by Tim Curran
By day, there were the birds.
Gulls and ravens, crows and buzzards. You would see them lighting off a floating cadaver, perching there happily on islands of drifting carrion, stretching their wings and cawing, picking out strips of raw red flesh and pecking flyblown faces down to the bone beneath. They feasted on maggots and insects and fought over the juiciest, greenest cuts of meat.
That was Witcham.
A putrid sea of decomposition haunted by vermin, a misting and rain-washed organic soup of decay that was charged with a hybrid flux of regeneration proteins vomited out of the secret catacombs of Fort Providence. And as such, it was not just a sea of death, but a great amniotic bath of degenerate and mutant life, resurrection, and unspeakable re-genesis.
17
On their way back through the city, they could plainly see the inexorable, almost ghastly change that had taken place in the past twenty-four hours. There was more water in the streets, of course, and it was still coming down. In buckets. There were more stranded cars and certain intersections were getting to the point where they were nearly impassable to anything that did not have a high profile like Tommy’s Dodge Ram. Many of these were blocked off and the public works had arranged detours. The National Guard was out in force, of course, as were the police and emergency services. Lots of people were on their way out of town.
But all that was to be expected.
What Mitch noticed was that much of Witcham seemed deserted now. And not just the heavily-flooded areas, but almost the whole town. Upper and Lower Main Street were nearly empty, most everything closed. Even the college looked empty. Yesterday, there had still been people in the streets shopping and going about their business, but today was a different story. What people they saw looked to be in a great hurry and those that weren’t looked simply confused, standing around on street corners and surveying the damage. It was hard not to view the city as a great waterlogged corpse in search of a grave and those few people standing about as mourners.
It was bad and this was just in the more passable areas of the city. Places like River Town and Bethany were pretty much underwater now and, if what people were saying could be believed, there were bodies everywhere.
“I think our hometown is on its last legs,” Tommy said.
There was no arguing that. There was a steady stream of traffic heading out to Highway 6 which led out of the city and out of the Black River Valley.
“They’re running,” Harry said, “and you can’t blame ‘em, can you? Not with what’s going on. I think the flooding is one thing, but dead things walking around is another. Lot of people, you know, they saw things last night and they don’t want to go through that again.”
Mitch knew that to be true. A lot of people died last night and a lot of them wouldn’t stay dead. That was the scary part. Tonight, the city would be an absolute graveyard. The water would rise and more of the zombies would reach areas they had been denied up to now. Witcham would be a house of horrors tonight.
Tommy brought them over to East Genesee without asking. Lisa Bell’s house was still empty as far as they could tell. No signs of occupancy, anyway. Heather Sale’s VW bug was not around. Over in Elmwood Hills, at the Sale house, the bug was not to be seen either. And what was worse, the front door was open and no one was around.
Harry did not ask what they were doing. Not until they reached the Sale house and Mitch told him flatly that they were looking for his daughter. He volunteered nothing else.
Tommy drove back towards Crandon, taking it slow, the water near the top of his wheels in places. Everywhere they went, desertion. Mass desertion. If it hadn’t been for the water everywhere, it would have looked like one of those cities in a movie that had been evacuated for an A-bomb attack.
“You can almost feel it, can’t you?” Mitch said.
Tommy nodded. “Yeah, it’s different. It’s bad. A real ugly kind of feel. City’s gone bad right to its roots.”
Mitch just grunted because that’s pretty much what he’d been feeling. It smelled like an open, rainy grave and now it felt like one, too. Just low and dank and mean like a subterranean tomb.
“I’m thinking about what that Osbourne guy said at the base,” Harry said. “That stuff that raises the dead and mutates things…it’s in this rain. And it keeps falling. I mean, shit, we’ve all been soaked in the stuff by now. Who knows what might happen to us.”
“You look okay,” Mitch told him. “I don’t see you growing any extra arms.”
Tommy laughed at that. “Relax, Harry. Way I see it is that this stuff that got pissed up into the air is gonna rain itself out. Maybe it already has. Maybe it’s just in the water itself now. It’ll run its course.”
Harry shrugged. “You’re probably right. But how much damage will be done by then? And how many of those things will be in the streets?”
Tommy kept driving until they hit The Strip in Crandon. Just about everything was closed there, too, though more than a few bars were open and doing pretty good business by the looks of things. They passed an intersection and some kid was standing in the middle of the street, water up to his knees almost. Mitch looked at him and then craned his neck and looked at him again.
“Stop the truck,” he told Tommy. “That kid back there.”
“One of the things?”
“No, just…I think I know him.”
Tommy pulled to a stop and then just reversed since there was no traffic around anyway. He pulled the truck to a stop and Mitch hopped out, going over to the boy standing there. The boy did not even look at him. He just watched the water moving past his legs.
“Chuck?” Mitch said. “Chuck Bittner?”
The boy looked up, his face wringing wet. He blinked a couple times.
“Don’t you remember me?” Mitch said.
The kid just stared. “No,” he said.
“It’s me, it’s Mitch Barron. Uncle Mitch.”
The kid cocked his head a bit, starting to remember Mitch’s face. Mitch understood. Christ, the kid hadn’t seen him in years. He was Lily’s sister’s kid, Marlene’s kid. Mitch had not seen him since Marlene had gotten her divorce and taken a walk on the wild side. He could not honestly remember if the kid had even been at Marlene’s funeral.
“Uncle Mitch?” the kid said, his voice breaking up.
“Yeah, Chuck. C’mere.”
The kid needed no prompting. He splashed forward and fell right against his uncle. Mitch felt his arms going around him, something in his heart tugging because he could feel the kid’s pain thrumming through him. They held onto each other in the street, impervious to the rain that fell.
“Where’s Aunt Lily?” Chuck wanted to know.
“Ah…shit, Chuck, she’s gone, you know? I don’t think she’ll be back”
The kid seemed to understand.
“What brings you way over to Crandon?”
The kid just looked up at him. “I was just walking. Last night…last night something happened.”
“You can tell me?”
So Chuck did. He was in a state of mind where he did not really care if he was believed or not. “I went home…my mom was there. She was one of them.”
Mitch felt himself stiffen. Lily had been right then, Marlene had returned. Jesus. Standing there in the rain, Chuck told him everything.
“I killed her with salt,” he finally said. “I killed her with salt.”
The kid started to sob and there was little Mitch could do but hold him tight. Tears came from his eyes, too. And he was glad for the rain that washed them away. When it had passed, he took the kid back to the truck and got him inside. With Tommy and Harry in there, Chuck had to sit on Mitch’s lap. But that was okay. That was just fine.
“We’re going to get you out of here, Chuck,” Mitch told him. “Out of the city before night. Don’t worry.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“Why the hell not?” Tommy said.
“Because I want to kill them,” Chuck told t
hem. “I want to kill all the dead ones.”
18
After they got back to Wanda’s and Mitch took the old woman aside and gave her the lowdown on Chuck, Harry led Tommy away from Deke and the Zirblanski twins. They went out into the garage and lit cigarettes.
“None of my business at all,” Harry said. “But what’s the scoop on Mitch’s wife and kid?”
“You’re right: none of your goddamn business. But I’ll tell you. You’re into this damn mess as deep as any of us now, I suppose.” He went over and sat on a crate. The garage smelled of machine oil and potting soil which was infinitely preferable to the gassy odors of the city. “Mitch’s wife…Lily…she sort of lost it, man. She had a twin sister named Marlene who was pretty much a piece of work, you come right down to it. Marlene killed herself awhile back and Lily was never the same after that.”
Harry nodded. “Twins…there’s a funny connection between them.”
“Yeah. That kid out there? Chuck? That’s Marlene’s kid, Mitch’s nephew.”
“Oh boy.”
“Yeah. Anyway, Lily. She was a real tough, independent sort of woman. Really something. But when Marlene died, I think part of Lily died with her. She got real depressed, was on medications and shit. She just wasn’t right anymore.” Tommy’s mouth tensed a bit at this part. “Last night, when we were over here talking to Wanda…well, Lily was watching Rita and Rhonda and she just acted weird, walked out into the water in the streets. She was just gone. We looked and looked, but we couldn’t find her. Now his kid is missing, too.”
“Shit, that’s a tough break.”
“Tell me about it. Anyway, that’s about it. That’s why we haven’t left the city. We can’t until we know the kid’s okay.”
“I hope she is.”
Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “Me, too. Wanda…you know how she is, visions and shit, she says the kid’s still here in town. That she’s alive. And Mitch has been having these feelings that she’s nearby or something. That’s how we ended up at the mannequin factory. He had one of those feelings. Anyway, he won’t leave until he finds her and, shit, he’s my best friend. My only friend, really. I’ll stay long as he does. We won’t stop looking.”
“Sure, I understand. I’ll stay, too. Where the hell else am I going to go? I’ll stick with you guys until they put me back inside again.”
“Mitch wants me to take the kids and Wanda outside the city to the National Guard camp out there. He doesn’t want them here tonight.”
“That’s a good idea. But we’re staying, right?”
“Yeah. I’ll bring ‘em out there in a little while. Mitch is telling them about that now. But I’m coming back.”
Harry pulled off his cigarette. “Mitch has a girl, eh? How old?”
Tommy looked skyward. “Let’s see…Chrissy would be fifteen, I’m thinking.”
Harry just stared at him. “Chrissy?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Chrissy?”
“Yeah, what of it?”
Harry was breathing real hard now. “At the University…I told you I was there with that asshole Jacky…there were two girls there. Chrissy and Lisa. Chrissy was a tall brunette and Lisa was a blonde, short.”
“Shit,” Tommy said, finding his feet. “What happened? You fuckers didn’t do anything…tell me you didn’t.”
Harry shook his head. “No, no, no. They were all right. I saw to that. Then that clown came and?”
But Harry didn’t finish that because there was a huge, violent rumbling in the distance and the entire house began to shake like it was falling apart.
19
At approximately 3:45 p.m., exactly one week after the torrential rains began falling, the Black River South Fork Dam failed completely. It was some six miles from Witcham and held the Black Lake Reservoir in check…which had been near to cresting for days, its intricate system of nearby spillways completely flooded. The Dam was 300 feet in height and two days previously, a leak was sighted near the northeast abutment, nearly a hundred feet below the crest. It was patched successfully, but by the time Mitch and the others had returned from Fort Providence, a new leak had appeared. It was some seventy-five feet down from the first. It started as a gigantic wet spot like the dam itself was beginning to sweat. And within thirty minutes, that spot of perspiration became heavy seepage which seriously undermined the integrity of the structure as a whole. The material began to slough and water ran freely from the cleft as erosion opened up the original leak until it reached the right bank to the dam embankment itself. Less than forty minutes later, the dam failed completely and collapsed.
The four-mile Black Lake Reservoir which was overspilling to begin with, released some forty-million tons of water into the narrow Black River Valley. Boiling with debris, uprooted trees, and a mountain of earth, the flood wall was sixty-feet in height when it struck Slayhoke Penitentiary and the result was devastating. As 4^th Battalion of the 1^st Air Cavalry Division, bolstered by the Wisconsin National Guard, were still attempting to restore order at the prison, the tidal wave of water hit with explosive force, obliterating the high razor-wire topped walls and smashing its way through the tall brick cell blocks which utterly collapsed, the upper stories completely sheering off. The high smokestacks fell and outbuildings were smashed, their wreckage?indeed all the wreckage of Slayhoke including trucks and cars and gravel piles, thousands of human beings and tons and tons of rock and brick?were swept along with that churning wall of water.
The Fort Providence Military Reservation was next in the path.
The water pushed right through, stripping the base flat, turning hills to valleys and scooping up millions of tons of sand and rock, and kept right on rolling, leveling everything in its path. Between Fort Providence and Witcham there was a nearly unbroken belt of forest and wooded hills some four miles thick. The flood wall, cutting its own channel as it roared towards the city, hit the forest and turned hills to mudslides, cutting down acre after acre of prime woodland?sugar maple, red oak, hickory, and birch, hemlock, jackpine, and spruce. But this forest significantly slowed the rampaging flood wall which would have completely destroyed the city.
When it reached Witcham?a rushing torrent of oily, muddy water inundated with millions upon millions of tons of grinding debris?it crested at nearly thirty feet. It hit the outlying areas first, dissolving hills and shattering bridges and turning homes to kindling, then it rolled right into Elmwood and Crandon following the path of the Black River, a tidal wave that smashed its way through Bethany and River Town and East Genesee. It swept everything before it, houses and factories and bridges. Water towers fell and buildings collapsed, telephone poles were torn up by their roots and mobile home parks turned into graveyards of sheet metal. Buildings that had stood a hundred years or more fell into themselves as did mills and foundries.
All the rubble and mud and debris were sucked into a massive whirlpool centered in the old Black River floodplain. River Town and Bethany were ground zero.
From above it looked like a wall of frothing brown water rushing into a city of sandcastles that simply disintegrated and were washed into a dirty foam. At the southern tip of Crandon, rows of high elms went down like bowling pins and blocks and blocks of houses simply vanished in the deluge. Others were crushed and some torn up from their foundations and carried off. Chatterly Park was gutted straight down to the bedrock. In River Town, those historic brick streets beneath the flooding fell right into sewers below. The Wiscon natural gas refinery went up with a booming explosion and plumes of yellow-white flame mushroomed above the city. Fuel tanks exploded into spirals of greasy, black smoke that the pouring rain dropped right back onto the city. At ground-level, that great rumbling wave of water shattered windows long before it physically reached them and when it did, walls and foundations were ruptured and roofs peeled free. The sound of that tidal wave was deafening, like a thousand bombs detonated simultaneously, their noise echoing and echoing and never seeming to die out. As the streets s
ank and structures fell, the water raged and sprayed and splashed and shot up into the air in great gouts.
And then, backflooding.
The water crested outside of Witcham and flooded right back, carrying trees and rubble, asphalt and concrete, glass and metal, cars and trucks, and thousands of bodies. It swept back into town, but its force was spent. In Witcham, the debris caught fire and became a river of flame that reached some sixteen city blocks. Houses and buildings that had stood the onslaught of water promptly ignited and the inferno burned and burned and burned, the pouring rain slowly bringing it under control. Survivors floated on scraps of building materials and the trunks of trees. Several hundred became entangled in miles and miles of barbwire from the WireWorks and if the waters finally did recede, it would take days to cut all those corpses free.
But for now, there was devastation.
The air was thick with a dusky haze that was part smoke and part fog and part suspended residue that slowly fell back into the flooded streets. The water was a bubbling stew of slime and waste, garbage and dead bodies.
The city had been on the verge of its grave for many days, but now it had finally found it and fell right in.
So by 6:00 p.m. that day, Witcham was a cemetery.
20
Alive.
By God, they were all still alive.
Mitch was looking out over the wreckage of the city which was so utterly complete that it left him breathless. Houses were gone, entire blocks were gone, but through it all, they had survived. It was enough to make you believe in a higher power. And if Chrissy had been there with him, he just might have.
When the rumbling started and that wave came rolling through the valley picking up speed and force, devouring Slayhoke and Fort Providence as appetizers and heading for the main course with slavering jaws, it was Tommy and Harry who had gotten everyone organized. They had no idea what was happening. With that rising noise and the ground trembling, maybe there was an earthquake or somebody had finally detonated a nuke out at the Army base like many had prophesied for so many years now. Maybe that was what was happening and that deadly shock wave was heading right at them.