by C.G. Banks
*
James Arnold knew none of these things as fact though he felt each and every one. Idling in the gravel of the Dead End he fought to maintain consciousness. He tried to wipe away the blood from his eye but it just kept coming. The pain in his side almost stole his breath away, and he was getting so tired. He wanted to simply pull over to the side of the road and sleep off this terrible nightmare. Come what may.
But there was the woman.
Then, a noise behind him and he turned, almost blacking out from the pain. Standish, coming around. She gripped the rack with her bloody hands and looked around in confusion, apparently no more aware of her surroundings than a new-born infant. It gave Arnold a place to focus his mind.
He heard sounds of commotion somewhere behind him, obviously the bonfire demons, but paid it no heed.
“Mrs. Standish,” he whispered, fighting to hold the coughing reflex at bay. “It’s okay. I’ve got you now.” She moved her body so as to get a look at his face. She seemed not to know she was bloody and naked, or perhaps more rightly, not to care.
“Who are you?” she managed.
He almost laughed. “Your savior,” he said. “Scoot up behind me and I’ll get you out of here.” He felt her warm body press up against his own, her naked breasts below his shoulder blades, her wet hair and lips against his neck as she laid her head on his shoulder.
“You’re bleeding,” she said emotionlessly.
“We’re all bleeding,” he replied and placed his other hand on the handle bars. “Hold on tight,” and her arms were already encircling his stomach, the shock keeping her from crying out when she locked hands. “We’re not out of this yet.”
He bore down on the throttle just as houses began to explode all around them.
Dull, muffled explosions of gas erupting shifted roofs on the houses they passed. Flames raged through broken windows, locked doors stridently held back the heat. All futile. At the corner of the Dead End and Samane, just as the four-wheeler rounded the turn a storm cap blew straight into the air, vast gouts of sludge following. The cap bounced off a company truck like a gong sounding. Arnold bent down low over the handle bars and cranked the throttle to its limit.
Now they had a straight shot to the highway but Arnold knew better than to hope, not in this hell of uncertainty. They flew down the gauntlet of burning houses, forms spilling from some of them into the yards, as far as the street. He swerved to avoid hands, gnashing teeth. Standish screamed in his ear, his vision wobbling like a heat dream. To the left her house exploded like a war-zone strike, the maple shattered to bits of flying wood, the leaves dashed to floating cinders.
The street became a Dantesque tunnel, some uncharted pathway in hell.
He saw the man standing in the street with the rifle a second before he heard the shot. Arnold jerked the handle bars right and felt something rip the air beside them. There was no pain, no hurry, no concern. The man was reloading when the four-wheeler caught him in the hip and spun him broken to the ditch on the other side of the road. Arnold saw the headlights of a car illuminate the area. He didn’t want to consider what that meant; he just kept his hand on the throttle, his shoulders hunched over the tank, the reassuring brace of the woman coiled around him.
Another engine fired to life somewhere outside his range of vision and the glare of headlights shown on the road from behind them. Instinctively he knew the ATV wouldn’t make it to the highway. Not on the road.
Just before the last intersection before the straight shot past the lake a jacked-up 4X4 reared out of a carport and blocked the road ahead. It made his decision for him. “Hold on,” he muttered over his shoulder and ripped the ATV left, through the cleft of ditch there, thirty feet in front of the 4X4, into the overgrown field toward the lake. He heard the truck lurch forward, its lights razing the land drunkenly, but never looked back. Grass and weeds melted before them and Arnold knew they were one large hole or rock from destruction, though this thought seemed childish and disconnected, not part of the world they inhabited. He just kept his eye on the darkness in front of them, swerving instinctively around things he felt more than saw. He heard a loud disruption behind them and the headlights of the 4X4 miraculously winked out. Arnold again chanced another prayer of thanks to the God of his childhood, the One he’d lost so many years before, and had now, oddly, found in this terrible place.
The lake was just off to their right, his Crown Vic resting, he hoped, on the darkened, outer bank. But there were things moving in the darkness. Human and otherwise. Hell was not giving up easily tonight, it seemed.
He rounded the bank in a wide ellipse, not daring his diminishing vision and weakness to sort through the maze of assassins he felt moving shadow-like through the tall grass. Another great stench filled the air, but he closed his mind to it when he saw the familiar shape of the Crown Vic no more than fifty yards ahead. He screamed up to it in a cloud of dust and flying rocks. Took his hand off the throttle and searched frantically in his pocket for the keys. Right there…good. He drew them out and unpeeled the woman’s fingers from his waist. Placed the keys into her bloody hand. He had so little strength left he was afraid he wouldn’t be heard, but his voice surprised him.
“Mrs. Standish,” he said, turning his head to the side. “Take the keys and get the hell out of here.” He could sense forms creeping up from all sides. “There’s a radio…call for help, they’ll hear you, but for God’s sake go!”
He felt her slide off the seat behind him, limp around to the car door and fumble with the lock. Arnold revved the engine of the ATV. Time was tight…so fucking tight. His failing vision saw the door come open, the picture of her naked body strangely arousing this close to the edge. She started to get in and stopped, turned her face his direction. “Why’d you do this?” she asked.
“I couldn’t even begin to tell you,” he replied, gunning the engine again. “Get the fuck out of here!” and he jammed the ATV into gear and spun around to face the lake. Oh, yes. All sorts of things were out there now coming to get them and Arnold almost laughed. Shook his head as he heard Standish start up the Crown Vic and race away. It was dark and these dumb fucks probably wouldn’t know who was on the ATV in the first place. Forms advanced from seemingly everywhere but Arnold sensed she’d make the highway. She’d seemed lucid enough right there at the end.
He remembered the cluster of bodies around the high priest, how he thought that sonofabitch had actually stood up. He couldn’t let it go. He fought back another cough and gunned the engine, starting back toward the back of the neighborhood and the clearing. Nothing else on his mind.
Epilogue
No one was ever sure exactly what happened that night at Leszno’s Acres. The disturbance was noted early on, and fire trucks and ambulances were dispatched in haste, but by the time any of them reached the neighborhood it was a pyre. Fires burned indiscriminately for hours up and down every street; gas mains blew; people died. Five firemen were sent to the hospital for exhaustion and smoke inhalation. The story made every national news channel. And it wasn’t purely from the scope of the disaster, but from its inexplicable nature. Bodies were discovered in the rubble for weeks thereafter, skeletons in the field near the lake, rotting bodies in the ditches. The stench paled anything the paper mill had ever produced over the course of the scorching days that followed.
Patsy Standish escaped to spend the next month in the hospital, her mind on the verge of collapse. The strange holes in her wrists and feet, the rope burns…all went unanswered. Her house had been reduced to a smoldering foundation and it was supposed by those who chose to guess these injuries had been sustained in the apocalypse that had befallen the neighborhood. She was never able, or willing some also guessed, to say for sure. She was eventually released and disappeared from record.
Detective James Arnold did not report to work the following day and was never seen again. Money and manpower failed to turn up the faintest clue as to how, or why, a naked, hysterical woman was found drivin
g his Crown Vic since polygraph tests given later showed no anomalies in her testimony.
She simply didn’t remember anything and he was gone.
Carolyn Skate’s car was discovered by a hunting party the next spring which opened new lines of query as to her own disappearance, but these, like the others went unsolved. Many nights detectives puzzled over the significance of a missing psychologist and mailman. Nothing connected the two and none of the bones found in the missing man’s attic were consistent with either.
In fact, the disappearances and the bones remain a mystery to this day.
The survivors of the neighborhood were unable to provide any worthwhile avenues of exploration. Of clues there were none. Of suspicions there were many.
Random tongues again recalled the history of the place; its wretchedness once more validated, this time on a national stage.
The remaining shells of houses were demolished, bulldozed. The utility poles removed. Anything remaining of value sold at auction. A vast fence was erected in the attempt to hold off curiosity seekers.
Months faded into years and the undergrowth once more advanced its claim. Leszno’s Acres was once again empty.
Haunted.
*
On a bright summer day in the summer of 2022 a car driving down Highway 27 pulled off into the overgrown spit of land that had once been Samane Drive. The fence had long since been overtaken by honeysuckle and poison ivy, and the driver, a woman, had to push hard against the ramshackle gate (to little effect) against the wall of weeds that had grown through the broken asphalt.
She looked through the fence. Nothing could be seen of the neighborhood. Only a vast stretch of tall, waving grass and new-growth forest.
Her name was Gabrielle Hernandez and she’d lived her once as a little girl. The deed to this land was hers, had been for years, but she’d never come back, never even thought of it. The snapshots in her mind had always been too bizarre and frightful for contemplation.
But things had changed of late.
She had dreams now, of this place, of what she could do here.
A great elation filled her soul as she stood, gazing enraptured, through the fence out over the land. Land that was hers now…
the end