Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “Maybe,” Tom broke in, “if this was some Bible-belt town or outback in the south, people would’ve sat on the street corners and spewed forth crap about the end times and repenting. But it’s New Jersey. You think you’ve seen it all when you live in New Jersey. But I don’t think anyone in Thrall was really ready for what happened. We didn’t have Bible-toters. We had perverts with a much darker system of beliefs doing God-awful things in the streets. But the blood washed them all away in one night....”

  Hearing it out loud, hearing another person confirm it, made Jesse queasy. There had been blood. It really had happened, then. “I tried to go back once, about three years ago,” he said softly. “To get Mia, to maybe convince her a second time around to get out with me. It happened to be the same night as the blood on Main Street. I told you about that. Talk about a real gooz-fuck there.”

  Jesse picked at some dirt beneath a chewed fingernail, unable to look at either of his friends. “I never went in. I couldn’t. My feet just wouldn’t take me there.” From the outskirts of town, Jesse had watched the blood rise up through the pavement like sweat from pores and collect until it was thick and deep and black as ink. Then, the dam had burst somewhere in Hell, and the blood surged forward with a loud roar, splattering mailboxes and cars as it rushed down toward the square. “It came up out of the ground, like a wound opening up in the earth, and...it was a tidal wave of blood, Nadia.”

  “Oh, Jesse, that’s sickening.” It was the first Nadia had spoken in a while. “That’s just plain awful.” Tears welled up in her eyes, then spilled, one at a time, down her cheeks in a faint watercolor streak of mascara. “I...I really don’t know what to say. I thought...maybe these were just nightmares. Or, I dunno, urban legends or bad acid trips or Jesus, God, Jesse, I didn’t—didn’t realize....”

  She stalked away from him, over near Tom. “I just wanted to be close to you, Jesse, to share something important with you, especially when it seemed you needed me. I thought maybe...I don’t know. But damn.” She laughed, trying to sound bitter, but succeeded only in sounding scared. “You pack me up and bring me along for the horrorfest weekend.”

  “I’m sorry, Nadia,” Jesse said after a time, his voice quiet. “I told you what I could remember. I can remember more now, being back here, more than I ever did in Ohio, but I swear I told you what I could remember. What I dreamed about. And I would have told you all the rest of it, if for no other reason than to keep you from looking at me the way you are now. But you have to believe I really didn’t know what this place had become. I don’t know what else to say, but I’m sorry.”

  “It’s never been easy with you, has it? Your girl that got away story, your bad childhood memories.” She seemed to be able to taste the bitterness in her own words. “No wonder you never let anyone get close to you. At least, no one outside of this place.”

  Tom tossed the magazine lightly on the rack, clearing his throat. “Uh, listen guys, I think we ought to give this place a going-over, make sure it’s secure for the night. Raw’ll be rolling in any minute, and I want to make sure nothing in it gets in here.” He took Nadia’s arms with a gentle kind of insistence and looked her square in the eye, and the look on her face softened. “Nadia, you probably have a good eye for this—we need food, supplies. Comforts of home, you know?” He smiled warmly at her. “Would you please do me a favor and give this place a once-through for anything we can eat, use, or take with us? I’m sure there isn’t much left here, but if you could find bandages, Twinkies, aspirin—they stay good forever. Canned food, maybe. Bottles of water, if there are any. That sort of thing.”

  She nodded, as if starting from a daydream. “Sure, sure, Tom.” Nadia shot Jesse a cold look that he pretended not to see. “Whatever you need.” She tiptoed around splintered shelves and Formica debris and the overturned, dusty remains of rotted cardboard packaging.

  More dark, ugly stains spotted the floor. When Nadia landed an unsuspecting shoe into one, it stuck fast to the sole and cracked when she drew her foot away. She cried out.

  “You okay?” Tom asked, and acknowledging her grateful nod with one of his own, turned to Jesse. “Wanna help me secure the place?”

  “Sure. Is there a back door?”

  “In the storeroom. And the bathroom has a window. I’m most worried about the front window here and the doors, but we should start with securing the back, I think. No surprises, right?”

  The guys headed toward the back room. Overturned cardboard boxes and a splintered broom, as well as some cracked blue and red plastic crates, littered the floor. Tom pulled a bell on a long string from his pocket, his eyes surfing over the contents of the room. He spied packing tape in the corner and scooped it up, then taped the string three-fourths of the way down across the door frame so that the bell hung from the middle of the taut string. Jesse’s friend grinned up at him. “Even the little fast ones fall for this. Works every time. They aren’t smart enough to go under or over it.”

  They made their way to the bathroom, and Tom produced another bell and string from his pocket, alarming the window in the same way.

  “Got one of those for the front of the store?” Jesse joked. “Maybe a barbed-wire one with a four points alarm?”

  “Nothing’s protecting that front door, man, but me and you.”

  The thought of nothing but his fists and Tom’s shotgun between him and whatever slithered, crawled, flew, or thumped outside didn’t sit well with Jesse, but he said nothing. They crossed the door and a figure loomed up in the shadows. Jesse flinched as Nadia, a pensive expression on her face, backed off a step.

  “Sorry, guys. Didn’t mean to scare you.” Behind Nadia, several packages of Twinkies, Beef Jerky, and cans of Campbells and Hearty-Man soups were stacked neatly against the wall. Next to them, three backpacks lay deflated on the floor. “I found backpacks under some old coats behind the counter. I guess someone left them here.”

  “Yeah, I did, the other day,” Tom answered. “Glad you found them. I was going to tell you they were there.”

  She chewed her lip, now devoid of gloss, and glanced at Jesse. “Um, Tom? Is there anyone else left here? I mean, is it possible that people could still be living here, without your having seen them in all this time? Normal, healthy people?”

  Something dark and a little frightening passed over Tom’s features then, and a sudden jab of unpleasant surprise found Jesse’s gut. But it passed, and in the next moment, Jesse couldn’t be sure he’d seen any change at all.

  “Yeah, it’s possible. Most people keep to themselves now, if they want to survive. You can’t really trust anyone anymore. I see people from time to time. Like I said, though, maybe it’s the air or whatever, but this town makes you see funny things in their faces sometimes. And think some crazy shit, even if you don’t want to. Makes you second-guess whether banding together with anyone is really a good idea.” He sidled past her to the counter and felt beneath it. His hand caught on something and he smiled, drawing out from beneath the Formica a .45mm pistol. He handed it to Jesse, who frowned, but took it anyway.

  “Like I said, after Jesse left, the town really got into people’s bones. Wasn’t just the Raw that took people out. Neighbors shooting nosy neighbors, bullies murdered by those they used to pick on. Remember little old Mrs. Piccato, Jesse? Drugged her thirty-five cats, lined them up and used them as speed bumps. Just about anyone could be a loose cannon, and well, even family became people you couldn’t vouch for....” His voice trailed off, then after a moment, picked up with a new thought. “It was like some big balloon had been expanding over the town, getting bigger and bigger until one night it exploded and all the bad stuff that was inflating it rained down on us. The shit hit the fan when Main Street flooded. Things happened that you’d never believe unless you saw them. Most of the people who were still living in Thrall tried to get out that night. I don’t think many made it, if any at all.”

  “Why?”

  “Raw rolled in fast and heavy. Things swimming a
round in it took down people right and left. I couldn’t see anything but that pinkish-red everywhere, but I knew those people weren’t gonna make it. The crying was so loud—surround-sound screaming. I remember thinking, ‘They were right, about the creatures in the Raw. They were right, oh God, they were right.’ I never heard people scream like that before. What was left of them got carried out with the Raw to wherever it goes when it leaves here.” He glanced at Jesse. “I guess the rest of us, whatever ‘us’ is left, are still here.”

  “How awful,” Nadia whispered.

  Tom turned and headed toward the door. “Some kept running blindly into the woods and got lost—but whatever was in the woods was just as bad as what was in the Raw.”

  Jesse’s eyes found Main Street outside the window, running north beyond a patch of land across from the 7-11. Burnt-out ruins of a pet store and a bank on that land across the street blocked out most of it. Deadlands, Jesse thought, but it was a deceptive idea. He’d felt something as they’d walked along Main Street, a pulsing, humming vein in the town pumping its toxic lifeblood into every vessel, every artery.

  Main Street, which had once been a river of blood, a carotid fit to bursting. The thick woods far beyond seemed to tighten their stranglehold on Thrall with an oppressive solidity. Gavin Hardley knew that, he thought.

  “What about you?” Nadia asked Tom. “Didn’t you ever try to leave?”

  Tom leaned into a shelf to push it in front of the sliding doors, and grunted. “Yeah. Yeah, I did. But there’s only so many times you can feel like a damned fool running around in the Raw at the very edge of town just to somehow end up smack-dab in the middle of Main Street again. And every time I take a chance on leaving, my chances of not being alone out there increase, too. I’m on borrowed time as it is.”

  Several moments passed in silence before Nadia spoke again. “But there may be others who stayed behind? Other normal people?”

  “I’m here,” Tom said. Nadia gave a tiny nod, to which he shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you about anyone else, though. I think ever since the blood on Main Street, no one born here has ever been able to leave. But don’t hold me to that. Years here do a number on anybody, but this place affects everyone differently.” His words were hollow, empty somehow of conviction, as if he didn’t believe what he said. Still, it seemed good enough for Nadia.

  ***

  The night passed in a relative crawl. Tom took the first shift as lookout, propped up against the counter with the shotgun resting over his tented knees. The dull thumping against the glass, and the occasional squawk from the depths of a muted darkness increasingly clotted with red streams, wreaked havoc on Jesse’s attempts at sleep. He awoke long before Tom clapped his shoulder for the changing of the shifts. Reluctantly, Jesse took the shotgun from his friend and handed him the pistol.

  Nadia moaned in her sleep and turned over on her jacket, which she had laid out underneath her. Her skirt was hiked high up on her thigh, and Tom cast him a quick, meaningful glance and playful smile before crossing his arms over his chest and sliding to the floor with his back against the counter.

  Jesse’s gaze turned back to the window. He sought to make out shapes in the haze pressing against the glass, but he caught little more than periodic movement. Whether it was the wind blowing wisps of the Raw outside or the traffic of alien bodies swimming around the parking lot, though, Jesse couldn’t say.

  Some half-formed instinct for self-preservation backed him slowly away from the glass. For several long seconds he watched the swirling of the pale reddish tendrils with a feeling of vague safety and triumph, as if some part of him dared those tendrils to just try and reach inside....

  It was then that Mia’s face thumped against the glass.

  Jesse shot up from his slouch against the wall. Her lips had smashed into flat and distorted strips of pink. They moved just barely as if she exerted great effort to speak. With a hollow kind of sadness, her eyes bore down on him.

  No, that’s not quite right, Jesse realized. Not her eyes. Her eye sockets. Empty sockets whose dark interiors swallowed up everything inside her. Good Lord, where are her eyes?

  He squinted through the gloomy interior of the convenience store at the waif-like form. Could it really be her? It was much thinner than Mia had been—a bone frame with skin stretched tight like a drum over all of it. But the face, the basic shape of the face....

  Jesse took a few tentative steps toward the door before the Raw swirled around the figure’s head. It lurched back a bit and the Raw swallowed it up entirely.

  “Tom?” Jesse whispered into the darkness.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Tom mumbled in his sleep. “Let her sleep. I’ll take next shift.”

  Jesse said nothing more until his turn was up.

  FOUR

  Morning skipped orange and gray light over the tops of the shelves. The Raw had cleared. For a moment, Jesse thought that Thrall looked normal, like any other town in the early hours, waiting for life to pick up where it left off. But the backpacks, now full, lay against the door as a solid reminder of life in Thrall. Life without plumbing or heating or regular food. Life without any sense of safety or security or normalcy. Jesse could almost see the outline of the .45mm beneath the canvas of his backpack. The reality of what he’d done—of where he was—gnawed at his gut. The sooner he found Mia, the sooner he could leave.

  Yet undefined doubt lingered in his mind, a nagging fear that if Tom couldn’t get out in all this time, maybe Mia and Caitlyn wouldn’t be able to, either. Maybe none of them would.

  Tom had no sooner grabbed a magazine off the rack and closed the door to the bathroom before Nadia sat down and stretched out alongside Jesse on the floor by the door. “So...how do you know Tom?”

  She was trying to look casual but she was fishing for information. He’d seen this before.

  “Tom? He’s one of my oldest friends. We grew up together.”

  “Well, I think he’s cute. Got a sort of Brad Pitt thing happening there.”

  “I figured you might think so.”

  “Why?” A manicured fingernail found its way to her lips. She had a habit of soft-chewing her nails that never really did any damage.

  “Because girls have always liked Tom.”

  “Girls like you, too, you know.” Nadia sounded soft, almost wistful.

  Jesse turned to meet her gaze. “Yeah, I suppose I do.”

  A pause. “Did Tom know Mia?”

  Jesse nodded. “He introduced her to me, actually. She was a friend of a friend of his. He said he saw her and knew I’d be crazy about her. And he was right.”

  He’d fallen in love with Mia the first time he’d seen her. She was so lovely, and had an innocent kind of charm, like the purity of princesses in fairy tales. Everything about her seemed to him so delicate—her small fingers and tiny little nose, slim waist and slender legs. She was very shy, and he remembered that the first time she had turned away, blushing, under his heavy, almost dumbfounded gaze. But when her big blue eyes with their soft brush of lashes met his again, he felt the attraction returned. She had a way, he remembered, of tilting her head so that her hair brushed forward over her shoulder like a shimmering gold-threaded curtain, framing her face. She did that when she wanted to talk him into something—or out of something. And her smile had been contagious. He found himself grinning like a fool around her, nuzzling her freckled cheeks and pecking those soft pink lips....

  “Hi, Jesse Coaglan. It’s nice to meet you.” Mia’s voice had been gentle back then, unburdened by the progressive horrors of their town. A twinge of pain caught him in the chest at the memory. God, he missed her.

  “Sounds like Tom knew you pretty well.” The hint of jealousy in Nadia’s voice brought him from his thoughts. Her gaze was resting on her lap now, so he turned to look out the window at the row of apartment buildings on Main Street.

  “Yeah, I suppose he did. Tom was always a good—” The rest of the sentence died in his mouth and shriveled to a lump that was
hard to swallow.

  Something was wrong—very wrong.

  The desolate expanse of sidewalk across the street left him a relatively unobstructed view of Main Street. It hadn’t been desolate last night.

  On the far side of North Main, slumping forms of brick and concrete pulled shadows to themselves and hid in the gloom behind a chain link fence. Jesse frowned. It was wrong, definitely wrong. There were no apartments on that section of Main Street outside the window last night, either.

  “Oh shit,” he muttered. “Oh shit. Tom! I think you better come see this.”

  “What?” Nadia’s gaze followed his across the street.

  Behind them, Tom’s magazine hit the ground with a heavy thwap! “Oh my God. What the...where the hell did they come from?” His voice sounded breathless.

  “What? Will someone tell me please what is going on here? Where did what come from?”

  “The Archammer Apartments. The ones that belong on Wheeler Road.” Tom whistled, coming up alongside Jesse to stare out the window. “What the hell happened to Main Street?”

  Nadia frowned. “Another weird quirk of the town?”

  Tom shook his head slowly. “No...no, not this. I’ve never seen it do that before. It’s like...it’s like something moved Wheeler Road and pasted it over Main.”

  The three exchanged silent looks. Tom grabbed the shotgun and slung it onto his back. Jesse and Nadia rose slowly, and they all took up a backpack and made their way to the door and out into the parking lot. Amazed, they wandered across the street, past where the pet shop had been and onto Main Street. For a long time, they stared in silence at the spectacle in front of them, taking the whole sight in and trying to find some mental compartment in which to process and file it.