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. Had to Start Somewhere Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

HAD TO START SOMEWHERE

You don’t have to tell a boy twice to play with worms, but Andrew Becket repeated himself anyway, shouting over the rows of chairs and the wooden dancefloor set up on the grass. “Boys! Boys, get over here! Come on, quick now.”

His four grandsons had wide eyes and ruffled hair. They raced on stubby boyish legs. Oatie was seven and the triplets, Nelson, Mint, and Chase, were five. Donning only underwear, high socks, sneakers, and bright white undershirts, the boys gathered around their grandfather where he pointed at the dirt.

“Look’it.” Andrew stood amid the first row of white fold-up seats. Dead earthworms had come to rest atop the grass as if floating. “Can’t have those here for your Aunt Amy’s big day. Get some ice cream buckets and collect these buggers.”

Jolly and laughing, trying to gross each other out, the boys plucked and squeezed and waggled the dead worms.

All endings have beginnings.

—

Fat crows ate the worms that the boys threw in the bush. They’d bloated some and had pink spots on their feet and running pink feces clung to their tail feathers.

Andrew Becket and his sons, Mike and John, collected the dead birds. The men had subtle table wine hangovers and a lack of interest in the nasty task. Luckily, most of the birds died where the boys had tossed the worms—so it appeared—and had made cleanup easier. Andrew held open a black garbage bag and the sons wore leather work gloves.

 “You think these guys ate the dead worms, huh?” John was a big man like his father and brother. He lived two miles from the farm where he grew up. “Must be some poison in the ground, huh?”

“Something, eh?” Mike said. Of the three, Mike was the odd duck. He wore a beard and married a girl from out of county. Still, he had a farm only nine miles from his parents and seven and a half miles from his brother. “Think you’ll have to get someone out here to test the dirt?”

“Start with burning the birds, if something else goes, then I ‘spose I’ll have to call someone.”

Birds collected. The fire lit in an old oil tank with a hole cut into the front and a hole cut into the top, like a woodstove. Paper plates, napkins, plastic cups from the wedding libations, spent flowers, and the household garbage went into the hungry orange flames. Once raging, Andrew tossed the birds on three at a time, adding kindling now and then to keep the fire hot. Thirty-nine crows became bits of bone and a mound of ash.

A gentle breeze carried the smoke east toward the lake.

—

Cats, dogs, and rodents, as well as the remainder of the local aviary spectrum began growing purple and pink spots. They had blood in their stool and became sluggish quickly. The local veterinarians were busy and confused, and the animals continued meeting ends. The sweet tang of rot began to hang on the air like fog.

“Did you see this?” Miranda Becket pointed at the TV showing the morning news from a cable station an hour south. “They’re going on, right on the friggin’ news, about Handover and the animals. Geez, says they’re beginning outbreak protocol.”

Andrew hadn’t called a specialist to test the dirt at the foot of the knoll where his only daughter accepted a good, local boy’s hand. Not calling made Andrew feel a horrid, sickly flavor of guilt. With every dead animal reported, there was a length of invisible tether reaching back to his guts.

“It’s…I can’t…” Andrew bumbled as the telephone rang.

Miranda rose from her plate of leftover toast crumbs and a blob of blackberry jam, fresh this season.

“Hello?” she said. “Calm down, John, what are you saying?”

“What? What?” Andrew was frantic. Somewhere inside he knew—just as surely as the talking heads on the television knew—that when the bigger animals went, the rest of the mammal spectrum wasn’t far behind.

—

Ninety-eight head of cattle died in a flash on John Becket’s farm. The man changed then, seeing his livelihood out there as nothing more than lumps in a field. All that death hardboiled John into someone his father didn’t understand or recognize.

“But you can’t go. Think this through,” Andrew said. His son leaving was unfathomable. Moving so far from home wasn’t how the Beckets did things. Home was home. “I know this situation is difficult, but you can’t leave Handover. It’s our home.”

John’s lip drooped from his mouth. He spat tobacco-laced saliva into the pen where the last few heifers and cows lay piled by the door. Andrew had helped push them there with a skid-steer. In the grazing yard past the barn, a man named Dougie operated an excavator, digging a massive grave for the deadstock. Thankfully, most of the animals died outside.

“You didn’t call anybody about the worms or the birds, did you, Dad?”

“How could I know it would kill…? I mean…if I’d had cows, certainly I’d have called, would’ve called right away, but some dead birds and worms? The other animals weren’t even on the farm.”

For a decade, Andrew ran his farm as a cash crop, no livestock, which meant none of the extra hassles attached to animals, and thusly, no dealing with auctions and other farmers’ concerns about animal health. He was out of that loop and not thinking about sickness when he sold his crops to farmers willing to harvest what he’d planted. Mostly, Andrew was retired and reaping the benefits of generational land ownership.

“I called around and found out who to talk to about securing the source. I saw it on the news. It reminded me of Unsolved Mysteries and how that Stark guy always said maybe a viewer knew something, like, maybe you can solve a mystery, or whatever. I told them it was on your property. You should’ve called. It should’ve been you calling them.”

“I know. I know.”

—

Tabby Reyes made it to the edge of her bed at Saint Laziosi Rest Home the second her sphincter gave and pink and purple feces sprayed down her pink and purple spotted legs. She tried to stand but fell face first onto the cold tile. She was dead by the time a nurse responded to the medical alert necklace paging the system.

More elderly died, and then the infants went shortly after. Three hundred-forty-four dead four weeks after the wedding.

Counties and towns dug great holes on the peripheries of government land. Soon after, vast white tents arose like a series of circus conventions, fences unrolled, and soldiers with rifles blocked the exits and the treelines of the quarantined zone.

Too late for that, so many had already left the county, spreading like dandelion tendrils in a tornado gust.

—

“Isn’t right,” Mike said, sitting on the back porch with his father. His mother was on the couch, napping, feeling a touch exhausted these last few weeks. “I mean it. John leaving, these creeps digging your lawn, and is Amy ever coming back?”

Andrew watched the busy men tunnel like ants through the land that didn’t really feel like his land anymore. Everything was wrong and strange and terrifying. The outfits the scientists wore were more like deep-sea scuba gear than the stuff they always had on in TV quarantine scenes. 

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“It ain’t right, this is our home!” Mike slapped a palm against the two-by-six hand railing.

“Andrew!” Miranda shouted from inside. “Andrew!” She raced to the backdoor, tears streaming. “It’s Amy. She’s dead.”

—

The population of Handover and the surrounding counties amounted to 17,042, according to the most recent census. Dougie buried 15,103 before he died and the mass burials ceased for that part of the world. The quarantine team was baffled. They’d lost some of their own, despite precautions.

Andrew and Mike had both become bachelors. John and his wife were alive, down in the city, but their boys had died. John called and made Andrew listen to every second of the gory details concerning the changes in skin, the sticky, bloody diarrhea, and the way Oatie’s entire face bulged like a ghoul before purple fluid sprayed free at his seams.

“Looks like we weren’t ahead of anything.” Dr. Singer was one of the first scientists who’d arrived at the farm. She had a cold can of Molson Dry in hand, and had foregone the outfit and sat in just her underwear and bra on the back deck of Andrew Becket’s farm. The telltale purple spots speckled her legs. “It’s crossed over into Europe and Asia now. Millions are dead. If it really began here, I’d say you’re immune.”

Doctors had multiple quarts of Andrew Becket’s blood and his natural inoculation left them curious and dumbfounded. There appeared no reason for his health.

“I can’t see how anything so bad could start here.” Andrew stared out at nothing, recalling the beauty of his land before the world went sour.

“The others are avoiding me. I guess they still see hope for long lives. Not me. I’m only working bits and pieces and that’s only because what else should I do?”

“I’m sorry,” Andrew said.

Dr. Singer laughed. “There’s no way you could’ve handled this. Nobody could. Even if you had called right away, this is a freight train, this is the big one, this is the impossible asteroid barreling toward Earth.”

“I know, but, still. I’m sorry for… You don’t think there’s any…?” Andrew rubbed his palms together. It wasn’t easy averting his eyes from the relatively young doctor—thirty-nine. He’d been married so long, and once a man got to a certain age—sixty-one in this case—it became difficult to know where to put his eyes.

Dr. Singer made it easy for him as the end of days made whims and fancies easy for her. “I don’t mean to sound insensitive. Your wife was a nice lady and everything, but I’m dying and yet, I don’t feel like it.” She took a breath, wore an honest smile and asked, “How would you like to get stinking drunk and see where the night takes us?”

Andrew shifted his gaze. “I’m a little old—”

“And not getting any younger!” Dr. Singer cackled and then coughed. It was sad and forced. It wore the razor’s edge of the apocalypse. Purple saliva dribbled down her chin until she swiped it away with her bare wrist.

Andrew thought a moment, but quickly gained the perspective of life in an hourglass. “I’ve got some tequila from a trip me and Miranda took to Mexico.”

“That’s the spirit.”

—

Most of the communication with the outside world fell away. Andrew, Mike, and the three surviving doctors found a radio station using a satellite dish. It was out of Brisbane, Australia. Way the hell across the country and a whole lot of ocean. There’d been mass, hapless executions of the sick, attempting to cease the spread of the Hokey Pokey Dots, or simply, shortened for ease, the Pokies.

Making a joke of it had Andrew queasy, but the sick and doomed saw it for what it was.

“Funny name,” Dr. Flores said. “You stick your dead arm in, you pull your dead arm out, da-duh-da-da-da-duh, and you spill your shit about. I can’t shake my spots, how about you guys?”

Dr. Flores was seven Molsons deep and slurring. He still wore the quarantine gear. The hooded top had been torn away.

“You know what we need, some whores… Hey, how was Dr. Singer, anyway?” Dr. Flores spat purple saliva onto the wooden floor near Andrew’s feet.

Andrew shook his head. She was wonderful the three days before she died. This was none of the angry man’s business.

“I asked you a question.” Dr. Flores swatted at Andrew. “That whore any good?”

Dr. Flores was much younger, but medical equipment set-up and lab experiments didn’t put on the muscle mass like moving hay bales, or running fence, or lugging grain sacks for a lifetime. Before he realized what he’d done, Andrew burst upwards. Two primed palms sent the drunken doctor reeling over the deck railing and down the seven feet to the lawn below.

The two other remaining doctors, Dr. King and Dr. Patel, jumped up to peer down at their counterpart. Dr. Flores lay on his back, stunned for the moment, before breaking into hysterical sobbing. Purple tears oozed from his eyes.

He spent the night there. By sunrise, he was dead.

—

Dr. Patel helped bury Dr. King a few days after burying Dr. Flores and then set to digging a grave for her own body, while she had the energy to do so. Mike Becket assisted her. His father had told him about Dr. Singer and Mike had vague hopes for an end of the world hump with a doctor too. Something different to ring in the apocalypse.

He was too shy to ask outright, but she understood and there was only one aspect of the act that interested her at all.

“I guess we could do what you’re getting at, make me think less about how dead we all are. You’re not really my type, but a distraction’s a distraction. We’re all done. We’re all on the way, right?”

“Except for my dad,” Mike said, kissing the doctor’s shoulder. “He might live forever.”

“You know, I’d rather be me than him right now.” Dr. Patel set aside her shovel.

—

“Dad, do you think there’s a Heaven? I mean really.”

Andrew looked up from his coffee, took a drag from his cigarette. Coming to tobacco late was better than never, he figured. The side effects of the habit had become pros. He’d probably never kill himself, but healthy living was out the window.

“You asked me that once before, way back. Do you remember what I said then?”

Mike shook his head. He was like a geriatric Dalmatian, spotted all over and not long for the world.

“I told you something like God has a Heaven for each one of us so long as we repent.”

“And you think so?”

“Hmm.” He paused, chewing on what he thought and then said, “Nope. Heaven can’t work unless God turns every soul into a like-minded drone. That’s not to say there isn’t an afterlife.”

Mike chugged back his coffee, coughed, and wiped a purple smear from his lips. “You think there’s an afterlife?”

“I don’t know. I guess if there is, I might have some explaining to do.”

Mike smiled, his face was gaunt and his ears were bright red and puffy. “Me too. I’ll try and warn ya after I get there.”

“Your Liz was always more reasonable than Miranda.”

“That you saw.”

That did it and they laughed again. Hardy and fine. Laughing like any old day, just father and son, best friends.

“Ain’t that how it is? We marry someone and then they show ya a whole different person once you’re in deep. Eh, Mike? Mike?” Andrew touched his slouching son’s arm. “Mike?”

The pause in that conversation continued and the laughter ceased indefinitely. Andrew set to digging a grave next to where he’d buried Miranda.

—

On his third day alone, after scouring the satellite radio space that Dr. Flores had hooked together, Andrew gave up on humanity. There was nobody left on the spinning rock but him.

He donned his finest suit and strode along the dusty trail to the site where his only daughter wed the love of her young life. The doctors had the area turned over. Dirt piles rose and holes dipped. It took some climbing and stumbling, but Andrew sat where he had, more or less, at the wedding and tried to relive the scene. He closed his eyes and played back the vows and the cheering. He turned his ear to where the DJ set-up and listened to Lone Star and watched that first dance of the newlywed couple all over again.

He sighed and lit a cigarette, leaned back in the rubble of what was once his farm. Dirt, his dirt. He let it run between the digits of his right hand while he held a cigarette with his left. Home was where you were born, you lived, and you died.

The whole world came to feel foreign to him.

“Where are my spots, huh?” he asked, brushing at the soil, kneeling forward onto his knees like a bored child ordered into contrition on a Sunday morning. “How come I’ve got to live while everyone else dies?”

Frustrated, he spat the cigarette and crawled deeper down into a hole. He began mining furiously at the wall rising before him. The dirt came away in dry clumps. It hadn’t rained all week.

The aging farmer screamed.

He raged with busy claws, carving soil.

“Why, God! Why?” Andrew wailed to the sky before falling back, exhausted. He lit another cigarette and gazed at the clean clouds.

Finished, he lit another.

And another.

And another.

The sun fell and he sat up. End of days or not, he’d sleep in a bed. He got to his knees and was pushing to his feet when the wall of dirt before him moved. He crouched like a baseball catcher.

“What’s this?” he whispered and leaned closer.

Gravity pulled the crumbs of earth down as a pink form wriggled free. A skinny little earthworm.

Andrew eyed the lazy motions of the thing. “Are you for me?” He paused to watch. “Why are you alive?”

Having no tools or skills for conversation, the worm wriggled as if reaching for Andrew and the last man on Earth put out a hand. The worm fell into his palm.

Dead.

Andrew fingered the creature to no avail, and then tossed it away with an angry grunt. A fresh shout got only as far as the back of his throat. “I’ll be damned,” he said with a smile. Four purple dots clustered beneath the landing spot of where the dead worm had been. “Just late for the party, eh, little buddy?”

Andrew retrieved and then pinned the worm to his lapel like a boutonniere. It was only time now and Andrew felt normal again, and at home on his land.

XX