Black Water

by Jon Fore

  The woman leaned over him a bit and fired again, this time into Mr. Roy’s chest. The shot sent blood, bone, and sidewalk in every direction. The woman then calmly knelt down and removed Mr. Roy’s scalp with a large knife. She lifted her shirt, under which she wore nothing but a thick leather belt and a number of other bloody scalps tucked underneath it like some horrible fur skirt.

  Kayla had become so scared now she could not think straight. She ran to the back of the store, looking for a place to hide. The first thing she found was a large green dumpster with a cartoon rendering of a frog. She climbed in quickly and hid herself beneath rancid, sweating garbage and wept until she slept, slept until the sky began to lighten into a gloomy gray day.

  Chapter 21

  Stan had always been a loner. He had a deep seeded hatred of people in general. They were always out for themselves, never interested in each other’s problems. Every day, on the news, he could see the proof of this, the evil of man, and wanted no part of it. He worked his job down at the post office, sorting mail for the some thirteen hundred citizens of the town of Black Water, and then spent his time alone, at home, preparing for the end of humanity, something he knew was coming, forced on those like him by the endlessly greedy masses. Now it was actually happening.

  His house, offset from the small town and some distance into the woods, was fortified in many ways. The walls had been reinforced with a surrounding of boles and the floor lowered somewhat to give him ducking space when the bullets started flying. Below the house was a rather complex network of tunnels, doors, and rooms. He had stocked them full of food and water, and even a small well if his supplies began to run low. This network he reinforced with metal plating and pillars capable of withstanding the house’s collapse if it ever came to that—at least he hoped.

  It was coming on nine o’clock when he realized the faint popping sounds he heard were actually gunshots. Someone down in the town had begun shooting, and this seemed to set off a chain reaction. By then, it sounded like a war zone filled with rifle and small arms fire from just about every corner. Even with all of his preparations, it still surprised him when it happened, and it took him a moment to remember what it was he was suppose to do.

  Now he sat behind his barricade, the front door opened to the world gone mad, waiting for people to fill the mantrap he had configured. Normally, he would have just locked himself in the shelter, but he had to know what was going on. The TV still worked, and some channels were on the air, but the only local news channel was unmanned. He had watched this for near an hour, the empty anchor’s desk, the complete lack of movement or sound before giving up. Even the radio stations were silent, save one. It droned on some best-of talk show rehashing quirky little jibes to callers’ beliefs in government or politics, all some weeks old.

  It did not really matter to Stan now; the end had come. The shooting continued below, and occasional explosions or some such thing punctuated the gunfire. The town was tearing itself apart, and everyone seemed to have forgotten good ole Stan-the-man Clark, the gun crazed nut in his cabin in the woods. From the Meade telescope he had fixed to his roof, he could see on the monitor that a number of fires were burning, not exactly out of control, but unchallenged by the stark red flashing lights of the missing volunteer fire trucks.

  Occasionally, in the soft glow of his laptop computer, the telescope revealed people in the streets, running this way and that, policed by no one. There were bodies, too, scattered about: some smashed by cars or beaten almost flat with cudgels, others burning or dismembered with hatchet or knife. Disgust rose in Stan’s throat as bile, and to his surprise, he found it mildly difficult to fight an urge to go and help, to try to bring the tattered remains of those still sane together and muster some form of defense or response. Still, all of them had made their fun of him and his hermit lifestyle. He decided they could all just rot in Hell.

  He turned to his portable shortwave radio and began tuning through different frequencies. He hit on a number of different conversations and paused at each. The happenings here in Black Water appeared to be only happening in Black Water. None of the ham radio operators talked about it and the topics they did discuss where mundane and nerdy at best. This had to be a localized situation, but Stan reasoned that Black Water could be ground zero for a global event. It would be best if he just holed up here, protected himself, and waited it out. The shooting down there had to stop at some point.

  The police and fire scanner had gone quiet some time ago. The last thing he heard was dispatch screaming to a patrol officer about Bill going crazy or something. It did not surprise Stan. Everyone knew Billy was a bit off kilter; not quit right in the head. It was bound to happen. Stan was surprised they even let him drive the big snowplow; the guy was so utterly stupid. However, in this crazy world, everyone seemed to have a place, even the borderline retarded. Stan was certain someone somewhere was benefiting from the dullard’s labor, probably that rotund mother of his. Someone had to feed that thing.

  A sound came from the woods beyond the open door. Something large had entered the forest or come down from the mountain. It was most likely a white tailed buck looking for love, or even a bear seeking out the happenings below. Stan gripped the mounted AK-47 and trained it towards the mantrap. If it, whatever it was, happened in, it would not get far. As he readied himself, his scanner began to crackle softly, distantly, as if his squelch was set wrong and the volume was much too low.

  The scanner eventually gave up on the signal and moved forward through the channels again. It paused for a second on dead air, and Stan picked it up to read the dial. It was the police band. Someone had opened their microphone and was saying nothing. Stan began to feel a dread pour over him, perhaps someone was playing with the radio of a dead cop, maybe a child.

  “Is anyone there?” a voice whispered over the radio. It was strained and whispered but clearly masculine. Then the voice snickered lightly, “Anyone? Can anyone hear me?”

  Movement sounded just near the door, and Stan put the radio down to return to his vigilance on the rifle. Something was about to enter the mantrap, and he needed to be ready.

  “Stan!” the radio barked, and he almost squeezed off a round. He looked down at the radio in disbelief; it had stopped on Channel 000000.

  “That’s impossible,” he said softly as something entered the mantrap. Stan leaned into the rifle and took aim on the shape before he realized what it was he was looking at. Before him stood Mildred Pierce, owner and sole employee of the Dainty Dots Day Care Center. She was nude but for a number of tiny corpses, hung from tiny hangmen’s nooses tied around her own throat. Her face had become bloated and purple, her tongue protruding, black in the low light. Her body violated many times by bullets, which shattered some of the tiny corpses as well. With all of the wounds, no blood spilled from the holes; she looked to have completely bled out.

  The creature shambled forward, navigating the mantrap in a stilted clumsy manor, her child-corpse clothing swaying around her like strands of beads. Stan, prepared for people to destroy themselves, most likely in a very violent way, was not ready for Mrs. Pierce’s entrance. She loved children dearly and usually bored people with her stories and impromptu lectures on child rearing. To have even thought of her with a dead child was near blasphemous. She turned the first corner of the mantrap.

  “Hi, Stan…” the voice hissed over the radio. “We have come to collect you…” This last part was in the voices of many children, distant and sad but gravely determined.

  Stan suddenly wondered if he had gone crazy, and if so, would the courts forgive him the killing of Mrs. Pierce? He fired the rifle.

  The bullet entered Mrs. Pierce in the chest and performed its acrobatic tumble before exiting in an explosion of bloodless flesh. Mrs. Pierce stumbled a bit but soon continued, so he fired again. This time he struck her in the belly, where the bullet pulverized her spine and jutted fragments of the white structure through the air. Mrs. Pierce stopped as the weight of the tiny cor
pses hung from her neck eased the top part of her body sickeningly backwards, allowing the tiny bodies to strike the floor. Now Mrs. Pierce was looking behind her, and her legs bent in determination to reach him. She started walking again, dragging the meat tied around her neck, her pasty gray legs trembling with the strain.

  “You mother-hating bastard!” the children’s voices screeched over the radio in a hellish chorus.

  Stan fired again, the bile in his throat reaching his mouth, the urge to vomit almost too much to aim. The round struck Mrs. Pierce in the hip, shattering that bone and collapsing the legs together. It stopped again and wobbled before falling to the ground.

  “You killed us! You shit fucker!” the children screamed. “Now we have to go… Captain Black gets to takes us…” The voices began to sob and scream over the impossible channel locked on by the scanner.

  Stan switched the radio off quickly and began to gag. Some twenty bodies now littered his porch, one of them still jerking and digging with its heels. This is not how he pictured it—men with guns trying to force him to give up or mindless, drug-crazed thieves shooting everyone and taking whatever they liked—not a nurturing mother-figure adorned in the hung corpses of her students coming to “collect” him.

  Sounds came from the outside again, the sound of many things moving in many different directions. The gunfire was becoming louder and more distinct. Stan could almost guess the caliber of each weapon used, if it was a rifle or a handgun, and knew the battle lines were drawing closer. He shoved all of his small portable radios and his laptop in a ditty bag and lowered that down the hatch and into his shelter. He then staffed the AK-47 again, this time slipping the illegally installed switch to the full auto position that was not even marked on the side of the rifle.

  People, one after another, sometimes in pairs, began rushing through the mantrap, all of them armed, some even shooting widely at him in a stark, guttural rage. Stan fired back, mowing them down best as he could, dropping some ten or fifteen before they began to bunch up at the doorway. There, they began to kill each other, clubbing or shooting in their rampage to get into the house.

  What bothered Stan the most was that these were not some form of walking dead, these were living people driven to some madness or rage they could not control. They bled and died on his porch, people he knew, people he had seen before, some he had never met in his lonely job and life style. When he could take the carnage no more, he went through his mental supplies list then dropped himself through the hatch and locked it with the rebar locking arm.

  He sat in the darkness next to his bag and listened to the combat above. Eventually, one of them made it to the AK and began spending the remaining rounds in the clip. Others were trying to open the hatch, pounding on it with rocks, clubs, or whatever in an attempt to reach him. Stan had come to know fear, fear of people instead of his normal hatred of them. They were mad and self destructive, but why so bent on killing him he could not say.

  He dragged the bag into his makeshift datacenter and hooked the laptop up to the telescope cables. He began panning around the town, looking for some sign of hope or end to whatever was happening. What he saw was dilapidated buildings, some just burnt out shells, others weathered and aged in the glow of the streetlights. It was as if the town stood abandoned for many years and was now the place of ghosts and legends. All along the streets drifted a mist of deep gray; heavy smoke from the fires he was sure.

  He looked down at the scanner again and after considering it for some time, clicked it on. It began racing through the preprogrammed channels again, searching for a signal stronger than the white noise. He watched it go through the sequence over and again before stretching out on the wall mounted rack.

  All of his precautions and preparations had proven effective enough to keep him alive. He was now safe from the dangerous intent of the people above and could sustain himself for many months. He was used to being alone, and the solitude would not get to him; he had a large collection of movies and books and other distractions.

  “You're not alone, Stan,” the radio whispered. “We can wait for you, wait until you decide to come out and join us.” The voice was barely more than static shaped in some unnatural way. In the background was the sound of droning machinery and grating metal.

  “Leave me alone!” Stan screamed unreasonably at the radio.

  The machine noise hissed and hummed in the background for some time. “We can wait for a long time…” the voice promised.

  Stanly switched the radio off and returned to his bed, defeated. He curled up like a fetus, and feeling utterly alone, began to weep his end.

  Chapter 22

  She eased up, her eyes fixed on the thickly overcast sky. The length of her body ached with pain, the pain of assault and rape. It had started with the screeching, the horrible screeching from Black Water Mountain. The town had gone mad, stark raving mad. People running this way and that, killing and dismembering each other, adult and child alike. She had hoped it was a nightmare, but the raging ache and skin-cracking sting in her crotch told her it was not.

  Her memory was like a velvet curtain, heavy and thick. All she could recall was the repeated rapes, the blood covered men climbing on her as she pretended to be dead. Some murdered as they took her, others just before or after. Bodies lay within an arm’s reach of her, all around her, and her skin stuck to the road by all the dried blood. Past this was a haze of darkness, soft but relentless, that hid from her even her own name.

  During some point of the repeated violations, she had lost consciousness and slipped to a place where their penises could not harm her. It was from there she had come, to find the bodies, to see her own, forced nude and battered in such horrible ways. It was not her fault, she did not ask for this, and so she refused to loath herself because of it.

  She was cold, dangerously cold in the early morning light. She had to seek shelter, find clothing, and get herself warm.

  Tearing herself from the street-wide scab, she stumbled to the closest shop, now a mostly destroyed building. The front window that had once read “Mary’s Fashion Boutique” was now in shards, both inside and outside the store; the doors were now missing, pieces of glass and metal their only remains.

  Inside, the racks and shelves had been overturned and tossed about. Clothing of all types lay scattered everywhere. She grabbed a particularly gaudy plaid coat from the floor and wrapped her nakedness within. Her body shivered against the aches and bruises, and she knew that she had to find more clothing quickly. She found a pair of black button-fly jeans and a tight little t-shirt that quoted, “Don’t expect a gift, I shop for me!” on the front. Atop this, she pulled on a rather woolly sweater with long sleeves and again the plaid coat.

  None of the shoes here were functional for much more than clubbing, but she found some thick tube socks, which she put on in triplicate. She would have to find better footwear, and somewhere in her mind, she knew there was a Coach's Corner store a few shops down where they sold running shoes.

  As she turned, she caught sight of herself in a fragment of a hanging mirror. Her face was bruised on one side from temple to the end of her jaw, and her other eye was swollen almost closed. Under that, she could see at one point she was a pretty woman, slender and petite with curly blond hair…and a squinted, swollen eye and purple cheek. She scrubbed some dried blood from her face with the sleeve of the coat, but still could not recognize the face.

  She could feel the strangeness of not knowing herself pushing emotion to the top of her throat, and she turned away before crying. She had to find shoes, then her car, then a cop or a hospital. Whatever had come down from Black Water Mountain had not killed her, and she did not intend to give it a second chance.

  She found the Coach’s Corner, and it was in much the same condition as the other store. The difference here was the bodies inside. Some seven or eight corpses lay twisted and broken throughout the small shop; they were shot, cleaved, or smashed in some sickening way. Overhead, some football
game played out over a hidden radio as if nothing had gone wrong the night before. She held her stomach as she found shoes and left the shop quickly.

  In the street again, she was shocked at how revolting the town had become. Even in the hazy gray light from the overcast sky, she could tell it had aged decades in a night, rust and corrosion taking its toll on the metal things, while the wooden ones looked weathered and dry. The streets were crowded with broken glass and trash, loose papers and tatters of clothing all amongst the randomly felled corpses.

  From the darkness of her mind, Shakespeare recited, “Something wicked this way comes,” in an author like voice, to which she said, “This way came is more like it.” The sound of her own voice frightened her, broke through the silence of the streets and disturbed the death of it all.

  She allowed her feet to pick a direction; she had to find her car even if she could not recall what it looked like, the make or model or even the color. However, they chose to lead her to the right and around the side of the boutique. As she reached the corner of the building, she found a purse there, splayed across the sidewalk, trampled and blood-spattered.

  She squatted down next to it, and withdrew a dark faux calfskin wallet. Inside, she found a license with her picture on it. The face was pretty, petite, and lacking the damage it bore now. Just underneath her picture was the name Shannon Clemens. The name sparked like an empty lighter, a flash without a flame. Irritation drove a wedge through her; it was infuriating she could not remember who she was.