by Tim Curran
And now they had it.
They were coming up the stairs. Yes, very slowly and maybe even painfully, dragging their feet from one step up to the next. When they pressed those feet down they made a squishing sound and water ran from them.
Oh yes, closer…and closer still.
Yes, they knew where she was and the trod of those feet was quicker now. Meg could smell her uninvited guest. He or she or it smelled of night and rank earth, rotting things pressed in oblong boxes, cocooned in black soil and rancid silk. Something that had lain in a pool of drainage from a backed-up pipe.
Meg knew she could not scream.
But neither could she move or do anything else. She could only wait as everything inside her withered away and tears rolled silently from her eyes and she held her swollen belly in her hands, praying and praying.
The door began to open.
In the lantern light, she saw a hand grip the edge of the door, spidery fingers slip around it. Gray water ran from them. The hand was white and puffy, the flesh almost transparent and set with a tracery of livid purple veins.
Then a voice, waterlogged and full of slime: “Looks like I got a live one.”
Meg started to scream and she could not seem to stop. At least until that grim form towered over her, dripping foul water, and a terribly moist and flabby hand was pressed over her mouth.
FLOATERS
1
The rain was falling and the dead were rising.
At least, that’s what the crazy bastard on the radio was saying. The guy was calling himself Brother John and inviting everyone to make “offerings of flesh and blood to the Holy Father”…though never saying exactly who that was. Maybe God and maybe the Devil and maybe Dr. Suess for all anyone really knew. People were complaining about old Brother John, but he was broadcasting on a pirate station at odd hours and the FCC were having trouble tracking him. Particularly since his station seemed to be a mobile one.
But what the hell? The city was losing its mind and Brother John was just another symptom.
Sighing, Mitch reached over and parted the shade, got a good look at the streets of Witcham.
Yes, even at midday the world was gray and misty. The rain was still falling, water sluicing along the curbs and filling the gutters, carrying leaves and sticks and garbage down to the iron-toothed mouths of stormdrains, which themselves had backed up now, creating lagoons of whirlpooling water and clotted debris.
The rain was falling and the dead were rising.
Jesus, of all things to say.
Well, he was half-right, Mitch decided, pulling off his cup of coffee and going back to his paper. The rain certainly was still falling and according to the Weather Channel, it wasn’t about to stop. For nearly a week it had been coming down like piss from a leaky pipe and from what they were saying, it would go on until the end of the week. Already, parts of Witcham were underwater…or nearly…and what was another seventy-two hours of this deluge going to bring?
“Mitch.”
He started, spilled a few drops of coffee in his crotch and swung around. Lily was standing there. Her red hair, always so fiery and brilliant, looked like old coals barely holding their heat. Her face was pinched from sleep and her green eyes no longer sparkled. The luster was gone from them, worn away by time and tribulation. But that was Lily these days, a reflection of the beauty she’d once been, but just a reflection. It had been that way ever since—
“Mitch,” she said again. “Did you hear that? Did you hear what that guy on the radio said?”
He pretended he hadn’t. Pretended he didn’t know that Lily had been listening to the radio in the other room just as she had been pretty much since the rain began. Listening to that especially irritating Jesus freak prophesying doom and gloom.
“No,” Mitch said, “what did that nut say now?”
Lily blinked her eyes rapidly. “He said…he said the rain is falling and the dead are rising. Why would he say that, Mitch? Why would he say something like that?”
“Because he’s about three plates short of a picnic, honey.”
“I don’t like it.”
She had enough going on in her head, she didn’t need that idiot making things worse for her. Mitch only wished he could get his hands on that sonofabitch. He would’ve kicked his ass on general principles.
“Shut the radio off,” he told her. “Or switch stations. Christ.”
“But what he said—”
“I don’t give a shit what he said. Last night he was talking about the righteous building a fucking ark for chrissake. You want me to get some two-by-fours and plywood, start making one?”
“But, Mitch…Mitch, Chrissy’s out there,” Lily said very slowly. “She’s out there in that…that rain.”
Mitch swallowed.
Chrissy was fifteen. She could handle herself. These were the things he wanted to say to Lily, but didn’t dare. He was almost afraid of how she might respond. Well, she’s not your daughter, is she? She’s mine and I worry. I can’t help it, I worry. Lily might have said something like that. Now and then she could still get up the gumption to be hateful, to be cruel, but when she did, Mitch knew, you had to grin and bear it. All those anti-depressants the docs had her on, they were doing funny things to her head. Mostly, she was withdrawn and glassy-eyed, but now and then she’d have mood swings so severe they were almost scary. You’d want to call the priest before her head started spinning and she puked up the green stuff. Almost like all those drugs were bottling up everything inside her, all the things you should be letting out when you were grieving. And now and again, they got out, all right. And when they did, cover your head and hope for the best.
Jesus Christ, Mitch, he thought, she lost her twin sister two weeks ago. There’s a connection between twins you can’t begin to know. It’s pulled the rug out from under her and shit down her throat. Be patient, just be patient. She’ll come back. Sooner or later, Lily will come back to you.
Sure, and that’s all he really wanted. Way he was feeling, the rains could wash Witcham right off the goddamned map if Lily would just get her feet under her again. Lily before her sister’s death was full of piss and vinegar. That red hair burned hot right down to its roots. She was a very passionate, energetic woman who took no shit from anyone. Now she was quiet, almost submissive, all that hot blood sucked right out of her and replaced with something tepid and watery. Mitch wanted the old Lily back, needed her back. He would have given his left nut and most of his right to have her suddenly snap out of it, to see those green eyes blazing and her mouth set sharp. Jesus H. Christ, Mitch, look at this place, will you? I drop the ball for a few weeks and you throw in the towel? Get off your dead ass and give me a hand cleaning this place up. You’re not in the Navy anymore and you’re not out on the boats, so let’s snap to it.
Mitch looked at her, wanting to tell her things, but he didn’t. Lily was gone and this frightened, shivering thing had taken its place.
One look in those eyes of hers pretty much stripped your gears. Lily was afraid of everything these days and if you looked in her eyes or listened to her long enough, that fear, that rampant paranoia, could almost be infectious. Yeah, certain parts of the city were flooding, just as certain parts of the Midwest were, but Chrissy was a sharp kid. She’d be fine. Maybe Chrissy was his stepdaughter, but he loved her like she was blood. And nobody could dispute that.
Mitch sighed. “You want me to go looking for her?”
Lily hugged herself, opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Then she sighed. “Yes…no…I don’t know, do you think you should?”
“Sure, why not. She take her cell?”
“Yes, but she’s not answering.”
“Don’t worry about that. Lot of the city is out of service now. We’ll probably be next, way this storm is going.”
Chrissy had taken off early that morning with a couple friends of hers, Heather Sale and Lisa Bell. They were going sightseeing around the city, seeing if the lo
w-lying areas really had water up to their windows like people were saying.
“Mitch, it’s just, you know, the things people are saying…all those stories. I start thinking those things and I can’t seem to stop.”
Sure, all those goddamned rumors and that idiot on the radio was the black icing on a very ugly cake.
Mitch stood up, pulled on his rain slicker. “Don’t worry, Lily. I’ll find her.”
2
The rumors.
Well, they were flying hot and heavy, of course, and the conspiracy theories were rife. The facts of the matter were that an unprecedented storm system was sweeping over the Midwest and the main rivers—the Ohio and the Mississippi—were swollen and bursting their banks. Not that any of this was much of a surprise, for so many smaller waterways emptied into them. In Wisconsin, you had the Fox and Wolf Rivers, the Menominee and the big old Wisconsin herself. All of which either drained into the Mississippi or the Great Lakes and all of which were either past flood stage or quickly approaching it.
A little closer to home—Witcham, that was—you had the Black River which had already overflowed its banks and attempts by the Army Corps of Engineers to suppress those turbulent waters with sandbags and dike systems were only partially successful. The Black was flooding and Witcham just happened to lie in the Black River Valley. About five miles outside of town, the Black had been dammed to form the Black Lake reservoir which powered a hydroelectric dam run by Wisconsin Electric which in turn supplied not only the city and outlying areas with power, but cities as far south as Madison and Eau Claire. In an area where the average rainfall was roughly 28 or 29 inches, some sixty inches had fallen in the past four days and the Black Lake reservoir was near to cresting. Even diverting water into the elaborate series of nearby spillways had only lessened the danger minutely. Back in the old days before the dam was built in 1934, Witcham, which lay in the Black River floodplain, was swamped regularly from heavy springs rains and snowmelt. Particularly, River Town and Bethany, both which sat roughly dead center of the city on opposite sides of the river itself.
And now those days had come again.
Just two nights ago, a huge section of the cement wall that contained the Black River had utterly collapsed, sending a huge wave of water into River Town that had washed away houses and Hillside Cemetery to boot. That was ugly business. Some thirty people were missing over there. Drowned, sunk in the mud, who really knew? But the real unpleasant part of that was that when Hillside went, some three hundred graves were swept into the city…along with what they contained.
And that was bad. Just horrible.
But it was none of these things that fed the rumors cycling through the city like cold germs making the rounds. It was something else. On the opposite side of the valley, tucked away in a heavily-forested hollow, was the Fort Providence Army Reservation. It had housed a cavalry battalion in World War I, been transformed into a POW camp for captured German soldiers in WWII, passed to the Army National Guard in the 1960’s, and then around ’78 or ’79 been absorbed into the Army Medical Command and became a high-security installation that the Army claimed was involved in “advanced battlefield medical research.” To locals that meant everything from germ warfare to genetic engineering to alien autopsies, depending on who you asked and how much they’d had to drink. No one really knew what went on there. You couldn’t get with a quarter mile of the fence without MPs all over you.
The third day of the rains there had been a tremendous explosion at the base. The boom was heard and felt in nearby Witcham where it was said the impact actually knocked people out of their chairs and birds right out of the sky, if you could believe that. Mitch’s Barron’s next door neighbor—a pensioner and all-round fussy prick named Arland Mattson—claimed that the explosion felt like God himself had picked up the valley and shook it out like a dusty rug. But Mattson did have the gift of exaggeration.
Mitch himself had felt it roll right through his house and rattle his windows. But he wasn’t about to give the explosion more than that.
The Army claimed a fuel tank had exploded out at the base and there was no need for concern, as it was being handled by the base fire brigade. The blaze was under control within an hour, end of story. The explosion made the local and state news, was even briefly mentioned on CNN.
Right after the explosion, Mitch stepped outside in the pouring rain like everyone else and even in the gray haze of the storm he had seen an odd yellow-green cloud hanging over the direction of Providence. Some people said it sparkled like wet quartz, though Mitch had not seen that. The rain had dissipated it almost immediately. But one thing was for sure, an acrid and sulfurous stink had blown through the town for hours afterward. And Mitch had told Lily that it had not smelled like fuel oil, but the world’s largest rotten egg fart.
And here, then, the rumors and wild tales got their footing.
The explosion was not from a fuel oil tank, but a mishandled tactical nuke and that yellow-green cloud had been a mushroom cloud seething with radioactive fallout. When mention was made of that awful stink, the story changed. It wasn’t a nuke, but a tank of lethal weapons-grade chemical agents that had gone up, maybe phosgene or chlorine gas. And that really got people going in Witcham. They claimed to see rains coming down that were either red or luminously yellow directly after the explosion. Mitch hadn’t seen any of that either, but he had noticed a peculiar almost ochre tint to the sky for several hours afterward.
The night following the explosion, Mitch tramped out to the alley through the spreading puddles with a couple bags of garbage and Arland Mattson had been standing in his garage.
“C’mere, Mitch,” he said. “Got something you’re gonna wanna see.”
He was standing there in hip waders and a red-and-black checked hunting coat, an old green cap with ear flaps on his narrow head making him look like a yak herder. Sitting on the concrete slab around him were dozens of mason jars full of water. Mitch was figuring he didn’t want to know anything about it, because since his wife’s death, Arland had gone from being casually annoying to a full-blown eccentric.
“You see what I got here? In all these goddamn jars?”
Mitch swallowed, shaking rain off himself, hoping it wasn’t urine. “No…what do you got?”
“Water,” Arland said. “Goddamn rainwater what fell from the sky.”
“Oh,” Mitch said, not wanting to follow that particular thread because Arland was the world’s oldest conspiracy theorist. He said there were holes in the ozone because NASA kept shooting rockets through it and that the neighborhood cats ritually broke into his locked garage and pissed all over the tires of his Buick Century just to spite him. Mitch never did ask him how those pussycats handled the lockpicks.
Arland was proud of his jars of rainwater. “Full of contaminates, Mitch. Stuff from those secret experiments at that goddamned Army base. See, I got it from a reliable source that the Army is using Witcham as a guinea pig, spraying us down with chemical warfare stuff to see what happens to us.”
Arland wouldn’t say who his reliable source was. He only pressed a finger to his lips so Mitch would know it was all strictly hush-hush and that you never knew who might be listening. Arland said that a tank of that goo had exploded and that was why it was raining so much. Mitch didn’t bother pointing out to him that it had been raining for like three days before the explosion.
“They been working that goddamned shit into our water drop by drop, spraying us down with it. That explosion was an accident, you know, but it plays right into my hands. Now the air is saturated with that shit and it’s coming down in the rain. I’m going to take these jars to a guy I know, then we’re gonna sue the goddamn government.”
Mitch believed that part because Arland was always trying to sue somebody. He’d tried to sue Mitch twice. Once because Mitch’s leaves were blowing into his yard and another time because the limb of the big oak out front was overhanging his yard and dropping acorns all over his freshly-cut lawn.
<
br /> “No sense in running away,” Arland said. “We’re all contaminated now. Every one of us.” He proceeded to open his shirt and expose his sunken, white-haired chest which was set with a half-dozen blotchy looking sores. “See them? That’s contamination. At night…at night, them bumps, they move. And when I took a shit this morning, I saw things crawling in my turds. They were like…hey, where the hell you going, Mitch?”
But Mitch was already vaulting through his yard, the rain finding him and drenching him. Arland called out to him that it wasn’t too late to get in on the class-action suit, but Mitch decided he’d pass.
So, those were a sampling of the rumors making the rounds. Some weren’t that crazy and others were considerably more so, but in general they formed the absurd folkloric tapestry of the city as the rain continued to fall and fall.
3
Mitch toured the city in his Jeep Cherokee, taking in the wreckage.
The wreckage of his hometown which was considerable.
Witcham was a mill town of about 80,000 people, a good chunk of those not there for the industry but because of the campus of North-Central U downtown. It was split into some five neighborhoodsEast Genessee, Crandon, Elmwood Hills, Bethany, and River Town. The latter two which occupied the lowest tracts of land abutting the river and were now flooded. Mitch lived over in Crandon, about four or five blocks from the house he’d grown up in. Crandon was up high, but given that the entire city lay in the Black River Valley, it was probably only a matter of time before even the high ground was underwater.
He went from neighborhood to neighborhood, the rain coming down so hard at times he had to pull over. Even when it wasn’t hammering down, it still fell in sheets of gray mist. A lot of streets were now blocked off by orange-striped sawhorses with attendant flashing battery lights and even old flickering smudgepots in some locations. And these streets invariably led down into the lower lying areas of the city where the standing water came right up to the tops of porches and sometimes even windows, the roofs of cars and cabs of abandoned trucks poking from the murky pools which were clotted with leaves and branches and all manner of debris.