Black Water

by Jon Fore

  Still, she collected what she could of her things and continued. Subconsciously, she pulled out a cigarette and lit it before she even realized that she smoked. It would not have mattered if she did or not; the cigarette tasted good and brought calm to her nerves. She drew deeply again, had a sudden urge for Scotch, and continued on her way around the corner of the building.

  The parking lot was empty. Not a single car was there, not even in ruin. What she found were six empty spots and a fifteen-foot tall chain link fence, bluish gray fog oozing through the diamond shaped holes. Far in the distance, she heard what she was sure was a single gunshot, and her nerves began to fray once more. She returned to the street, made another right, and continued into the deepening fog. Shannon hoped there was a gun store nearby, some place where she could pick up a weapon or something to protect herself; she had suddenly resolved not to become a victim again.

  The fog was wet, cold, and heavy and allowed for only a few yards of visibility. It put her on edge even more, and she drew deeply on the cigarette again. No matter how hard she thought on it, she could not reason how she came to be in a place like this, in a situation like this. The only sign of life she had encountered was a gun shot from far off, a sign of not only life but the dealing of death as well.

  In only a few shops, she found a sporting goods store with rifles visible on the back wall. She stepped over the broken glass and around the heavy camouflage coats. The counter had been smashed, but it still held a number of handguns. They were large and unyielding and Shannon had no idea what it was she was looking for. She knew it had to be small enough to fit her hand but have a big enough bullet; this was something her brother had taught her after her first break-in.

  Her brother, she could almost remember his face, but the image eluded her. She could remember his voice, soft and drawn into a Southern twang. Aggravation began to rise in her again, and she wrestled it back down. She found a gun that fit her hand; according to the black plastic case, it was a Glock model 27, .40 S&W. She had no idea what all this meant, but the gun was small enough to fit her hand and the barrel was large enough to fit her index finger.

  She found a clip and shoved it into her pocket and sought out the ammunition. The store seemed over-stocked with .40 S&W boxes, so she picked up one and dumped it into her pants pocket. It was a lot of weight, so she dumped another in the other pocket to even it out. She then used a third box to fill both clips and struggled for some time before being able to draw the slide back and bring a round into the chamber. Now she was ready.

  Shannon stepped through the door and paused a moment. She had no idea which direction to go, completely unfamiliar with a town she knew she lived in. It was unsettling to say the least. She raged against the curtain in her mind, struggled to push it out of the way. Finally, she turned right, giving the fight over as lost. She continued down the street in slow fashion, unsure what was about to come screaming out of the fog and fearing it.

  The sidewalk had begun to crumble in many places, giving way to the rapid aging affecting the entire town. She slowed even further to keep from falling over the refuse. With all the want of being free of this town but forced to go slow, anxiousness and urgency began to build in her alongside the irritation of not knowing herself.

  “Hey! You, miss?” a voice called from the edge of the fog.

  A man in a long coat came into view, and Shannon stopped, more out of fear than interest.

  “Miss, are you alright?” the man asked as he started to approach her in a nervous, quick manor.

  “Stop!” Shannon shouted.

  The man slowed to an even pace. “What? Are you hurt or something? Did you hear the news?”

  The man seemed in control of himself, not a raving lunatic like those from the night before. His question about the news interested her, but still she was nervous as all get out. “What news? Can’t you tell me from there?”

  “No, but its wonderful news. But first, are you hurt?”

  “Uh, no, not too bad. What’s the news?” She found the grip of the pistol in her jacket pocket and pointed it in his direction without pulling it free.

  “Well, I tell ya, it is great news!” He stopped just in front of her looking like a computer nerd gone crazed weekend flasher. “He is coming! Are you ready for him?”

  “Who is ‘him’?”

  “Captain Black!” he shouted happily.

  “Who is Captain Black? Is he a police officer?”

  “No, silly, he is quite like Santa. He brings presents to all the good children!”

  Shannon felt a chill run down her spine.

  “Have you been a bad girl?”

  “Mister, I think it’s time you leave,” Shannon said while taking a step back.

  “You haven’t taken a life yet, have you?”

  “What?” she shouted. “Are you crazy?”

  “No, really! He rewards those that kill for him! Honest!”

  “Get the fuck away from me!” she screamed.

  The man’s face went from joyous rapture to a hurt, sunken look of rejection. “Okay, that’s fine. One more can only help, I guess,” he replied as he drew a long fillet knife from under his long trench coat. “Shame since you’re so pretty and all.”

  “Get the fuck away from me!” she screamed again. Somewhere over her shoulder, she heard someone yelling, which fed the disjointed terror building inside her. The man approached her and she squeezed the first bullet through the first handgun she had ever fired. The explosion was terrible, even inside her pocket, and the man flew backwards a few feet before skidding on his back. The spent casing fell onto her hand and burned her. She jerked her hand from the pocket and shook it up and down.

  The man lay prone on his back. He had been nude under the trench coat; his body covered in shallow lacerations, a crisscrossing pattern of self-abuse, but now with a neat smoking black hole in his upper chest. He had left behind his fillet knife and one shoe, still standing where she had shot him.

  She pulled the gun from her pocket and then the empty casing. She released the magazine and added another round to it before putting it back into the gun. She wanted to make sure she kept the thing loaded until she was out of here. Then she would bury it somewhere so no one could say she killed this man; accuse her of murder even though she was just protecting herself.

  “Hey! Up here!”

  Shannon spun around and saw a man in the window of a large building some many yards away. She raised the gun and pointed it at him, and he ducked immediately. “I had to! He was going to kill me!” she screamed desperately.

  “I know,” came the reply over the edge of the window. “I saw the whole thing. Can you get me out of here? I’m getting hungry and there are no nurses up here.”

  “You’re in a hospital?” she asked after her heart slowed its hammering pace and she gained control of her breath again.

  “Yeah, sort of… Can you come and let me out? The door is locked!”

  “Why are you locked in?” Shannon asked as she approached the building.

  “They thought I was crazy, but then they tore their own town apart.” The man peeked over the sill again.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No, I know what I saw, and it’s the same thing that’s going on around here. They just didn’t know about it. I tried to tell them, and they locked me in here.”

  “You know what’s going on then?”

  “Not exactly, but I think my friends and I started it. Come let me out, please?”

  “What are you going to do if I let you out?”

  “Get the flaming fuck out of this town, that’s what! Please?” he pleaded.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ethan.”

  “Alright, Ethan, I’ll come up—but I will have some questions for you before I let you out.”

  “That’s fine. Do you have any food with you?”

  “We will worry about that after I get you out. Here I come…”

  “Hey, what’s your name?�
�

  “Shannon.”

  “Nice to meet you, Shannon, and thank you!”

  She walked along the side of the building searching for the entrance to the hospital. She was not sure who this guy was, but if he had any answers to what was going on, maybe he knew who she was, maybe he could help her remember. At a minimum, she could talk to him from a safe distance.

  Chapter 23

  Shannon found the entrance of the hospital, which was now shattered and broken, blood dried along the glass. Bodies littered the entry way, torn and battered during their flight. A stench began to rise from them, mixing with the air of decay and the faint smell of something sweet and rancid burning somewhere distant. Shannon decided that somewhere close by were the very gates of Hell.

  The remains of a young nurse, no more than twenty, lay across the pressure switch of the large automatic doors, holding them open. The girl was clearly raped much like Shannon, but beyond that, she was dismembered and laid open across her mid-section, lengths of her intestines draped across her naked body like some ornament. Shannon shuddered and gritted her teeth, fighting back the sudden urge to wretch the nothing she had eaten. It had become clear to her that last night could have seen herself much like this young nurse, and she wondered if she were going insane.

  Shannon worked her way around the nurse and entered the lobby of the upscale hospital, which now was a scene of soulless violence. Many corpses lay scattered about, all cut neatly into pieces, each piece placed in a pattern around the host corpse. The entrails of most draped along the walls like some hellish semblance of art, and dried blood sat frozen in mid drip, forming patterns of gore on the walls and the reception desk.

  Shannon came to a short stop, shocked with the brutality and violence, the utter disregard for life or even the sanctity of a corpse. Every fiber of her being urged her to leave, to run from this place, this abomination of a hospital, and get as far away as she could. Deep inside her, in the hollow places not hidden by the thick velvety blanket, she knew that leaving Ethan up there, locked in his room, was just as much killing him as she had the nerd in the street.

  The power had not been lost, so the unbroken florescent lamps illuminated the horror around her as she picked her footing slowly. After some time, she finally navigated the fleshy gambit and entered the darkened hall just beyond reception. It was as though the scene displayed out there was intent on keeping people out of the hospital, like a warding of some sort, a gruesome standard that warned against trespass. Nevertheless, she was through and quickly left it behind.

  The hospital had suffered the same aging dilapidation as the streets, landscaping, and façade outside. The tiled floor was filthy and debris-strewn, the walls stained and mold-grown, and the drop ceiling threatening to come down in more places than it already had. Through the center of the passage traveled many long and bloody streaks, as though someone dragged corpses through to the reception area. Shannon took the Glock from her pocket and let it hang at her side.

  Ethan was on the second floor, and Shannon hoped it was just above her. She found a single utilitarian elevator in a small recess, the kind large enough to accommodate a wheeled gurney. She pushed the call button and felt the floor tremble slightly as the car went into motion. From deep inside the large building, she could hear the aged cables and pulleys screeching their protest. The sound was ominous and painfully loud. If the decorator of the lobby was still in the building, then now it certainly knew she was here as well.

  The elevator car came to rest with a long, sighing hiss, and the doors parted. On the far side of the car, doors came open as well, revealing not only another passage but also an apparition of a hellish nightmare her mind was incapable of inventing. A large, overweight woman was standing some yards down the passage but staring right at Shannon. It was mostly nude, its nurse’s uniform torn almost completely away. What made it so horrible to see was that its skin had gone an ashy gray, and all over its body in random places, it had stitched severed limbs to herself, as if to add many arms and hands and other more revolting things to the nurse’s ample frame. Not even these displaced parts were the same sickly gray of the host, simply the bluish tinge of anatomy gone empty of blood.

  In each of its real hands, it held tightly large surgical knives—not scalpels but long toothy bone saws. Its face was a twisted semblance of rage, each crevice or crease stitched into place with black nylon by a sloppy hand. Its mouth, the lips pulled back with rows of wide stitches, opened horribly, and it screamed rage at Shannon, a deep-seeded rage and blind contempt for the living.

  Shannon screamed back.

  The thing began to shamble towards her, the limbs stitched about bouncing and slapping lifelessly along her ruined body. Shannon screamed again, raised the gun, and started firing. If she had thought better of it, she would have run, but the heart-squeezing terror had been impossible to think through, and her inner voice shouted at her to destroy this wrongness, to rid the world of such a bald evil.

  Her aim was sloppy and confused by the powerful bucking of the handgun. Her arm flailed up with each shot, jolting the bones in her hand, arm, shoulder, and neck. Nevertheless, she gave no ground to the thing’s advance nor did she stop firing. Soon the creature was too close to miss, and its body began to tear as each round passed through it. The flesh pierced in the front and then exploded out the back, but it did not slow the monstrosity.

  When it entered the elevator, Shannon realized her thinking was flawed, that the thing had her now and there was no fleeing it. Before the thing swung the wicked serrated knife, there was a twang, and the elevator suddenly dropped, fell rapidly, and crashed into the basement floor. From far below, Shannon heard the thing scream, the rage now impossible to believe. She did not wait, but leapt over the now vacant elevator shaft and went to the stairwell to the right.

  Her breath was rushing in and out at an unreasonable pace, and her heart hammered against the inside of her chest; it is one thing to see people gone mad, but something entirely different to see them brutally changed into an insidious monster. There was no chemical in the air, no infection like airborne rabies; it was an evil thing happening here, a biblically evil thing that she did not understand or know how to handle. She had to get to Ethan and find out what was going on.

  She ran up the gritty stairs and ripped open the door to the second floor. The passage was much like the one below but for the bodies instead of just streaks of blood. They were clearly dead but not ravaged like those downstairs. It scared Shannon to realize how wholesome it seemed that these corpses were still complete. Shannon began to wonder if perhaps she had gone mad and was just spending some time here in a mental ward.

  She turned right and realized this was in fact a mental ward. The small windowed doors to almost every room stood open and were now broken or hanging crooked, all smeared with blood and bits of flesh. In some of the doors were what appeared to be patients, half in, half out of their cells, all lying lifeless and brutalized in bloody orange coveralls.

  Shannon replaced the clip in her gun, unsure how many shots she had left and not wanting to run dry. She then began to walk slowly down the passage, leading with the gun, peering into each room before passing. The hall was long and as dark as the one below, the stench of blood and warm meat hanging thick in the air. A soft humming and occasional crack came from the florescent lights above as they fought to come on completely, forcing the passage into a maddening flicker from gore and human refuse to almost complete darkness.

  At the far end of the passage, toward the outside wall, there stood a single door among many. This door, however, did not seem infected with the blight of the rest of the building. It was still clean and sterile, the light above the threshold still burned steadily, and the floor and ceiling were clean and without the stain of fungi. It seemed as if the Holy Grail was contained within, and the evil consuming the town could not approach. This seemed so completely odd to Shannon, enough to make her loath to approach it and see what the room actually hel
d. That was until a face filled the small window and looked down the hall towards her.

  She knew at once it was Ethan and she rushed to the door.

  “Shannon! Thank God! I heard shooting; was that you?”

  “Yeah. Back away from the door!”

  “Can’t you just open it? What happened to your eye?”

  She raised the gun and pointed it at him through the wire-filled glass. “Back up!” she screamed.

  “Alright, don’t shoot!” Ethan hollered as he stumbled quickly back from the door.

  Shannon inched the door open slowly until she could see the young man completely. She kept the gun trained on him, “Why aren’t you dead like the others?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever happened out there stopped at my door. Can you lower the gun? I won’t hurt you,” he assured her, his hands held empty before him.

  Shannon looked all around the small room, looking for any sign he may have an improvised weapon or something stranger. “Take off the coveralls,” she said flatly, seriously.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Take off your clothes!” Shannon screamed. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on around here, but I need to know you don’t have a weapon.”

  “I don’t have anything under these…” Ethan began.

  “Take them off now or I am leaving!” she threatened.

  “Alright, relax. Here.” He unzipped the front and let them drop to his hips. “See? Nothing!”

  “Drop them all the way!”

  “I don’t… Fine.” He dropped them to the floor and shrugged his shoulders at her.

  “Turn around.”

  Ethan did as he was told, if not a bit quickly. “Okay?”

  “Yeah, fine. You can get dressed. Nice birth mark by the way.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” he replied dryly as he zipped the front of his coveralls. “Did you bring food?”

  Shannon let the gun drop to her side. “No, and you’ll be glad I didn’t when we get out of here.”

  “Oh, why? Never mind, let’s just go. Are you alone?”