by C.G. Banks
*
All along Samane Street gas stoves began clicking to life. The handles and knobs ghosted past the lighting elements and poured streams of gas into the homes, unlit. Some of these inhabitants were up, some sleeping worrisomely through ghastly nightmares, some dead. The action took no notice. Gas continued to flow, lights to flicker in some insane choreography of speed, faster and faster as each second passed. Filaments in bulbs failed, sparks ignited. Fires began in great gouts of energy as bulbs exploded.
All through the neighborhood the conflagration had begun.
*
Families of dead slowly stirred to motion. Stinking abattoirs in bedrooms wriggled like the decomposing bodies of animals giving birth to fly larvae. Bodies reanimated in the tall grass of backyards, clawing hands punched up through the soil of flowerbeds where they’d been buried. A sooty, slime-covered body scraped its way up the chimney in Tod Holsteins’ house around the corner.
*
The lake bubbled as if heated to boiling. Thick masses of flesh rolling to the surface. Rotted hands and burning red eyes. Some of these things made it to the bank and once there heaved themselves ashore, the bodies so newly incorporated that the flesh refused to hold. A nauseating, fishy stench glued to the very air itself.
*
Pace Boyd walked mindlessly from his study and opened the bedroom door on his wife and little daughter. They were huddled in a corner and screamed when they saw him. His look never changed as he brought the twelve-gauge up and pulled the trigger. Then he backed away from the spattered walls and entered the kitchen, paused as if ascertaining the hissing there. He pulled a Bic lighter from his pocket. Held it out before him and smiled right up until the moment of the explosion.
*
A murder of crows lined along the ridge vent of a house started up an unearthly cawing. The by-now mindless band of rabid squirrels turned upon one another until all were torn asunder. Worms were expelled from the ground like thin, fleshy fingers. Everything that could escape did and the land drained of canines, cats, feral owls. Their sounds agonized and lost.
*
Cracks began forming in the soil along the borders of the Acres. Steam issuing up as if from a percolating kettle. The sibilant voices grew to higher registers though the sounds were no longer vague human utterances, no language alive nor lost.
The death throes of the land were upon it.