by Brian Hodge
I wiped a tear from my eye, then picked up the microphone and placed it against my lips. “I’m here.”
Ten minutes later, I clipped the microphone back into the bracket and looked toward the intersection. There were at least a hundred people out there now, jammed together in an unwanted pushing-shoving match, with many more being added by the minute. Most of the new arrivals found themselves caught in strong gales that blew them violently and unsympathetically into the fracas; a few others made more conspicuous entrances, with lesser winds dragging them along the road as if fettered by leashes; by the time their bloody carcasses were propelled into the collective, they’d become mostly unrecognizable as humans. And the noises that came from the crowd, well, they could easily drive a man insane—a man lucky enough not to be inside. Every captured person did their damnedness to scream and shout and yell (I imagined the pain-induced vocalizations as being mostly involuntary), and the collective volume of such came together to sound like a sea of lost souls bathing in the lavas of hell. Well—that’s how I imagined it.
I’d earned myself a heckuva headache, probably from all the wind beating against my ears. It was at this moment I realized that the fire siren had stopped tolling, probably had some time ago, and the only sounds that could now be heard were the high moans of the wind and the shared anguish of those caught in its tight embrace. This is hell, I thought, and suddenly wondered what the cop had meant when he said, The prophet was right. They’ve come.
The man I spoke to who’d holed himself up at the Woodlawn Police Department was named Kelly. He was a biker who, like me, had remained untouched by the winds, and we both decided that there had to be more of us out there, and that we should make an effort to join forces and hunt for the truth of the matter. He told me that he would remain at the Woodlawn Police Station until I arrived. At that point we’d take some time to formulate a plan, and hopefully make contact with others like ourselves. I told him that I was going to head home first to check on my family, and then I’d make the thirty-mile drive to Woodlawn. He suggested that I find a motorcycle somewhere, but I told him that my wife and ten-year old son couldn’t ride. He didn’t answer me. He just told me he’d play with the radio until I arrived. He must’ve assumed that I’d be arriving alone.
I rolled the car across the lot, staring out at the crowd which had swelled beyond the edges of the intersection, now down Main Street. There had to have been about five hundred people in there now, some of them familiar faces: Jud Barlowe from the hardware store; my next-door neighbor Phillip Deighton; Phillis Darmody, Kevin’s third-grade teacher. The wind still whipped about them fiercely, and a thickening layer of debris circled the crowd like a planetary ring. The car rocked and jostled, but had not been directly influenced by the wind; it seemed only to be affected as an outside encroacher to the prime directive, whatever the fuck it was. Then I remembered what Kelly had said, that every time he came too close to the crowd, he’d been ‘blown away’. Perhaps this is what was happening to me also. As if, like he said, I tasted bad.
I decided to move on, to allow the crazy scene to progress toward its inexplicable resolution. And did it ever, with me as its witness. I didn’t know what to think, how to feel—well, I could feel my mouth hanging wide open and my eyes bulging and my breath staggering in my lungs, but other than that I could do nothing but white-knuckle the steering wheel and watch the extraordinary scene unfold before me.
Before I made it across the parking lot, a familiar flash of light emanated from above. It flickered a few times, like an expiring light bulb, then shifted from a flash to a glare and illuminated the entire area in a constant glow. It blinded me, as if a searchlight’s beam had been pointed at my face. I squinted and cupped my hands around my eyes. The environment grew brighter, and when I looked up I saw a tiny sun riding down from the blue sky, a fiery ball of light the size of a small house. It hovered in the air perhaps two-hundred feet above the whirling tornado, as silent as its appearance was sudden. It remained there unmoving, as still as a boulder and seemingly transfixed on the activity below it. Soon a high droning sound emitted from it, something oddly mechanical sounding despite its non-mechanical appearance. With this, the tornado and the debris and even the people began to swill up into it. At first only a few dark bodies shot up into the light; crazily, I thought they looked like lemon pits being sucked up through a straw. But soon more people started making their way up the funnel. The whirl of dust and debris went from dirty gray to blood-red as it fully ascended into the ball of light. In a time less than five minutes, the light had drawn everything up into its wake, the tornado, the people, every shred of debris, leaving the street free of any evidence. With its mission accomplished, the ball of light geysered upward into the sky and quickly disappeared, taking most of Darien Falls with it.
And then, almost immediately, the wind died down, leaving me alone in a ghost town.
Despite the lack of mankind, it had been an even slower go returning home than it had been coming into town. My watch had stopped at 9:14, but I estimated perhaps three hours having past since I left home for Wegman’s. I still had Sharon’s grocery list in my pocket, and prayed it wouldn’t end up as my very last hold on her existence. A few clouds had returned to the sky, only some thin wisps, but a welcome sight nonetheless.
During the drive home, while I maneuvered around dead animals and fallen branches and some crashed cars, I ran the dial on the police scanner from left to right. In this time I heard Kelly again, searching for others, and a preacher man who cried of the scourges of hell and the immortalities of mankind through a dry cracking voice. I listened to his diatribe for a few minutes, and was about to change the frequency when he pulled a passage out of the book of Nostradamus that sent a chill through me and made the hair on my arms stand on end:
“At the nineteenth sunrise, one will see great fires in the skies,
Wind and light will extend towards earth: circles of life will form
Within the circles, death, and one will hear cries,
Through wind, and fire, death awaiting them.”
I thought it too coincidental to be true, unless the preacher with the hoarse voice took liberties upon himself to exaggerate the prophecy, if one existed at all. Then I thought of what the cop had said: The prophet was right. They’ve come, and I turned the scanner off, deciding for the moment that I’d sampled enough apocalyptic talk for the time being. I made it to Pikes road and turned left toward my home, praying like hell that God had spared Sharon and Kevin despite my shortcomings and sins in life. The downed tree was still downed, and I followed the tracks I’d made earlier across my neighbor’s front lawn. I passed the broken electrical wire that no longer snapped and popped, and finally turned into my driveway, the sound of the gravel under the Dodge’s tires a familiar welcome to my slammed mind.
The wind had made a mess of my house. Shingles peppered the lawn; the gutters dangled from the eaves like those few tree branches still clinging to life; all of the windows had shattered. I ran in through the front door, calling, “Sharon! Kevin! Where are you?” But there were no answers.
In the den, Kevin’s blanket lay halfway out the window, skewered on a thick shard of glass still in the windowframe. The shard, and the blanket, had blood all over it. I walked over to the window, peered outside. A trail of blood led ten feet away, then abruptly ended, as if he’d been picked up and carried away.
I shoved my fist in my mouth and bit back my tears, shaking my head in denial. What made me think that my family would be spared from the loathsome wind and its harmful intent? I looked up at the sky, wondering where Kevin was now. Whether he was alive or dead.
More clouds had filtered their way in. Birds chirped happily from the injured trees. It seemed somewhat evident that the essential duties of the wind had been completed, and taking into consideration the most optimistic viewpoint, life would have to continue on with those few remaining people to build upon its offerings. It seemed an unfathomable task, especiall
y with those memories of Kevin lazing on the couch and Sharon tending to the fire.
I thought of the last time I saw Sharon, the screen door whipping from her grasp, how frightened she was of the advancing winds and the storm she thought would come.
The storm…
The basement!
I walked to the basement door, knowing that she would’ve hid herself downstairs in an effort to soothe her storm-driven anxieties. I opened the door. The darkness beyond the threshold of the door was forbidding…yet acted a possible means of salvation for my wife. Dear God, please…
“Sharon?” I called.
And she appeared like an angel from the heavens, her feet pounding the staircase, falling out of the darkness, hands grabbing me, holding me, tears streaming from her eyes, cries spilling from her mouth in a pure outpouring of comfort and relief. I hugged her back, tighter than ever, making sure she’d stay with me forever.
“You survived,” I said through my tears, wondering how many more people were still buttoned up in their homes, drumming up the nerve to emerge into the aftermath of the storm.
“The wind…it blew in all the windows…it took Kevin. I ran to the window, but the wind, it tried to take me too. I had no choice…had to lock myself downstairs. Jesus Christ, I saw Kevin flying away into the sky.” She cried hysterically, then blurted, “Was it a tornado, was it? Was it?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded my head. “A very bad one.”
“I was in the basement,” she cried. “I didn’t know what to do!”
I hugged her tighter and rubbed her head. Nothing I could say would ever alleviate the grief running through her body. “We need to leave here, for now. There’s someone in Woodlawn waiting for us.”
She didn’t ask any questions, and I didn’t mention anything about what’d happened while I was away. I looked in to her eyes, and she at once knew that I’d experienced something extraordinary this morning, something inexplicable, and with this, gave me the benefit of her trust.
I grabbed her by the hand and led her outside, and for one brief harrowing moment wondered again how many people were holed up in their homes, hiding in their basements and their closets, peeking out only to see if it might be safe enough to grab some food and water.
When we reached the Dodge, I knew at once that there weren’t going to be any survivors hiding in their basements, or their closets, because in a matter of seconds the wind made its undeniable purpose known, and made me realize that it was preselecting its victims and would get to them no matter what, no matter when, and I knew this because when I looked to the sky I saw the clouds suddenly evaporate, and then I saw a great flash of light illuminate the environment, and then the wind swooped in and snatched up Sharon like an eagle divebombing a mouse in a field, tearing her away from my grasp and carrying her over the roof of my house into the distance, toward Capson Lake and perhaps all the way to Deerfield where there would most likely be another mass herding of humans awaiting her arrival.
I stood there dumbfounded, considering the truth of what’d just happened, a ten second incident that defied imagination and rewrote the book on fear. In this time, the clouds returned and the wind died down and I was left alone wondering, why not me? Why not me?
Now, I sit three days later at a Motel Six in Latham, writing all this down on a composition ledger I lifted from behind the front desk. There’s twenty-three of us now, we each have our own rooms, lucky, I suppose, to have found enough with the windows still intact. I’d decided that these rooms didn’t have any people in them at the time the wind blew through. We passed by a few plane crash sites, but didn’t dare approach the still-smoldering ruins. There’s ruination everywhere, but still, no bodies. The only people we’ve found were alive, and they’re with us now. We’re all armed—protection from the dogs roaming about. Kelly and I are leading the coalition of survivors, and know there are plenty more out there. We just have to find them.
And when we do, they will ask us the same question: What caused this?
And we will tell them: It was something in the air.
Scarred For Life
Every night I dream his face. It is just as I remember it, staring, accusing…and yet, unbridled in its potential to forgive. Do you love me? he asks. I try to answer but in this ongoing dream I am incapable of expressing my feelings for the boy…the boy who is my very own flesh and blood—an extension of my love. By reason of my inability to illuminate my affections, he senses only my fear, rising from me in an invisible musk that only he can detect. His rosy cherubish innocence vanishes from his face, morphing into a bestial visage secreting hot fluids from the snarls of his formed muzzle, strenuously taut from pleading.
If you say you love me, father, then why did you let me die?
I let him die because I had to. Because I did not love him.
My son died during childbirth. It had become no true shock after all the painful difficulties my wife tolerated throughout the latter months of the pregnancy. Fourteen hellish months it lasted. Nine of those joyfully anticipated, the remaining five painfully endured.
I sat by her side in our bedroom for most of those five months, gingerly running my fingers along the purple gnarls lining her swelled abdomen. I could feel the baby kicking, moving, answering the gentle tracings of my finger as I prayed for its escape from the womb, my mind searching for a reason as to why the attempt of Caesarean childbirth would be fatal to both wife and child. Why the inductions had failed to work. And then why my wife vehemently refused medical attention, choosing the herbal remedies of a naturalist midwife.
Even here, before his birth, he haunted my dreams, my fetal child running the show like a mysterious ringleader, we the parents its unwitting puppets, answering his every beckon.
Her water broke in an alarming spray of fluids, shocking against the natural sterility of the environment we occupied, the odd plants arranged about the bed, the high humid temperature my wife insisted upon. She gripped my hand and held it vice-tight as the midwife began the procedure. I watched with great disquiet as her face fell into an agony of contortion and pain and fear. I could only return her grasp and offer false hopes of reassurance.
Screams abounded: my wife producing noises like nothing I’d ever heard. The pain of childbirth, I thought. It must be nearly unendurable.
It happened so quickly, her bloated stomach shifting, our baby slipping free from the womb.
My breath escaped me. I fell back in utter loathe, dizzied at the sight of him. I could see my wife’s stomach undulating, pumping fluids and matter free from her womb, surrounding the infant in a moat of steaming gore. The placenta-shrouded newborn twisted madly on the bed amidst its afterbirth, the head and arms rupturing the tenuous veil, emerging forth. Wicked claws brushing at the dermis with feline-like consideration, wiping the matter across its face as its tongue lapped urgently for nutrition.
Its gaze found mine, primordial eyes with diamond pupils set in blue irises. A brown gelatinous fluid purled from its throat and fled down its sodden torso. My wife reached desperately for the infant, moaning and still fraught in pain. The midwife bustled madly, assisting in the action. She cradled the infant to her breast as it writhed and convulsed in her arms, seeking freedom from her grasp. She toweled its fine hide, the umbilical cord whipping about like a snake, possessed with a life of its own.
And I could only stand silent and watch the horror of a baby that seemed to defy all that I expected this moment to be.
When the baby quieted I walked over, took it from my wife’s arms. Its eyes shined green with a luminescence that I knew bragged sight in the darkest and dampest of places.
I asked myself, Do you love him?
No, I answered. I don’t.
I returned the child to the midwife, and left the room.
Three days later, my baby died.
I sit in a chair on the porch of a rented cabin that exists deep in a wooded area, far from civilization. There is a special tranquility about t
his place, one that I cannot put a finger on, yet it is where my wife wishes to be. Somehow, this feels right.
The environment was all wrong, my wife had explained. It is why our baby died.
Had my wife not seen the state in which our offspring had been born? Had she not seen its deformations? And, had she not seen me shun the child unlike a father should do? This is why our baby died!
My wife exits the cabin and stands next to me. I gaze into her eyes and I know at once it is time. The midwife follows, assisting her down the three steps to the clearing before the cabin. She removes my wife’s clothing, first her shirt to reveal the pendulous breasts and a distended stomach that have endured yet another fourteen months of agony. She then peels her skirt away—a wash of fluid is evident between her thighs.