Subroutines

A preview of the new Kill Switch Anthology

As technology takes over more of our lives, what will it mean to be human, and will we fear what we’ve created? What horrors will our technological hubris bring us in the future?

Join us as we walk the line between progressive convenience and the nightmares these advancements can breed. From faulty medical nanos and AI gone berserk to ghost-attracting audio-tech and one very ambitious Mow-Bot, we bring you tech horror that will keep you up at night. Will you reach the Kill Switch in time?

The latest anthology by HorrorAddicts.net Press.

 

[image error] The Kill Switch Anthology available in paper at Amazon featuring my story “Subroutines”
A quick glance at Subroutines

We whispered the warning in third grade. A game. A childhood ritual from a different time, a different dimension. In a universe where children walked unattended to school, the movies, the end of the neighborhood, across traffic, and into the woods where they leaped into the river and rode the running water to the falls miles away.

We whispered the warning when we walked past the weathered stone wall on Manchineel Lane.

You remember the wall, don’t you? The wall under the tree with reddish-grey bark, yellow flowers, and tiny green apples.Twisted limbs creep across the wall and drop the fruits—overripe and rotting—onto the pavement until the city sends someone to trim them.Every year or two they come—wearing long sleeves, leather gloves, and gauze masks. Still, they turn their faces away as they snip, afraid the fruit might touch them.

We whispered the warning when anyone mentioned ghosts and on Halloween when the dogs bayed at the full moon. We whispered the warning and our children whisper it too.

Don’t climb over the wall. Don’t play in the yard. Don’t touch the tree. And never—under any circumstances—enter the house on the other side. The specters will spirit you to the next world and no one will ever see you again.

My mother called it nonsense. An urban legend. A story spread during her childhood, her mother’s, and grandmother’s.

By no means should you enter that house, she said.You’ll fall through the floor and break your leg, but ghosts aren’t real. Neither are portals to Hell. The dead die and dead they remain.

I repeated the warning verbatim the first time my children rushed in, leaving our door swinging on its hinges, eager to tell me about the shadow in the mansion on the other side of the weathered stone wall. The shadow that steals your soul.

I said, “Ghosts aren’t real. The dead stay dead. No one can steal your soul, but don’t cross that wall. Don’t enter that house. It’s two hundred years old and the floor could collapse beneath you. The ceiling could cave in on your head.”

My children entered anyway. Scrambled over the wall, tiptoed through grass taller than them, crossed the threshold, and never returned. We called their friends, scoured the woods, searched the neighborhood grid-by-grid. Only after the story played on the nightly news did their friends admit what they’d done.

It was a dare. That’s all. A dare. Ernest was such a fraidy cat. They could call him chicken till the roosters rose and he’d never take a dare. Grace would laugh at their stupid dares and say, “I dare you back. I’ll hold your hand while you try.”

But that time they took the dare. Into the mansion they went.

“I’ll do whatever it takes to find them,”I said.

“Wait ‘til morning when it’s light,” my business partner said, but he wanted me to finish debugging a security patch. A pernicious subroutine that locked our servers, forcing a system-wide reboot.

My wife, Karen, wasn’t so cautious. “It’s been two days. How long can they stay safe?”

We begged the sheriff to search the house after she found dozens of websites listing people who were murdered or disappeared within its walls. The town’s founder, who killed his family and impaled himself on a pitchfork. The newspaper’s first publisher, who tied one end of a rope to the second-floor stairwell and dove off the bannister into a ballroom filled with inebriated, celebrating socialites on New Year’s Eve. Six different children, six different decades, never seen after entering the house on a dare.

The sheriff stood at his file cabinet, facing away from us. His fingers dawdled at the same three files. The bastard wouldn’t even turn to face us.

“An injunction keeps us off the property.” Even as he spoke, his deputies glanced at the calendar, their shoes, any object in the room but us. They tried to hide their fear, but I read it in every line in their faces. They were grateful for the injunction.

“They’re children,” Karen pleaded. Even if she wore makeup, it wouldn’t have covered the circles under her eyes.

“They’re trespassers.”

Edited By: Dan Shaurette & Emerian Rich

Stories by: Phillip T. Stephens, H.E. Roulo, Tim O’neal, Jerry J. Davis, Emerian Rich, Bill Davidson, Dana Hammer, Naching T. Kassa, Garrett Rowlan, Daphne Strasert Laurel Anne Hill, Chantal Boudreau, Garth Von Buchholz

Available now on Amazon!

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