Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Shells Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

SHELLS

Evan Hull looked into the rearview mirror, smiling at his daughter Cara and her chocolate-spattered lips and cheeks. The highway was quiet, lifeless, which made sense; they were on their way up to Hyder, Alaska to see the glacier where John Carpenter shot much of The Thing. T Swift was on the radio and, despite only being five—six next Thursday—Cara knew all the words. It gave him a queasy feeling to realize that soon she’d know what all those words meant, then she’d know how they felt, then she’d have her own words about breakups. Someday Cara would be a woman. Someday Cara would no longer be his little girl.

He steadied his jaw as a tremble played into his chin.

“Daddy, why doesn’t Mommy come back?”

Like a dull knife directly into his heart. “Hon? Come on. Don’t—”

“Act like a baby,” she said in a tease.

“Dying is just what happens. Remember?” Grief had him mad and confused; he didn’t tell Cara until the morning of the funeral. And there was Lara, dead in the box, face tastefully painted, and Cara refused to look. He should have forced it, but he had little will to do anything.

Cara pouted. “But that’s not fair.”

Evan swiped a finger beneath each eye to catch the drops that felt like they’d fall every day for the rest of his life. “No, it’s not.”

“You’re not going to go away too, right?”

Evan steadied himself as he met his daughter’s gaze in the rearview. “I’m not going anywhere until you’re an old, old woman. Older than Grandma and Grandpa and Nanny and Grampy, older than old. Ancient.”

Cara smiled, then carried on singing like there’d been no conversation at all.

—

Mark Kerr and Penny Bouchard had paced their little rental house all day. They’d found something to watch on TV, they’d found things needing cleaned, they’d done a ton of little duties in search of distraction, but the hours refused to speed up. Waiting for the announcement, which was coming at four o’clock, Pacific Standard Time. They existed like thrumming livewires.

Mark was mostly anxious because Penny was anxious. He had no doubt she’d pass. He’d even planned a little secret two-person celebration, ready for the moment after they posted her marks, and she could then apply to colleges.

She’d had to drop out in the tenth grade to help with an invalid father. And she planned on going back, but the man clung to life. With each passing season, the resentment mounted. She was twenty-two by the time the man died, and six months after that, her mother followed, seemingly dying of a lack of purpose. By then, it all felt over. It felt like life had passed her by. All the classmates she’d known were deep into what they’d forever be, and she hadn’t even begun her trek—at least, that’s how it felt.

But then she met Mark. He’d set a fire beneath her, convinced her to go part-time at the motel, turning beds, helping where he could with the high school equivalency stuff. And now she’d done the work, sweated through learning the almost endless facts, and battled the two-hour test.

At 3:58 PM, her marks were posted. Mark had to click through, laughing at Penny’s nervousness.

“Oh,” he said. “Fifty to pass?”

Penny looked out from between fingers. The recommended grade average for equivalency tests to get into college for nursing was 70% across the board, minimum. Penny dropped her hands and fell into the squeaky computer chair.

Math: 69%

Science: 26%

English: 44%

History: 73%

Geography: 12%

Penny balled her hands into fists and began striking the sides of her head, a high growl riding up her throat. Mark wrapped himself around her shoulders and whispered, “Einstein failed out of school his first time, too.”

Penny softened in her seat, melting beneath him. “Really?”

Mark didn’t know for sure, had heard Adrian say it on Rocky. “Absolutely. Just have to do it again.”

—

The moose appeared before the speeding Subaru wagon as if made of night. Evan cranked the steering wheel to the right, passenger’s side rubber instantly skidding over the gravel shoulder. The moose did little more than blink before the heavy car struck it. The driver’s side was crushed, more so in the back than the front. Pebbles of safety glass twinkled beneath a quarter moon while fluids drip, drip, dripped into the ditch where the Subaru had come to settle. The moose, barely clinging to life, lay on its side, wheezing out wet breaths, mucous flaring from the tip of his nose like spiderwebs in the wind.

Evan slunk and shimmied, working his way through the mangled wreckage to the backseat. The reek of spilt oil was heavy on the air, mixing with the crisp, natural scent of the atmosphere in the mountains. Cara lay unconscious, bloody, a bit of steel poking into her forehead, though only far enough to have broken skin, rather than skin and bone.

“Honey?” he said, putting his hand to her little throat, feeling for a pulse.

She was alive but fading. “Daddy?” she whispered.

“Don’t move. No matter how it feels, stay completely still. Please.”

The center console as well as the glovebox had flung open, scattering pages from manuals, napkins from fast food joints, and the rest of the bric-a-brac out onto the floor and seats. His cellphone was there somewhere, surely.

“Okay…Daaah…”

His attention jerked back to his baby girl—six next Thursday. Time was short. Frantically, he swatted through the mess, then recalled the house they’d passed less than a minute before striking the moose. One hand on the ceiling, the other on the bench seat, Evan dragged himself through the obstacle course of jagged metal, out to the broken hatch at the back. He did not feel the glass against his flesh, nor the cool wetness of the mountain runoff trickling along at the bottom of the ditch. He felt nothing at all aside from the need to get help and save his little girl—the fucking weight of the world.

Evan broke into a run once back onto the highway, sparing only a moment to glance at the dying moose and the gentle rise and fall of its great chest. The path was black and barren, a lifeless stretch of highway that appeared to lead only to more night.

Sometimes, areas of nothing but forest stretched one hundred kilometres between communities. It had been a while since they’d seen even a roadside gas station, but that house, that single, wonderful house, was close. And there it was.

Evan got to the edge of the property, not quite within reach of the yard light’s touch. On the short and aged porch was a young woman and a young man, passing a joint between them.

“Help!” Evan shouted. “There’s been an accident! My daughter!”

The woman, Penny Bouchard, slapped the man’s, Mark Kerr’s, chest. “Told you I heard something.”

Evan reached the porch and latched onto the sleeve of Penny’s too large hoodie. “Call an ambulance! My daughter!”

Mark had his phone out already. “On it.”

Evan tugged at the sleeve again, his fingers slipping on the fabric. “We have to help her!”

Penny, joint in hand, blinked at Evan, then at Mark. Mark nodded and stepped down the rickety wooden steps, phone pressed to his face. Evan led the parade in a brisk jog. Mark spoke into the phone most of the way back, falling about forty feet behind.

The Subaru’s headlights remained lit, illuminating a ditch rich in green and angle. The moose hadn’t moved anywhere; no longer moved at all.

Penny dropped the joint when she saw the damage. The moose looked huge, sprawled out on the road above the Subaru. Evan climbed down the ditch and reached through the broken window next to where his daughter sat, motionless, eyes closed, blood crusty upon her face and neck.

“Come! Help!” Evan shouted, sobs racking his body.

Penny made a noise somewhere between trepidation and outright discomfort, but she powered through, dropping to her seat, sliding over the oil-stained grass, down into the ditch. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust once at the bottom, to understand what she was seeing.

There was a man in the driver’s seat, dead. His head was kinked hard to the left, bits of steel and plastic lodged into his face and neck. His eyes were open and glassy. The door had come to fit him like a spacesuit.

“What?” Penny said as she turned to the man who’d led her here, the man identical to the dead driver.

“Sorry,” Evan said, grabbing a fistful of hair, then stabbing his right hand into her gaped mouth, never questioning how he knew what to do, never questioning how it worked.

Penny began to struggle, trying to scream. Above, Mark began calling for her as he drew closer and closer.

Evan slammed his arm deeper, reaching, reaching, reaching as Penny gagged, panicking over the inability to breathe. Her eyes closed and her knees gave out. Mark appeared then, a dark silhouette above them.

“Hey!”

Evan yanked his arm free. “Inside, quickly now,” he whispered to Cara.

She’d done as told, not moving a muscle, even when she had to hold tight to herself in a way that was confusing and terrifying. Now, she felt the tug even worse. As she pulled free of the wreckage and her corpse, it was as if the universe wanted to yank her apart, deconstruct her collection of atoms. She wouldn’t let them because she loved her daddy; he was all she had left!

“Show me where, Daddy,” she said, eyes closed, arms reaching wide.

Evan took her right hand and guided it into Penny’s mouth.

“Hey! Get off a her!” Mark said as he slid down into the ditch, riding his left heel, hands out like a surfer for balance.

Evan let go of his daughter who was already snaking herself into Penny’s mouth and leapt onto Mark before he could rise. Mark screamed in surprise. Evan stuffed that open mouth with a fist, then pushed his arm down the man’s throat. Mark thrashed, punching and pulling and squirming and kicking. The ambulance sirens sounded in the distance; Evan watched with a keen eye on the road as Mark’s death rattle shook the ethereal arm Evan had forced down into the stranger’s chest.

Once Mark was out cold, Evan broke away, feeling himself begin to separate once again—Cara, Cara, Cara, he thought—but managed to slink back into the Subaru for his wallet. The lights above the ditch were alive with action, while below, butt in the wet grass, Cara was touching new-to-her breasts with tentative fingers. Evan pulled the wallet from his pants, took the debit and credit cards, then hurried out of the wreckage and back to the body he’d wear for a while.

“Don’t worry, hon; we’ll set this right,” he said as he stuffed the cards into Mark’s—now his—pockets.

“Hello! Emergency! Is anyone down there?” a voice called, soundtracked by footfalls and slamming doors.

Evan punched a fist into Mark’s open mouth, forcing himself inside on a bolt of need. “Here,” he said as the first paramedic made her way down the hill. “Here,” he said again, stronger, lifting himself to stand on shaky legs. He stood Cara up as well and held her at his side. She began shivering and leaned into him, burying her face against his chest.

“Were you in the car?” the paramedic said, leaning inside to touch the throat of Cara’s foregone body.

“No, we live up the road and heard it. We came to check it out and phoned when we saw the moose,” Evan said from another man’s mouth.

—

Evan and Cara sat in the battered F-150 they’d taken from the home they’d temporarily inhabited. Evan had driven them back to civilization, though remained far from any major cities. Cities had too many eyes, too many cameras, and too many untrusting people. Kamloops, BC had fewer than 100,000 citizens, which felt like a bit of a sweet spot—though he couldn’t begin to express why it felt this way. The schoolyard they watched had a group of second, or maybe third graders, playing a game of hide and seek. Two teachers stood against a brick wall, observing the kids. Teachers certainly might become a pain in the ass, but they weren’t stopping him from righting one of the universe’s great wrongs.

“Stay put until Daddy waves, okay?” Evan said, then kissed Cara’s twenty-five-year-old forehead.

She nodded. Being a woman, even just for a few days, felt wrong and icky; she just wanted to be a kid and grow up like everybody else. It wasn’t fair.

Evan climbed out of the truck, eyes on a tiny child currently bunched up behind a shrub, making her invisible to the school and much of the road. She was big eyed and rosy cheeked and full of life. It was her, the future Cara Hull, there was hardly a thought otherwise.

Evan broke into a jog, so focussed on the little girl that he didn’t look to his right. A long yellow bus laid on the horn as the brakes screeched. Evan thumped against the bumper and fell beneath the wheels. Too heavy to go over, Evan was pushed along the asphalt, caught in the undercarriage, flesh coming away in road-rashed chunks as a smeary path played out for more than twenty feet behind the bus.

He felt his atoms coming apart and tried to hold on. Cara was no longer in mortal danger, okay, but maybe…maybe there was a chanc—

What remained of Evan Hull burst into a billion pieces before the bus driver had the door swung open.

—

Cara sat in the old truck that smelled like someone else and watched. She missed the collision but had witnessed the gory aftermath. Tears spilled down her cheeks as the police cordoned the area and paramedics scooped up bits of the body her father had inhabited into a Rubbermaid garbage can. Eventually a cop came to her window. She didn’t dare roll it down.

“Miss?” the cop said, knocking a meaty fist against the glass. “Miss.”

Cara, mind of a small child, body of a young woman, stared forward, feeling scared and helpless and all alone in the world, waiting for her daddy to return, waiting for him to put her back in a kid’s body, waiting for the universe to be right and fair.

“Miss?” the cop said once more, trying her door handle.

XX