutes we kept trying, but it just kept giving garbled and non-sensical answers.

Finally, frustrated, Hunny demanded to know, "So are zombies going to fall from the sky or something?" She wasn't even touching the planchette anymore, but me, Jess, and Emmers were. I felt my hand get dragged, it was the most forcefull it had moved all night, and I saw Jess let go of it in shock and Emmers eyes bug out.

The planchette pulled our hands to "yes".