The Living and the Dead

by Greg F. Gifune

  Perhaps in hindsight, Rae had.

  The light fell on the closest wall to reveal several small handprints staining the cheap sheetrock. The kids’ handprints…in blood…

  Duck moved closer, widened the beam.

  Written crudely in blood above the prints: EZEKIEL 13:13.

  “Don’t you know that one?”

  His heart leapt into his throat as he spun round, landing the beam on Rae. She stood a few feet behind him, smiling mischievously, as if all were right with the world. Her face was pale and moonlike, framed by the surrounding darkness. A wide black scarf was tied about her head.

  “Rae—Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me—are you all right?” He inched closer. “How the hell did you get behind me? Were you hiding?”

  “‘In my wrath I will unleash a violent wind, and in my anger hailstones and torrents of rain will fall with destructive fury.’” Her eyes sparkled. “Any of that sound familiar to you?”

  “Why is it written in blood? Are the kids all right?”

  “You come to save us, Duck? Is that it?”

  “Talk to me, are you OK? Never knew you to be a Bible-thumper.”

  “Funny to hear me spouting scripture, huh?” She smiled, her white teeth cutting the darkness. “I’ve read all the holy books. I know about all their bullshit and lies, and all about their magic. What the marks don’t know is they all got plenty of both. Ezekiel seemed fitting, no? Besides, most Gypsies are Catholic, people forget that. We even have our own saint, Black Sara. Except she’s not a for real saint. Figures, even our saints have to be outsiders, right? But you know what I’ve learned, Duck? Sometimes it’s nice to be on the inside.”

  She either hit her head, he thought, or she’s been severely traumatized during the night and is still in shock. “Where are the children?”

  “What do you care? Not like they’re yours. Always thought their father was a useless bastard, but at least he tried to love us before he left. You couldn’t even manage that.”

  “Rae, where are they?”

  “They’re here,” she answered with an unsettling trace of glee in her voice. “The children are here.”

  “What’s with all the blood and drama, are they all right?”

  Rae cocked her head as if she’d heard something in the distance.

  “Get them and let’s go,” Duck pressed. “I’ve got people outside with me. We’re headed for town to—”

  “Why would I want to go with you?”

  “Rae, please, this isn’t the time to get into all that. I’m sorry for—”

  “Sorry?” She laughed quietly. “Don’t you understand what’s happened?”

  “What I understand is that we need to get the hell out of here right now.”

  “Don’t you see it yet? Dempsey was too stupid to realize it, but I thought you were smarter than that useless old fuck.”

  “Dempsey’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “How could you have known that?”

  “You tell me.”

  Duck looked deep into her eyes, the light trained just below them so as not to blind her. There was something off, something not right about them. Probably a concussion, he thought. “Take me to the children, Rae.”

  “You should be more worried about yourself.”

  “What happened here last night?”

  “An ending,” she said.

  “It’s over then?”

  She nodded. “Of course, with every ending comes a new beginning.”

  “What was that thing? Dempsey—”

  “Dempsey thought he brought it on, that it was about him, just him. It’s not. He helped open the gate in this shit-hole town, that’s all. He let it out here. But this goes farther and deeper than any of you know.”

  “The creature, Rae, what the hell is it?”

  “Hindus and Buddhists call it Garuda. In Europe it’s known as Owlman. The Native Americans call it Thunderbird. To others, it’s Mothman.”

  “But this is a physical being, it—”

  “Always has been,” she said. “It’s been a part of every culture going back as far as the ancient Sumerians.”

  “Dempsey said it’s a harbinger of tragedy and death.”

  “Did he now?” Rae stepped closer, the mischievous look on her face returned. “Thing is, once the gate opens all the dogs come out to play. Evil is internal, Duck, didn’t he tell you that? And just like it’s written in all the holy books, eventually, it gets loose and rains down on humanity like the plague it is, bringing with it the dead. We could’ve cured ourselves, purged ourselves of it but instead we nurtured it, fed it, let it fester and grow stronger. Others just ignored it or pretended it didn’t exist. And finally, like a big dog off its chain, it got free. It’s been inside us all along. We’re carriers and don’t even know it. That’s the trick, see? That’s the secret. At the end of the day, the herd’s got to be thinned now and then.”

  “But you—you said it was over.”

  “It is.” She raised a finger to her lips. “Shhh.”

  He listened but heard only remnants of a slowly dying wind and rain.

  “We have to get to town,” he told her.

  “You really think it’ll matter where you go?”

  “Won’t it?”

  “You have no idea what’s coming. This is only the start. It’s just showing us the way, that’s all. It’s not human, it doesn’t think like we do. It just is. And like the dead it shows us, it watches. It waits. Then it’s gone and the rest is us.”

  “How do we stop all this?”

  “We don’t.” A slow trickle of blood leaked from behind Rae’s scarf, ran along the bridge of her nose and down across her lips.

  “Jesus, Rae, you’re bleeding.”

  “Don’t be silly.” She grinned. “The dead can’t bleed.”

  Duck pushed past her, stumbled across the room and smashed his shoulder into the closed bedroom door. The flashlight swept the area, settled on a pile of blankets laid out in the far corner of the otherwise pitch-black room.

  “Oh Christ,” he cried, focusing on the children’s bodies, lying there as if asleep, looking oddly peaceful in all that blood, their throats sliced ear-to-ear. And there with him, between them, an arm around each and an ornate dagger resting in her lap, was Rae, her own throat cut last. She’d killed them all to save them from what she’d known was on its way, not realizing until it was too late that with each slash of the knife she’d done nothing but assured their damnation.

  He spun back, but the flashlight found only empty space behind him. His mind splintered. If the creature that had brought up the dead had truly gone and was taking the storm with it, then why were the dead still…

  As two tiny hands tugged at his pant legs, Duck looked down, saw the children standing on either side of him, small faces smiling and blood-spattered in the dark.

  And then he knew.

  Duck pulled free and staggered back into the main room, the flashlight beam bouncing in front of him, spinning round and revealing not just the darkness, but those that lived within it. And in that split-second, countless thoughts and visions flooded his mind, pouring over him like the rain drenching Tall Tree Junction. Faces, places, times and events all merged into a harried collage, the eyes of that young Vietnamese mother watching it all and desperately fighting to understand.

  Now, he knew just how she’d felt.

  Something moved along the ceiling above him.

  Something impossibly large.

  And in that horrifying moment, somehow, it made perfect sense.

  “It’s here,” he said hopelessly. “God Almighty, it’s here…”

  The night came alive, staring down from the ceiling, glaring fatefully through glowing red eyes.

  34

  Outside, the others sat in the darkness and drizzle.

  Lennox threw open the door and stepped out from the backseat. “It’s so dark without that flashlight,” she said, pacing along the road before wan
dering a few yards onto Rae’s property. Her bare feet sank an inch or two in the mud, squishing it between her toes. She looked to the sky. “The moon, it’s behind the clouds.”

  “Do you really think getting out of the car’s a good idea?” Anita asked.

  “I know this is all real,” Lana said to no one in particular. “I know it, but I just can’t seem to…”

  “I kept thinking I must be dreaming,” Anita said, rescuing her. “That sooner or later I’d wake up and this would all be some twisted nightmare.”

  “If nothing else, I think the worst of it may be over.”

  “I’d feel a whole lot better if a car or something came along though.”

  Lennox stepped across the pavement and squinted in an attempt to see further down the road. The car headlights were still on and illuminated quite a distance, but not enough for her to see beyond the next bend. “Yeah,” she sighed, “me, too.” She turned back toward the car and zeroed in on Chris, who hadn’t said a word since they’d left the cottage. “So you’re a shrink?”

  “Clinical Psychologist,” he answered in a quiet, detached voice.

  “Figures,” she sighed.

  He simply stared straight ahead, offering nothing more.

  Anita reached for him, touched his wrist.

  “What the hell’s taking him so long in there?” Lana asked.

  Lennox looked back at the dark cabin. “How long’s it been?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Long enough,” Anita said.

  As if on cue, Duck stepped into view in the open doorway, the shotgun held down by his side and his face bathed in shadow and intensity. Without a word he moved across the yard and headed for the car.

  Before he’d reached his destination they all heard the screams, screeches from somewhere inside the shack, cutting the night like razors, inhuman and piercing, part animal shriek, part tormented wail of a human being.

  “Get in the car,” Duck said to Lennox. “Move.”

  She did so without protest, jumping into the backseat as he slid behind the wheel and immediately sped from the shack.

  “What the hell was that?” Lana asked frantically.

  “That thing’s in there,” Duck said, speeding along the winding roads despite the inherent danger. “It could’ve killed me but it didn’t.”

  “What about your friend and her children?”

  He shook his head in the negative, and but for the drizzling rain, their own labored breathing and the hum of the car engine, the night fell silent.

  They’d traveled a ways when Duck pulled over again. No one asked why they were stopping this time, remaining quiet instead as he took a moment to compose himself. Face in his hands, he drew several deep breaths and whispered something to himself, some mantra no one else could make out, then after a moment sat back and looked to the sky, half-expecting to see the goddamn things flying overhead.

  Lana put a hand on his shoulder. “Do you want me to drive?”

  “I’m OK.” He ran his hands over his face, wiping away the rain and perspiration. “We need to hold it together. Whatever it is that’s happening here, it—I don’t think it’s confined to Tall Tree Junction. Rae…or something that used to be Rae…she told me that—”

  “What we’re experiencing is a mass hallucination,” Chris said in monotone, eyes still dead and trained on the back of the front seats before him. “It’s a phenomenon which generally occurs in particularly—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Lennox growled. When he did, and looked at her with a level of helplessness and pain she’d never before witnessed, she felt a twinge of guilt. Before all this began she would’ve softened, but no more. “Just do everybody a favor and spare us your psychobabble bullshit, OK?”

  “Don’t talk to him like that,” Anita said, but it seemed halfhearted at best.

  “Says everybody’s favorite fuck toy.”

  “What did you call me?”

  “You heard me. Just what kind of friends are you, anyway? You both have wedding bands on and—”

  “It’s none of your goddamn business, Tiffany.”

  “It’s Lennox, asshole.”

  “Is asshole a family name or—”

  “Both of you knock it off,” Lana said, turning in her seat like a mother reprimanding her children. “We’ve got enough to worry about right now without this senseless bullshit.”

  Lennox sat forward to meet her. “Nobody’s talking to you, bitch.”

  “Hey,” Duck said, drawing everyone’s attention before Lana could respond by pointing at something beyond the windshield. “Look.”

  The sky had turned a dark gray charcoal color. Though sunrise was still a ways off, the darkness had begun to shift and die, and the storm had weakened enough to reveal thick clouds of smoke billowing up over the distant trees.

  “Something’s burning,” Lana said.

  “Yeah,” Duck sighed. “Downtown.”

  Driving slowly now, he followed the road as it snaked around another patch of forest and became a straightaway that went on for at least another mile. They drew closer and closer to the smoke, until finally they saw flames and a spinning blue light through the trees.

  As they reached the boarded up, decayed buildings that had once constituted the midway, they could see that just beyond the distant boardwalk lay Main Street. All but one of the buildings sat dark. The general store was on fire, the flames lapping from every opening in the structure and sending clouds of dark smoke up into the air. Even at a distance, they could feel the heat. Earlier, the rain would’ve stopped such a fire, but now the drizzle did little to combat the growing flames.

  A police cruiser was parked in the middle of Main Street, the hood popped open and the rooftop light spinning, bathing everything in blue as it swept round and round in continuous motion. The only other vehicles on the street were disabled, smoking or both.

  They drove across the midway and mangled road until they reached the boardwalk, then followed it to the edge of Main Street. By the time they reached the road, the car had slowed to a wary creep.

  A lone man stood a few feet from the police cruiser, looking disoriented. His uniform was wrinkled, torn and filthy, spattered with blood and dirt, and blood from a large gash on his balding head had leaked, trickled down across his face and dried there.

  “Christ,” Duck said, pulling over, “it’s Wendell Hopps, the chief of police.”

  He jumped out of the car and was still a few yards away when Hopps said, “Can you—do you know—can you help me?”

  “Wendell, what the hell happened?”

  The cop stared at him awkwardly, the blue light and reflection of orange flames cascading along his troubled face.

  “Wendell, it’s me, Duck.”

  He nodded but still didn’t seem to recognize him. “I can’t…I can’t find my gun.” He motioned to the empty holster on his hip. “I…I had it but I can’t…can you help me find it?”

  Duck looked past him, taking in as much of the street as he could. But for them, the area looked deserted. At the far end of the street, a man had hanged himself from the roof of the hardware store, his body swaying gently in the wind and dangling in front of the blown out front window. It’s perfect, he thought, a plan seemingly flawless in its design. Born within them, evil, like the parasite it is, had fed on their minds, hearts and souls since the dawn of time. Once turned loose, to destroy this disease of evil they had to destroy themselves, thereby granting the darkness what it had intended all along. An ideal apocalypse from which there was no escape, and all the while, as people watched the skies, studied ancient scrolls and tried to guess when, how and from where the evil that would eventually bring about Armageddon might attack, the entire time it had been hiding within them, biding its time. He swallowed the lump in his throat.

  The others slowly emerged from the car.

  “Where is everyone?” Duck asked.

  “Everybody’s gone crazy,” he said, brow knit and eyes glazed. “Some
run off, some are dead and some are hiding but they…they won’t let me hide with them ‘cause they said I was talking too much. I just—I’m only trying to find my gun. I’m the chief of police, you know.”

  “The radio,” Duck said mostly to himself as he ran to the police car.

  “Why hasn’t anyone come?” Lennox asked the chief.

  “I’m supposed to…law enforcement officers should never surrender their weapons under any circumstance, says so right in the book. I’m gonna be in a lot of trouble.”

  Realizing talking to Hopps was useless, she turned to the others. “Why isn’t there any help? Where’s the National Guard or whatever? I mean, isn’t somebody supposed to—”

  “I had it before,” Hopps interrupted, staring at her with a blank expression. “I had it before. It was right here in my holster.”

  She nodded wearily. Whatever had happened to this man in the night had destroyed him. Perhaps the head wound had damaged his brain, or perhaps he’d witnessed things much like they had—maybe worse—things his mind could not withstand, and he’d simply imploded under the stress of it all. “It’s OK,” she told him. “We’ll find it later.”

  Duck returned from the cruiser, nervously looking back every few steps. “Radio’s destroyed. The battery’s still working the lights but otherwise it’s a mess, car’s not even drivable.”

  “We have to find the other people. He said they’re hiding.” Lennox took hold of the chief’s wrist, the way one would with a distracted child. “Chief, where are the others? You said they were hiding, can you tell us where?”