Don't Open The Well by Kirk Anderson

Chapter 1
    As the hellish, angry screams of rage erupted from beneath
him, Michael fought in vain against the fear that threatened to overtake him.
The flimsy wooden barrier, the only thing separating ‘them’ from him was
beginning to splinter and crack as the relentless onslaught continued.
    It wouldn’t be long before they broke through. They
wanted him… wanted revenge for the atrocity he had committed.
    “I didn’t know… I didn’t know…”
    He screamed at them through the well cover he laid
atop, straining to keep them at bay. They roared back with renewed fury and he
turned his head away as a section of the well cover splintered beneath him,
showering his face with needle-like slivers of wood.
    Michael knew he had just seconds to act, but what
could he do? Where could he go? They would come for him no matter where he went
and … he shook his head, pushing the thoughts aside. He didn’t want to
contemplate the fate that surely awaited him once they finally reached him.
    There was a loud crack as the cover split up the
middle and almost completely separated in two but Michael howled more in fear
than anger and pushed downwards with all his might.
    Just seconds…
    His father’s words rang out in his mind as clear as
if he were stood before him. “You’re about as much use as a wet fart in a
thunderstorm kid,” he had said laughing before swigging his beer. “Ain’t one
good thing you can’t turn rotten!”
    Tears began to break through Michael’s clenched
eyelids and no matter how hard he fought against them, the droplets formed a
flood. He was babbling like an infant.
    It was true – every damn word of it was true. He was
useless, but most of all, he was a coward.

Had his father been wrong to try to instill a sense of courage within his son?
    A blackened hand broke through the splintered well
cover, scrabbling at Michael’s clothing before eventually latching on to his
sweat-soaked shirt, pulling at him, his face painfully slamming against the
wood. The pain was the last thing on his mind though – through the ragged
gaping hole in the wood just below his face, he saw them closely for the first
time since… since their ‘change.’ 
    Merely a cluster of waving, scrabbling hands and
pounding fists, but through the forest of arms, a hundred pairs of eyes fixed
upon him, their mouths opening, snapping shut, opening and snapping shut again
hungrily.
    Michael screamed.

Chapter
2
    The crematorium was where it all began, ironically
the one place that Michael had feared the most, the place he dared not even go
near and was forbidden from entering anyway. Even the woods around the cold
grey hulking structure seemed to be dead and lifeless as though animals sensed
its purpose, knew that it consumed flesh -- albeit dead flesh – on a daily
basis.
    That was his father’s job, the family run business
passed on to him from his father and his father before him – to receive bodies
each day and commit them to the hungry flames within. The closest Michael ever
got to the crematorium was when he sat up in his tree house, watching as yet
more filthy black smoke spewed forth into the sky from the enormous smokestack
that rose up so high, it seemed to almost touch the clouds.
    To him, the crematorium was a living, breathing
entity – a monster that consumed the bodies of innocent people who just days
earlier had smiled, laughed and taken life for granted like everyone else. That
thick, smoke that snaked into the sky throughout the day was a reminder to
Michael of what lay just over the river, through the trees as he wandered and
explored the woods surrounding the family property.
    The cloud of black choking smoke was like a wraith
rising high up into the sky, and no matter how deep he ran and hid in the
woods, it always found him, on the skyline, reminding him that one day father
would summon him to work within that dark and dead place where no living thing
belonged.
    Michael’s tree house was the only place