Twisted Roads – Twisted Horror Stories by Matthew Tonks

What a Whale Hides

The water laps against his motionless form, his decaying body swollen and crawling with bugs of varying sizes and types. Dulcet crouches a few feet away, scrunching his nose, furrowing his brow, and narrowing his eyes. He grips a piece of dry cloth in his blue glove-clad fingers, presses it against his face, and shuffles forward, stopping a few feet from the corpse, the stench clawing through his makeshift air filter. His face turns green, and his eyes momentarily roll into the back of his sockets.

“If you’re gonna puke, get out!” Harbour snaps through gritted teeth. “You contaminate my crime scene—you waste my time! You waste my time—you piss me off!”

“I-I-I’m fine, okay? I might be—just give me a second!” Dulcet hisses, jerking his head toward the fifteen dead whales that litter the beach, alongside the dismembered corpse, each in varying stages of decay. “I can’t stand dead fish.”

“That’s probably what he was counting on,” Harbour says, holding up a squirming insect with a pair of tweezers before dropping it into a jar.

“Do you think there’s anything worth our time, or is it just one big fisherman’s basket?” Dulcet quips, a wry smile twitching on his lips.

Harbour rolls his eyes, shakes his head, and shrugs, his expression unreadable. “Not sure yet. He’s been dead about as long as the first whale, and wherever the bodies were stored, it was the same place.”

“All of them? Are you sure?”

Harbour nods, setting the jar aside. “From what I’ve found so far, every body shows the same signs—same bugs, same chemical imbalances in their organs. For all the differences in size and weight, they’ve each been hit in the skull in the same precise way, and each has had the same percentage of brain matter torn from their skull. Most of it from the frontal lobe—though it’s all guesswork without proper tools.”

“Even the whales?”

“That’s what ‘all of them’ generally means,” Harbour says, not hiding his irritation.

“I’m just—” Dulcet checks himself, pressing the cloth firmly against his face. For a few seconds, he inhales shallow, desperate breaths through his mouth, his eyes squeezed shut. He swallows, gasps, and forces his eyes open again. Tears streak his face. “W-W-What—what kind of space would he need to pull this off? A football field?”

“Almost,” Harbour murmurs, chewing the inside of his mouth. “It’d have to be somewhere nearby too. The bodies have been decomposing for eight to twelve days. Frankie here, we know, was last seen on the thirteenth, and the smallest whale over there disappeared from the aquatic park three days ago. But if I was to calculate its length of death based on the results I’ve managed to harvest here, its corpse is older than that. My best guess is, if they were all crammed into some kind of pressure cooker—a sealed, rotting box—it could account for the accelerated decay.”

“And the bugs?” Dulcet’s voice cracks. “How does that fit if they were sealed up?”

“The first few were probably left out to rot,” Harbour replies, his tone clinical. “To attract the insects. By day six or seven, they started piling the fresh ones in, sealing it up tight. The animals suffocated, then the bugs took over.”

“And the missing brain lobe thingy, how does that fit into it all?”

“Not sure yet. The wound isn’t surgical—it’s more animal-like, as if it was torn into with teeth and claws.”

“Why go to such a large-scale display for the murder of one person?”

“Maybe Frankie pissed off the wrong person, maybe they wanted to make a legacy statement, maybe—”

Screams erupt from further down the beach. Both men turn toward the noise, but the hulking whales block most of their view. They exchange a confused glance before a sea of people surges over the sand dune, screaming as they run.

“What the fuck?” Dulcet whispers under his breath.

The whale to their left starts to sway, its bloated mass quivering. It lurches once, then again, before its side bulges grotesquely outward as something forces its way free. The rotting flesh splits open, and a sea of bodies explodes out—hungry, decomposing figures that rush toward them.

Dulcet pulls his revolver free, his breath catching in his throat, but before he can aim, Frankie’s corpse lurches up. His decaying hand grips Dulcet’s arm, his teeth sinking deep into flesh. Dulcet cries out, his finger tightening on the trigger. The gun fires, and the bullet rips through Harbour’s skull. Blood sprays across the sand as Dulcet’s scream is swallowed by the swarm of ravenous, undead bodies, tearing into him with unrelenting ferocity.