by Sean Wallace
That thing . . . the beast . . . the monster . . .
Thinking of it now, he felt stupid. It was a child’s word used to describe something he struggled to label in an adult world. Everything changed the day it arrived; even the rules of physics were twisted out of shape, along with the precarious geometry of his own existence.
When he was a boy, he loved reading comics and watching films about monsters. Now he was a man, and he had seen the proof that monsters really existed, he could not even begin to fathom what his younger self had found so fascinating about them.
He opened the door and got out of the car. Night was falling but it was still light enough to see clearly. There was a slight chill in the air. The woman was closer now to his position, and she wasn’t as young as he’d initially thought. Middle aged: possibly in her early forties. The mud on her face clouded her features, at first hiding the wrinkles and the layers of anguish that were now visible.
“Have you seen them?” She approached him as she spoke, stumbling a little as she crossed onto the footpath. He saw that the heel of one of her shoes—the left one—had snapped off during her travels. The woman hadn’t even noticed.
“I’m sorry?”
“We all are . . . we’re all sorry. But have you seen them? My children?”
He clenched his fists. Moments like these, situations in which he could smell and taste and just about touch someone else’s loss, made him nervous. He felt like a little boy again, reading about mythical creatures from a large hardback book.
“No. No, I haven’t.”
“They’re still alive. Somewhere.” She glanced around, at the wreckage of the neighborhood. Her eyes were wide. Her lips were slack. “They let me come back here to try and find them. They were in the cellar when it . . . when it hit. The Storm . . . ”
That’s what they called it: the Storm. The name seemed fitting. He couldn’t remember who first coined the term, probably some newspaper reporter.
“I . . . ” He stopped there, unable to think of anything that might help the woman come to terms with her loss.
“I got out, but they stayed down there. The army truck took me away—they wouldn’t let me go back for them. They were trapped, you see . . . by the rubble. The Storm trapped them inside, underneath. I have to find them.”
She reached out and grabbed his arm. He could barely feel her grip, despite her knuckles whitening as her fingers tightened around his biceps. “Could you help me look for them?” Her smile, when it struggled to the surface, was horrible. Jeff thought he’d never seen an expression so empty.
“I have to . . . I have things to do. This was my house.” He pointed to the pile of bricks and timbers and the scattered glass shards; the piles of earth; the pit formed by a single foot of the Storm.
“We were neighbors?” She peered at him, trying to focus. “Before it happened?”
“I guess so.” He’d never seen her before in his life. This woman was a stranger but they were all supposed to be connected by their shared tragedy. Jeff had never felt that way. He was alone with his ghosts.
They stood there for another moment, as if glued together by some sticky strands of time, and then he pulled away. Her arm remained hanging there, the fingers of her hand curling over empty air
“My children . . . ”
He looked into her eyes and saw nothing, not even an echo of her pain. She was stripped bare, rendered down to nothing but this mindless search for things that were no longer here. He couldn’t tell her; she wouldn’t be told. She needed to discover the truth for herself.
“Good luck,” he said, and he meant it.
Jeff walked away, heading towards the ragged hole in the earth where his house had once stood, the great footprint of the beast that had once passed this way. He wished he’d seen it happen. It must have been an amazing sight, to see the buildings flattened by the gigantic beast as it charged through the neighborhood and towards the city.
He heard the woman’s scuffling footsteps behind him as she moved away. He wished he had it in him to help her. He hoped she would find her children alive, but doubted she ever would. Not even the bodies would remain. Not even bloodstains.
The Storm came, and that was all. There was no reason for its arrival. It wasn’t like the old movies he’d seen as a kid, where an atomic detonation or the constant experimentation of mankind caused a rift in the earth or a disturbance in the atmosphere, and out stumbled a stop-motion nightmare. No, it was nothing like that. The Storm came, it destroyed whatever it encountered, and it went away again, sated.
They were unable to fight it. The authorities didn’t know what to do; the army and navy and air force were at a loss: none of their weapons had any effect on the Storm. So they waited it out, hoping the thing would either wear itself out and tire of the rampage, or move on, crossing the border into another country. Fingers hovered over the buttons of nuclear launch systems. Members of parliament voted in secret chambers. The nation prepared for a great and terrible sacrifice.
He remembered those first surprisingly clear pieces of footage transmitted on the Internet, and then again on the news channels: HD-quality CCTV pictures of some great lizard-like beast emerging from the shadows on the coast, a B-movie come to life. But this was not a man in a suit, or a too-crisp GCI image. It was colossal, the height of two tower blocks, one standing on top of the other. Its arm span was a half a mile across, but it barely needed to stretch them so far to tear down a church, a town hall, a factory warehouse . . . Bullets and bombs simply bounced off its thick, plated hide to create more damage to the surrounding area. Its call was the trumpet of Armageddon. When it opened its mouth to roar, the sound was unlike anything humanity had heard before.
Nobody knew what the creature was, where it came from, why it appeared. The scientists mumbled in jargon, talked about tectonic plates, seismic events, and then finally, they went quiet. They locked themselves into deep underground laboratories to try and invent something that would kill the thing.
And then . . . then it went away, slinking back into the ocean, the waves covering it like a blanket. The sea bubbled. Ships capsized. The coastal barriers fell. The Storm passed.
But the Storm could return at any time. They all knew this, but it went unspoken. There were celebrations, the blockades came down, people started to rebuild what had been ravaged. But somewhere back in the shadows, or under the dark waters, the Storm waited. Perhaps it even watched.
Jeff walked across the roughly turned earth, his boots hard and solid as he made his way towards the hole in the ground. When he reached it, he went down onto his knees and peered over the rim. It was deep, with standing water gathered at its base, and in each of the toe prints. There was no sign of a body, or of body parts. His family were wiped out, deleted, removed without trace from the face of the earth.
He smiled, gritting his teeth.
As a boy he’d loved monsters. As a man, he wasn’t so sure how he felt.
If it were not for the Storm, he would have been forced to think of some other way to dispose of them, but the monster answered his desperate prayers and came to cleanse him, to remove the evidence of his crimes.
He wondered . . .
If he hoped hard enough, wished for long enough, might it come back? There were other people he wanted to get rid of. It was a nice thought, but he knew it was a fantasy. The situation had nothing to do with him; it was simply a handy coincidence. Even now, it amused him to think something this absurd had saved him from being found out. It was as if one of those childhood comic books had come to life.
Jeff got to his feet and moved slowly away from the ruins. The breeze turned into a light wind, and it whipped up a mass of litter, sending papers and packets and scraps of material scampering into the gutter. Jeff watched them as they tussled. He remembered the way his family struggled: Katherine and the girls, fighting for their sad little lives. It was like watching a movie, only less real. The actors didn’t even look like the people they were tryin
g to portray.
They’d never looked like his family, those actors. The woman he’d married, the daughters he’d fathered, were at some point replaced by strangers. That was why they had to go. It all seemed so clear, and then, without thinking, he’d done it: he had ended them. There was no memory of planning, or running through it all in his mind. There was only the act itself, and the mess left behind.
The wind died down. The litter went still. He smelled old fires and diesel fumes. He tasted bitterness at the back of his throat. Something huge loomed against the horizon, its form unclear, fluttering and unstable.
Jeff walked back to the car, climbed inside, turned on the engine, and waited. He watched the woman as she made her way across the street, towards yet another ruined house. He smiled. Inside his head, he heard the voice of the Storm.
The roaming woman sat down in the rubble, staring at the ground. She clenched and unclenched her hands and then started rooting in the dirt, as if she might find her lost children there, somewhere beneath the disturbed top soil. He imagined her brushing away gravel to see a face staring up at her, eyes closed, lips sealed shut on a silent scream.
Clouds moved behind her, shifting across the low red sky. Something dark shimmered beyond them, like a promise straining to be fulfilled. He thought of giant butterfly wings, and then of the opening mouth of the Storm.
Jeff started the car but waited a few moments—still watching the woman—before driving away. He didn’t turn on the radio. All they ever talked about was the Storm.
As he headed down the road, towards some unidentified place he’d never been before, he thought about this new world and wondered how everyone would cope with the way things were now, the changes happening in the wake of the monster. Jeff had stepped through the veil, but the rest of the world followed behind him.
He drove all night, and then he stopped the car in a lonely place to sit and look up at the sky. Trees stirred like wraiths against the breezy evening. The stars pulsed, the darkness bulged, threatening to burst open like a ripe melon, and he tried to catch a glimpse of the old world, the one they’d all left behind. After a long time, he gave up trying.
And at the bottom of the sea, curled up among the old wrecks in a long, deep, nameless trench, something yawns and blinks its eyes before drifting back into a deep, soundless slumber. It dreams of screams and bloodshed, and finds comfort in the sweet memory of Man’s fear.
Whatever Became of Randy
James A. Moore
Have you ever wondered how much anger a person can take before they change beyond any hope of redemption? I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and the sad fact is, I still don’t know the answer.
I don’t think I ever will.
At any rate, I should get down the details before I forget them, before the media hype and the interviews with survivors get to be too much.
His name was Randall Clarkson. We just knew him as Randy. Randy was not the brightest bulb on the old Christmas tree, but he wasn’t stupid, either. He was a good man who took care of his family even when times got very, very bad and they did, believe me.
Randy was ten when I met him. He and his family moved to the same town as me and mine. There was a new facility opening, you see, and his folks and mine were all the same sort of doctors. All they ever told me or Randy was that they worked for a “think tank.” We used to get the giggles trying to draw what a think tank would look like. I think Randy came up with the best illustration. It was a giant brain on treads that was running over half a city and crushing buildings under the treads. He was a good artist, too. That’s another thing most people won’t remember about him in a few weeks. All they’ll see is what he became, not what he was before the incident at Castle Creek.
Castle Creek is where we grew up. More accurately, the creek ran right past the town of Harts Bluff, Colorado. Tiny town. I mean that. Our closest neighbor was Summitville and that place looked huge next to us. And Summitville did its best not to even exist in the eyes of the world.
We had a private school, the best that money could buy, and we had satellite TV, and once every month, we took a field trip to a real town.
Harts Bluff was not a bad place to grow up, but with a population of only around one hundred people, you could go stir crazy very quickly.
Randy was there for ten years, right alongside me. We were friends who bordered on being brothers. We had fights, we had good times but through it all we were friends. There weren’t too many kids around the same age as us.
After a decade together, our families went their own ways. The project was done with, and there were new think tanks to consider on different subjects.
We stayed in touch. Not every day, but once in a while we’d call each other and shoot the breeze. Life got in the way for a lot of that, but we managed just the same. There was college to consider. I went to MIT and Randy went to a little liberal arts college in upper state New York. I went into the family business, genetics. Randy went into working as an illustrator. He made a decent living, which in hindsight was a good thing. He had his own hours as a freelancer, and that was even better. Because while I was setting myself up in the business of mapping the human genome, Randy was working his ass off and taking care of his parents.
Samuel and Myrna Clarkson both managed to come down with recurrent glioblastoma multiforme originating in the brainstem. Translated into simplest terms, they both developed aggressive brain tumors that were inoperable. The tumors were not only resistant to chemotherapy and standard radiation; they were also metastasizing at unholy rates and as malignant as Adolf Hitler.
Randy had just set himself up in Manhattan and was making enough money to handle his bills, just barely, when the news reached him.
He left New York the next day and flew to California to be with his parents. The good news for him was that he had talent. The better news was that he’d managed to establish a few solid contacts before he bugged out. The work followed him and he managed to wrangle new clients, even while he was spending a ridiculous amount of time taking care of his parents and their affairs.
I would have probably thought nothing of the entire situation, but believe me when I say it’s a little unusual to have two people developing the exact same sort of cancer at the exact same time. In their cases it wasn’t just a possibility that the diseases were related: I know, because I managed to get samples sent to me at the National Institutes of Health.
Genetics, remember? In this case I decided to study the two cancers and see if there were any genetic markers linked to them. The cancers were aggressive and not behaving themselves. I wanted to know what caused them and to help out a friend if I could. If he was like a brother to me, then his parents were an aunt and uncle. I hadn’t kept up with them as well as with their son, but they were often the subjects of conversation between us.
The end result of my examination was unsettling. They didn’t have similar cancers. They had the exact same cancer. Genetically speaking, they were suffering from the same organism, which was as impossible as it was preposterous. I checked the samples three times and then asked for more samples to reconfirm.
The end result was the same. Two people who were unrelated by blood were sharing the exact same disease. Which is pretty damned impressive for a disease that has traditionally only come via genetic mutation from one individual. I thought about the possibility of a contagious cancer that could spread through contact or, God forbid, through something as simple as a sneeze, and had to talk myself down from a full-blown panic attack.
Cancer is not, cannot be contagious. By its very nature it cannot be transmitted from one person to another. That’s just the way it is. I came to the conclusion that there had to be another answer, and I went about trying to find it.
And while I worked on trying out every new theory I could come up with, Randy did his best to keep his parents comfortable as their lives and bodies withered away. Want to hear an irony? They were coherent through the entire process. Brai
n tumors. You’d have expected them to have hallucinations, or seizures, or even blinding headaches, but the worst pain was mild and they remained in control of their mental faculties throughout the wasting of their bodies and the tumors that savaged them.
Randy, on the other hand, suffered plenty. His career didn’t come to a complete halt, but it slowed down a bit. He had enough money, that wasn’t the issue. What he didn’t have was time to himself. When he wasn’t working his ass off to keep up with his orders, he was taking care of his mother and father or helping them settle affairs that needed handling. As anyone who has ever dealt with a long lingering death can tell you, it’s an exhausting experience, emotionally and sometimes even physically.
I wanted to be with him, wanted to spend as much time as I could trying to give him a little back up, but I was working, you see, trying my best to understand what the hell the samples from his parents meant and how best to stop the impossible cancer from eating them alive.
Happily, Gwen came into Randy’s world. I didn’t meet her at the time, but I heard about her. Gwen was a hospice nurse. She came highly recommended and I managed to get a little financial aid for my friend in exchange for more samples and the promise that we would be allowed to autopsy the bodies of the decedents when the time came. Does that sound cold? I suspect it does, but I had to get those promises in order to get the payments worked out. Gwen might have been a lovely girl, but she was also a lovely girl who had to make a living in the sort of field that remarkably few people want any part of. Insurance is nice, but the provider in this case wanted nothing to do with the comfort and dignity of the patients when it cost more to have a nurse provided at home than it did to have a hospital room.
So, Randy met Gwen. She was there for him when I could not be to take care of the physical needs of Randy’s parents, things like changing out their IVs, offering them pain medications and changing the sheets on those occasions when they couldn’t get to the bathroom in time. You think it’s a vile thought to have to change a dirty sheet for a grown up? Here’s one for you: imagine being a grown up whose child has to change your dirtied linens. That was another indignity that the Clarksons were spared. At least most of the time.