Test Town

by Leigh Kenny

This was not her idea of a good time, but her brother’s idiot friends thought a pit stop at an old nuclear test site was the height of adventure.

once her older brother was in the vicinity of his friends he seemed to regress about a decade. It was like being on tour with a gaggle of thirteen-year-old boys,

gaudy

The only difference here was that instead of families breathing life into the homes, these were occupied by a quieter inhabitant.

It was the infamous mannequins that had drawn them here.

“The town was just left abandoned after small-scale nuclear tests were carried out,”

Jacob had made her watch a horror movie when they were kids. A bunch of teens had ventured into a nuclear test site, not dissimilar to this one, and had been picked off one by one, by a sadistic cave-dwelling killer called Desert Dan,

“Their lack of responsibility gives us a golden opportunity to see things most people only see in textbooks or documentaries.

It was the thousand-watt smile plastered across each hard plastic face that gave Savannah the creeps though.

Those massive false smiles, topped with the dead, glassy eyes of a shark.

“I think I’ve had enough of this nightmare fuel.

Her stomach sank as he passed through the doorway, the gloom instantly swallowing him whole.

"I'm here," Travis replied. "We heard something. An animal, maybe. I don't see anything in there though. Nothing aside from those creepy-ass mannequins."

It wasn't even a ghost town. A ghost town implied the presence of life at some point. This place, this Test Town, was nothing more than a place that should never have been. A place where humans took human-looking lumps of wood and plastic and made up back stories for them before blowing them all to hell. This human place breeds inhuman monsters.

the longer he spent rustling around the empty houses, the more he regretted his decision to come. The atmosphere was insidious.

interspersed

His brain was still trying to make sense of the mannequin before him with a full head of wavy chestnut hair, holding Pete’s severed head like a football,

Beside the body stood a male mannequin, its eyes seemingly fixed on the trespassers. In its hands was Pete’s head, cradled like a baby or a ball.

eyes were black with blood, his lids cut away. His face had been sliced almost from mouth to ear, in a gruesome extension of a smile.

“Jesus, his fucking tongue is gone!”

Jacob’s body hit the cement floor heavily. A mannequin stood smiling just beyond the door,

The strobe of light was sudden and bright, and before her in the beam stood an army of mannequins. They stood silent and still, dazzling smiles in place as always.