Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The village of Marrowridge was not on any map. It sat nestled between hills perpetually wreathed in fog, the kind that tasted like ash and clung to the lungs like guilt. The people who lived there didn't dream anymore.

Because something in the smoke ate dreams.

It began with whispers.

A child named Orrin was the first to complain. He said the shadows beneath his bed were breathing. That something thick and gray had crawled into his mouth at night and drank his thoughts. His parents dismissed it as a nightmare, until they, too, began waking with blank stares and black phlegm in their throats.

Soon, no one slept.

Not truly.

Instead, the villagers sat up in their beds, eyes open, unblinking, staring into nothing as curling tendrils of soot drifted in through cracks, under doors, through keyholes. It didn't burn. It caressed. It invaded.

And it feasted.

Clara Veil, guided by the voices of her many selves, found her way to Marrowridge on the seventh night of the dream famine.

She could hear the village groaning before she saw it.

No birds. No insects. Only wind dragging itself across the husks of chimneys and houses with boards like broken teeth.

When she entered the tavern, no one looked at her.

They sat around tables, motionless, as though carved from wax. One man was mid-laugh, mouth wide but no sound, eyes rolled white.

The tavernkeeper, once Madame Grin's rival in another world, whispered without lips moving:

"The smoke comes when they sleep.

So they stopped sleeping.

But it waits anyway.

It waits to be let in."

Clara followed the stench to the well at the village's center.

It was dry. But something rose from it.

A smoke made of memory.

She saw Orrin's dreams as they burned—images of birthday cakes, kites, a dog with three legs. All devoured and churned into ash. The smoke pulsed like a heart, fed by fear, starved of beauty.

Clara stepped to the well's edge and opened her palm. Her starlit blood shimmered, and the smoke hesitated.

It knew her. Or rather—it knew the selves she had been.

It reached for her.

And Clara let it in.

For thirteen seconds, she burned from the inside.

She saw every dream the village had lost. Love letters never written. Goodbyes never said. Hopes swallowed before they took form.

Then Clara screamed—and the smoke screamed with her.

It poured out from her mouth, her eyes, her skin, rising above the rooftops like a tower of despair. But it was bound now, imprisoned in the shape of her voice.

And then…

Silence.

The villagers blinked.

Breathed.

And fell into the deepest sleep they'd ever known.

At dawn, Clara walked away from Marrowridge.

The fog had lifted.

The dreams were safe.

But behind her, in the well, something whispered:

"There are worse hungers than us."

And far above, the stars realigned—shifting in recognition.

The smoke had spoken to them, too.

And they had listened.