by Ronald Malfi
When she pulled her face away from his chest, she looked over toward the burning silo. The rain was reduced to a fine mist now and the fire burned the entire base of the silo so that it looked like a rocket about to blast off into space.
“I didn’t see him in there,” she said in a small voice.
“He wasn’t,” Ben said, knowing she was talking about her brother.
“Do you—” she began, and that was when a low moan escaped the confines of the burning structure. Brandy whimpered softly and clung to Ben, fearful that he might run and leave her there by herself.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he assured her. “I need your help.”
She nodded numbly but she wasn’t looking at him and he didn’t think she truly heard him.
“Brandy! I need you!”
She jerked her head back in his direction. Her eyes were wide, lucid. “Yes. Whatever it is…”
“Unless it dies from smoke inhalation or the fire itself, it’s going to try to get out,” he told her, already digging in his pants pockets for more slugs. “I’m going to keep an eye on the door. I’ll shoot it if it tries to come out. I need you to go to the other side of the silo and make sure it doesn’t get out another way.”
She nodded but he wasn’t sure she was getting it all. He gripped her forearm in one tight fist. “Honey, do you hear what I’m saying?”
She blinked. Rainwater cascaded in torrents down her face. “Yes,” she said. “You want me to go around to the other side in case it tries to escape from there.”
“Very good. Now go!”
She ran, steadier than he would have thought possible at the moment.
Ben turned and crouched in the cold mud, facing the closed door of the silo. The flames had blackened the wood around the base but the storm was keeping it from burning out of control. He proceeded to reload the shotgun, filing the shells systematically into the body of the gun while keeping his eyes trained on the silo’s door. He supposed he had struck it with at least one blast from the shotgun as it descended the throat of the silo, but if it had done any damage, he couldn’t tell.
This is where we die, he thought with bitter finality. We die now.
Something slammed against the other side of the silo’s door. Ben could hear it like a cannon blast and he could see the door itself rattle in its frame. Fiery bits of sheathing rained down as a second strike shook the entire structure.
This is where—
And then the silo collapsed.
11
The bottom of the structure gave out first, the old wood—coupled with the guano as an accelerant—consumed by the fire despite the soft patter of rain. The silo appeared to telescope straight down at first, releasing a noxious black cloud from its base that rose up like a death shroud to cover the entire structure. Rows of staves blew outward in a shower of splintered wood, iron rivets, and steel bands. As it did so, great scores of bats burst forth and whirled up into the atmosphere in a dizzying black flurry, their numbers so great they temporarily darkened the sky. Their shrill cries, unified in an orchestra of hackle-raising discord, resonated in Ben’s molars like fingers down a chalkboard.
Then the silo canted to one side, the remaining staves coming apart as the flames licked up from the foundation. The cupola collapsed in on itself and a mushroom cloud of black smoke billowed out of the hole at the top like the smokestack of a steamship. The silo then appeared to sway like a house of cards before the whole thing came crashing down. It struck the earth in a belch of black smoke and fire.
12
It seemed to take forever for the fall to end. Debris rained down. Dead bats missiled earthward from the sky and exploded in shallow, muddy puddles. Circular bands of iron struck the ground and rolled like hula hoops until their momentum ceased. Filaments glided and wafted and slowly fell.
Trembling, Ben stood on quaking knees, his entire body shaking so horribly that he did not trust his finger resting on the trigger of the shotgun. Only vaguely was he aware of Brandy running back toward him through the commotion, his eyes locked on the fallen structure, as bits of wood still showered the ground. The air itself was acrid with the stench of smoke.
Brandy arrived at his side, breathing heavily. “Is it dead?”
Ben tightened his grip on the shotgun. “I’m going to find out.”
He tramped across the sodden earth until he arrived at the wreckage. Brandy was a step or two behind him. She said, “Look,” and pointed at the wreckage—at the steaming, buckled boards and the whitish smoke that corkscrewed up from them. Dead bats littered the ground and some flapped their mangled wings futilely while drowning in puddles of mud.
“What?” Ben asked…but then he saw what had attracted Brandy’s attention—a section of boards bucked and heaved. There was something underneath struggling to liberate itself. “Stay here,” he instructed.
The smoke-scarred boards were unstable beneath his feet. He trod upon them with the discipline and heed of a tightrope walker, avoiding the sections of wood that still burned or looked weak enough to surrender beneath him and cause him to break an ankle. The stench that engulfed him was one of burning wood, shit, and hair…with an underlying medicinal odor. Ben stepped atop the charred boards and walked to the place where the boards bucked. The wood here was shattered and splintered and blackened, like the remains of a house fire, and the thing that moved beneath this sharp and indelicate shrapnel did so with the lassitude and fast-fading resolve of a deer fatally wounded after being struck by a car on the highway.
With his boot, Ben kicked away planks of wood and bits of ancient, twisted metal. A hollow opened up beneath the boards. Something was writhing within. Ben crouched and stared down at it, the gun shaking in his right hand. His breath whistled in and out of his throat and sweat stung his eyes.
A segmented tail retreated beneath the heap of smoldering wood through a crack in one of the boards. It left a trail of snotty fluid on the boards that glistened like semen.
A few feet away, one of the boards rose up and separated itself from the rest of the wreckage. A pale and impossibly long arm extended out from beneath it, stretched halfway to the muddy earth that was just out of its reach. Whatever the creature was, it was seeking solace on solid ground. A second arm appeared…and then the creature itself extended out from beneath the smoldering planks of wood.
The thing possessed only the most rudimentary humanlike appearance, in that it appeared to have a central trunk from which limbs diverged. Its head suggested some strange mutation between plant and insect, though there were really no specific details to identify it as such. The longer Ben looked at it, the more formless and indecipherable it became. At one point, he believed he was looking at a gigantic insect crawling out of a hole in the ground. At another point, he swore the thing was amphibian in nature, almost toad-like. Yet again, it also appeared to resemble a hybrid between a human being and some alien species of vegetation. It dragged its organic web behind it like a paratrooper dragging a deployed chute through unwieldy terrain. The tendrils that connected the web to the creature pulsed with lifeblood—or some otherworldly variation thereof—and the web itself, like a glistening sphere of bonelike spokes, appeared to deflate until it more closely resembled a wind sock on an eerily calm day.
Ben approached it, the shotgun up and the butt pressed against his right shoulder. The thing dragged itself out from beneath the wreckage and was in the mud now, the soft rain pelting its formless, colorless hide. The segmented tail carved a muddy swath in the ground as it pulled it up underneath its body. Ben saw the four hooks suppurating like infected sores, bleeding milky fluid onto the ground.
Ben stepped down off the ruined planking, his boots sinking in the mud. He took a few steps toward the creature as it clawed its way along the earth. It had a destination in mind—Ben could tell by its determination and from the direction it was heading, which was clear across the field toward the dip beyond the trees that was a tributary of Wills Creek. The creek itself was flo
oded now, and water simmered at the cusp of the wooded embankment, black as night itself.
I can’t let it reach the water. That’s how it got here and that’s how it wants to leave. I won’t let it leave. I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.
Ben leveled the shotgun at it. The creature must have sensed its impending doom, for it paused in its campaign and leaned to one side. For a brief moment, Ben saw it how it really was—bulbous, inhuman eyes, a nasal cavity like that of a human corpse whose nose has been eaten away, semitransparent skin through which its network of internal organs could be glimpsed pumping and throbbing and dilating and expanding and retracting. Where its mouth should have been there was a small and reddened anus-like cleft.
You’re a vampire after all, Ben thought. Only you can’t drink our blood or eat our flesh. You use that tail to poison us and turn us into monsters that do your killing and eating for you. Then we return to your lair and regurgitate all of it back into you. And in return, you pump your poison back into us so that we can continue doing your bidding. It was a hideous, gruesome, synergistic dance.
And then it was his father.
Ben exhaled a shuddery breath. His lower lip quivered. Sweat peeled down the sides of his face and stung his eyes.
“Dad…”
The old man smiled wearily up at him, his moist eyes socketed in a seamed and unshaven face. Bill Journell’s mouth moved, and although no words came out, Ben was certain he heard the man speak in his head, a chorus of whispering voices that said a million things at once.
So that’s how you do it, Ben thought, fighting back tears. You reflect our own thoughts back at us…show us the people we most want to see. That’s why you go after the children first—they believe what they’re seeing to be real.
“You’re not my father,” Ben told it.
He pulled the shotgun’s trigger.
What sprayed out was not so much blood as it was a pale-green sludge. It oozed like molasses from the gaping wound that most closely approximated the creature’s neck. It writhed and squealed, though Ben could see no orifice through which such a sound could emanate. Its segmented tail whipped furiously along the ground, cleaving through the mud in a horrid mockery of a snow angel. Once again, as it died, Ben could only see it in pieces instead of one complete whole: the papery, transparent skin; the network of veins just beneath the flesh, congealing with green mucus; the snakelike appendages of its limbs; the crimped and segmented tail with its quadruple hooks and black hairs sprouting like poison-tipped porcupine quills…
It was still shuddering when Brandy came up beside him. She looked down at it and a soft moan escaped her. Ben thought he heard her say “Daddy.” Then she picked up one of the loose boards that was shaped serendipitously like a wooden stake and held it reverently against her chest before handing it over to Ben. “Please,” she said.
He said, “What?”
“Stake it through the heart. I…I just can’t…”
He set the shotgun down then gripped the makeshift stake in both hands.
If I do this, I risk losing my sanity. I am on the cusp, on the verge. The world as I know it is crumbling down all around me.
But it didn’t matter. Not anymore.
He lifted the stake above his head and drove it down through the center of the creature’s body. He felt the flesh yield with surprising pliability as he sank the stake all the way through it to the ground. Something popped and air hissed from the carcass. More green ooze frothed out from the fresh wound. As Ben stared down at it, the creature continued to change its appearance before his eyes. Like flipping through pages of a book.
“Just in case,” Brandy said.
Then she dropped to her knees and cried.
13
Surrounded by a misting rain, they retreated back across the field toward the squad car. They did not speak to each other, opting for silence, as if they had just completed some religious ceremony. And perhaps they had.
Halfway back to the car, they paused to stare at the body of the hairless boy, dead in the mud. He was partially covered by debris from the collapsing of the silo. He was dead and projected all the morbidity and hideousness of a dead body…but he was also a boy once again, as if the stopping of his heart had instantly released him from whatever unimaginable horrors had kept him prisoner.
“Who was he?” Brandy asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you think…” she trailed off on her own. She didn’t need to ask the question. Ben knew what she was thinking, anyway.
She took off her rosary and laid it on the body. When she rejoined Ben, she was crying silently.
Chapter Nineteen
1
Ben awoke to a world that was already half a memory. The farmhouse was still dark, the mustiness of the place greeting him in its customary way. A soft rain fell against the roof. He listened to it for a time, and found the world otherwise silent. No power hummed through the walls of the farmhouse. No one drove cars up and down Sideling on their way to work. For a change, there wasn’t even the sound of generators off in the distance. Ben glanced at the clock on his nightstand and saw that it was just after seven in the morning, though there was still night pressed against the windows.
It was Friday, Halloween Day. The power was still out on the outskirts of town, including the Journell farm, but that didn’t bother Ben all that much. He stripped the bedsheets from his body and climbed out of bed. In the kitchen, he lit a few candles then drank two tall glasses of water from the tap. Rain sluiced against the windowpanes.
He turned on the gas stove and lit the burner with a match. He filled an old percolator with coffee and stood there in the semidarkness waiting for it to brew.
Ten minutes later he went out onto the covered back porch and sat in the coolness of the early morning listening to the storm and watching the craters in the untilled soil overflow with water. Due east, warm pastel light bled up the horizon, forming a sharp and jagged silhouette of the mountains.
He sipped his coffee and contemplated taking up smoking.
2
And he thought, Every small town has power. The people are aware of it in the way we’re aware of electricity humming through the walls of our homes or that our water is delivered through a network of pipes underground. We sense it like animals sense a tornado coming.
3
And he thought, Maybe the plague seeks out a town that is already on the verge of collapse—that is already very much near death—and it grabs hold and takes root and plants its virulent claws into the soil. Maybe when a town dies, it becomes this rotting, festering corpse that attracts the sorts of things that feed off corpses.
4
There were no reports filed and there were very few phone calls made. The death toll was never officially stated, though the number of lives lost came to just over two dozen. In a small, rural town the size of Stillwater, that was quite a lot of people.
At daybreak, Ben made the rounds in his squad car. Some of the water had retreated from the town square but there was still a lot of damage. Out on U.S. Route 40, the receding water left articles of clothing, discarded couch cushions, and pieces of antique furniture in the roadway like roadkill. Similarly, a number of cars at Jimmy Toops’s tow yard—including Tom Schuler’s beat-up old Maverick, which had been there for the better part of the week—were casualties of a mudslide that sent them tumbling down to the banks of the Potomac River. The stockpile of automobiles created a makeshift damn that caused the cold, black water of the Potomac to rise at an unusual rate, overtaking Beauchamp Avenue and flooding the root cellars of all the homes along Town Road 5. An avalanche uprooted trees and spilled their remains across Schoolhouse Road while the basement of the elementary school gradually filled with septic, black runoff. The school janitor, Odom Pulaski, would return to the building over a week later to a rancorous stench that would remind him of Vietnamese killing fields.
The water left bodies behind, too…although it was apparent thes
e people did not suffer a death from drowning. Among the human detritus were the fetid and bloated corpses of Evan Quedentock and Tom Schuler, their faces sheared off and their skulls cracked right down the middle. (A black river snake might have been discovered curling up in the empty cranium of Mr. Quedentock.) Their mutilated corpses would be discovered by some thrill-seeking teenagers looking for valuables left behind in the wake of the flood. Bob Leary’s body would eventually be found too, his skull having been split open like an overripe melon, his legs still protruding from his fireplace. Floodwaters scooped Mike Keller’s body right off his front lawn and sailed him like a parade float down Schoolhouse Road. He would be found nearly a week later, snared in the Y of an oak tree, but by that time his face, fingers, and neck had been eaten away by wild animals. Judy Janus, his live-in girlfriend who drove the Chevy Blazer, would never be found. No one would ever know that it had actually been Officer Mike Keller who had shot and killed her that night following her tearful confession of infidelity. When Mike was attacked and killed on his front lawn by the Leary boy, he had been on his way into Garrett County to plant a bullet between the eyes of Judy’s lover.
In fact, there were a great many things that had happened in Stillwater that no one would ever know, although some folks would come close to knowing them. Ben himself had come close to learning that the unidentified hairless boy who had washed up along Wills Creek had spent the weeknights prior sleeping in a semicatatonic state up in the trestles of the Highland Street Bridge. He was the troll that Jim Talbot’s seven-year-old sister thought she had glimpsed while traveling along Route 40 with her father. He would have also never been found had the Highland Street Bridge not been washed away in the previous flood, casting his hibernating body into the muddy reeds where it was discovered the following day by a group of drunken watermen.
On this day, the Narrows itself continued to gurgle and roil and spill over its concrete barrier. It took some things with it and deposited others as it saw fit, just as it always had throughout the years. Ben pulled over onto the shoulder of Route 40 and climbed halfway down the embankment toward the rushing gray waters. It was a difficult climb and he nearly lost his footing twice. He decided not to descend any farther and merely remained halfway down the embankment, clinging to the old Witch Tree as he watched the risen waters moving at a quick clip. On the other side of the Narrows and up the hillside, the plastics factory held court over the town, the mummified corpse of a king presiding over an abandoned kingdom. Ben turned away with a feeling of dread crawling around inside his belly.