by Tim Curran
Quietly, very quietly, Lou backed away, one silent step at a time.
Then he slipped around a corner and ran like hell.
8
Lisa Tabano left her mother’s house in something of a daze.
Had she been able to think clearly, to process and sort the details of her little fugue, she would have known she was in shock. But that blood, all that goddamn blood, splattered, pooled. Like a slaughterhouse.
That crazy woman there…had she murdered her parents?
Maybe killed them in the kitchen, dragged them outside? Maybe that’s what she’d been doing when Lisa arrived. Feeding on them, maybe, mutilating their bodies at the very least. Just finishing up when Lisa arrived, taking out the scraps.
Yes, Lisa saw it all in vivid, shocking Technicolor and, seeing it, her traumatized mind simply closed-up shop, pulled in on itself. The reality of it was simply too much, so it was filed away in some dark shadowy closet where the worst nightmares were stored.
Then Lisa, bewildered and confused, her dazed brain running on auto, wandered off in an outraged stupor. Guitar case in hand she toured the city. She made it quite a few blocks before she was seen.
Two young punks, is what she thought.
Then she really saw them as they stepped into the glow of the streetlight. They wore leather motorcycle jackets that were crusted with filth, no shirts beneath. Their flesh was the color of tombstones, their ribs jutting like ladders of bone as they breathed. Their eyes were huge, empty, devoid of anything remotely human. Wide, staring pools of electric neon yellow rimmed in red.
Maybe this is what brought her out of it.
Like a slap in the face with a wet towel or a boot to the crotch.
She blinked, blinked again, felt a scream clawing its way to her lips. It brought her back to the real world, to reality, the reality of survival in her hometown which was now a barbarous netherworld. It showed her that Lisa Tabano was about to become a victim. And there she was, head full of dreams and dust, guitar case in one hand, purse thrown over her shoulder (gotta protect the stuff inside, God yes).
Then she did scream.
The two punks grinned, snarled really, lips pulling away from teeth, tangles of terrible translucent foam running from their mouths. Their chests were crusted with it.
“Oh, Christ,” she managed, knowing she was mostly fucked here.
The two punks separated, moved to either side of her, coming in slow and stealthy, breath rattling from their lungs with the sibilance of wind through pipes.
Lisa tried to go back, tried to duck forward, tried all the easy moves but they kept pace with her all too effortlessly.
The punk to her left got within three, four feet when there was a thunderous, distant crack and his head literally exploded, shattering like a crystal vase in an eruption of blood and bone. His head neatly split open, his face actually dangling by threads of meat, he took two, three drunken steps forward and went down in a heap. He should have been motionless, divorced of life, but his body trembled, his fingers clawing madly at the wet sidewalk with shrill scraping sounds.
Lisa let out some kind of cry, went down on her ass, confused as ever now.
The second punk studied his fallen comrade with amusement, turned back to her.
He bent his knees, made to leap like a cat on a sparrow. His hands clutched to either side, he actually moved maybe a foot before his face caved-in. One minute he was coming at her, whispering hungry death, and the next there was another loud report…and his face imploded, actually blew out the back of his head.
She saw it spray in the air, white crown-shaped things tinkling over the walk.
She realized they were teeth.
He slumped over, went face-down. Did not move.
She pulled herself to her feet, jogging away. Bile kicked up into her mouth, her stomach trying to push its way into her throat. She stumbled off, not even looking where she was going until she slammed into a wrought-iron fence. Then she cried and coughed, her head echoing with dark noise like a scream in an empty room.
She looked up and saw the church.
Yes, St. Thomas’. She knew it very well, having made communion there. She took catechism in the school out back. It loomed up before her gigantic and black and gothic. She pushed her way through the gate, fell on the stone steps.
I’ll be safe in there.
They can’t get me in there.
They can’t come in here, not their kind.
In her brain was everything she ever was or wanted to be. Her life, her goals, her aspirations. She thought of the next CD Electric Witch was working on. The songs were better than the first. Her playing was so much better, so much more professional, not rough and raw. She could hear her own voice telling her that, yes, yes, girl, you’re gonna be a rock star, you’re gonna be big, band’s gonna be big…and then all that faded away into grayness as she saw how easily this town had stripped it all away from her.
She opened her eyes, looked up.
There was a man standing above her.
He was not a big man, but hard-looking, powerful, wizened.
“I guess you think you’re going to live, eh?” he said.
And then he descended on her.
9
The town was dead.
Cut River was a graveyard.
Ben Eklind and his wife Nancy cut through darkened yards, up shadowy streets, across lonesome boulevards. The chill night wind was at their backs, dead leaves skittered up walks, and everywhere, everything was sullen, empty, abandoned. The houses were dusty tombs, the buildings mausoleums. There was no one, nothing, just that awful creeping, electric stillness that buzzed in the air.
They’d run into town, breathless and bewildered, needing only to be free from the scene of the accident. From the dead guy who was anything but dead, maybe not truly alive in the human sense of the word, but definitely not dead. Caught in some twilight limbo in-between perhaps.
So they ran…into this.
“Sam…” Nancy kept saying under her breath. “Sam. Sam. He’s—”
“Yes,” Ben told her, holding her tight against him. “He is, darling. But we can’t think about that right now. We’ve gotta think about us.”
And that made sense to her.
They knocked at the door of the first house they found.
Nothing. No one answered.
Same at the one after that and the one after that. All the houses were dark, uninhabited. Phones were dead. Cars were in driveways. Yards were neat. Hedges trimmed. Everything looked normal…yet, there was something wrong here. They both knew it. It wasn’t just that psycho on the road, either. That was minor compared to this. Nobody anywhere. Not that you could see, anyway. But, down deep, down where the aboriginal being lived, Ben knew they were still here.
Somewhere.
Hiding.
Playing some wicked game of cat-and-mouse.
More than once, he’d been sure there was someone in the dark, someone just watching them.
“Maybe the world ended,” Nancy said, “and somebody forgot to tell us.”
Ben shook his head. “No, this is localized.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I just…I don’t know, just a feeling.”
“Oh really?” she said, as they moved up a nameless street. “I hope it’s not the same sort of feeling that told you to take the shortcut or we’re seriously screwed here, I think.”
He ignored that.
Something was wrong…but what?
He’d been through it all in his mind, the usual things. Nuclear war. Plague. Foreign attack, terrorists, alien invasion. Some natural catastrophe. Everything he’d sucked in from a lifetime of watching old movies on the late show. But none of it fit. None of it seemed to wash in his way of thinking.
Something had happened.
Something pretty bad.
He kept thinking chemical spill. Maybe some tanker truck had overturned, spilling a load of some toxic substance. The t
own had been evacuated. And maybe…yeah, maybe that guy on the road had been contaminated or something. He liked that scenario, it covered all the bases. He liked it until he stopped to consider that they, Nancy and he, might get tainted by the stuff, too.
But he kept thinking about it.
It was something rational to hold onto.
“Look,” Nancy said as they crossed an avenue. “Over there.”
Ben saw it. In the middle of the block, a small ranch house with its lights on. They’d been in Cut River for some time now and this was the first sign of life they’d come across.
Up ahead, he could see, there were more lit up houses.
Even streetlights shining like beacons in the murk. He sighed with relief. It meant they were still on planet Earth, anyway. Crazy as it sounded, he was starting to think they’d stepped off into some alternate universe.
The first three houses were dark, festooned with creeping shadows, wound up in webs of blackness. Scary, sure. It was all scary. But why was it that this ranch house, lights glowing in its windows, seemed more…threatening? There were other houses lit-up on the next block and street lamps, too, but this one, all alone in the tenebrous sea, really got under Ben’s skin.
He could feel a formless dread rolling in his belly.
It didn’t bother Nancy, though.
When they reached the house, he hung back. It wasn’t a conscious decision. Something atavistic, maybe, wouldn’t let him get any closer.
Nancy, however, went up the walk, totally at ease.
Ben looked around—a bird feeder, thick cedar bushes, a fence in need of paint, a newer pick-up in the drive, a few newspapers on the porch, rolled-up and unread—there was nothing wrong with it.
Yet, he knew there was.
Something.
“A cup of coffee,” Nancy was saying. “That’s what I need. Or maybe a drink. You don’t know us, but here we come.”
“Maybe we should just make for the main drag like we said,” Ben said.
She looked at him over her shoulder, annoyed. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said, realizing he couldn’t put it into words. “Why not?”
“Why not? Because this town is giving me the fucking creeps, Ben, that’s why not. We’re going here. Maybe their phone works.”
He followed her up onto the porch. “I doubt it. Lines are down.”
“Well, maybe they’ve got a computer. Maybe they’re on-line.”
“Not if the phone lines are down.”
She shook her head. “A lot of people use cable now, bright boy, or haven’t you heard?”
“It’s probably down, too.”
“Oh, quit being such a moron. I don’t need it, Ben. You hear me? My brother’s dead and I don’t need your bullshit right now.”
Yeah, Sam was dead. But Ben knew they weren’t that close, never had been. Right now, he knew, she was worried about her own ass despite what she said. It was funny how her insults didn’t bother him now. Any other time he would have been thinking about putting her down on her big butt, but right now her caustic tongue was almost reassuring.
She was knocking at the door.
She kept at it, on and off, for maybe three, four minutes. Then she opened the screen door, the inside door. Ben’s protests went unheard. She walked right in. He had no choice but to follow.
First thing that struck him was the smell.
It wasn’t the usual household bouquet of lingering food odors, tobacco, pets, room deodorizers. This was heavy, pungent. A strange, heady chemical brew almost like ammonia.
He caught a good whiff of it and then it was gone.
He had to wonder if it was ever there.
“Hello?” Nancy called out.
Her voice echoed and died.
Ben felt the flesh on his arms begin to crawl; he didn’t like this in the least.
“Hello?” Nancy called out again. “Is anyone here?”
The heavy echo of her voice told them the place was empty.
Funny, Ben was thinking, but the very quality of an echo can tell you so much. It can tell you that a house is empty. It can tell you that something is wrong, that something nasty is about to happen.
They walked from room to room to room. Bedrooms were empty. Living room ditto. The TV was on, but there was nothing but static on the screen. Nancy picked up the remote, clicked a few channels. She found the Weather Channel.
“See?” she said. “Cable’s working.” She tossed the remote on the couch. “Where the hell is everyone?”
There was a blanket on the floor at the foot of a rocking chair. Next to it was a side table, an ashtray sitting on it. A cigarette had burned down to ash long ago. A pack of Marlboros and a lighter were next to it.
Nancy shrugged, put one in her mouth, lit it. “It’s cold in here, Ben. It’s so cold in here,” she said in a low voice.
Ben was going to remind her that she’d quit smoking six months before, but he didn’t; he had an urge to light up, too, and hadn’t smoked in eight years. Right now, he needed something.
In the kitchen, the back door was open to the night, frigid air funneling in. Ben closed it, the texture of the darkness outside somehow unsettling. There was a ham sandwich on a plate, a pile of chips at its side. A bottle of Coke, opened, sat on the table, untouched.
It was eerie.
Like the fucking Mary Celeste, he thought.
Except this place wasn’t out in the middle of some gray, empty ocean. It was just an average house in an average town in the upper Midwest in the very average state of Michigan. Yet, hehad a pretty good idea nowif he hadn’t beforethat something extremely un-average had swallowed this place whole and spat something back in its place, something sinister, something malevolent.
“Lets go,” he said, barely able now to contain the horror he felt.
But Nancy, stalwart and self-deluding, maintained her sense of normality. She tried the phone, shook her head. Then she started leafing through bills by the phone. “Gerald and Shiela Bricker,” she said. “I wonder where they’ve gotten to?”
“I’m leaving,” Ben announced.
“Oh no you’re not,” Nancy informed him. “There’s a truck outside. Help me find the keys. Then we’ll drive out of this mess.”
“We can’t steal their truck.”
Nancy raised an eyebrow, looked him dead in the eye. “Oh yeah? And why the hell can’t we?”
But he couldn’t seem to come up with an objection. He’d never stolen anything in his life. It wasn’t in his make-up to do so, but right now grand theft auto sounded perfectly fine. He started rooting through drawers, but quietly, as if someone might hear.
And maybe that’s what he was afraid of.
He found a cell phone on the floor. Looked like somebody had purposely smashed it. He picked it up, but it was useless.
Nancy searched around in the living room, checked the hall closet. The Bricker’s bills in hand, she went to the back bedrooms. The last one was not a bedroom at all, but a computer room. She sat down at the desk. The screen was black, but she clicked the mouse and it came up. Somebody had been chatting.
“Ben, come here,” she called, afraid now, too.
He came in, his usual windburned, hearty complexion wan and sickly.
“Look,” his wife said. “Shiela8. That must be Shiela Bricker.”
Shiela had been at the keyboard trying desperately to reach the outside world apparently. She’d last logged-on some two hours before.
6:28 P.M. Shiela8: help me
6:31 P.M. Shiela8: help me
6:39 P.M. Shiela8: help me please is there anyone
6:42 P.M. Shiela8: is anyone out there
6:55 P.M. Shiela8: alone am alone am alone help me out there
7:02 P.M. Shiela8: last one am i the last one am i the last i
7:07 P.M. Shiela8: nobody nobody help me help me godhelpus
7:11 P.M. Shiela8: youareout areyou out help meeeecan you
7:14 P.M. Shiela
8: happeningnowhelpmememe helpmeee
7:15 P.M. Shiela8: help usssss
Ben cleared his throat. “What the fuck happened here?”
“Look,” Nancy said then. “Somebody answered her.”
8:35 P.M. XXX: where are you
8:37 P.M. XXX: tell me and i’ll come for you yes
8:40 P.M. XXX: i’ll help you tell me
“I wonder who the hell that was?”
Nancy shook her head. “You never get out and chat, Ben. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Sure I do,” he said, crossing his arms. “Chat rooms are full of dipshits with too much time on their hands.”
“Sometimes.” She shrugged. “Maybe this XXX person was trying to help.”
“Probably thought it was all a joke.”
“Let’s find out.”
“No.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s find those keys and get out of here.”
“Ben. This might be our only contact with the outside world.”
He looked angry. “I said no. Let’s find the keys, get in that truck and get the hell outta Dodge.”
“And if we can’t find them? Then what? We go house to house looking for a car to steal?” She fixed him with those dark eyes of hers, that don’t-be-so-fucking-stupid stare. “Let me try this, get a message out there. Then we’ll go.”
He didn’t like it, but he submitted. “All right. Whatever.”
Nancy typed a message.
9:31 P.M. Shiela8: Hey, is anyone out there? This isn’t a joke. I need help.
The minutes ticked by. Ben stood there, feeling superior but not enjoying it at all. They were wasting time. For some reason, he felt time was very precious. They had to get out of this mess now. They couldn’t afford to wait.
9:34 P.M. Shiela8: Please we need help. We’re in Cut River Michigan. Something’s happened here. We’re trapped. We need assistance immediately.
9:35 P.M. XXX: cut river yes where are you
9:35 P.M. XXX: where are you
“Don’t answer that,” Ben suddenly said. “There’s something wrong about this.”
“Oh, quit it for godsake,” Nancy said and typed.
9:36 P.M. Shiela8: We’re at 809 Kerrigan Street. The Bricker’s residence