by Tim Marquitz
“Fred.” The man held out his hand. “This is my wife Lucy.”
Alan took the hand, still nervous. Lucy smiled at him. She looked younger, though not young enough for her red lipstick and blonde bleach.
“We saw the front door had been ‘opened’ and thought we’d stop over,” Fred said.
“For the night.” Lucy looked over her shoulder at the stairwell.
“Sure. Join us.” Alan straightened. He’d been hunched for action. “Come on in.”
The Robins, Fred and Lucy, came well equipped. They settled in a corner and started to brew coffee on a small camping stove. They had food too. A good thing, because the kids were hungry.
“So what the hell is going on?” Alan sat back in an office chair, a hot coffee in one hand, a cookie that he really didn’t want in the other.
“It’s the end of days.” Fred nodded as if agreeing with himself. “Better hope you’re straight with Jesus, Alan.”
Lucy looked up from her bowl. “Hell is rising.” She gave the rehydrated stew a nervous poke.
“You might be right . . .” A day ago Alan would have the couple down as crazies.
“No ‘might’ about it, Alan.” Fred slapped his leg. “That out there is the second flood.”
“It’s dark out.” Sarah stood by the window, watching.
“At least the lights are holding,” Fred said.
Ben paled at that and hugged closer to Jane. Alan could cheerfully have throttled the older man. He stared up at the fluorescents. Don’t shoot the messenger. The lights were holding.
The Robbins snuggled down into four seasons sleeping bags at around nine. Like two blue slugs on the red and orange of the carpet. Fred had three heavy duty flashlights laid out beside him. Jane slept with the kids under two coats they had brought up from the car.
Alan sat and tried not to think. He watched the clock. He listened to the tick, tick, tick beneath the slow breathing and Fred’s muffled snore. It’s the end of days. Better hope you’re straight with Jesus. Hope floats. A dark tide.
His head jerked up. Had he slept? He tried to make sense of the clock. What woke him?
Alan leaned forward in his chair and hugged himself with cold arms.
In a quick pulse a black circle appeared on the carpet, grew to an oval two feet across, and then shrank to nothing.
For a moment sleep held him.
Another touch of darkness, across the room.
A convulsion ran through his legs, jerking him back into the chair, nearly toppling it. He leapt up. Two strides took him to Jane and he hauled both children from her, lifting them by their collars.
“Get up! Now! It’s here!”
And as he shouted the orange on red of the carpet turned black. The dark sea rose through the floor as if it weren’t there.
“Get up!” A scream holding only fear.
Alan ran, holding his children under his arms. Fred and Lucy writhed, trapped in their sleeping bags. The darkness lapped around them, an inch deep. Through his shoes it felt like maggots crawling.
At the door Alan spared a glance back. Jane staggered after him. She stepped over Lucy. Alan caught a glimpse of the woman as she reached an arm out of her bag. The darkness stained one side of her face. A blood-red eye stared from that side, without iris or white.
“Jesus!” Better be straight with Jesus. “Oh God!”
Alan ran for the stairwell, almost dropping Sarah after two strides.
He barged through the door to the stairs. A small voice at the back of his mind gave thanks to whoever had chosen to let it swing both ways.
It took two flights of stairs to make him draw breath, and when he did his legs turned to jelly. He collapsed on the seventh floor landing, gasping. Jane fell beside him. For several minutes they said nothing, all four holding tight whilst Alan recovered from the climb.
From the narrow window that ran the outer length of the stairwell, the town appeared as a scattering of islands. The tallest buildings stood alone in an ocean of night. To the west the ground sloped upward towards the expensive side of Ashton, homes in James Hill sold for a million or more, and they remained untouched.
A faint howling reached them, echoing up the stairwell. A thin retching howl and the sound of breaking glass.
“Oh God.” Jane moaned and held the children close.
The lights failed as one. For a moment Alan thought the dark tide had reached the power station, but through the window the distant lights of James Hill still burned.
At least we still have the lights . . .
Jane screamed. And then, a click and the beam of a flashlight stabbed out. Her white face looked at him over the blinding light. Somehow she had swiped one of Fred’s flashlights as she escaped the room.
“I knew I loved you for a reason.” Alan found a grin.
“Let’s go.” Alan stood up. His feet burned, as though circulation were returning after near frostbite.
No-one had to ask where. They slept on the roof.
~
By ten o’clock the morning sun drove the darkness from the foyer. Alan leaned over the low wall at the edge of the offices’ roof-space and watched the blackness retreat along the street. By noon it appeared to have gone as far as it would go. Half of Ashton lay submerged in the night-stuff. Alan imagined who might walk there. Lucy, with her blonde hair and red lips, leaving the building as the tide ebbed, haunting the dark streets by the underpass, her red eyes watchful.
“I have to go down.”
“You’re insane!” Jane held his arm. Ben seized his leg. “No! Daddy! Don’t leave us.
“We’ve got to get to a higher place,” Alan said. “The dark could reach us if it comes in higher tonight. I need to go down and check if it’s safe. I need to find us a route to James Hill.”
“That building is closer.” Jane pointed to a tower three blocks over. It looked to be thirty stories.
“Maybe. But there might be a way out from James Hill. A way to the mountains. If we get to the mountains we can put thousands of feet under us, not just a couple of hundred.”
“I want you to say,” she said.
“We have to go.”
“I know.” Jane pushed the flashlight into his hands. “Be careful. Come back.”
She unhooked Ben’s arms from Alan’s leg and held him while he cried.
~
The dark tide had almost reached the roof. Alan found the mark just below the ‘roof access’ sign. The paint remained only in shreds. The plaster looked blistered. The stairwell stank of rot, the sulphurous reek of moldering seaweed.
Alan paused at the door to the top floor. The image of Fred and Lucy writhing in their sleep sacks rose in his mind. He saw them twisting as the darkness washed over.
A dull thud. From past the doors, from down the corridor. A noise.
“Oh Christ.” He felt hollow. Terror had cored him.
For an age Alan stood without motion, waiting for the sound to come again.
“I have to check.” He said it out loud in the hope it might not be true.
If he went past without checking ... something might go up the stairs while he looked for a path to higher ground.
His hand trembled as he pushed the door open. He eased it, not wanting to make a sound. The thing squealed like a bastard on corroded hinges.
“Shit.”
Alan crept up to the door of the office they had slept in. Black handprints marked it, and a dent below the handle looked to have been put there with a sledgehammer. The daylight from the stairwell window made little impression in the corridor. Alan turned the flashlight on.
He pushed the door.
Desks lay overturned, chairs scattered, filing cabinets pulled down. He scanned the beam of his flashlight across the room. In places the decayed carpet had been rucked up into folded piles to expose the concrete beneath. Smears of black sludge scored the walls and coated the windows, holding back the day.
In the center, one of the sleeping bags was hunched
up, like an inch-worm, as if the occupant were praying to Mecca. The surface, black and glistening, reminded Alan of a chrysalis he’d dug up as a child.
It’s going to move. The words sounded in his mind, cold and certain.
It’s going to move.
Move? The chuckle from the Sanders basement echoed through him. Hell, it’s going to eat you.
Alan took a step back. He took another. Was that motion? Did it just shiver? His nerve snapped and he spun around to run.
“Going somewhere?” Fred stood in the corridor immediately behind him. Close enough to touch. Not the kindly well-fed and well-equipped Fred of the night before. Not the Fred that was right with Jesus.
Alan screamed. He leapt away, back into the office. Nothing would come from his mouth except an animal noise, half sob, half shout.
“Did you think we’d left, neighbor?” Fred asked. He looked like one of those bodies hauled from peat bogs after seven hundred years, the flesh stained and shrunken.
“Stay back.” Alan managed. A pleading without authority.
Fred advanced with slow steps, his hands wide. The nails on several fingers were torn off or hanging on a hinge of skin.
“We’re driftwood, Alan. The next tide will draw us in. This is the flood.” Fred’s voice bubbled from corrupt lungs, full of mirth and malice.
“Back!” Alan raised his arms, and discovered the flashlight. Fred, or whatever creature lived inside Fred’s flesh, drew away as the light fell across him. His eyes narrowed to crimson slits.
“Don’t fight it, Alan.” Fred smiled. A black tongue passed over stained teeth. “This isn’t the first dark tide. You’ve lived your entire life beneath dark waters. The oldest world was as different from today as today is from tomorrow when the dark tide swallows this town whole.”
Alan listened and the words almost mesmerized him. He almost didn’t hear the tearing of rotten fabric behind him.
As Lucy rose from the remains of the sleeping bag, Alan lunged forward. He clubbed Fred aside with the flashlight and ran from the room. Her nails raked across his back, nearly snagging his shirt, but he tore free and reached the stairwell door. When he pulled it closed behind him, he caught a glimpse of her charging down the corridor. Blonde hair still clung to her scalp in bushy tufts. He clung to the door handle, hauling to keep the door closed.
“Jane! Jane!” he shouted as loud as he could. “Jane!”
“Alan?”
“Get the kids out. Do it now.”
The door shook with awful force. He knew he couldn’t hold it.
“Quickly!”
Jane and the children hurried past, clattering down the bare steps.
The door shuddered. It threw him back and opened a good twelve inches before he slammed back into it, pushing it shut.
“Alan?” Jane looked back at him, horrified.
A splintering sound reached him through the fire door.
“Just go.” He gasped for breath. “Into the street. Don’t stop.”
The noise of footsteps faded as Jane descended.
“Run, Alan.” Fred’s voice bubbled behind the door, tender, almost seductive. It turned his stomach. “Run. We won’t chase you. The dark wants you for itself. It’s a high tide tonight.”
And Alan ran. With sick laughter echoing behind him, he ran, taking the stairs four and five at a time, careless of injury.
~
Being trapped is bad. The slow discovery that you’re trapped is worse. Having to march your young children through decay and ruin in order to learn that you’re trapped is hell.
Without a car they had to walk. Alan knew that you could hot-wire a car. But he didn’t know how to. So they walked.
The streets were empty, but where the dark had run during the night, they were corrupt. They stank, the weight of decades had descended on them in hours, and gruesome relics lay scattered amid the rusting cars. A severed hand, handcuffed to a street light. A baby seat with the straps torn away. Four parallel scratches across a doorstep, as if someone had been dragged away.
Ben grew tired, and Alan carried him. Sarah grew tired, but she had to walk.
Time and again they turned a corner and found the road dipping into the liquid dark.
“What are we going to do?” Jane asked the question they weren’t allowed to voice.
“I don’t know.”
Alan had seen the footage of Nazi’s herding Jews onto trains. He had been too young when he saw it, and the images kept with him all his life. He had seen a man with two little boys, holding their hands, leading them on to the train. And later, the pits, with skeletal bodies stacked like cord wood. Every new understanding in his life had added a fresh layer of horror to the look on that father’s face. And now it was him. Perhaps he really had lived his whole life beneath dark waters.
“We’ll go back,” he said. “Try the west route.”
“But that’s away from James Hill,” Jane said.
“I know.” And he beat down the fury that threatened to burst out of him. “I know it is.” Because if it got out, he would hurt the things he loved.
Another image reached him. Rats in a trap. Kittens in a sack as the water seeped in. Animals, with nowhere to run, biting each other.
He glanced at his flashlight. The bulb held a dim glow in the fading light. He’d forgotten to turn it off. The batteries almost run out.
“Fuck!” His hope had run out with them.
And he threw it. Out across the rippled darkness. The flashlight landed twenty yards away, where the dark sea lapped close to the top of abandoned cars. No splash. The yellow box-like body of the thing vanished beneath the surface immediately, but for a long moment the mirrored lamp held there.
“What the hell are you doing, Alan?” Jane shouted at him now, her own fear maturing into anger.
He watched the lamp. It held for another second and then slipped away beneath the surface.
The weight of his misery crushed him. A man in dark times, throwing away his light. Abandoning hope.
Hope floats.
“Quick. Follow me.” He grabbed Sarah’s hand and started to run.
“What?” Jane stumbled after him. “Why?”
Alan couldn’t say. The idea flickered at the back of his mind. If he named it, it might die, it might fade away like a waking dream.
Three blocks back and he stopped in front of the store they had passed earlier. ‘Wild and Wet.’ He let go of Sarah’s wrist and she collapsed. He had dragged her the last half block. One of her patent leather shoes was gone, the other worn to a dirty brown.
He cast about for something to break the window with. It took a while. The dark tide hadn’t reached these streets and there’s never a baseball bat around when you need one.
The hardware store he needed next lay just around the corner. In it he found a portable generator, the kind folk buy so they can watch TV after a storm and keep their freezer running. It seemed that the wind just had to puff these days and the lines went down.
Alan loaded the generator onto a trolley and stacked a workman’s tool-box on top. He added a length of plastic tubing, some gas cans, and five rolls of duct tape for good measure. A man can never have too much duct tape. Jim Sanders used to swear by it.
Looters will be shot on sight. The thought rose as he wheeled the trolley out of the broken doors. He grimaced. If a cop turned up to shoot him, or the National Guard came in by helicopter, he’d weep for joy.
Jane and the kids waited for him in the street. She sat on the box holding the inflatable raft from Wet ‘n Wild. Across her lap, both the shotguns he’d taken from the sports shop.
The children watched him with exhausted eyes, too tired for questions.
He came back pushing a second trolley, stacked with several nine-by-four boards, a circular saw, steel brackets, screws, heavy duty drill.
“I’m going to need help,” he said. “We need this stuff on the roof.” He pointed to a nearby office block. Seven stories.
J
ane and the children set to lugging the equipment up piece by piece. Alan stayed in the street with his gas cans, tubing, and a screw driver. When he had siphoned enough cars to fill his cans he took them up.
“What are we doing here, Alan?” Jane sounded weary but calm. Sweat ran down her neck making streaks through the dirt. In the streets below the shadows were lengthening.
“I’m … I have an idea. It may not work.”
It almost certainly won’t work.
Most of what he was doing was for the sake of doing something. It was to occupy his mind, to distract the kids, to keep busy and not think about the black sea rising from below.
Jane said nothing, and watched him.
“The flashlight floated for a moment or two,” he said.
Sarah and Ben stood to either side of their mother, silent and watching.
“It must have weighed four pounds, maybe five, and the light was weak, but it floated.”
Alan looked around at the equipment laid out on the flat roof. He had brought up several panels of fluorescent tubes removed directly from the office ceilings below their feet.
“We’ve got a generator and plenty of gas.” He spoke fast now. He needed to get the words out, to spread it all out before Jane could question him. “We inflate the rubber dingy. I make a wooden frame and set it on a stand, and set the boat in the frame. I attach these banks of lights to the underside of the frame. I wire the generator to juice the lights. We use another panel with lights for drive. If light can float us, it can push us forward too.”
He looked at Jane. “What do you think?”
She raised her hands. “You’re building an ark?”
“Sure. But we’ve gotta be careful sailing her. The underside is going to be fluorescent tubes. Scrape them across anything and we’re going down.”
“Can you do it?” she asked.
“I’ve got to.” He could hear her thinking it. He was the man never further than a fuse switch away from calling out an electrician. The man who had trouble getting shelves straight. “Necessity is the mother-fu ... I’ll just have to.”
He built the stand first. Close to the edge of the roof so they could sail out over the deeps.