Death Rattle (A story)

[Vaguely Creepy]

Happy Halloween!

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Death Rattle

   Very late one autumn night, Jyrras was hard at work in the lowest levels of his lab, designing the circuitry for one of his newer ideas.
   At the moment though, he couldn't remember which it was.
   He had a pencil in one hand, a keyboard under the other, parts to a circuit board and a calculator in front of him, a dozen empty coffee cups at his feet, and a serious need for some shut-eye.
   "Let's see... connect the circuit here... route the power there... if the resistance is... unh... uhhh.....Oh forget it."
   Looking up from his work, he peered blearily at the clock on the wall over his desk. The plastic red minute hand was on the six, and the plastic blue hour hand was pointing towards the three on the clock's face. At least, that's what he thought. He couldn't quite make it out for sure. He knew it was late, though.
   "Eh. That's it for tonight," he muttered to himself. "I guess four all-nighters is just my limit. I'll bring more coffee next time."
   Stifling a yawn, Jyrras reached over to his computer and started the shut down process. While the screens were flickering from black to green to blue and back, he bent down under his desk and started picking up the empty styrofoam cups.
   "Nnn. Maybe some espresso-?"
   BZZZZT!
   "YAAAAH!"
   BONK!
   "OWWW!"
   Grabbing the top of his head and grumbling several things he'd rather not let his mother hear him say, Jyrras crouched under his desk, recovering from the onomatopoeic barrage. And the concussion.
   "*%&#ing stupid #$%!@ing lousy *%$^#!-$#! &%$!#-*&!@ing no good #$%&!#@! I oughta *%^$ the *&@#ing..."
   And so on.
   After a few more expletives, Jyrras finally thought to look around for the source of the noise, and stumbled over in the direction the sound came from, still rubbing the crack he knew was now in his skull. When he got there, it appeared that the problem was the washing machine he kept in the lab in case of spills. After a bit more grumbling, he realized that there weren't even any clothes in the thing!
   "Oh, fertheluva- one of the most advanced labs in the country, and the washing machine's busted. Eh, the public's tax dollars hard at work, yessir..."
   Resolving the fix the blasted thing the next day Jyrras turned around to head for the elevator.
   "YAAAAAAHH!"
   He jumped back against the washing machine as he saw-
   
   A cute baby bear.

   Clutching his chest and starting to hyperventilate, Jyrras stared in terror at the infant sitting there, staring back at him with big, dewy eyes. After a few moments of not being mauled by the gooey pile of cuteness passed, he began to get a hold of the situation and calm himself down.
   "It's just a baby, it's just a baby, it can't hurt me, it's just a baby, just a teeny, tiny little baby..." he said to himself, over and over, as his psychologist had taught him.
   To be fair to the baby though, he was twelve or thirteen months old and almost as big as Jyrras. Not that this helped matters any.
   As his pulse rate returned to non-critical levels, Jyrras managed to give a weak smile and an even weaker chuckle. "Heh heh..." pant...pant... "Good grief, kid, you nearly scared the cra- uh, crud out of me!"
   pant...pant... pant......pant......pant...
   "Okay. Okay. Ugh. Jeeze, you sure picked a bad time to come down here. If I didn't make a point to get some exercise occasionally, I think you would've given me a heart attack!"
   The baby just sat there, looking at him and gurgling a little.
   "Wait a minute... How did you get down here, anyway? Forget the washer, now I'm worried about the security!"
   The baby blew a spit bubble.
   "Oh well, I'll worry about it tomorrow, I guess," he said, bewildered, as he walked over to pick the infant up. "Right now, we need to – guh! – get you back – hup! –to your – gggrraah! – mother!"
   Pull as he might, Jyrras just couldn't get the infant up off the ground, let alone carry him to the elevator. Finally, he gave up.
   "Right now," he said, panting, "Right now, we need to get Lorenda down here."
   He walked over to the intercom, took a look over his shoulder at the baby, turned to press the button for Lorenda's room, and said softly, "Lorenda? Hey, Lorendaaaa. Lorenda!"
   Jyrras let go of the button to see if she would respond. After a few moments of silence, he pressed the button again and spoke louder. "Hey, Lorenda? It's Jyrras. Sorry to wake you up, but I've got a problem down here. Can you come and help? Somehow a little baby found his way to the bottom level, and I can't carry him into the elevator."
   He let go of the button, thought for a second, then pressed it again.
   "Okay, so he's not so little. Could you come down here, please?"
   The speaker was silent for a second, then let out a crackle and a moan.
   "Sorry, I didn't catch that," said Jyrras leaning closer and turning his ear to the speaker. "What?"
   The speaker crackled again, and this time made a very distinct noise:
   "Gee heee ha ha ha."
   His eyes suddenly going wide, Jyrras recoiled from the speaker, thinking over and over "I didn't just hear that, I didn't just hear that."
   Reaching cautiously over to the button again, Jyrras reluctantly pressed it and said, his voice trembling, "What did you say?"
   
"Goo goo gah hah hah, hee hee!"
   
   Jyrras let out a frightened yelp and slammed the "off" button on the intercom with both hands, starting to breath heavily again and shutting his eyes tight.
"The intercom is broken," he thought to himself. "That's it, there aren't any more babies in the house, just that brown baby bear sitting behind me."
   At this, his eyes snapped open wide and he whirled around to find-

   The baby bear was not there.

   Panicked, Jyrras started to whip his head about, looking for the baby, but he was nowhere in sight. His mind raced through a list of all of the different things in the lab that the baby could be getting in to.
   He didn't like the ideas he was coming up with.
   His nice-guy nature taking over, Jyrras forgot about the intercom and sprinted off through his lab, trying to find the baby before it hurt itself.
   "Baby! Baby! Baaaayy-beeeeee!"
He stood still for a moment in the middle of the hall connecting to the room with the "mining laser" and tried to catch his breath.
"Hey kid, where are ya?!"
Suddenly, his right ear perked up as he heard a scuffling sound come from behind him. He was petrified, until he heard a familiar sound:
"Goog boo ba hee."
A smile spread over Jyrras's face as he turned around and said, "Come on, kid, that's the second time you've freaked me out like-" He stopped midsentence.
Sitting in front of him, looking up at him with big, wet eyes, was a baby.

Panther.

"-this..."
A second noise caused Jyrras to spin around again and see the baby bear sitting behind him, looking almost exactly like the panther baby.
Suddenly, Jyrras wasn't so worried about the baby's safety as he had been a moment before.
Starting to panic, Jyrras started recanting the mantra his therapist had taught him: "They're only babies, they're just babies, they can't hurt me, they're only babies, they can't –" His chanting was cut off by a clang from above and a sudden weight on his head. Looking, up his eyes met the eyes of a baby phoenix, comfortably making a nest in his frazzled hair.

He lost it.

Big time.

"YAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGHHH!"
Jyrras tore down the hallway, leapt over the baby panther, and started racing towards the elevator. As he was running full speed down another hallway, an air vent in the ceiling in front of him suddenly exploded down to the ground with a monstrous CLANG! Jyrras skidded to a halt, looking up at the opening in the ceiling in wide-eyed terror. His worst fears coming true, dozens and dozens of baby phoenixes and cubis began descending from the opening, gooing and gahing, their tiny wings flapping quickly as they floated down towards the ground.
"YAAAAAAAAHHH!" Jyrras screamed as he did a one-eighty and took off the way he came, hoping to find another path out. Every other hall he took ended up filled with babies right in front of him or just behind him. He was beginning to run out of halls to take when he finally spotted the elevator. Putting on a fresh burst of adrenaline-induced speed, he scrambled towards the elevator door at the end of the hall.
CLANG! A falling ceiling vent nearly missed his tail.
CLANG! Another falling vent grazed his arm!
KRONG! A third vent nailed him squarely in the back of his head and sent him sprawling and sliding down the hall, finally coming to a stop in front of the door to a supply room in the middle of the hall. Hearing the crawling and cooing of the baby hordes behind him, Jyrras struggled to his feet and-
"AAAARRGGHH!"
-was buried as another thirty babies tumbled out of the now-open supply room door on top of him.
"NYAAHH! GAH! GAH! YAAAHH!" he screamed as he desperately clawed his way out from underneath the squirming pile of youth and diapers.
At last managing to free himself, he made a mad dash over to the elevator and started jamming the button frantically, looking back and forth between the elevator door and the slowly advancing infant army. After what seemed far too long, the door finally opened and Jyrras jumped inside and immediately began jamming the ground floor button as fast as he could. Just as the lead baby, the brown bear from before began to reach out towards the opening, the elevator door shut and the elevator began to rise.
Heart pumping wildly, Jyrras focused all of his attention on the light above the door, willing it to start moving faster. Just as his heart had decided it wouldn't explode just yet, his ears picked up a faint shuffling sound coming from the roof of the elevator car.
Eyes wide, he stood stock-still for a moment and listened. Then, he whimpered "No..." as the car's air vent fell in and nailed him on the head.
"OWW!" he yelled at the open vent. "WHAT, DO YOU JUST LIKE HITTING ME IN THE HEAD OR SOMETHING?!"

Yes.

"......Who said that?"

Umm...and a baby dropped from the opening in the ceiling right in front of him!
"GAAAHH!"
(Phew. That was close.)
Jyrras threw himself against the door begging it to open as three more babies dropped down and began crawling towards him. The first baby had just managed to grab the leg of his pants when the door opened and he leaped out. He then ran out into the living room, turned around, and slammed the door shut, catching a glimpse of even more babies dropping from the open elevator roof, their landings being cushioned by their extremely absorbent and reasonably priced diapers.
Leaning up against the door to hold it against the ever-increasing wave of big-eyed evil, a great smile leapt onto Jyrras's face as he heard a familiar voice coming from behind him:
"Jyrras? Hey, Jyrras?"
Still holding the door, he cried out with joy. "Oh thank God! Lorenda, you've gotta help me, I'm being chased by all these babies and they're popping out of nowhere and-"
"Jyrras, if you're awake, pick up."
The smile fell from his face like a lead weight.
"Well, I was just calling to let you know that Mom found me in the mall earlier tonight, and she needed my help with some new, uh, "decorations" she found for her house. Don't worry, it isn't anyone you know. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know I won't be home until sometime tomorrow afternoon, okay? See you then. Bye."
Realizing long before the message finished that it was just the answering machine, Jyrras let out a small groan. The door was starting to give way, and there wasn't anything he could do to stop it. He counted to three, and jumped away from the door as it crashed into the room, bringing a sea of babies with it. Jyrras ran towards the foyer to get outside, but was stopped short by another troop of babies in front of the door. He turned around and dashed to the kitchen, but was only met with babies on the floor, sitting on the table, dangling from the light fixtures, and pouring out of the open oven and refrigerator. Making a quick right turn, he jumped over two babies and dashed around three more and headed into the bathroom.

Which was also filled with babies.

Everywhere he went, every room he tried, Jyrras was cut off by babies crawling out of closets, from under furniture, and from behind doors. He was soon chased to a small guest room on the top floor that overlooked the pool. He desperately began fumbling with the window latches, trying to open it so he could jump in the pool and swim then run to safety. As he started to get the first latch open, he heard a sound that he had not heard before that night, but still made his blood freeze. Not daring to turn around, he let his eyes creep over to the vanity mirror on the wall...

...and saw a four-foot-tall blue baby griffin sitting in the opposite corner of the room.

Neither he nor the baby moved.
......
......
......
CRASH!
SPLASH!
Shards of the broken window raining down around him, Jyrras immediately began frantically swimming towards the side of the pool. Hauling himself out of the pool, he risked a brief glance back at the house. It seemed to be completely quiet, but he wasn't planning on staying to find out. He started to run without direction, and ended up heading quickly into the middle of the grove he had planted on the mansion grounds.
After his fifth all-nighter and an hour and a half of running and adrenaline pumping, Jyrras couldn't move any further and just collapsed under an elm tree. He lay there for five minutes, cheek in the dirt, focusing only on getting as much oxygen to his tired body as he could, too tired to even care about the babies anymore.
Finally, after another five minutes, he struggled into a sitting position and leaned back against the tree, eyes closed, still breathing heavily.
After another five minutes, he opened his eyes. His breathing had slowed enough to let him start thinking clearly.
"Okay," he said to himself. "If I ran *pant pant* directly away from the house...*pant pant* ... and the pool is on the south *pant pant* side of the house... *pant pant* ... then to get to the road I need to go..."
He began to lift his hand to point in the direction he thought was the right one, when he felt a drop on the back of that hand. Not daring to move, he sat there, hoping he wasn't right about what had just happened. After a few more seconds of not moving, he slowly craned his neck to look up into the trees.

He saw nothing.

"Leaves... and sky. Heh. Just a raindrop."
A smile spread across his face, and his head nodded forward. He was so tired that he went to sleep right where he sat.
......
......
......
Suddenly, his head jerked up, his eyes wide. "But... there... aren't... any... rain...clouds...and...it's...autumn..."
Rolling his eyes upward, he looked into the trees again.

The bare branches were covered with babies.

They descended.

... ... ... ... ...

"YAAAAAAAHHH!"
"AHHH!"
Both Jyrras and his youngest sister were on the living room sofa, Jyrras sitting bolt upright and screaming at one end, his sister clutching the TV remote and screaming at the other end. After a few moments of back-and-forth screaming, they calmed down enough to talk.
"What was that for?!" she yelled.
Clutching his heart, Jyrras responded in short breaths, "I guess... I was just... having a... nightmare."
"Googee gah gah goo!"
Jyrras's head whipped to the left, his eyes widened, and he leaped back screaming.
"YAAAAHHH!"
BONK!
His head hit the wall behind him and he fell to the floor, unconscious.
Lorenda walked in, holding an open soda can. She looks down at Jyrras lying on the floor, then looks at his sister.
"Why is he-"
"I. Have. No idea.", she interrupted.
Lorenda looked at Jyrras on the floor again, took a sip of her soda, and walked back into the kitchen.
Thinking for a moment, Jyrras's sister got and followed her. "Are there any more of those left?" she called after her.

On TV, the baby that caused Jyrras to knock himself out laughed and giggled, and began squealing and clapping.

"Hah hah hee hee hee! Ghee hee hah!

Jy-jy! Hee hee! Jy-jy, Jy-jy!

Hee hee hah!"

[RJ]

Even I'm freaked out!

[Gareeku]

o.o Freaky!

Great story, VC!

[Aisha deCabre]

Very nice story.  Funny and...slightly creepy.   

Poor Jyrras can't catch a break... 

[Alondro]

As Homer Simpson once said, "Uhhhhhhhuhhuhuh... babies..."    *episode in which Maggie was in a day care center and had to get the passifiers for all the babies.. homage to "The Birds"*

[Vaguely Creepy]

Heh. I'm glad you all liked it. Thanks for the comments.

[Tapewolf]

Yeah, it reminded me of the Invader Zim episode 'Plague of Babies'.

[Tiger_T]

Cool story!
Very fitting for Halloween.

[Boog]

Now, I want to start spouting tasteless dead babies jokes, but this has left me speechless. Bravo, I say!

[Vaguely Creepy]

Yeah, it reminded me of the Invader Zim episode 'Plague of Babies'.

Oh yeah, I remember that now. I was just thinking of things that would be funny if you put them in front of "-alanche," and when I though of Jyrras, babies sprang to mind. (Or did Jyrras spring to mind when I thought of babies?) Then I guess the idea just snowballed.

I'm really glad so many people enjoyed this story. I may have to write another one sometime. (Although, if the gestation period for this one was any indication, it won't be until next Halloween.)

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Now, I want to start spouting tasteless dead babies jokes, but this has left me speechless. Bravo, I say!

"How many dead babies does it take to change a lightbulb?" ?