The rear end kicked to the left with a ferocious bang.
Screams echoed from within the cab as Ray tugged Jill onto his lap on the passenger seat with a groan, the door slamming shut behind her.
Darren looked quickly to the rear view mirror to see what looked like a snake made human trying to wrench its claws out of the rear quarter panel of his Blazer, those long talons standing out from it like hooks. Black shadows swept down the front of the building from the shattered windows on the upper floors, sliding effortlessly down the sheer face until they reached the ground with the others, now growing rapidly smaller behind them.
Chapter 7
I
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
PHOENIX HAD GROWN ACCUSTOMED TO THE HORRIFIC STENCH, BUT THE eyes were something else entirely. Staring at him from the darkness, carefully scrutinizing him, waiting for him to give them even the most remote opportunity to snatch him and carry him off into the darkness. He imagined them to be light bulbs set into the recessed ceiling, crawling with fat spiders. While that in itself wasn’t especially comforting, it was vastly preferable to the truth of the matter.
For some reason, they wouldn’t set foot on the basement floor. They’d come down the staircase from above, but had only been able to enter his cellar prison by leaping and climbing up into the cobweb-rife rafters. At first they’d dangled from clawed feet, trying desperately to slash him, but had quickly given up as they realized that so long as he was flush with the ground, they would neither be able to reach him or drop down to the floor.
He wondered if they were aware that he could see them up there, bodies flattened between the long wooden slats, absorbed by the darkness, only their glowing eyes tracing the outline of the reptilian forms. Or if they even cared.
Each time he so much as flexed a muscle in preparation of making even the slightest movement, he heard the clatter of claws above, the inhalation of sharp breaths reissued as hissing. There was nothing to eat. Nothing to drink. Even crawling to the end of the room to slurp the condensation from the mildewed walls was out of the question, for he had no idea whether or not the creatures could scurry down the walls or if they just hadn’t yet. Either way, he didn’t want to have to find out.
He could last a while, he was certain, so long as he just receded into the darkness in his mind and imagined himself at the edge of the beautiful pond where he now pictured the woman sitting with her feet in the cool water, letting the sun bathe her face while the doe and her fawn drank from their mirrored reflections. The girl with the snow-white legs was there beside him, her cool fingers interlaced between his, her sweet breath warm on his cheek.
Nuzzling his head to the right, even in that dank basement he could feel her skin against his, the gentle touch of the downy hairs on her forehead against his chin, the—
“Help me!” she screamed into his ear.
Phoenix’s eyes snapped open, but he was able to resist the urge to quickly sit up.
Had he really heard that?
“Help!” she screamed again.
The monsters slithering through the darkness above hissed at the sound.
“Where are you?” he shouted, having to close his eyes against the sudden genesis of saliva dripping onto his face from the ceiling.
“I can’t find you!” she screamed, her voice so tight with fear that the hairs on his arms and neck stood erect.
“More man tears!” he bellowed into the darkness.
“I don’t know what that means!”
“You have to find more man tears!”
“Help me!” she called again, this time her voice much weaker as though moving down a long hallway away from him.
“White sand!” he screamed so loud it felt as though his throat had torn, remembering his dream. “Black smoke! White sand! More man tears!”
And then her voice was gone, leaving him alone in the cold darkness, surrounded by a constant exciting hissing. He could tell that they were tasting his fear.
“No!” he roared, slamming his fists into the ground.
Flailing claws dropped from the ceiling, slashing inches above his chest, but right then he didn’t care. He needed to find the girl and he needed to help her!
“Leave me alone!” he railed, grabbing onto one of the slashing wrists and giving it a solid yank.
With the sound of a saw tearing through wood, he felt the thing’s weight slam down upon him before he even knew it was falling. What felt like razors cut easily through the smock into his skin, releasing a swell of warmth long before he felt the pain. His breath exploded past his lips and he rolled quickly to the side to try to knock the thing off of his chest.
There was a flash of blinding light and a smell like burning rubber as the thing hit the floor.
Phoenix averted his eyes, shielding them with his hands as he could hear the crackle of fire consuming flesh, snapping like bacon grease. When he finally forced himself to look, the creature was little more than a charcoal sculpture coated with the yellow and orange glow of the dwindling fire, its clawed hands reaching back up toward the roof, before spontaneously dissociating into piles of black carbon.
Its brethren hissed and snapped their jaws above him, carving grooves into the wooden joists and clattering from the pipes and ductwork.
“I know you can hear me!” Phoenix screamed, closing his eyes and grinding his teeth on his tongue to focus his concentration and energy. A spurt of blood slapped the back of his teeth. “We have to help her!”
His body thrashed on the floor as his eyes fluttered beneath flagging lids, preparing to seize.
“We’re out of time!”
His head banged up and down on the cement.
“Find me now!”
II
Dover, Tennessee
NEITHER OF THEM HAD SPOKEN SINCE THEY LEFT THE HOUSE FOR WHAT they could both feel would be the last time. The entire situation seemed surreal, as though rather than living their lives, they were dreaming their way through them. No matter how many times they’d tried the phone, they were never able to raise anyone. The only plan they could come up with was to get in the car and drive until they found more survivors. That was all they had. Everyone in town was dead. It had taken a while for the grim reality of that thought to sink in, but now it sat every bit as real as a rock in their bellies.
“We’re not going any farther in this,” Missy said, turning off the idling car with a click.
They’d sat in the lane behind the snarl of wrecked cars, smoke wafting from beneath their hoods, hazard lights blinking slower and slower as they began to drain the batteries. From their vantage, they could clearly see several of the occupants lying on the side of the road, already beginning to rot into the earth like so much road kill. Others were tangled in the barbed wire fence lining the fading pasture to the right; those fortunate enough to have cleared it or crawled beneath it littering the coarse grass like the piles of manure surrounding them.
A small farmhouse sat at the far side of the pasture with its back to them, turned away from the close-cropped rows of dead cornstalks. A mass of trees lined up on the other side of it, tracing the progress of the river along the eastern horizon. A large aluminum construct, more like a warehouse than a barn, sat beside it, three times the size of the adjacent house. Huge letters adorned the face of the building above large corrugated sliding doors reading in bold red letters:
AUCTION HOUSE
JONATHON
MIRAMONT
STEERS
The building was surrounded by a split-rail fence that had to encompass an acre by itself, with wooden ramps along the north side where cattle could be loaded into awaiting trucks.
The embankment to the left, across the opposite lane filled with cars that had tried to circumvent the pileup only to run headlong into oncoming traffic, sloped steeply upward to a tufted lip of bluegrass, marking the edge of the forest beyond.
Neither knew how long they’d been sitting there, but it had seemed the only appropriate th
ing to do. The prospect of turning back toward town, which they already knew was filled with nothing but corpses, was demoralizing. So long as they were moving forward, there was at least the elusive promise of hope somewhere beyond the approaching horizon, while behind lay nothing but death.
Without the rumble of the engine, the car seemed far too still.
“Where can we possibly go?” Mare asked. His voice was hoarse from screaming, his face stoic as the tears had washed away all feeling and left him numb.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, “but I can’t sit in this car any longer. I need to keep moving or I’m going to lose my mind.”
Mare nodded. He couldn’t think of anything better. If the options were narrowed to sitting in the car and pretending not to see all of the corpses slumped over the wheels and felled on the roadside or simply getting out and walking, then the choice wasn’t that difficult. After what had become of their father, neither wanted to be close to any of the bodies. The car provided a little security, but the windows were only made of glass after all. Even death was beginning to hold a certain appeal. At least maybe then things might become clear in some sort of revelation. The not knowing was enough to drive him to want to flay his own flesh.
He opened the door without looking at his sister, slinking from the car on legs that felt like rubber. The powerful smell of exhaust barraged him, but was quickly ripped away on the wind, which rose and fell as though unsure of which direction to blow. It almost looked as though if he stood on his toes he could reach up and touch the black storm clouds that grumbled past overhead with the speed of crashing waves.
Hauling open the rear door, he pulled out his backpack and slung it over his right shoulder, straining to bring his left through the strap on the other side. Missy’s clanked as she did the same, the collision of the cans within almost a reassuring sound against the purring of engines and the thunder.
Mare looked back over his shoulder to make sure that she was behind him, but said nothing. He knew that Missy wouldn’t know which direction to head any better than he and broaching the subject could only lead to more time wasted in discussion. It was best to just put one foot in front of the other and start walking. So long as he maintained some form of inertia, then at least he would feel as though he was doing something productive. There was still the flicker of hope in his chest that the next town they would come across would have been unaffected by whatever had happened in Dover, but the rational part of him knew otherwise. The purple lightning and the assault of mosquitoes and locusts defied that same logical side, but it was something tangible if nothing else. He could accept the insects, for he had seen and felt them. He could accept the deaths back in town, for they had been impossible to miss. He could even somehow fathom that after his father had died, he had become something else entirely, but if he were to accept the notion that there was no one else alive beyond the next turn, or the one past that, then he would be forced to accept that even hope had abandoned him.
He walked beside the yellow line, paralleling the highway, skirting angled cars knocked onto the shoulder, covering his mouth through the thick black smoke coughing from the dying engines, stepping carefully around the dead bodies of children within arm’s reach of the teddy bear that would forever elude them; past men and women holding hands with their final efforts; past faceless bodies just sprawled prone on the asphalt. And some he couldn’t bring himself to think about, or wouldn’t allow himself to ponder more precisely.
There were melting puddles of shed flesh, minus the skeleton that had once been beneath, as though like snakes they had merely slipped out of the last layer of their existence and hurried away. He couldn’t stand the smell. The inside out flesh, thick with yellow clusters of adipose tissue, made him want to vomit. But worse still was the thought he fought most to keep from pondering… Where had whatever had once been in those bodies gone?
He imagined one of those black-skinned creatures leaping up from behind every parked car or slithering out from the shadows beneath. He pictured them smashing through the windows and lunging for him, wanting nothing more than to drag him back through that shattered maw to rip him to ribbons in the back seat.
Yet there was nothing. No movement. No flies buzzing around the bloating corpses or abandoned children like themselves crying where they hid. There were only the minions of smashed insect carcasses spotting the cars and the bodies of the current and former occupants.
Ahead, a Greyhound bus had been knocked sideways, crossing the entire shoulder and dipping from the road to the right where the bumper was tangled in the barbed wire. There were dozens of black shapes slumped forward against the seats in front of them, while more disturbing still were the vacant seats with the shattered windows beside them, balled glass mixing with the gravel on the shoulder.
He was prepared to ask whether Missy wanted to walk between all of the parked cars to get past the obstruction or avoid the whole mess by detouring through the field when he heard the crumple of gravel as she slid down the shoulder and then stomped forward with a crash into the tall brown weeds lining the fence.
“Wait up,” he called, jogging to catch up. He grabbed the top wire between a pair of rusted spines and pulled it upward with all of his might while standing on the middle line to create a gap for his sister.
A body a dozen yards up slipped free from the top wire and made a horrendous tearing sound as it fell forward into the grass. It released a wet smell that assaulted him like an uppercut from the spread of innards that splashed out onto the earth.
Missy ducked beneath and stepped out into the field, turning to hold it for her brother to slip through.
“Which way—?” Missy started, but was cut off by a loud thump of metal, like something jumping on the hood of a car, and the sound of smashing glass.
They stared at each other a moment, listening.
Silence.
“I’ll bet once we get around this traffic jam there’ll be some open road ahead,” Mare whispered. His eyes darted everywhere at once, making him look as skittish as a prairie dog poking its head out of its hole. “Maybe we could just take one of those—”
Another bang of buckling metal somewhere on the other side of the bus, in the snarl of vehicles.
Missy found her brother’s stare and latched onto it. She jerked her head in the direction of the house and then pointed in a looping half-circle around the edge of the field.
Mare nodded.
Without further conversation, they struck out into the field, looking quickly back behind them every few strides as the chaotic sounds of something thrashing around in the midst of the stalled traffic grew more frequent. Neither looked at the bodies spotting the pasture around them in the knee-high grasses, silently giving them a wide berth like all of the other piles of refuse.
They reached a point where the thrum of engines blended with the chuckle of the Cumberland, only to be drowned beneath with each subsequent step. While they could no longer hear whatever was raising such a ruckus in the pileup, they still glanced back every few seconds as though half expecting something to be racing through the field toward them. The crisp stalks and fallen husks crunched uncomfortably loudly beneath their tread as they passed from the comparatively posh meadow into the decapitated rows. They weren’t even fifty yards from the back of the farm when they saw the woman spread across the ground next to her basket of sheets and quilts that were now trying to flap away on the breeze. Several more snapped and flagged from the clothesline like untamable ghosts.
“I think we’re far enough away to start heading back around them,” Mare finally panted.
“What do you think was raising all the commotion back there?” Missy whispered, still uncomfortable with making more sound than absolutely necessary.
The wind howled its response, the grasses in the field rippling toward them like waves on a lake.
“I don’t know, but I don’t like the idea of finding out.”
She nodded and turned north, the gale
now battering her from the side, tossing the dirty tangles of her hair across her face, heading for the edge of the field where the rows of mixed deciduous and evergreen trees waited with open arms.
The barn rose to their right, the scent of the manure creeping off of the dirt pen and through the fence toward them. Compared to the now familiar reek of death, such a banal, commonplace smell was a welcomed change.
“Where are we really going?” Mare finally asked. It had been gnawing at him since they’d left.
“I thought we were going to drive until we ran into anyone else,” she said.
“The most logical route would have been heading to the west away from Atlanta. We’re heading north.”
She looked quizzically at him a minute, and then turned and started walking again.
“I…” she said, pausing to rub the dust from her eyes. “I don’t know why we came this direction. I guess I wasn’t thinking. You could have said something, you know.”
“I—” he started, but was cut off by a loud bang.
Both looked immediately to the auction house to their right.
“What the—?”
Another bang.
The closed barn door shivered in place.
The words gracing the façade were made of carved wooden letters painted cherry red and either nailed or glued to the aluminum front. There was another loud bang, this time the closed sliding door bending outward as though rammed by a truck from the inside. The letters A and U shook free from AUCTION and fell to the ground in front of them, the sharpened top of the A stabbing into the soft dirt.
“Something’s in there,” Mare gasped.
There was another deafening collision and the left side of the door bowed upward with an awkward wrenching of metal. Beneath they could see four wide feet capped with thick hooves swirling through the dust seeping out from the building. The legs vanished, only this time they heard the thundering charge of the beast before it slammed into the door and sent it flying out into the pen.
The Fall Page 30