It Came from Anomaly Flats

by Clayton Smith

  The mayor isn’t smiling anymore. She nods to her Administrators, her lips pressed into a line. They give her a curt, collective nod, and they step down into the pit once again. With surprising efficiency, they pry the second door up and throw it open. The flies explode from inside, and the acrid smell intensifies, and now a little light is filtering into the open mouth of the container, and it’s just what I feared, it’s just what I knew, what I always knew, somehow. I see gray silhouettes in the shadows of the time capsule, bodies and bodies and bodies piled up, one on top of the other on top of the other, a tangle of broken arms and useless legs, gaping mouths clogged with matted hair, dead, startled eyes against sallow skin, tattered clothing writhing with maggots. Lumps and piles of dead, rotting meat stuffed into a cube eight feet across, twenty feet long, and a full forty feet straight down into the ground.

  The mayor stares down into the box. The edges of her lips curl downward. Her cheeks twitch. The color drains from her face. This is not what she expected. This is not what she had planned. Her fingernails dig crescent moons into her wrists. She gives her Administrators another nod, and then she’s gone, stepping stiffly off the back of the wagon, climbing into her antique Town Car, disappearing behind the glass. The driver pulls ahead, and she is gone, leaving us alone with the future.

  The Administrators get to work. They reach, undaunted and mechanical, into the shipping container and begin pulling bodies from the tangle. Most of them come out whole. Some of them are rotted enough and soft enough to tear, and they do. Limbs rip free; heads crack loose. Flannel shirts rip, and bloated maggots fall like milky raindrops. The people behind me still can’t see what’s happening, and they’re still trying to get close. Somewhere behind me, there’s still hope. Those of us at the front are desperate to get away, get away, get back to the back, but the noisy crush of our neighbors pushes us ever forward, and now my toes hang over the edge of the pit, and I’m staring down into the eyes of Mrs. Myers—not the Mrs. Myers who’s lost somewhere in the press behind me, but the Mrs. Myers of forty years from now, her red hair faded to dry-blood gray, her cheeks gone flabby, her skin drained to white and rotting to blue. Behind me, she’s still alive, still sad but alive, but below me, she’s old and pathetic and dead, her eye sockets sunken, her leg twisted and broken, her throat nibbled away, her hair crusted down with petrified blood where she’s taken a blow to the skull. The Administrators haul Mrs. Myers’s future out of the steel crate and toss her onto the growing, stinking pile against the wagon.

  More familiar faces are dredged up from the crate. Bill Stevison, a quiet loner who lives out past the Lurchwoods. Trudy from the Nite-Owl, still wearing her diner apron, even forty years from now. Rachel Morgan, the cute bartender over at the Dive, her old, wrinkled body split open by a series of deep cuts, like someone took a hatchet to her limbs and couldn’t cut all the way through, but just didn’t know when to stop. There’s Sandy Sullivan, her tattered blue Walmart vest still cinched around her neck where someone will use it to choke her to death sometime in the next forty years. It takes two Administrators to haul up the wet, bloated body of Johnny Dixon, one of the town’s champion drunks. They toss him onto the grass like a bag of fertilizer, and he hits with a splash. Lake water spouts from his compressed lungs on the impact.

  Some bodies are unrecognizable, or else are just parts: a rotted foot; a severed hand; a clump of black hair stuck to someone else. The Administrators work tirelessly, climbing down into the crate when the tide of bodies sinks too low and tossing them up over the lip of the crater. Word has made its way to the back of the crowd now, and there’s no more push to the front of the line.

  No one wants to see.

  The crowd is thinning; I could move if I wanted to, and I do want to, but I can’t. More and more bodies are flung up on the ground…the maggots are thick; they crawl over my shoes, but I cannot move. I’m suddenly aware that I’m standing alone at the edge of the hole now, and as if through a deep well of brackish water, I can hear someone calling my name, begging me to come away, but I can’t. I won’t.

  I need to see.

  The bodies of my friends, and my neighbors, and people I’ve seen in passing, and people I’ve known since I was born, they’re dredged up in endless succession. Dorothy Jimble, Tucker Branson, Maude Roach, Roland Spears, every person I’ve ever known...choked, drowned, hacked, slit, shot, beaten, crushed, hanged.

  Some of the bodies have aged a full forty years. They look freshly dead, like they might sit up, shake it off, and walk on back home, if only they didn’t have those small chunks missing from their throats. Others, though, especially down toward the bottom…they’re rotted down to skeletons. The bodies have been dead a long time, maybe decades. The Administrators pull out a dark, twisted thing that used to be a man, and I recognize Jack Reagan, only by the denim jacket with the Biggs Tobacco pouch sewn onto the arm. Jack’s had that jacket a long time, and it’s falling apart, right now, in my time. He won’t have it much longer. Not in four years, much less forty. But here he is, wearing it, at the bottom of a stack of bodies sealed up four decades from now.

  I can’t breathe. My chest heaves, there’s no air, and there’s a pain in my gut like a knife stuck in. I know why Jack Reagan’s still wearing that ragged old jacket at the bottom of the grave. It’s because whoever does this to us—whoever slaughters the entire population of Anomaly Flats and stuffs it into a shipping container and buries it in the ground and sends it back for everyone to see—whoever does this doesn’t start in forty years. They start soon. They may have started already. Jack Reagan in his jacket will be one of the first to go.

  Whoever slits our throats and crushes our skulls and hacks us to bits...it doesn’t take them forty years to start.

  It takes them forty years to finish.

  I suddenly find the ability to move. I peel my tennis shoes up from the sticky residue of death and scrape backwards, away from the crate. Still the bodies come, some old, some fresh, and my body is moving, slowly moving, but moving, I’m putting distance between myself and the future of Anomaly Flats, but I can’t look away, my eyes still want to see, and the Administrators are hidden from view now, so far down in the crate, and I’m waiting for the next body, and I’m watching, and I’m walking without looking, and my foot strikes a soft, fleshy body that’s rolled loose from its pile. I trip backwards and fall hard. My legs are tangled in the legs of this dead thing, and I scream and struggle to kick them free, but the dead legs are struggling back, and I claw my way backward, desperate to be loose, desperate to be away, desperate to leave the time capsule’s scattered limbs and torn fabrics that are blowing in the wind. I finally shake my legs free, and I’m turning to crawl away, but the corpse beneath my knees opens his eyes. His pupils shrink in the sun, and he furrows his brow. I scream again, or I try to, but it doesn’t come out.

  I know these eyes. They’re older, but I know them.

  I know this face. It’s wrinkled and creased, but I know it.

  I look down at myself on the ground. The me of forty years from now looks back up at me.

  All of these dead bodies, in the future, and I’m the only one who lives.

  I am old, lying there on the ground, but unmistakable. My hair is gray, almost silver, where there’s still hair left, and the faded ink of an old tattoo is visible beneath a tear in my sleeve, even though I don’t have any tattoos now. Seeing it on this withered husk is almost comical. In fact, it is comical. I laugh. Once, abruptly, short and loud.

  This is an old and tired version of me. But it is me.

  I writhe on the ground, in pain, probably disoriented. I have been locked in the bottom of a crate crammed full of death and dismemberment, choking on stench and coagulated blood, going mad in the stifling, pressing darkness, in the heat that rotted the bodies around me into wet softness. I have a deep gash in the side of my skull that looks pretty fresh. The blood isn’t flowi
ng, and most of it is caked and dry, but some fresh rivulets pour through the crust. I am mouthing up at myself, my voice harsh and quiet, and I can’t hear the me of forty years from now, so I crouch down. I take my hand in mine, because it seems like an appropriate thing to do, and I give it a squeeze. I pretend I can feel that squeeze through the decades, but I can’t. I can’t feel anything.

  My old eyes blink longer now, slower, and I’m fading. I sink to my knees, and we’re tangled once more, hand in hand, arm through arm, and I lower my ear to my ancient lips. Suddenly, my eyes spring to life, and I am seized with a jolt of strength as I grip my younger hand. I’m startled by this, and I try to pull away, but I am strong, in this moment, despite my age, and I hold tight. My eyes fierce with light, I stare up at my present self, and I whisper, “Run.”

  Then I fall onto the soiled earth, and in forty years from now, holding my own hand, I am dead.

  I kneel there for I don’t know how long. My thoughts tumble into themselves and create the hum of nothing at all. For an instant, or a minute, or an hour, I don’t know, but for however long, I am a void in the universe, separate from everything.

  When I come back to myself, almost everyone else is gone. The Administration has pulled out the last of the bodies, and they’re lighting the piles on fire. They’ll be on me soon. I realize my face is soaked through with tears, so I drop my dead hand and wipe my palms across my face, rubbing it dry. I stand, and I am stiff, but I stagger backward, away from my body, twisted and battered and gone cold on the ground.

  Everyone I know, murdered. Thrown into a steel canister and sealed in to rot. Me, bloodied and lost, alone in the dark, crushed beneath a pile of death, stifling, suffocating, screams muffled by limbs and torsos and hair. “Run,” I said to myself. “Run.”

  This is the fate of Anomaly Flats. This is how we end. This is how space is made for Something Other.

  I should run. I should leave Anomaly Flats. Leave the county, leave the state. I have family in North Dakota. That’s what my folks used to say. I should go there, find them, get a job, rent a house, lock the doors, shutter the windows, hide in a crawl space, never come out, never come back.

  This is what happens to me if I stay. Forty years and a blow to the head. Holding my own hand as I die. I should save myself.

  I should run.

  But there’s no point in running. No one leaves town.

  There’s no escape from Anomaly Flats.

  I turn my back on my dead self. I push my hands into my pockets, and I walk away from the smell of roasted meat and the cluster of bonfires crackling in the field. I leave it behind, for now. I leave it behind, until I eventually return. And I will return.

  Because this is what happens.

  No one gets free.

  You can’t change the future, and it won’t change the past.

  Hope is a thing best avoided. No matter how much we want it.

  There is no hope in Anomaly Flats.

  Faeligo

  I was out in the woods when it started to snow.

  I wasn’t prepared. I admit it. But it was June, for pity’s sake, and who could expect it to snow in June? It was chilly for the time of year, yes, but not cold. Still...you should always be prepared. You never know what Anomaly Flats is going to throw next, and you should always be prepared, but I wasn’t. Not for snow.

  Not for anything that happened that day.

  It came on quickly, the clouds growing dark and splitting open without warning. The snow fell hard and fast, each flake as sharp as a razor. My light jacket shredded like crepe paper in the onslaught; the snowflakes tore through it like a hail of bullets, and within seconds, my skin was covered in little red slits like paper cuts, tiny trails of blood dribbling out of the wounds. Anyone who has been caught in a snowstorm—and that’s pretty much everyone in the Flats—they all know what it’s like when the little blades slice your skin, the edges of the flakes so sharp, they sing as they cut through the air. I covered my eyes and nose with my hands as best I could, but I didn’t have my steel mesh mittens. Why would I? It was June. But without them, the snow tore my hands to ribbons.

  I panicked. I didn’t know what to do, and I couldn’t think straight. The stinging of a thousand cuts has a way of making your brain scream itself into oblivion. On instinct, I ran.

  I plunged deeper into the woods, and it helped some, because the trees were huge and sprawling with fresh, green leaves. The canopy provided protection, but only a very little. The flakes tore through the leaves, of course, and ribbons of green fell all around me like confetti. Some of them stuck to my fresh wounds.

  I don’t know what I was hoping to find. Some manner of shelter, I suppose. An outcropping of rock, or perhaps an old beaver dam. Anything that could offer a short respite. If I’d been thinking straight, I would have run north and taken my chances in Dead Man’s Cave, tried to take cover until the storm let up. But instead, I just ran, hoping to find a house, or a hunting cabin, or something, and it was foolish, because I had been in those woods hundreds of times, and I’d never stumbled across so much as a lean-to.

  But I pushed deeper and deeper into the forest, perhaps further in than I’d ever been before, blinded by the white wall of snow as much as by my own hands, and after I don’t know how much time, I broke into a clearing, and there, in the center, stood a log cabin, its windows alight with candles, smoke curling lazily from the rough stone chimney.

  I should have kept running. I should have let the snow tear me to shreds. I should have bled out on the forest floor, gasping for breath as the flakes slashed through my windpipe, crying tears of pus as they buried their razor edges into my eyeballs.

  It would have been preferable.

  But instead, I chose the cabin.

  I leapt up onto the porch, and the long eaves of the roof, rickety as they were, provided some little shelter from the snow. But the flakes still tore into my legs and cut at my boots as I banged my fist on the door. “Hello!” I yelled, hammering on the thin wood. The door rattled about in its frame. “Hello? Please help me!”

  No answer came from inside the cabin, and who could have expected otherwise? A stranger running from the woods and hammering on your door, screaming for help? Who in their right mind would answer that call? But the pain of the snow cuts blinded me to reason, and I beat away at the door until the latch broke, and the door banged open against the wall.

  “I’m sorry!” I called, stepping in through the door, wincing at the last few slices of snow against my ankles. “I didn’t mean to—I’ll fix it, I promise. I needed—”

  “Shhhh,” sniped an old woman’s whispering voice from the depths of the cabin. “Shut your mouth. You’re making it angry.”

  The inside was dim, the faltering light as gray as smoke; even though flames from the fire crackled and leapt in the stone fireplace, the firelight seemed to be swallowed up by the gloom. I couldn’t see an old woman, or the angry thing she spoke of, and as I hesitated, I wondered if I shouldn’t head back outside and take my chances with the snow. But the old woman hissed, “Shut the door, too,” and I did, automatically, without questioning it, and I do not know why.

  I was alone in the dark with a creature I couldn’t see.

  “Come,” the woman whispered.

  I glanced nervously back at the door. Beyond it was a snowfall as lethal as a firing squad. Scores of people have died from the snowstorms in Anomaly Flats. People were probably dying right at that moment, from that very same storm.

  A nicked artery, a split vein, death by a thousand cuts.

  Bleeding out in the snow or matching strength and wit against an elderly woman and an unseen anger. These were my choices.

  I chose the woman.

  I wish to God I hadn’t.

  I walked slowly into the next room, and the shadows began to take shape
in the misty light. The woman sat in a rocking chair near the fireplace, straight-backed and unmoving. Her hair was done up in a loose bun, and she wore a heavy shawl around her shoulders to ward off the sudden snowstorm’s chill. My eyes continued to adjust to the darkness, and the shape of a double-barreled shotgun formed itself in her lap.

  “Whoa!” I cried, instinctively raising my hands into the air. “I’m unarmed!”

  “Shhhh!” she hissed. “Shhhh.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but I realized she wasn’t pointing the shotgun at me. She was pointing it at a heavy door on the opposite side of the room, just to my left. Then I heard something unsettling...the long, slow scratching sound of sharp claws scraping against wood.

  There was something on the other side of that door.

  “Have you come to help me?” the old woman whispered, her voice creaking with disuse, cracking with hope.

  “Help you?” I asked, trying to tear my eyes from the door. “Help you with what?” But I already knew the answer to that question. Or I think I knew it. I should have. I must have. Because the scratching was getting louder, more frantic, and my skin was already prickling up into goose bumps.

  The old woman didn’t bother with an answer. She just sat in her chair and kept her shotgun trained on the door. The only change was a little more slump in her shoulders. I wasn’t there to help her, and whatever hope she had evaporated into the cold air.

  “What...what is it?” I asked, moving slowly away from the door and closer to the old woman’s chair. I should have turned and run straight out of that cabin, out of those woods, snow be damned. But curiosity gets to me sometimes, I admit it, and I just cannot shake it. “Some sort of animal?”

  “No animal,” she whispered, sparing her words. “The devil.”

  That set my teeth on edge. A certain sort of fear started to rise from my belly, but I shook my head to clear it, and reason prevailed. Anomaly Flats is a strange town with many terrible things, but it’s not a playground of angels and demons. I’m reasonably sure about that. And if you did manage to catch the devil, he sure as hell wouldn’t be contained by an old woman and an old door. I knew it was an animal, but that wasn’t to say it might be any less dangerous than the devil. Corner a wild beast, and it will rip you to shreds without a thought. Especially if it’s rabid.