by Tim Marquitz
“What the hell is going on?” Walter said, suddenly afraid.
“Keep going,” Timms whispered, that wild light in his eye getting brighter. He locked and loaded his M-4.
As they sped toward the blockade, an MP rushed out with his weapon to block their path.
Walter skidded to a stop, ducking behind the steering wheel as the MP ran up yelling with his rifle up, red in the face, so amped up Walter couldn’t even understand him.
Timms got out the passenger side and slammed his door.
“At ease, corporal!” Timms hollered.
The MP backed down when he saw Timms.
“Sir, I got orders not to let any civilians near the gate.”
“What’s the matter?”
“They’re coming up from Lawton and the surrounding ranches, sir. The infected. They just walk right into the bullets. But if they get close … ”
“Fuckin’ A,” Timms said, looking toward the gate where the roar of machinegun fire was unending.
He turned then and slapped the hood of the DPW car.
“Get back to Lodging, Walter. I’ll see you later.”
Then Timms was trotting off with the MP, back toward the gate.
As Walter turned the car around, he caught a glimpse under one of the trailers blocking the gate of scores of corpses on the ground. More than he’d ever seen.
He peeled out and roared back toward Lodging. Nobody took any notice of him.
Walter didn’t feel like stopping there though. There was nothing to do there but sleep. He’d go crazy listening to the gunfire from his room. His hands were shaking at the wheel. He needed to occupy his time.
He parked by the north barracks, pulling right up to the side and leaving the battery on so he could see to work by the headlights. He got his toolbox and the last pressure vacuum assembly out of the back and deposited it by the old one on the side of the building and stood smoking in the high beams. The gunfire was still going. Jesus, what was happening?
Walter finished his cigarette and stamped it out, then decided he had better check the latrine for leakage before he started.
He got his flashlight out of the car and went in through the front door.
Rows of white metal bunks, the thin green blankets still uniformly made, and empty lockers met him, lined up in orderly formation on either side of the wide bay. The floor bore a huge scroll motif, outlining the Army’s Seven Core Values. He let his flashlight play down the words—loyalty, duty, and respect—before he headed for the latrine.
He rounded a corner and opened the door to the latrine. His foot splashed in the dark.
He cursed as with another step the water sloshed over his boot.
The recent rain must have caused another back up, or maybe a pipe had burst. He reached out instinctively for the light switch. Nothing. The power to this grid must have been cut. His hand came away wet and he wiped it on his shirt in disgust.
He frowned as the sewage smell met his nostrils. It was particularly bad. He was going to have to call somebody with a wet-vac to come in and …
And that was when he remembered the rain.
Walter pointed his flashlight down at the water and the beam did not show the tiles beneath the surface. The water was entirely black, like a lake of crude oil, ominous. Little ripples moved up and down the floor from his step.
He caught his breath and started to slowly back out of the latrine, conscious of the sound of the water lapping against his ankles.
Timms had said the black rain was toxic.
Walter didn’t have the mask of his suit on, or the gloves, which he’d taken off to drive. He wasn’t even buttoned up.
He stumbled backwards out of the latrine and his wet booties squeaked across the bay, leaving black tracks smeared across the Seven Core Values.
Outside at last, in the cool dark air, he went around to the side.
Walter felt strange. Cold. He coughed and shivered, and when he stepped into the headlights of the car, he froze.
His hand, the hand that had touched the light switch in the flooded bathroom, was entirely black.
He felt sick and retched uncontrollably, vomiting up his breakfast, along with a startling quantity of blood.
As the painful heaving subsided, he stood doubled over with his hands on his knees, and watched the blackness creep swiftly up the veins of his arm.
He wretched again, and this time it felt as if his insides were tearing free and joining the exodus over his tongue. He collapsed entirely, losing all muscle control.
As he convulsed on the grass, Walter’s brain was struck through with flashes of fire.
In the center of each burst came a flood of understanding, not as if something were being made known to him on purpose, but as if his very essence was being evicted, and he gained impressions of the thing that ousted him in passing.
He saw a world of red fire skies choked with rock vapor over cracked black ground, which seeped the Black Water, and his human mind understood that he looked upon the earth in its earliest eon, billions of years before his birth.
He was not Walter Coombs, but the Black Water itself. Though his human mind tried to give the Water a name, tried to bestow upon it some form or reference, he could not. The Black Water was. It always had been, until the Light came (and the word Light was a curse in his mind, as filthy a name as any he could conceive). The Water was the tranquil nothingness and the hand of Light had forced it into blasphemous, unnatural form.
Then ages flowed as if time lapsed, like a movie montage, and he saw a dark dot in the angry red sky that grew swiftly larger until it filled the horizon. There was cataclysm and apocalypse, and fire and torrential rains of ash as two planetoids collided.
This was the Invasion. This was the Dread Weapon, hurtled at the Black Water by the Power out of Space.
The top of the earth blew off, shedding fragments into the void. The Black Water that had managed to retain its true shape coalesced, clinging to the molten chunks of planetary debris and riding out the dizzying centrifugal forces of fledgling gravitational wells for eons, weaving a buoy in space, spinning a preserve that became a sustaining, encasing reservation of rock and dust, peppered and battered by flights of meteors and micrometeors.
The moon.
Below, its homeworld became a cursed land of churning oceans and green ground, and the nutritious life-giving silicates were entombed in miles of crust, covered in snowy mountains. The Black Water watched as stromalites pumped the first wisps of oxygen into the air, paving the way for perverse living forms that shambled out of the oceans, growing over immeasurable time from prokaryotes and sliding across the world like vermin.
Then the Whistling Invaders came at last to the world they had prepared with their terraforming planetoid Weapon, their great seed. The mysterious, terrifying floating polypous entities, colonizing the earth below with sky besieging basalt pillars, fading in and out of perception as they went about their incomprehensible errands.
Out of the stars came the hideous Vegetable Things, erecting their sprawling cities with the aide of the Black Gelatins, and in their shadow the Reptilians and the Apes also rose up and built their own emulating cities, only to have them wiped out when the Floating Whistlers flattened them all with monstrous winds and the Vegetable Things unleashed their colossal technologies in counterattack, until the earth was frozen in snow and all the great civilizations had crumbled.
All these events the Black Water regarded with infinite, detached patience from exile within its spinning tomb, these and millions more, until at last, the time of Walter Coombs, when the latest apes launched their steel seeds against the moon and bored into her, sinking their roots deep.
But in so doing, they freed the Black Water, and now the Black Water had returned to their ancestral cradle, using eons of observed knowledge to remake the planet once more.
Already the fungus that obscured the planet’s wealth of silicates was being choked off and killed. The Black Water expected a ce
rtain paltry, tedious resistance from parasitical humanity. Yet it derived no enjoyment from genocide, and saw no real use in the human body it was possessing, except to further its greater cause, that of extermination.
It already encircled the planet entirely, its own body blocking the solar radiation that had given birth to and nurtured the weird monstrosities that covered it. It would continue to precipitate itself, to soak the earth and poison the fragile organic matter that coated it as a farmer must eliminate colonies of troublesome aphids from his crop with clouds of pesticide.
All these things Walter Coombs learned as he died.
The thing that walked haltingly into Sergeant Timms’ office the next morning and settled into the chair across from the desk was not properly Walter Coombs. It retained his appearance, and enough of the memories it had shared in passing to don the hood of its hazmat suit, lest the black liquid that filled its human eyes and seeped from its gummy lips alarm the jittery sergeant.
It was not Walter Coombs that failed to respond to Timms’ tearful, besotted confession that he had gunned down Sergeant Mackey, and what felt like half the population of Lawton, that he had enjoyed it at first, that it had been like over there, kicking in doors and asses. Or a zombie movie. It was not Walter Coombs’ sympathetic ear that listened to Timms as he rambled on about the black geysers aflame in desert oil fields on the other side of the earth, and the muddy spatter, the tar that covered every man that walked through that hell and how the people of Lawton reminded him of them with their black eyes and mouths full of the same black slime.
It was not Walter Coombs that lifted the mask of the hazmat suit when Timms held out the near empty bottle and asked him how he’d slept.
But it was the Black Water that commanded Walter Coombs’ hand to reach out and grip Timms’ wrist, causing the bottle to smash on the desk. It was the Black Water that opened Walter Coombs’ mouth as shock just began to register on Sergeant Timms’ face, and it was the Black Water that spewed from Walter Coombs’ mouth through the parted lips of Timms.
And when Sergeant Timms tumbled backwards, gurgling over the office chair and crashed to the floor, it was not Timms who rose again and accompanied the body of Walter Coombs out the door as, overhead, the night sky began to drip a black bounty once more.
The law of gravity stated what went up must also come down. But the night had fallen.
And the reverse did not apply.
Double Walker
Henry P. Gravelle
The man was short, stubby in appearance with a receding hairline. His waist showed the results of fast foods and unhealthy eating habits of a middle-aged, semi-active human. He sat, pushed deep into the comfortable cushiony chair, pressing the palms of his hands together and squeezing his fingers in a wringing motion, unconsciously attempting to rid himself of anxiety, nervousness ... fear.
Doctor Maria Dobbs observed his actions from her chair behind the desk opposite Benedict Arnold, a man whose problems, she thought, began when he realized the cruel sense of patriotic humor his parents possessed.
“Both of your parents are deceased, Mister Arnold?” she asked, pen atop her notepad ready to scribble undecipherable observations.
His head bobbed slowly up and down. “Yes.”
“And how did they pass?”
Benedict looked at her. Their eyes met. He searched for the concern of a doctor, the affection of a friend, the passion of a woman, but found the curious glare of a skeptic.
“Same as the others,” he murmured.
Doctor Dobbs smirked, placing the pen and notepad onto the desk blotter. She folded her hands and silently looked at Benedict as he lowered his head once again in what she thought, Defeat, anger, pity, loss of self-esteem, perhaps emotional weakness, or was Benedict a paranoid schizophrenic?
There certainly was evidence of an existing psycho physiological disorder. She was leaning towards drug abuse as a simple cause of his malady, although he showed no physical signs of it, He does possess an erratic eating routine, which may contribute to a high stress level, therefore producing a conversion into a psychological dilemma. He had to be hallucinating … his shadow killing people?
She grinned to herself, then asked, “Can you begin again, Mister Arnold?”
He lifted his face with an expression of contempt towards repeating his history once more.
Doctor Dobbs noticed. “I meant to say, can you proceed from the night you were watching television. I believe it was The David Letterman Show.”
She reached for the pen and notebook, crossed her legs, and then settled back into her ergonomic leather chair. Doctor Dobbs realized most patients needed prodding to help them discuss whatever caused their disturbing actions or unwanted visions. Benedict was no different, fearing to raise his eyes very long, glancing around the room, or at anyone. From his file and diagnosis by other clinicians, Arnold was afraid seeing his shadow would bring death to someone, especially someone he disliked, or who upset him in some way.
A curious fellow, she thought, afraid of his own shadow.
She tapped the pen against the bridge of her nose waiting for him to begin,
“Yes, the Letterman Show,” he sighed heavily, still looking towards his knees. “As Paul Schaffer began intro music for some obscure actor seeking affection from the audience, I heard loud thunder, right overhead. Then, as Letterman stuck his hand out to greet the celebrity, the television blinked, popped, and fizzled out.
“It seemed just a mere second or two until power came back on. The television sparked to life, showing a test pattern on the screen. My watch showed it was five-thirty in the morning. I had fallen asleep for six hours.”
“You fell asleep exactly the same moment the television lost power?” Doctor Dobbs questioned.
He nodded.
“Go on, Benedict,” she said.
“Please … Ben,” he almost whispered.
She smiled, understanding his desire for a shorter version of the name. She considered approaching the name subject at another session; especially questioning why he had not changed it. For now he was distraught enough without adding fuel to his emotional bonfire. He continued without further prodding.
“I sat in front of the test pattern for a while. I was tired, feeling like I was up all night and not rested. From the corner of my eye, I caught the movement of a shadow. I assumed it was a bird flying past the window or a mouse running along the woodwork.”
He stopped there and his head lowered further, placing his chin onto his chest.
“What was it?” Dobbs hoped to continue his open dialogue without searching and pulling answers from him.
“I don’t know. It disappeared, but I felt something, or someone, in the room.”
“One of your parents, perhaps?” she wondered.
“No. I asked them, but they had been asleep. I explained what happened and father laughed, explaining it might have been a Double Walker.”
“Excuse me, Ben, a what?” Dobbs said, leaning forward.
“Doppelganger.”
Doctor Dobbs nodded and made some notations. She tried to appear aloof at what she just heard.
Doppelganger.
With that word, Benedict had brought other areas of expertise into play: parapsychology and mythology.
“German, meaning a mythological phantom, quite an interesting choice of words depicting a simple shadow,” she said with a grin.
“It means the same in any language, Doctor Dobbs,” he pointed out almost belligerently. “My double, my shadow, a spirit, phantom, demon … whatever you wish to call it.”
She looked at the top of his head as he still gazed down. His thinning hair was brushed back in an attempt to cover a widening bald spot at the crown of his scalp.
“Why won’t you raise your head?”
“I am afraid to see it.”
“Why is that, Ben?” she asked.
“It is not a good thing. I-I cannot control it.”
“But it’s just your shadow
. It moves with you, stops with you … how can a shape which mimics your own movement, a shape without substance, harm anyone?” Dobbs wondered.
Ben shook his head, laughing softly, almost crying. He wrung his hands harder, his head lowering further still, almost tucking his face between his knees in a bent position.
“You don’t understand. No one understands. They all think I am crazy. How can a shadow hurt anyone? I’ll tell you how!” Benedict’s voice grew loud with frustration. “It is not a shadow but my exact duplicate. It has killed without warning and without my approval. It will again, I assure you. It will kill anyone who upsets me, or him, and I cannot control it, damn it!”
He slammed his fist onto the armrest, then raised his face long enough to present his angered expression to Dobbs before lowering his chin back to his chest.
Doctor Dobbs watched amazed while thoughts raced through a crammed mind laden with professional opinions and phobias, disorders, treatments, and medications. They clicked through her thought process, mentally examining the probability of the Double Walker’s existence.
“This shadow murdered your parents?” She carefully asked, knowing she had entered a sensitive area and needed to understand his every word. Not for the Attorney General’s office, but for the course of treatment she must follow with Benedict Arnold, serial murderer by means of insanity.
Thank God for doctor-client privilege because there’s no way I could explain how this man killed anyone with a shadow.
Arnold remained silent for a moment, contemplating his answer, for this was where others had shown misjudgment of his sanity.
“The Double Walker broke their necks,” he replied softly.
“It wasn’t you, Ben?” she asked.
“I told you it wasn’t.”