Her voice shakes. The door pounds like my heart.
“They were very happy, these people, very excited to find it. And like they always did they opened it, hoping to find special things. But what they found was more special than they expected.”
She squeezes my arm so hard it hurts.
“It was an invisible beast.”
The beast ran at them through the air, she says, from one person to the other to the other, then to other lands, until it was in all the lands. It attacked the people, and many of them fell, but some of them didn't. The ones who didn't changed. They became beasts themselves but not like the invisible one in the sand. These were beasts that could be seen, made from the people who didn't fall, who were what people call immune.
I look down at her hand. She's holding the needle, the one she's been hiding in her pocket, except the blue water isn't inside it anymore. She rubs my arm again and it's sore, but when I ask her why she just smiles. It fades a little when the door cracks, like it's about to break.
She tells me to stand. Then she takes the rest of the suit off.
“I need you to remember that story” she says, slipping my foot into the leg, “so people know how it happened.” She pulls the suit up and puts the mask on over my head.
“Please don't,” I cry.
She grabs some silver tape from the kitchen and wraps it around me so the suit stays in place. “You'll grow into it,” she smiles. “Now give me your wrist.” I hold it out and she puts dad's watch around it. “Keep it. So you always know the time.”
“Mommy. Please.”
She helps me up onto the chair and pushes me up to the window and out. I hold on and hang, a fireman's fall, like she showed me.
She kisses my mask.
“Now run, baby.”
I let go and hit the dirt. It's steep behind me and I climb up, but when I've gone a few steps I look back at the trailer. Through the window I see mom grab the knife in the man's chest and with one, hard move pull it out just as a final CRACK echoes and the trailer door comes crashing in.
She turns to face them, the monster people, the Mune people, and I can barely see her through the water in my eyes.
I climb the steep as fast as I can, as hard as I can, the trailer shaking and rocking behind me, my hands holding onto grass and roots and rocks, digging in with gloves that are too big for my hands, slipping and falling but never stopping because mom told me to run, so that's what I'll do. I'll run and I'll run and I'll run, and when I can't run anymore I'll hide, because that's what she told me to do.
Just when it feels like I can't breathe anymore inside the mask I reach the top of the steep. Above me is an even bigger steep, steeper than anything, and as I look up at it I know all those things behind me, the town and the city, mom and dad, they're gone.
This is my home now.
The Mountain.
AFTERWORD
I.
It's ironic that I'm writing this by candlelight, but it's taught me a few things.
Just as I finished writing Part Zero, the final chapter of The Mountain and The City, a hurricane reared its head over the horizon. The day before the massive storm was scheduled to make landfall, my wife and I made the standard precautionary trip to the supermarket. As is also standard, we spent it laughing at the other shoppers. Their terrified hands grasping the last loaf of bread, carts barreling down the aisles filled to the top with bottled water. It's wind, we said. It comes. It goes. Life continues.
A little after ten the next morning, just as the winds were starting to pick up, we heard a loud boom from outside the house. In the next moment, all the lights went out. Throwing on sneakers and windbreakers, we ventured out into the chaos to find a large branch had fallen off a neighbor's tree and ripped the power-line from our house. Live wires tangled with wet leaves, so we blocked off what we could to keep the the dogs away from it and we ran back inside, ducking rain and debris.
We were off the grid, and not in a politically-motivated, ecologically-conscious kind-of-way.
The next thing that happened was just about everyone on our little island, roughly ninety percent of them, joined us in losing power. The flood waters rose and overtook homes while others had boats thrown against them. Even away from the touch of the water, no one was safe. What looked like lightning was actually transformers exploding in every direction. Shingles blew off roofs and landed in pools. Hundred-year trees fell, ripping their roots and any surrounding grass right out of the ground.
Given that a giant goddamn hurricane was going on around us, it wasn't surprising to hear the conservative repair-times thrown at us by the power company. So we looked around at the house to assess the situation, to see how prepared we were for the potentially long road ahead of us without power and light and heat, without television and internet and video-games.
Needless to say, we were not prepared.
As much as the wife and I are avid apocalypse enthusiasts, we don't have the kind of money it takes to really commit to being eccentric disaster preppers. Or, as I like to say it, we're mentally prepared but financially screwed. It's one thing to talk about these things at stoplights or boring parties, but it's something else completely to have the plug quite literally pulled on your way of life. I'm sure it sounds spoiled rotten to complain about a lack of cell-phone service while shoving rapidly-defrosting ice cream in my face, but the simple truth is this: life is what we know. It's important to keep a sense of perspective about yourself, and not treat your inconvenience like a tragedy, but regardless of what you currently call reality, seeing how fast it can all fall apart can be a scary moment.
At the supermarket a block from our house, the same as before, we pushed a cart around under the few lights running by generator and we picked out what was left. The meat was gone, the frozen section blocked off with plastic bags. More disturbing though were the faces of the shoppers sharing the darkness with us. Hollow eyes in tired faces, forced to think beyond their usual brand name loyalties and preferences and start thinking about what was shelf-stable. What would be a source of fat and calories and protein.
What would keep them alive.
Just under the surface, and more visible in the coming week as a gas shortage gripped the area, was a sense of panic, the feeling that at any moment the social contract keeping one man from knifing the other would expire. Within days they were fighting at the gas pumps, and this was with hope in sight, power coming back a block at a time, talk of clearing the bridges and tunnels for supplies to make their way in. How would those same fights go with no hope in sight? Anyone who stood in another's way would be considered fair game.
Survival. Making omelets and breaking eggs. Dog-eat-dog. Make no mistake- this is why I reserve a deep fear for crowds. It's their inherent potential, the fact that, if they made a sudden choice to turn on me, there's nothing that could stop them from holding me down and ripping me apart. Arrest who you want, I'd already be dead.
As the days wore on I heard one story after another from the people who had made it; the survivors. A tree falling onto a neighbor's house, causing it to explode with such force that it blew out the windows of the surrounding houses. The entire back wall of a house falling away into the rising sea and all the furniture, including a grand piano, floating away. A pond overflowing and stranding a teenager on top of his car. Ducks in the backyard. Fish in the basement. Seaweed in the kitchen. It was obvious, even as we huddled around our fireplace to stay warm and cook our dinner, we were some of the lucky ones.
I learned a few things from my apocalypse taster. Without access to TV and internet, the images that allow us to see the bigger picture, the experience itself, becomes very personal, very small, almost like a pinhole camera aimed at a war. I learned how much I need music, how I hold to it to keep me sane the way Silvia did with her record player. I got to see how people can come together in bad times, but I also got to see, from a short distance, how thin the veneer of society runs, how it's a precise and delicate balan
ce, and if you take away one ingredient, just one- electricity, gas, food, heat- the whole recipe starts to turn.
Now imagine adding an extra ingredient as well, in this case the Munie plague, and I guarantee the ground would bottom out so fast, you wouldn't get a chance to look down to see it falling away.
II.
A word on serials.
From the time my ninth grade English teacher introduced our class to Great Expectations, written and published by Charles Dickens, I've had an interest in serial fiction. As she explained to our mostly-bored class how it was so popular in its time that people crowded the docks waiting for the new issue to be shipped in, then stood around the boats to read it, I fell in love. Admittedly it appeals to my ego to think that my words could have that effect on people, but I'm also fascinated by what it means for the writer and the reader, how it changes the nature of their relationship by adding a push-pull element. A period of writing, a period of reading, a period of reaction, then the process repeats itself. This system actually affected the story of Great Expectations as we know it. People hated the original ending so much that a retraction had to be printed, the ending changed to appeal to their sensibilities. While I'm not a fan of the introduction of test audiences to art-making, there's something to be said for making popular art popular, and that means listening to the people. It's very different from the standard starve/gorge set-up of long-form fiction and much closer to the style of comics or television- two modern inventions that enjoy success by appealing to the way we've come to consume media.
But it was another modern invention that made me think the second coming of the serial just might be due: the e-reader. Everything about it lends itself to the serial, from its ability to offer cheap or even free reading, to the fact that a reader can enjoy a piece of writing literally minutes after the author publishes it.
The upshot: no more crowded docks.
The Mountain and The City didn't start life as a serial, it started as a short story, a one-off for online reading, but as I listened to people I noticed a genuine interest had been piqued, a concern for the fate of its heroes. Unfortunate, I thought, since I'd intentionally painted them, and therefore myself, into a corner. The end. Or is it?
It was a challenge, but if I could get our heroes out of that dead end long enough to continue the story, it would be just as exciting and unpredictable to read as it was to write. So I set to it. It worked, so I did it again. And again. And again. The goal became to end each part in a way which would make not just you but me say, now what? How do they get out of this one? This was cliffhanger as form, not as cheap device. As a result The Mountain and The City isn't a novel chopped up into pieces and sold off a slice at a time, it's a true serial, from conception to death, that like Dickens' will spend its afterlife as a novel.
Call it Horrifying Expectations.
***Special Preview of Shallow Veins***
Description:
Franklin Butcher is a recently divorced, hard-drinking cop in a small town. What starts off as the simple disappearance of a local man grows into something larger when his own partner goes missing, drawing him into an unseen world of gods and monsters.
Meanwhile, a new couple in town begins to learn the deadly secret hidden in their house.
Book One of The Obscured, a bold new series about hidden worlds, the monsters they hold, and the heroes who are destined to save us.
Description for The Obscured series:
Imagine parallel worlds. Places filled with creatures large and small, creatures that would terrify the normal person. Imagine they hate each other, and want nothing more than to destroy and take over each others worlds until only one species remains on top.
Imagine the only way they can get to each other, is through us.
Chapter One : Deep as Hell
Franklin Butcher puts the metal to his mouth. It's cold on his lips, and it reminds him of playgrounds as a kid; afternoons spent laughing in the sun, beautifully ignorant of the years to come; the love and the lust and the loss just down the road. He thinks now of adulthood as a feral cat, sneaking up slow and silent at first, until a screaming flash of claws and fangs digs into the neck to finish the job. It's been a rough chain of years, and he feels it in his bones.
He tilts the flask and takes a heavy pull of whiskey. It warms his gut enough to steel him against the damp air of a cold, autumn morning. As he screws the cap back on, he takes in the view through the dusty windshield.
The modest church is in such need of fresh paint the wood looks thirsty, while the lot it sticks up from like a bad tooth is more weeds than blacktop, even up close where Butcher is parked. The small, free-standing garage off to its right is all but ready to collapse into a pile of tinder.
Butcher hasn't been in Shallow Creek long, yet the stories he's heard of the church, and of Father Curtis who runs it alone, could already fill a notebook. How at its height Father Curtis' sermons were so popular, local folks would bring their own chairs to sit outside the door and listen in, even in the rain. How he once developed a deep infatuation for a beautiful trapeze artist who passed through town. How he burnt up Mister Reed's crops one summer because he claimed they hid the devil in them. How his congregation has dwindled so low, no one knows why he bothers to keep the church running anymore, except as a tax shelter.
Officer Butcher stashes the flask in the glove compartment, grabs his hat and steps out of the cruiser. He adjusts the gun on his hip as he enters the tiny church.
**
It takes a moment for Butcher's eyes to adjust to the dark interior of the church, but even with limited vision, one thing is clear: there's a body on the floor.
Beneath the cross with the pale, bloody Jesus nailed to its beams, a figure in dark robes is splayed out on the floor. By instinct, Butcher's hand goes to his hip to feel for the butt of his gun. Before he can unclasp the holster, the body stands.
Father Curtis makes the sign of the cross and turns to Butcher. Bushy, snow white eyebrows raise on his wrinkled forehead. “You're too young to be divorced.”
Officer Butcher tilts his hat up on his head. “Word travels, I see.”
“In a town like this it’s the only thing that does." He closes the distance between them. "If you don’t mind me asking, why is it you and your wife separated?”
Butcher clears his throat. “You called the police?”
The old man smiles, sheepish. “I'm sorry, my son, I have a curious mind and it gets me into trouble. People normally share so much of themselves with me. At least they used to.” He gestures to the empty church.
Butcher leans against a pew, his legs suddenly tired, and lets out a lungful of air that smells of booze- a fact which doesn’t go unnoticed by Father Curtis. “I guess you could say we had a difference of opinion. She thought I was a delusional, stubborn fool who would never change.”
“And you?”
“I thought she could learn to live with it.”
“You’re a better man than you give yourself credit for, my son. Many men are.”
“With all due respect, you don’t know me.”
The old man shrugs his boney shoulders. “You meet enough sinners, you learn to know when you haven’t.”
“Yeah, well divorce is a sin last I checked.”
“True, but perhaps I believe the greater sin is wasting the life that was given to you. After all, there are more worthwhile fights in this world than whose turn it is to take out the garbage.”
“It wasn't all as simple as that.”
“No?”
“No." He pauses. "Sometimes it was the dishes.”
The father wheezes, a sound Butcher realizes is what the old man has in the way of a laugh. “I like you,” Father Curtis nods, “I'm glad you were brought here.”
Butcher gives him a look.
“By the Lord, of course.”
“Of course. Listen, I don't want to be rude but you still haven't explained what you called for. Dispatch said it was property damage but
you weren't clear on the phone. Was the church vandalized? Did someone break in?” Butcher glances around but sees nothing out of place.
Father Curtis shakes his head. “No vandals. No people.”
“You know you can't call the police because a building is falling apart.”
The man's face wrinkles. “I'm not so old and feeble that I dial 911 because I can't change a light-bulb.” The old man catches himself, grips his chest, allowing himself a moment to calm down. In this moment, Butcher can't help but think of his father. “Would you like to see why I called you,” the priest asks.
“At this point,” Butcher says, “I think I'd better.”
**
The priest steps to the edge of the abyss. He beckons Officer Butcher to join him, his pale hand pointed to a safe place in the grass. With firm words he tells the younger man to take a look.
“You should step back from there,” Butcher replies.
“Nonsense, it's perfectly safe.” The wind blows at his robes, moves through his spider-web hair.
Butcher moves from the back door toward Father Curtis. He chooses his footsteps like the ground is made of glass. He tries not to seem worried in front of the old man, yet he knows it would be foolish to rush forward and risk falling in, potentially to his death. Once he's alongside the man, he ventures a peek down.
The sinkhole's sides run straight down for twenty feet until they angle in sharply. The bottom, just visible in the morning light, is littered with ancient, damp wood. What looks at first glance like roots and branches stuck out from its walls have fingers and toes. The stones littering the bottom have names, pieces of words carved into them.
The Mountain and The City: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale Page 29