by Ray Wallace
Toward this horrific scene Thomas fell, his mind numb with what he saw. To his left and right he noticed that there were others much like himself, far off in the distance, plummeting toward the literal Hell that awaited.
My God, he thought, starting to believe, to really believe some of the stories he’d been told in church when he was a child. Because if there was this… If there was a Hell then there had to be a Heaven, right? A Devil. A God.
Please save me, Lord…
He soon discovered, however, that he was beyond saving. Because his descent did not stop, did not falter in the least. He continued to fall and then he plunged into the lava and the heat of it seared him, flash-burned every particle of his being. But it didn’t kill him, no. As the indescribable torment went on and on it never killed the apparently immortal body he now found himself possessing. The burning continued, endlessly, relentlessly, unendurably, until…
He found himself on solid ground, lying on his back, water splashing down onto his face, the whole of his naked body. It was blessedly cool and refreshing right then. He was certain he’d never felt anything so wonderful in all his life. Opening his mouth, he let it run down his throat in soothing rivulets, drank it in, savoring the touch and taste of it on his tongue. He was content to lie like that for some time, to never move again, if need be, if only the water would continue to comfort him with its simple benediction.
Minutes passed like that before he opened his eyes, before it even occurred to him to do so. It was the rumble of thunder that made him sit up and assess his situation. The sound made him think of a storm where it wasn’t rain that fell but something foul and sickening instead. Was it possible that he’d spent so much time parched and in pain that the touch and taste of blood would seem as soothing to him as water once did? Looking around, he was relieved to discover that it was only water, nothing more, that fell upon and about him. It was raining, just a regular old thunderstorm, the kind he had known before the world became such an alien and inhospitable place.
He was sitting on the front lawn of his house, could only guess at the time of the day. The clouds were thick and grey overhead but the sun was still visible behind them. Night had not yet fallen although it seemed to be fast approaching. Had it all been a dream? The torments of Hell. The swarm of mutant bugs. The blood storm. The disappearance of his family... If only it could be so. All of it. But a glance toward the house showed him the broken windows through which the bugs had entered. And there was the blood that had congealed like scabs upon his yard which was only now being loosened by the rain, starting to sluice down the slight incline of his property toward the runoff at the side of the road which was empty of all traffic.
He sighed and got to his feet. A part of him knew that he should be concerned about his nakedness but right then he couldn’t have cared less. Besides, it wasn’t like there was anyone around to see him. His muscles ached like he’d been lifting weights for hours or wrestling someone who outweighed him by a hundred pounds. Like he’d had his ass kicked, is what it felt like. It was already occurring to him that what he’d recently experienced—the descent into Hell, the flight through the forest, the meeting with Julia (Dana?)—was, in fact, a dream. A very powerful and lucid dream, to be sure. A hallucination? Something to do with the insects, breathing in the powder of their desiccated bodies?
That last memory of Dana wasn’t sitting very well with him. He hoped that it had only been part of the hallucination. The thought of Julia and the kids, the guilt that accompanied it, threatened to smother him. Surely thoughts of her own family would make Dana feel the same way.
The front door of his house was hanging open. Looking into the deepening gloom consuming the living room, he could see no traces of the bugs whatsoever. It seemed that they had disintegrated into nothingness. Is that what had happened to his wife and children? Had they died then withered away, kept dissolving into smaller and smaller particles until there was no trace of them whatsoever? He shook the idea from his head. In his present state of mind it was not a theory he wished to contemplate. Figuring it was better to be safe than sorry, he took a deep breath and held it before stepping through the doorway.
In the kitchen he found his flashlight standing on the countertop. After a quick search of the house’s lower level—which yielded no signs of bugs or Dana or Gerald—he wrapped himself in a crumpled blanket lying on the couch and went upstairs to the master bedroom. Once there he allowed himself to take a shallow breath through a section of blanket which he held over the lower half of his face. Wan lighting came in through the shattered window and with the aid of the flashlight Thomas could see that there were no bugs here either. And no Dana. The clothes he’d been wearing when the hallucination began lay scattered about the bedroom floor. None of Dana’s clothes were there. He wasn’t sure what that meant. Had he imagined the whole thing after all? Or had she come out of the hallucination before him, taken her clothes and hurried away?
His pistol still rested atop the dresser. An anxious feeling overcame him. What had happened to Gerald? The last time Thomas could remember seeing him was in the closet. So he went there and with his heart starting to pound in his chest—he wasn’t sure why but on some small level he thought he knew—he looked inside. And there he was, a dark, huddled form, lying on the floor, not moving. With a feeling of dread welling up inside of him, Thomas knelt down next to the old guy and gave him a gentle shake. His body felt light, too light, as if it wasn’t all there.
“Gerald?”
Still the man did not move. Thomas shook him harder, all the while saying his name. He took the man’s wrist in his hand, felt for a pulse. Nothing. No trace of breath from his mouth or nose. And his face. The bruising there. Something odd about the angle of his neck.
For a moment Thomas wasn’t there, wasn’t in the bedroom at all, he was back in Hell, drowning in fire, when a demon snatched him up out of the lava and impaled him through the midsection with its spear. Thomas punched and kicked at the creature with everything he had, with all the will and ferocity of the damned, and all the while the demon laughed, oh, how it had laughed. But there was something behind the laughter. A sound like screaming rising above all the anguished howls of the tortured souls beneath him. Also, there was something about that brutish face, something oddly recognizable. Eventually the demon growled and released its grip and Thomas plunged once again into the burning river…
He came out of the flashback and he knew. He knew. He’d done this. At some point during the frenzy of the hallucination he’d found Gerald here, sitting huddled in the closet. And he’d done what, exactly. Kicked him? Punched him? Pummeled him until he stopped moving?
“No,” said Thomas. It was too much. All of it. His family. The blood. The torture. Now this… What was going on? Good God, what was happening here?
He stood and turned away from the closet and walked over to the dresser. With shaking hands he pulled out clean clothes—underwear, socks, jeans, and a long-sleeved shirt—and put them on. When he was fully dressed he made his way back downstairs, all the while wondering where Dana was. What had he done to Dana? Then he grabbed his keys, his gun—which he tucked into the front of his jeans—and his flashlight and walked outside, got in his car and headed off into the rain and the fading light.
*
As I look back over those first couple of days I wonder how I got through it all with my sanity intact. Especially after what I’d done—or thought I’d done—to Gerald. And possibly Dana too. Trust me, there were some terrible thoughts going through my head as I left my house that evening. Of course, the drugs were helping. The Valium and the Prozac were doing their job keeping me wrapped up tight in a snug little blanket of emotional security. And there was the sheer overwhelming unreality of the situation in which I had so unexpectedly found myself. It was all too easy during the worst of what was happening to tell myself that none of it was real, that it was all just a dream. Or that I was experiencing some sort of mental breakdown, a psychotic b
reak that had allowed the inventions of my imagination to take on a frightening believability, so much so that they had overridden the truth of what my senses normally told me about the world I lived in. The latter explanation had its own frightening implications—what could have led to such a break with reality and, while in such a state, what might I be capable of doing? And if nothing around me was real then where, in actuality, was I? A mental hospital? I recoiled from the idea that I had succumbed to madness. My life had been going along pretty well, all things considered. Could the stress and the anxiety for which I’d been seeking treatment have suddenly bloomed into full fledged insanity? And if so, what could have triggered that sort of breakdown? Short of the unexpected deaths of my wife and children, I couldn’t think of anything. Is that what had happened, had Julia and the kids been killed—car accident maybe?—and as a result I’d constructed this nightmare scenario as a distraction from what had happened? Farfetched, I knew, but just about any explanation I could come up with—and there were a limited number of them, to be sure—was equally as farfetched.
All I knew that night when I left my house was that I had to get away. Far away. Since there were no answers, and no promise of aid to be found in the town where I’d lived for the past eleven years, then I’d just have to leave town and seek help elsewhere. Surely there was someone out there who knew what was going on, who was taking the proper steps to fix the situation. It wasn’t much of a plan but at least it was a plan, one that I could hang my hopes on for the time being.
Unfortunately, I would soon discover, hope does not always spring eternal, sometimes it withers and dies in practically no time at all…
*
Even in his current situation, Thomas was still amazed by how much the town had grown since he and Julia had moved there. Five years back they’d put a mall in over by the interstate. After that, coinciding with the local housing boom, neighborhoods and apartment complexes started going up on what seemed like every available piece of property. And the people started pouring in. Now, where there had once been trees and cow fields there were strip malls and banks and fitness clubs. State Road 60, which ran through the center of town, was still in the process of being widened from four lanes to eight. Considering what had happened, Thomas figured that the construction there might never be finished. And might never be needed, either.
After pulling out of his subdivision, Thomas had followed Providence Road up to 60. He took it slow even though the weather was good and the only other cars he encountered were parked haphazardly in the middle of the roadway or off near the sides. All of the traffic signals were out but the streetlamps seemed to be working fine as they started to illuminate the way ahead of him in the fading daylight. At the intersection of Providence and 60 he took a left, away from the center of town, out toward the mall about a half mile away and the interstate entrance ramp just beyond. As he drove he thought of Dana and Gerald, of the terrible things he’d done and might have done. Gripping the steering wheel tightly, he tried to banish the mental images only to have them return more vividly, haunting him like a vengeful spirit from some Shakespearean tragedy. As he neared the mall, the road widened enough to allow him to increase his speed a bit. Then he was passing the entrance to the mall’s vast parking area, preparing to change lanes in order to make his way up the entrance ramp to the interstate which would take him out of town...
And then came a profound sense of disorientation. Pain blossomed behind his eyes and a feeling of nausea took hold deep down in his gut. It was immediately apparent that he had somehow turned himself around, was now heading back in the opposite direction from which he’d just been traveling. All thoughts of Dana and Gerald were forgotten for the time being as he stopped the car, took in deep breaths, and looked around a bit wildly trying to figure out what had just happened. Unable to come up with an explanation, he did the only thing he could think of and turned the vehicle around, tried to approach the interstate again. With the exact same results. A brief moment of disorientation, further physical discomfort, and he was driving back into town, away from the on ramp and the hope of escape that it had come to represent in his mind.
“What the hell?”
He stopped the car again, this time put it in park, got out and stood in the warm evening air, waiting for the sick feeling to pass. When his stomach had settled a bit he walked toward the area where his progress had been halted, hands out in front of him as if he expected to bump into something that wasn’t there. After a couple dozen steps he did feel something, a thickening of the air like he was pushing into a nearly liquid or gel-like substance. He made his way forward slowly then held his breath and stepped all the way into the field of resistance or whatever it was that was blocking his way. What he had experienced so quickly in the car took much longer this time. He felt as though he was being spun around and around, impossibly fast, like the world had fallen away beneath him and he might be sucked out into the cold, unforgiving depths of deep space at any moment. Instead he found himself falling to the pavement, vomiting what little there was in his stomach onto the roadway’s black surface. He stayed down on his hands and knees for a time, breathing deeply once again. Eventually he was able to climb a bit unsteadily to his feet, to turn and stare back through the barrier that he could not see but knew all too well was there. It was completely invisible. The road continued on beyond it. He could clearly see the interstate overpass. Cars were scattered there much as they were along the roads throughout the town behind him. No people at all. It looked to Thomas like a movie set waiting for the actors to show up, for the director to shout “Action!” through a megaphone from his vantage point atop a crane ten feet up in the air.
Is that what this is? Thomas couldn’t help but wonder. Some sort of movie set? Maybe Julia and the kids and Dana’s family weren’t the ones who’d disappeared. Maybe it was he and Dana and Gerald and whoever else was here, trapped in this town, who’d been taken away, brought here to this reproduction of the place where he’d raised his children these past several years, recreated down to the smallest detail. But who could do such a thing? And why? To what end? It didn’t make any sense.
You’re losing it, man. Losing your mind. Right here. Right now. Who could blame him, really? It was all so damned crazy. He couldn’t get his head around any of it. A movie set, though? What was he thinking? Just another half-baked explanation that made as much—or as little—sense as any other.
He let loose with a wordless cry of frustration, unnaturally loud in the surrounding silence, the only other noise the low rumble of his idling vehicle. His head felt as though it might explode. He knew he should search for another way out. No way the barrier could surround the entire town. Could it? Instead, what he did was get back in his car and drive away from the barrier in the direction from which he’d just come. He knew there was a liquor store nearby. A few minutes later and he was there.
Someone else had saved him the effort of having to break in through the front door of the place. He had no idea who it may have been and right then it didn’t seem all that important. A drink was all that mattered. Flashlight in one hand, pistol in the other, he walked into the dark interior, calling out, “Hello? Anybody in here?”
No response.
Feeling just a wee bit guilty for his thievery, he pulled down a bottle of whiskey from one of the shelves, a whole fifth of eighty proof oblivion. There were some warm two liters of Coke in a nonfunctioning electric cooler behind the store’s front counter. Armed with his newfound provisions, he walked back outside, sat down and put his back against the brick wall of the storefront. And there he drank, surrounded by the warmth and the silence of that summer evening until the thousand senseless thoughts and memories swirling through his mind were washed away by the booze and the welcoming embrace of sleep.
CHAPTER 3
Wednesday, June 23
When he awoke he wasn’t sure where he was. Actually, it took him a few moments to remember who he was. When he did, when he reme
mbered that his wife, Julia, and his children, Robert and Jenny, had been taken from him, he moaned.
“Quiet,” said a voice from nearby.
Thomas’s eyes were still closed so he didn’t have any idea who had spoken. The voice wasn’t familiar. He opened his eyes and moaned again at the tiny bit of light that pierced his brain like a sword. Another day another hangover…
“I said, quiet.”
He still couldn’t see the person who possessed the voice. It was undoubtedly male, not particularly deep, the words spoken in a gruff tone barely above a whisper.
Thomas sat up. The pain in his head intensified but this time he was able to suppress the third moan that threatened to escape him. He was sitting on a bed. The room around him was unfamiliar, filled with vague shapes in the wan lighting. To his right, just a few steps away, was a window with its blinds pulled open. Two people were crouched down near the window, a man and a woman, with their backs to him, gazing out above its lower edge as if they were trying to remain unseen by something outside. The darkness beyond the window was fading but it wouldn’t be full daylight for another half an hour or so, judging by the quality of light coming in through the glass. Thomas realized that he was wearing the same clothes as the night before. How had he gotten here, wherever here was? His need for answers overrode his discomfort and any trepidation he might feel in the presence of these strangers—if they meant him harm surely they would have gone through with it by now—and so he rolled off the bed and practically crawled the short distance to where the two strangers were looking out through the closed window.