by C.G. Banks
*
Joe and Mary Clark huddled together in the closet of their bedroom. Achin Street was calm both up and back. Almost 4:30 in the afternoon and neither of them had been to work. They had pushed back into a corner as far as they could go, their arms wrapped tightly around each other.
Their eyes shut.
The malady (if that’s what it was; by this time at least Joe was beginning to entertain their affliction might be closer rooted in insanity) had come on Mary the Thursday before, on her way home from work. It had started on Joe the next morning, almost imperceptibly. Now they huddled, clutching in the dark, squeezing their eyes shut against the onslaught even a glimpse of light would give them.
With Mary it had started with a dog. A medium sized Heinz 57 alongside the road. She’d been cruising along at a good forty-five miles an hour when she happened to catch movement out of the corner of her eye. She passed it, already a couple hundred yards down, before she admitted what her mind had suggested. The dog had been upright and walking, its eyes a vast, dull empty, its side split open and trailing insides along the gravel side. She found her heart hammering and her breath coming in short brilliant stabs.
She failed to note the brake lights of an Impala rolling slowly to a stop behind the line of cars until almost too late and laid on her own, skidding to an abrupt stop inches from the other car’s bumper. The lady behind the wheel looked sharply into her rearview mirror and flipped her the bird. But it was not the finger Mary saw. The woman behind the wheel, one car in front, only a few yards of metal between the two, was a rotting corpse. The sun had reeled around an escarpment of trees and flooded the inside of the Impala. The corpse took no notice. It railed and pitched within the confines of the car, screaming its silent rage into the rearview mirror while Mary stared. Bits of wet, ragged material began to dot the inside of the windows. Mary looked around but there was no one else to notice. Then the door on the corpse’s driver side began to open.
The light up ahead went from red to green.
The line began to edge forward.
The Impala’s door snapped shut.
Mary did not step on the gas until the car ahead was almost lost in the glare of the road and the driver behind laid on the horn. And then she drove with both hands clenched on the wheel, her eyes drilling into the distance ahead, always staying well behind the demon Impala until she came to a sidestreet that provided a route of escape. She shook all the way home.
And when she got there Joe was already home. He greeted her at the door and noticed her distress before she even set her few things down. She collapsed at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. He sat down beside her. They’d been trying to get pregnant for the past year and just the other day Mary had brought home an EPT test. That night she’d taken it. According to the test, she was pregnant. Now this. It was as if a cold chill had blown into the kitchen with his wife’s entrance. He wanted to touch her but was afraid. She told him of the two hallucinations. At one point she’d held her hands up in front of her face so he could see how badly rattled she was though she really hadn’t needed to.
The night had passed and she’d seemed better the next morning. He’d felt fine too. Absolutely wonderful until he’d gotten into the car and reached for the radio. For just a split second he’d seen his hand as a bloody mass, a deep-red dripping bundle of holed tendons and black, fly-picked bones. Then it was gone and he’d not chased it down. By three o’clock that afternoon (just the previous day, now) they’d both been back in the house, all doors locked against the outside, all curtains drawn. Lights out. They’d fled a panic of blood. Everywhere, in the streets, on people’s rotten faces, lying in skimmed puddles of depravity as they’d fought their way home. Mary’s car had a dent along the entire back side. Joe’s truck was resting on a blown tire.
And then they’d begun to see the carnage in each other.
Nothing much at first, just the barest smudge of black beneath the eyes, a deep gray blooming through the skin. They’d tried to ignore it. Talked to each other with averted eyes in case the hallucination (because that’s what it was; what else could it be?) should take on more complexity. But that hadn’t lasted long. The other’s eyes had clouded over, going an unpleasant rheumy yellow, long rotted cracks sprouting underneath the skin and spreading outward like some fast-acting cancer. Blood dripped from their ears, their hair fell out in greasy chunks. Mary had gone to him once, in a thinly-veiled panic and touched John’s face. It seemed whole, alive, not the ghastly rot her eyes told her was there. And then John had begun to cry black tears.
The smell of corruption surrounded them.
That was when they’d retreated to the closet. Within its darkness they could see nothing. Even the lingering stench of rot didn’t have a foothold there, though the faintest whiff of foulness did waft back and forth through the hanging row of clothes. Large balls of toilet paper filled their noses in the effort to hold the stink at bay. To only partial success.
Like being in a grave.
And as they huddled, lost in the desolation that had swarmed down upon them the blood began to run from between Mary’s legs.