The Town Of Dead

A photographer travels to an Indian village for his next project. He starts by taking photos of newly born kids with parents, little kids playing, and some daily life chores. After clicking the photos, he keeps his camera back into his bag and goes off to his cottage which was probably nearby the woods.

After reaching home, he was pretty fine with himself neither feeling tired nor hungry. He just felt like getting some peace of mind. He put his camera bag on the bed, threw his jacket off, loosened his belt, and pounced on the couch as if a tiger pouncing on its prey. Later, he switched on the T.V. to watch some news, entertainment shows, movies, or anything that'd please him. The first thing he saw on television was a movie channel with a movie about the zombies being played. He didn't believe in the supernatural world or so, just a person who smiled when his camera clicked some happy moments and made the client smile. Just after this thought, he recalled that he had to edit and transfer the pictures he had clicked, so without wasting any further time, he jumped on his bed directly from the couch and figured out that the bed wasn't too plump and he had kind of got hurt in the side-waist by the stiffness of the bed. But as we all know, work is work and "What needs to be done has to be done, now" So, he took out his camera from the bag, switched it on but it didn't turn on, his first thought was did he ruin the camera, but he found that the battery of camera had been drained off. So he put it on charge and...."Aaaaaah!"..... a loud voice shouted. He had chills running down his spine and couldn't dare to turn around, but later he thought to himself to man up and turn. (He wasn't scared of all this, but what happened that night scarred him.) The first thing that caught his eye was a pair of bloodshot eyes and super long teeth embedded in a wicked smile. It took him less than a minute to recognize that he had left the T.V. switched on with the zombie movie being played on it. Later he turned it off and came back to the bed.

He scoffed his silliness off and went on with connecting the camera to his laptop. He switched the laptop on, started transferring all files from the camera to the laptop the next thing got him dead struck.

In all the photos which he had captured, there were only shadows in the places where people should have been. This made him worry, rather worried would be a vaguer word to describe him at the moment. He was dead struck. He couldn't think of any other reason for why this happened to calm himself. Before he could think of anything, there was a knock on the door. He was already so much petrified that in a feeble voice, he squealed, "W..Wh-who's there?". A girl's voice replied, "I'm Sarah, I live a little too much far from this place, and couldn't find any other place to knock on to in this dark, pouring night." The photographer, forced closed his eyes in a crushing way, and opened the door with the end of his eyes he saw a fully drenched woman in a saree, carrying a long banana leaf to rush from the rain outside. Before he thought anything else he couldn't figure out when the rain started but left the thought as it is, and welcomed the lady into his cottage. Though he was still under trauma after seeing shadows in place of people, he passed a nice, greeting smile towards the lady, and received the same in return.

The photographer offered the lady a warm blanket and some of his clothes which he had packed for the trip, the lady went to the bathroom and changed, after she came out, she saw the photographer sitting on the bed looking down to the ground with his right hand on his forehead, his body language made it enough for her to find out that he was tensed and something was bothering him. She went up to him and asked about what was wrong. He looked up to her and told them about what he saw and what had happened. Sarah then calmed the photographer, and asked her "Do the shadows look something like this?". The photographer looked up again but Sarah wasn't standing there, just a shadow was on the floor. Seeing this the photographer stood up with fear and was going to run towards the door just before he saw really long hair hanging from the ceiling, using his eyes he followed the length of the hair up till the ceiling where he saw, bloodshot eyes with dripping blood and long teeth embedded in a wicked smile which turned into a mouth saying" Welcome to the Town of Dead, honey. Either die or die, no alternate." This was enough to make the photographer run out of the door and straight out of the village without even turning back. 

The next day he booked a flight back to the US, and never wanted to stay back. As he boarded the flight, the air- staff started distributing newspapers, as the photographer read the first headline it read, "People found that the people living in an Indian Village were walking dead and now are shot dead. The place is known as 'The Town of Dead'." Reading this the photographer, closed his eyes to sleep and forget the incident, but as soon as he closed his eyes he was never able to open them again.