by Tim Curran
He was soaking wet and smelled like a rag used to wipe out a public toilet, but his throat was dry. Just as dry as he was inside, filled with dust and time and memory, maybe understanding that one invariably leads to the other. They came to the end of the street where the road split into a Y. They took the right fork and simply because Mitch was going purely on instinct here. Wanda Sepperley’s directions were fairly vague, only saying that the bus was down Coogan Avenue, at the bottom. And when it came to two diverging roads, Mitch had read somewhere that when lost, people almost always chose the right fork over the left.
They came around the corner and there was the bus. The front end had sunk down into the water right up to the hood, a flatbed truck right in front of it. Carefully, Mitch and Tommy moved along the side, hoping that those kids were still inside. Mitch thought he could hear a few muffled voices, but wasn’t sure. He came up to the bifold door and hammered on it with his flashlight.
“Hey, you kids! Open up!” he called out. “We’re here to get you out!”
“Anybody in there?” Tommy said.
A few faces appeared in the rain-specked windows and you could see by the way they did it?very cautiously?they were maybe afraid of what they might see. Tommy flashed his light at them and pretty soon they could hear feet thumping around in there. The door swung open and a flashlight caught Mitch directly in the face.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Sorry,” Bobby Luce said to them. “We thought you were normal, but…but we weren’t sure.”
“All right, c’mon,” Mitch told them. “We’re getting you out of here.”
The kids, seven or eight of them, came scrambling out, not minding the water, just glad to be out of that coffin, glad that the waiting was over. And Mitch could see it on their faces, that the waiting had been the very worst part. The water came up to their chests and he and Tommy led them away from the front of the bus to the rear where it dropped down towards their bellies. Quickly, Mitch formed them into a daisy chain, made them hold hands. Tommy led the way out and he himself watched the back door.
It was a scary, tense business wading through the soup, making for the hill and the van above. But they did it. They actually did it, ignoring the splashing secretive sounds all around them.
And when they reached the top of the hill and Tommy moved them into the back of the van, Mitch stood there with his shotgun and flashlight, guarding them. Before he got in, he looked down the hill to the rising, black water.
And they were down there.
Dozens of distorted forms had risen from the water and they just stood there like wax statues.
The walking dead.
DECAY
1
Sometimes it was the rain and sometimes it was the wind and sometimes it was just the night closing in on them. All Chuck Bittner knew for sure was that maybe, just maybe, he had made a mistake here. Maybe they all had. Maybe they should have waited with the others in the bus for rescue. Because, yeah, it had seemed like a good idea at the time, just up and walk out of there, but now he just wasn’t so sure.
He wasn’t so sure about a lot of things.
Because with the power out, things were very dark, pitch black almost. You could see the shapes of buildings and houses looming around you, but that’s all they were, just shapes. Even the flashlight did them little good with the rain pouring down and the night rising up and that wind howling through the empty places, because…well, because sometimes it almost sounded like human voices out there.
They’d been slogging through the waist-deep water for what seemed hours now, Cal and Kyle Woltrip in the lead, seeming to get a kick out of the whole thing. Tara Boyle was with them and Brian Summers, Jacob Key and Mark Tobin. That was their posse, the ones that had made the heroic breakout from the schoolbus. They had been turned around and turned around again and God only knew where they were now.
Chuck was numb from the waist down. He very much wanted to be out of this. Because he was starting to feel the need to do something he had not done publicly in years: cry.
From the moment they’d left the bus he’d felt oddly exhilarated, excited that they were doing the sensible thing and just helping themselves. Taking charge and not waiting in that damn bus like a bunch of old ladies. But no more than twenty minutes into it, following behind the Woltrip brothers who managed to get them more and more lost with each turn, he began to feel something more primal, something that cut from the inside: fear.
There was no denying it.
And it wasn’t just him.
For not only were they wet and shivering, they were all scared.
At times, the rain came down in a fall of needles, fierce and blinding, and there was nothing to do but cover your head and wait it out. At other times, it was more of a cold drizzle than anything else.
But it all sucked.
It all completely sucked.
They were paused at what might have been an intersection once. Overhead, in the beam of Cal’s flashlight, they could see the swinging mass of a dead traffic light. It swung on its wires, impossibly large and impossibly clumsy looking. If it fell, it would surely crush one of them. Cal put the light on the street signs. Westhaven and 15^th Avenue.
That didn’t tell Chuck much.
He was from Elmwood Hills like the rest of the kids. He didn’t know Bethany and this was Bethany. Maybe he didn’t know much about directions outside of Elmwood, but he did know that Westhaven Street was over in Bethany. Chuck agreed with his dad that River Town and Bethany were just a lot of ugly old properties that should have been razed for new development. Chuck’s dad sold real estate and Chuck figured he would one day, too. And when he did, he’d have Bethany bulldozed to the ground.
Tara Boyle, slumping under the rain, said, “I thought you said we were in Crandon. Westhaven isn’t in Crandon.”
“It is too,” Cal Woltrip said, but you could detect a note of uncertainty under his words.
“It is not! My dad’s going to put a Burger King in Bethany! He told me so! He said he was putting it on Westhaven Street!”
“Lah-tee-dah,” Kyle said. “Do we have to listen to this?”
“You’re both…jack-offs!” Tara told them. “All you’ve done is get us lost!”
“You could do better?” Cal asked her.
“Anybody could do better,” Chuck told him.
“Okay, smartass. Here’s the flashlight. Go ahead, take it. You lead. You get us out of here.”
Brian and Jacob and Mark just stood around forlornly, rain dripping off them.
Chuck swallowed, took the light. “Good, now we have a chance.”
“You don’t know your own ass from a hole in the ground,” Kyle told him. “Just a fag like your old man.”
Chuck turned on him quick, but Cal got in-between them.
“No, no, no,” Cal said. “Let the big man lead us out. Go ahead, Mr. Big Man. Do your stuff. But if you don’t get us out, then we’re all gonna kick your ass.”
Brian giggled.
Tara sighed. “Oh, spare me the drama.”
Chuck turned away from all of them.
They all stepped back, left him out front, all alone.
Well, it was just a matter of…well, he didn’t honestly know. But he wasn’t about to admit that. Westhaven was right ahead of them. If they followed it back the other way, to what he thought would be east, then they would have to come out in Crandon. Of course, if those dumbass Woltrips hadn’t been in charge, they could have followed the hill up out of Bethany to Broad Street.
Chuck, feeling very tense inside, took a step forward. Then another.
2
By God, it was a wasteland.
Bethany was a drowning wasteland.
Chuck Bittner saw it open up before him and it took his breath away. You simply couldn’t realize the extent of the devastation until you were hip-deep in it. Just like you couldn’t appreciate the cool dankness of the grave until you found yourself in one.
; A bit of moonlight came through now and about all it did was make the streets look like a flooded cemetery with all those buildings and houses rising up, some leaning and others narrow and skeletal. The waters had claimed Bethany like some gargantuan oil spill, something black and rising and glistening. Nothing but floating leaves and garbage, pieces of houses and tree branches.
“C’mon,” Chuck said.
He moved down Westhaven in a direction that he was pretty certain would take them away from the river. And that was the important thing now. The water was thick and sludgy, lots of submerged things bumping into them. Occasional ripples brushed through it as if things were moving just under the surface. Everything echoed with a rolling, subterranean sound that was more than a little disconcerting.
Chuck was scared.
Oh, he’d never admit it to the others, but he was bad scared. Scared like he hadn’t been in years maybe. Back when he was little and his mom used to hold him when he had a bad dream. A long time ago. Mom was dead now, of course, and Chuck had trouble feeling anything about that. She’d moved out when he was like five and spent her time drinking and whoring (his father’s words). Chuck saw her quite a bit at first, but as the years passed and she tangled herself up with one man after the other, the visits became very infrequent. When she died, he hadn’t seen her in almost three years. But right then, he wished she was there. Not his dad, but her.
They moved on that way silently for maybe ten or fifteen minutes and then stopped.
“What was that?” Brian said.
“I don’t know,” Kyle told him.
They’d all heard it and it stopped them dead. Nobody was willing to identify what it was. Or maybe they were just afraid to. Chuck panned his light around. It gleamed off the water, sparkled with raindrops. A few stray leaves blew around before settling into the murky soup.
“It was nothing,” Chuck told them.
But, dear God, he did not honestly believe that for a minute. That sound had been clamorous and loud and sharp. He knew what it sounded like, but he wouldn’t dare put a name to it. Not out loud. But in his head, a voice was saying, You know darn well what you heard. It’s weird and freaky and it just doesn’t belong, but you know what it was…a noisemaker.
Sure, one of those silly contraptions you spun around on a stick on New Years Eve. They were kind of funny, kind of annoying maybe. But out here? Out in this flooded blackness? Such a sound was about as disturbing as anything Chuck could imagine. For those things didn’t make noise by themselves, somebody had to spin them, to wind them around on their sticks. And that could only mean that someone was out there, someone who thought this was all some kind of party. And what kind of person would think that?
The sound came again and again.
“That’s…that’s one of them whaddyacallems,” Kyle said.
“Noisemaker,” his brother put in.
“Out here?” Jacob said.
Suddenly they could all hear Tara breathing so hard and so fast it sounded like she might be hyperventilating. “We better get out of here,” she said. “This isn’t right. Nobody would do that. Not out here.”
And maybe they were all waiting for Cal or Kyle to say something truly inappropriate like, well, nobody sane. But they said nothing and it was just like that moment on the bus when they’d all suddenly felt something outside. It was like that…heavy and ominous.
Nothing but silence and falling rain, the moan of the wind.
Mark sniffed the air. “You smell that? Does anybody smell that?”
Chuck felt something tighten inside, wind up tight like a rubber band to the point of bursting. He was smelling things, too, but right away his mind simply refused what it was receiving. He could not be smelling these things.
Not out here.
Tara’s breathing galloped quickly, then slowed. “That’s…oh my God…that’s cotton candy! Can you smell it? That’s cotton candy! Like at the carnival and the fair!”
“No, it’s not,” Chuck said.
“It is,” she maintained.
“Yeah,” Kyle said. “I can smell it…but why out here?”
“I smell other things,” Brian said.
“Hot dogs…that’s hot dogs,” Jacob said, just beside himself.
Mark nodded. “And popcorn.”
But they were wrong, they were all wrong and Chuck knew it. Sure, he had smelled those things, too…at first. Sweet cotton candy and salty buttered popcorn in little boxes, the smell of hot dogs bubbling in grease and wrapped in doughy, deep-fried buns. Maybe ice cream and root beer in waxed cups, too. Like all of the fall carnival in one swooning breath. But he knew he wasn’t really smelling it. It was in his head, just as it was in theirs. And if he let himself go?and he badly wanted to with a childish glee?he might have smelled the smoke of barbecuing chickens and iced lemonade and hot-buttered corn-on-the-cob, maybe even elephants and the dirty straw from the monkey cages, too.
But he did not let himself go, even though a funny, sing-song voice in his head was saying, Aw, kid, don’t be such wet blanket! Can’t you smell the circus and the carnival and the fair in August? Don’t you know the fun you’re missing? It’s all out there, it’s all waiting for you and all you have to do is simply roll with it like the others…
No, Chuck was not rolling with it.
Maybe the others were. Maybe they didn’t know that there was something deranged and perverse about all this, but Chuck did. He knew danger when he smelled it and he was smelling it now like the acidic fumes from a battery that was about to explode in his face. He felt it up his spine and along the back of his neck and down deep in his stomach in a thick, expanding mass that made him want to throw up. But maybe the others didn’t and maybe they were so damn scared inside, they were afraid to admit to it. For what could be dangerous about such things? What possible hell could there be in the smell of sweets and junk food?
But Chuck knew.
Because sweets worked on kids, didn’t they? That’s why perverts offered them to kids so they’d get into their cars. Kids liked things like that…carnivals and fairs and circuses and popcorn and hot dogs and cotton candy. Good fun and games and sugary things. And maybe those sweets tasted good when you shoved them into your mouth, but when that dark, evil car rolled to a stop in the shadowy woods and you were dragged screaming into the trees, smelling the vileness of your host, feeling his or its hot breath in your face, those eyes like dirty coins appraising you like fresh meat and you smelled the sour rot of his breath…well, the kiddie games were over, now weren’t they, boys and girls? Now comes the touching and the defilement and the juicy blackness that would tear your soul out in bloody, soiled chunks?
“No!” Chuck shouted.
The others stopped their daydreaming and their respective fantasy trains ground to a rusty halt. They were all looking at him, thinking he had lost it now. And Maybe he had. Maybe he had at that. And how could he really explain to them that if they kept rolling with this one, they’d roll straight off the biggest fucking cliff they could ever imagine?
They all just stared and he couldn’t seem to find the words to make them understand.
He knew what they thought about him.
He knew what all the kids at school thought about him.
He knew they despised him. Oh yes, despised him. That was the word. Because Chuck Bittner was a braggart, he was overstuffed and full of hot air and superior and uppity. Chuck always bragged, always. My dad did this and my dad did that. We own this and we own that. My dad bought me this and my dad bought me that and we’re going to Cozumel and Disneyworld and I have three new game systems and my own checking account…and what do any of you have? You have nothing compared to me because I’m better than you, richer than you, oh so much more important than you. That’s the way they all saw him and he knew it and he always had. Oh, he pretended he didn’t know how they hated him, but he knew. That’s why some nights he woke up, unable to breathe, because he knew he was alone, terribly alone. They hated him and h
e had no friends but the ones he could buy with daddy’s money. And sometimes it was just too much, like being the only mouse in a snakepit, knowing those kids would kill him if they could, do just about anything to cut him down to size.
And now they were all staring at him like he was crazy.
Sure, he was a little spoiled brat and he knew it at that moment like never before. He saw himself as he was and he hated himself, too. Really, truly. And that’s what made this all even harder, because they would never believe him.
Never understand that there was danger ahead.
That he knew things they did not.
And that funny sing-song voice said, You’re a spoiled rotten little bastard! Ha, ha, ha! That’s all you are and daddy can’t help you out here! He can’t buy you out of this, now can he?
Though he was numb from the chill water, Chuck was sweating profusely, feverish and just sick about who he was and what he now knew. “Listen to me,” he said. “Please just listen, okay? I know you guys don’t like me, but listen to me. You’re not really smelling those things. It’s all a game, you see? Something out there wants to draw us in. It’s using these smells to get us to go out there where it’s waiting…”
3
“He’s tweaked,” Cal said.
“Had to happen sooner or later,” Kyle added.
Chuck fought for the words to adequately express himself. He wished Bobby Luce were there, because he was good with words. He would have made them understand. Sure, those smells were getting stronger now for Chuck, too, but once you accepted the fact that they were not real, they started smelling like other things…like closed-up, mildewy places and wormy corpses and blood bubbling from slit throats.
“Listen!” Tara said. “Do you hear that? Do you?”
They all began to talk at once, but Chuck could not hear them. He could only hear the tinny, rising melody of a calliope, the sort of thing that always provided the background music for merry-go-rounds.