by Tim Curran
Hardy ignored her. “Sure did, missy. Pissed outta the sky red as blood. Poisoned wells and rivers and killed twenty people. That was nineteen-fifty-two.”
“Ahhhhhh…forty-nine that was,” Knucker said, not looking up from her crossword.
“Fifty-two.”
“Forty-nine!”
“Fifty-two, you stupid old bat! I should know! That was the fall my kid brother got electrocuted up on the roof.”
“Ahhhhhh…your brother lives in Sauk City.”
Tommy laughed. “Goddamn Hardy. What a guy. Red Rain, my ass.”
Hubb looked over at college girl. “What’re you fucking standing there for, sweet cheeks? We got cocksucking people here! Chop! Chop!”
Back on went the oxygen mask.
Tommy shook his head. “That silver-tongued devil. He just has a way with the ladies.” He laughed and turned back to Mitch. “Least that radio’s off the air. You been hearing what Brother John’s been saying?”
“Yeah, I heard all right.”
“Last night it was build your own ark and today it was something about the rain falling and the dead rising. How you like that shit?”
Mitch said he didn’t like it at all.
But what he was thinking about was Lily. How was she going to be handling this? Christ, she wasn’t holding herself up these days with much more than a wet straw and with no radio and no TV, phones down, she might just lose it completely.
“I should be getting back home,” he said.
“Sure,” Tommy said. “Don’t want to be leaving your family, not with all this shit happening. Especially Lily, you know.”
Mitch was going to leave, but he didn’t. He wasn’t exactly sure why. His wife was probably needing him and if Chrissy had come home, there was every possibility they would start fighting. Chrissy was a good kid—smart, witty, and oddly urbane for a fifteen-year old—but she was still a teenager. And if God had ever created a more self-serving, sassy, and selfish tribe than teenagers, Mitch didn’t want to know about them. Lily wasn’t up to putting on the gloves and knocking Chrissy down to size the way she needed from time to time. Not these days. And Chrissy? Well, her teenage drive of self-pity and vanity had amped up to full power these days and it was very hard for her to sympathize with her mother sometimes, particularly when she had trouble seeing anything not reflected in her hand mirror.
So, Mitch should have left and made ready to play referee, but he didn’t. He stood there, almost wishing Tommy would volunteer to come home with him.
“It’s that goddamn Army base, that’s what it is!” somebody said. “That’s what this is all about!”
Tommy and Mitch turned, both saw the woman doing the talking. She was maybe forty, her hair dyed so blonde it was white and set in a spiky ‘do like summer grass baked dead and dry. She had to go in at an easy two-hundred but had decided to squeeze herself into a cherry-red skintight set of Capri’s and matching sleeveless terrycloth blouse. An outfit like that might have looked spectacular on the college girl behind the counter, but on this one the profile was that of an over-nourished gourd.
Tommy, ever the mature adult, started giggling soon as he saw her. “Ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.”
Her face was going about as red as her outfit as she stabbed the air with one straining, pudgy finger. “The government’s behind it all! That explosion with the nuke or the poison gas out there at Providence! You think they want word of that getting out? You think they want you people here telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there about these funny rains? Course they don’t! That’s why they’re locking us in here!”
Tommy laughed at her. “Jesus Christ, lady, that was three days ago! You think they’re just getting around to clamping down on us?”
“Who asked you?” she said to him, jabbing the air in front of his face with that finger. Her face was flushed almost purple now, sweat beading her brow. “Why don’t you just stay the hell out of it?”
Tommy laughed again.
“Guess she told you,” Mitch said.
“Guess so. Fucking Hot Tamale.”
Another doomsayer, just what the goddamned city needed, Mitch thought.
But people were ringing around her, their common sense telling them to laugh it off, but something else telling them to listen, that this woman had something important to say. People maybe claimed to despise suffering and atrocity, but they loved things like that, Mitch knew. If it disgusted them or frightened them or disturbed them, well, dammit, that was a pie they wanted a piece of and they intended on cutting into it for seconds, thank you very much. It was the same sort of thing that made children ring around some older kid as they described in graphic detail the maggots in that dead dog’s head at the side of the road or what their sister’s hamster had smelled like after they dug it up a week after it was dead.
“They’re loving this shit,” Tommy said.
And they were.
They had suckered their mouths to the soft white underbelly of dread and were feeding on it, on the horror and dark prophesy that crazy fat bitch was slinging like grisly leftovers.
Tommy shook his head. “I had a cousin like that. Linda. Everything was death and doom with her. She’d get worked up about any old thing. She had a gas pain in her stomach, she thought it was cancer. A plane flew too low, it was crashing. She smelled smoke, her house was on fire.”
“What happened to her?”
Tommy shrugged. “She got leukemia, I think. But then a plane crashed into her house and she burned up with it.”
Mitch just shook his head.
“The phone’s won’t work,” Hot Tamale said, “because they’re not supposed to work! Can’t any of you see that? This goddamn valley is full of death and the Army don’t want us leaking it! So you know what they’re doing? They’re shooting stuff into the air, signals and vibrations that screw-up your TV and radio and phone signals, they’re, they’re—”
“Jamming frequencies?” someone suggested.
“—that’s it! That’s it exactly! Jamming our frequencies so we’re cut off while all that crap they sprayed in the air or blew up settles down on us and makes us all sick! If you’re smart, you’ll go to your families and get out while you can! Because by tonight, there’ll be no way out! Nothing to do but wait here to die! Do you hear me? Wait here to die!”
She made a mad rush for the front door, leaving a heady and slightly nauseating wake of strawberry perfume. Three or four others followed her. The others just sort of stood around foolishly, feeling silly, and dispersing gradually like an offensive odor.
Tommy said, “Jamming our frequencies, my white ass.”
He made a big show of looking around on the floor.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mitch asked him.
“You smell that perfume? Christ my eyes are watering and my nuts have shriveled up. Just checking the floor to see if she left a puddle.”
They both laughed, but there was something almost nervous about that laughter. Tommy was looking a little tense like maybe he would have felt a lot better right now if he had just drilled Hot Tamale right in the face and been done with it.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Mitch said.
And that’s what they were about to do when they heard the sound of squealing rubber and somebody screamed and a Dodge Intrepid came vaulting the curb, knocking the front end of Mitch’s Jeep aside and slamming right through the front of the store.
And then all hell broke lose.
6
Some distance from Crandon, in the flooded and smelling byways of River Town, the corpse of Meg Sheeves had been adrift for almost two days. What had come into her house that night, a dripping and faceless thing freshly exhumed from a watery grave at Hillside Cemetery, had been quite merciful, all things considered. There were many things it could have done to her as she began to scream her mind away in a shriek of black noise. Many horrible things. But what it did, it did almost instinctively, and this just to silence her
. It placed a single moldering and oozing hand over her mouth and held it there until she stopped moving. Until there was only the slushy sound of its own breathing and rain striking the windows.
Meg, quite dead, sat there in bed, her blue eyes wide and panicked and lifeless. And what had been growing in her womb these eight months died with her.
Then, for no other reason than sheer amusement, Meg’s corpse was tossed out the window and into the water. Where it had been drifting ever since. Bathed in the peculiar amniotic waters that had taken River Town and were even then spilling into the city at large. Fish had been at her, as had other nameless things, and most of the flesh been stripped away from her back and throat. Birds had pecked her face down to a grisly deathmask.
And although she was very much dead and would not reawaken, her corpse began to move. It shuddered in the water, shook itself like a wet dog, and then went still again. She floated spreadeagle, her mauled face, breasts, and swollen belly like separate islands breaking the surface. The largest of these islands began to shake, began to pulse with almost rhythmic undulations as something wriggled its way out of her birth canal. Threads of tissue and slime coagulated in the water like egg whites and then something hairless and pale emerged. Water and blood glistened atop its bulbous head. It opened its gray, cloudy eyes. Shaking and gasping, it coughed out a flux of liquid and jelly and pulled itself atop its mother’s corpse like some fleshy and puckered monkey.
Then without further ado, drool hanging from its seamed mouth, it began to feed.
7
“Well, fuck me,” Tommy said.
The Intrepid had buried itself into the front of Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus like a torpedo spearing into a submarine. The store was, after all, nothing but a sheet metal Quonset held together with screws and rust that shook in the wind so it wasn’t surprising that the car slammed right through it. Right up to the driver’s side door as a matter of fact, taking out the front entrance, flattening a display of rubber rafts and sending a couple mannequins in fly fishing gear pretty much airborne.
Mitch was one of the first to the car, followed by Tommy and a dozen others, all talking at the same time, all asking what the hell had happened here. What was going on? This guy drunk or on drugs?
“Probably crack,” said the guy in the yellow baseball cap, the one who’d announced that the TV and phones were out.
The guy behind the wheel was a kid of sixteen or seventeen with a pierced eyebrow and a Social Distortion T-shirt on. The Intrepid had barely stopped rolling before he was trying to kick his door open. But it was wedged in a snarl of mangled sheet metal. There was rolled insulation hanging all over the roof of the car like the Quonset had vomited it out in its death throes.
“Somebody get a goddamn crowbar over here!” Mitch called out.
The kid was trapped in the car, blood all over his face and necklaced at his throat. He was just out of his mind, kicking at both doors and pounding at the windows, leaving bloody fist-prints on the glass.
“Take it easy, son,” Tommy told him. “We’ll get you out.”
The others gathered were talking about calling the police and 911 until someone reminded them that the phones were all dead.
“I got a CB in my pickup,” a guy with a beard and a ponytail said. He made for the back exit.
A crowbar appeared and by then the kid behind the wheel had settled down a bit. He was just sitting there with a glazed look in his eyes, staring forlornly ahead. Tommy kept talking to him as Mitch bent the sheet metal back. You could say a lot of things about Tommy Kastle, Mitch figured, and most of them would have been true. But when somebody was hurt or needed help? He was always there, not a smart comment or salty crack to be heard. That’s the kind of man Tommy Kastle was.
“Oh my God,” said Mindy, the college girl, her bosom heaving. “Oh my God, oh my God…what happened to him?”
“Ahhhhhh…I’m guessing he ain’t having his monthly, honey,” Knucker cracked and there were a few nervous chuckles.
It went right over her head and Mitch was figuring most things probably did. She looked like a sweet kid—honestly concerned about the driver of the Intrepid—but most there had already drawn the conclusion that this girl wasn’t much sharper than your average dessert spoon. Someone else told her to get out of the way, called her Malibu Barbie, and she told them her name wasn’t Barbie at all, it was Mindy.
Mitch worked with the bar, bending back the sheet metal which groaned and snapped. The wind started pushing a wet mist through the aperture the car had created. All around him, the crowd that had gathered was pulling back, some leaving altogether and there was a good reason for that: Hubb Sadler was on his way over.
“What kind of cock-knocking clusterfuck is this?” he wanted to know, suddenly very spry for an old man dependent upon oxygen. He came over with the aid of his cane, his face red and popping with gnarly-looking purple veins that made his white hair look almost luminous. “Holy H. Jesus Christ! Lookit the front of my cocksucking store! Who in the diddly-hopping, mother-raping Christ is going to pay for this fucking mess?”
He looked pretty much like he was about to suffer the same malady that put his hot-headed brother in the ground. He kept swearing and spitting and wheezing, using every form of the word “fuck” he could think of. And when the old well ran dry, he started making up new ones.
“Take it easy for chrissake, Hubb,” Tommy told him.
Hubb turned on him, slapping a pair of helping hands out of the way. “You shut your cock-fucking mouth, you know what’s good for you. Ain’t this my mother-cocking store? Ain’t I got a fuck-sucking right to wonder whose gonna pay for this mother-cunting damage?”
Mitch just ignored him. He was figuring not much save a towel shoved in Hubb’s mouth would shut him up. That or a good old-fashioned coronary. He kept ranting and gesticulating and wanting to know what kind of dick-shitting driver this slit-cocking kid behind the wheel was anyway.
Mitch was wondering a few things himself as he freed the door.
There was a whole heaping helping of blood on the kid and Mitch was thinking it wasn’t from the impact with his Jeep or barreling through the front of the store. Sure, the Intrepid’s front-end was smashed pretty good, the gold paintjob scratched and gouged up from the sharp sheet metal, but that was about the only damage. Something had happened to the kid and he was thinking it wasn’t from the crash. And whatever it was, it hadn’t been good.
Mitch finally got the door open and the kid pretty much fell into his arms. He half-carried and half-dragged him into the store, laid him out on the floor. What people remained finally got the picture. They brought over a sleeping bag and wrapped the kid in it.
“Hey!” Hubb cried out, more veins popping on his brow. “Who’s going to pay for this cunt-fucking merchandise?”
The kid was breathing real hard. His mouth kept opening and shutting like a fish gasping for air. His eyes were wide and unfocused. He was drooling and shaking and weird spasms ran right through him from time to time like he was getting irregular jolts of electricity.
There was a siren whining out in the distance and somebody said help was on the way, but it seemed to be getting no closer. A few seconds after it first shrilled, five or six gunshots rang out. It sounded like they came from only a few streets over.
“What in the hell’s going on out there?” somebody said.
“Christ…are we under attack?” Yellow Baseball hat asked.
Tommy looked over at him, said, “Shut the hell up already.”
The kid was coming around now. Mindy had brought a first aid kit and Hubb wasn’t happy about that either, because those cunting bandages cost money. Mitch used alcohol wipes to clean up some of the blood, then a hot washcloth Mindy also provided. She was on her knees next to the kid, an arm around his shoulders. He was still shaking, but he wasn’t having the fits anymore.
Mitch got most of the blood off his face and discovered that there were scratches that began at the kid’s
forehead and were scraped right down his cheeks. If he didn’t know better, Mitch would have thought a human hand had caused them. Four scratches that had thankfully missed his eyes.
Sure, he thought, like some maniac with sharp fingernails had tried to peel his face off.
The kid shuddered, looked at Mitch and then at Tommy. He swallowed and shook his head, looked over at Mindy and then at Hubb, Yellow Baseball Cap, and the three or four others gathered around. “We…we were over near River Town, me and my mom…we were over there,” he started saying, eyes going real wide and lips hooking in a sneer. “Our place, man, it was flooded out…but not real deep…me and mom, we waded down there to get some things. Water was up past our hips and…and they came out of the water! I saw them, I tell you I saw them! They came right out of the fucking water! Three of ‘em, just came right out of the fucking water, stinking and muddy and they took mom! They just grabbed her! They were smiling! They…they didn’t have any faces…they didn’t have any fucking eyes!”
He started crying and Mindy held him, held his face tight against her chest and Mitch was figuring there were more than a few jealous men standing there. He kept sobbing and shuddering and nobody was saying much. What the hell could they say? Somebody came out of the water, he said. Three of ‘em. Three people and they didn’t have faces, didn’t even have any eyes.
“Kid’s fucking overwrought, that’s what,” Hubb said. “No faces…what kind of campfire fuck-wongling is that? Jesus and his ugly sister, what the fuck is that?”
Tommy looked at Mitch and they held each other’s gaze a moment. Something might have passed between them, but neither really wanted to acknowledge that or what they were thinking.
When the kid had calmed, Tommy said, “Those people, they scratch you like that?”
The kid started panicking again and it took Tommy, Mitch, and Mindy to keep him sitting down. He told them in a high, whining falsetto that those things had come out of the water. And he emphasized things, made sure they realized he wasn’t talking people here. Those things came out of the water and just took his mom. She screamed and they pulled her under. The kid fought, got scratched, and then two more came after him. He barely got into his car and away before they got him.