Hang Wire

by Adam Christopher

  He had to stop, now and again. After freeing children from behind a stuck door, after lifting half a house off an elderly couple (one dead, one alive), he would excuse himself, back off as others moved forward, some slapping him on the back for a job well done and thanks, mister, we can take it from here. Robert would walk backward and close his eyes and breath it in.

  Death. So much death. And it was delicious. It sated a hunger deep inside, one that Robert thought he had expunged years and years ago. He felt like an addict taking a hit of opium long after the habit had been kicked. It was all still in there, somewhere. He was just waiting for it, had been waiting for it forever. And all he had to do was reach out and embrace the dying city, and he could have his fill of death and decay and terror and horror. Oh, what a wonderful, beautiful day it could be, if only he gave in, if only he let the hunger take over.

  Robert blinked as the clouds parted and sun bathed his face. He looked around him, watched the people of the city digging and running, saving lives.

  The moment passed. Robert’s hunger was replaced with disgust, self-loathing, and sadness. He had to focus. The city needed him.

  The fire. He had spent too much time clearing rubble when the greater danger lay ahead. The fire was growing, and to stop it the army was going to dynamite whole streets, creating a network of firebreaks.

  There, the need was greatest.

  Robert dusted his hands on his jeans and continued his journey deeper into the city.

  It was quiet on Van Ness, the broad avenue that circled the western edge of San Francisco’s downtown. The army had cordoned it off, their trucks arranged at one end. Soldiers were busy running cables, while officers in caps studied plans stretched out over a stack of wooden crates. As Robert watched from the shadowed eaves of a still-intact house, he saw the officers point first at the map and then down the street, and then back again. They were agitated, and Robert could sense their fear. And he could sense… something else.

  Something that didn’t belong. Something… moving.

  He peeled out from the shade, keeping close to the buildings as he looked down the avenue. Ahead a few hundred yards, the road was riven in two, a great canyon opened horizontally from one side of the street to the other. The edges of the ravine were curled and blackened, and from within rose smoke, lazy and brown, thick and tangy with something that made Robert’s nostrils twitch. It was chemical, but nothing quite like anything he had ever smelled before.

  And then he saw it. Along the street, radiating out from either side of the canyon, the road undulated. Robert stepped out from the building behind him and braced himself, ready to act quick if the aftershock sent more debris crashing down to the street.

  No aftershock came. The ground was – for the moment – solid, stable, unmoving. But ahead, the street continued to ripple. Robert could see now the movement was in thin, discrete lines, like there was something alive under the paving, its tentacles stretching out and moving the roadway as they stretched and flexed.

  The dynamite trucks started to make more sense. The fire was steadily eating the city, but it didn’t seem to be sweeping in this direction. The dynamite was for something else.

  Robert moved in for a closer look.

  The soldiers, so busy laying fuses for the explosives, were easy to avoid. Robert skirted clusters of them, and soon found himself at the edge of the smoking fissure that bisected the avenue.

  “Help me, please, help me.”

  Robert stopped, and ducked down, trying to locate the voice whilst staying out of sight of the soldiers. This side of the street was rubble, nothing but a few isolated walls showing the outlines of where tall buildings had stood. There could be any number of people trapped here, and with the area cordoned off, it seemed the army was prepared to let them die for the greater good.

  Robert moved away from the canyon and crept along the side of the street, searching for any movement, any sign of life, within the shattered buildings. There was nothing, so he took a chance and tasted for death, that familiar, divine tang on his tongue.

  Nothing. The row was empty, the only dead things near a dog and a horse. Robert stopped, and heard movement behind him. He turned, pinpointing the sound from the split in the middle of the road. Retracing his steps, he moved back to the edge and, keeping low to avoid the soldiers at the far end of the street, looked down into the fissure.

  There was someone in there. Someone had fallen into the crack and couldn’t get out. It was shallow, only six feet deep, but it wasn’t a clean wound in the city’s fabric. Inside the fissure were jagged shelves and black openings, the bottom buried under crumbling, burned earth.

  There was an arm, bare and waving, covered in black ash, reaching out from underneath one of the rocky shelves, the hand scrambling against the crumbling dirt.

  Robert jumped into the trench. It wouldn’t take a moment to pull the rock and dirt away and free the person. He’d bring them back to the soldiers, and then they could search for more survivors. He reached down and grabbed the hand.

  At his touch, the other person wrapped their fingers around Robert’s hand with enough strength to crack bones. Robert pulled back instinctively, hot, sharp pain coursing up his forearm. He stumbled backward. His bare feet slipped in the dirt, and his back collided with the jagged shelf behind. Robert cried out and slid farther, clawing a fistful of carbonized earth with his free hand as he tried to pull himself back up onto the road. He realized the hand that held his own was cold, freezing.

  Another hand grabbed his ankle so hard it felt like his leg was caught in a vice. Robert kicked out blindly with his other foot, and was rewarded when it connected with something soft. The icy grip released his ankle, and Robert tore his broken hand free from the other. Ignoring the pain, he pulled himself over the lip of the fissure. He lay on his chest on the road; ahead, he saw soldiers point in his direction. One of them shouted.

  The voice from the trench came again. It was calm, emotionless.

  “Help me, please, help me.”

  Robert rolled on the road. There, in the trench, a blackened form reached up toward him; the hands grabbed at the air, fingertips straining.

  It was a person, wasn’t it? Someone caught in the earthquake, caught in the fire that clearly scorched the earth here. They were injured – dying. All Robert could see were two wet eyes in a face caked entirely in thick black ash.

  Some of the dirt below crumbled away, and another hand broke the surface, close to the first figure. This hand too was blackened, grasping, the quiet, calm plea for help coming from under the rubble.

  Booted feet pounded the road, getting closer. Robert glanced over his shoulder and saw a group of soldiers running toward him. He looked back along the trench, trying to work out what had happened to these victims of the earthquake. The road had split, parts of the surface collapsing into the trench. There must have been traffic, pedestrians, people out early. They’d been swallowed whole, and then trapped as the road caved in. That may have saved them from the fire, but Robert knew they’d die if he didn’t get them out, and soon.

  Then Robert saw it. A small packet, like meat from a butcher’s shop wrapped in brown paper, wedged into the rock just underneath the opposite lip of the trench. The packet was wrapped in string, which trailed off, horizontal to the street. About half a dozen yards farther along was another brown packet, stuck at the same angle in a crack in the earth. More string, and then farther on, another.

  Robert looked to his left. The pattern continued, all long the trench, from one side of the road to the other.

  Dynamite.

  “Help me, please, help me.”

  The army wasn’t going to blow up the street; they were going to blow up the trench.

  “Help me, please, help me.”

  The road moved beneath Robert, undulating waves out from the crack in the Earth. The wave pushed him up, and then continued down the street, the cracked paving clicking as it was lifted and lowered.

  Something m
oving. Something under the street. The army knew, had seen it, and were going to try to kill it.

  Robert pushed himself to his feet and took one step into the trench, careful of his footing, aware the charred earth could crumble beneath him at any moment. Black hands reached up toward him. He bent over, reached down, and then a black hand was in his. It burned like fire, although it was cold, so very, very cold. The hand pulled him forward with surprising force; then another burst through the black dirt and grabbed his forearm, then another his elbow. Robert toppled head-first into the trench as the black figures – two, three, four – emerged from the ground.

  The gunshots were loud, each leaving Robert’s head ringing like a bell. He felt the heat on his face and was showered with dirt and dust thrown up from the ground as the soldiers fired into the trench. Big hands – hot hands – grabbed both his legs and yanked him backward. Robert hit the road with his chest, the air driven out of his lungs. He rolled onto his back, and squinted into the sun, blinking away the ash and dust and blood from his eyes.

  The soldiers formed a row – five men, rifles raised. They continued to fire into the trench. From where he lay, Robert couldn’t see the carnage within.

  “Stop!” he yelled. “For god’s sake, stop!” But his voice was weak and choked with dust and dirt. The soldiers kept firing. Robert clutched his aching chest and arched his neck, looking back at the trench and the soldiers upside-down.

  A black figure leapt out of the trench – lithe, naked, caked in black ash, long matted hair swinging. A woman, the first victim Robert had tried to pull out of the ground. Either the soldiers had somehow missed their targets at point-blank range, or the bullets were having no effect. The woman leapt onto the front of a solider, and then pulled him backward. The pair toppled into the trench.

  “Retreat!”

  The firing stopped. Robert felt himself lifted by four soldiers, one on each limb. As he was carried back to dynamite trucks, he looked back at the receding trench. More black hands appeared over the lip as the creatures began to pull themselves up.

  The soldiers had seen. As he got nearer to the trucks there was a flurry of movement, orders shouted. Someone cried out that they couldn’t be stopped, that they’d be out soon, all of them, that they would be all over the city by nightfall, that the street had to be blown right now.

  There was a crump, like a gunshot underwater, and the street and the trench disappeared in a cloud of brown dust and red and orange flame.

  Then the shockwave from the explosion hit the trucks, and Robert’s world vanished into darkness.

  WHAT HORROR SLEEPS BEYOND THE KNOWLEDGE OF MEN?

  INDIAN TERRITORY, OKLAHOMA-TO-BE

  APRIL 22, 1889

  Now, this is the story of a young man by the name of Joel, a young man with nothing to lose and everything to gain by traveling west into Indian Territory, where the Unassigned Lands were ready and waiting for those seeking their fortune, for those wanting to start something special, something new.

  Young men like Joel, who had arrayed himself with the multitude assembled in one great line that stretched north to south. A train of wagons and horses, men and women and children, the young and the old, the fit and the infirm alike. The way ahead was free, and at high noon the land run would begin, each settler able to stake a claim on one hundred sixty acres of the finest soil that had once belonged to the native people, but no longer did.

  Those on horses would be first off the mark and they’d get the best of the best, of course. Those in wagons would be slower, but the Unassigned Lands were big and even if there were fifty thousand people standing in the line like the whispers rippling back and forth through the crowd said there were, then there would be plenty to go around. And if you were in a wagon, well, then maybe things were looking better for you already, if you were smart and had that there wagon loaded with the tools and means to improve the land you staked.

  If you were desperate, you could go on foot. You’d be slow, you’d get the scraps, but maybe, just maybe, you’d find your lot and live happily ever after.

  Joel was on foot, and he was desperate, and that was yesterday. Today he watched the sun rise in the east from his camp, nothing more than a makeshift bivouac of blankets over a fallen log. The sun rose into a clear blue sky, the color so deep, so real that if he lay on his back and looked straight up into the apex of the dome above him, the sky was almost black. It filled his vision, and made him feel like he was swimming in an ocean of nothing but color. Joel lay there in the dirt for a spell, staring at the sky until a shining diamond of light struck the edge of his vision as the sun crawled higher, toward the west.

  Toward the future. Joel’s future. This he knew, somehow, like it had been foretold, like it was written in his blood and the blood of his father and in the blood of his father before him.

  Joel hadn’t known his father, not really. His daddy had left to fight in the war back in, oh, must have been ’63 or ’64, marching to Atlanta and never marching home again. But before he’d gone, he’d given Joel something. A coin, a double-eagle. He said it was gold and it sure did shine like it was gold, and his daddy said he wanted Joel to look after it and he’d come back for it.

  He didn’t come back for it, but that was OK. The coin was in Joel’s pocket and when he carried it he knew his daddy was with him, marching by his side. Heading west, toward the future, toward the light.

  Joel packed up his bivouac and rolled his blankets and turned his back to the sun, and marched onwards across the Unassigned Lands.

  By the end of the first day of the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, the dusty Unassigned Lands had become two cities, Oklahoma City and Guthrie. After the sun had set, two newspapers and one bank had already been established, serving those who had carved a future not just for themselves, but for their children, and grandchildren, and so on down the line.

  Joel knew nothing of this. After the first day, as the horses and wagons had raced past him, as men had run past him, he walked onward, due west. He was desperate, he had nothing to lose, but he was patient, and he knew that a patient man was a man whose reward would come, in time.

  The morning of the second day was still, and quiet. Joel felt like the only man in the whole world and maybe that was so, because the only thing he’d heard in the night was someone calling, far away, the voice carried on a dull wind even before Joel was fully awake. He thought of the voice now, and as he walked west, across a dusty plain of dry grass, with not a soul from horizon to horizon, he wondered if maybe his daddy really was there with him, calling out for his son to keep on marching and keep on fighting because a patient man would find his true reward.

  The coin in his waistcoat pocket felt heavy. Joel kept marching and dipped a finger and a thumb into the pocket. He stopped, pulling his hand away, hissing like he’d just been bit.

  Because the day was getting hot already and the blue sky above was an unbroken dome, and the coin in his pocket was cold, cold like the bottom of a blue ocean, the ocean Joel often dreamed of.

  He stopped and kicked the dirt and looked around, but he was alone in the world. He looked down at his waistcoat, his eyes following the line of buttons running down to his belt. His suit was old and black, dusty, a relic from another time, something his daddy left behind when he marched to war. Like the silver gun with the creamy pearl handle that hung from Joel’s waist. Why his daddy hadn’t taken the gun to war with him, Joel didn’t know. He’d found it in the closet, along with the suit and a box of ammunition. He hadn’t fired the gun yet, not even to test it, perhaps afraid that the weapon was too old and would explode in his hand. Maybe that was why it had been left behind. But with the gun on his waist and the coin in his pocket, Joel felt as though his daddy was watching over him.

  Joel gritted his teeth and slid his fingers into the pocket where the fob watch should have been, had he not hocked it somewhere back in Tennessee the previous week, getting just enough money to reach Indian Territory by high noon. The watch was nothing a
nd was worth virtually the same, but it had been just enough. The coin was worth a lot, Joel knew that, even if it wasn’t gold like his daddy told him (but it was, it was). But the coin was his father and his father marched with him, to the west, to the future.

  Joel took the coin between two fingers and pulled it out. It was cold, although not burning cold like it had been moments before. Joel held it up and turned each side in the sun, the embossed bird on each catching the sunlight and shining, shining like the eagle itself was alive.

  And then Joel heard the voice again.

  The cave was deep – less a cave, more a long trench in the otherwise smooth and rolling dusty plain. It started as nothing more than a crack to catch the foolhardy traveler (although, Joel knew, if they were walking in his footsteps across this particular part of the godforsaken Unclaimed Lands that he found himself in somehow, then they were fools already) but widened and deepened until it was big enough for a covered wagon to fall into, breaking the axle and probably the horse in the process.

  Joel had neither. He stepped into the trench and walked down toward the opening in the earth. The ground was dry and brittle, covered with a darker kind of dust than the surrounding plains, something more like ash. It was like the hole in the ground had been burned through the crust of the plain. But there was only scraggly brush nearby, dry enough but still alive, simply baked under the summer sun. If there had been a fire here then it had died long, long ago.

  A riverbed then, or a creek – perhaps an underground spring run dry. The cave entrance was a black abyss. Joel slipped and slid forward, dirt and rock cascading from under his old boots, the skin on the heels of his hands soon red and raw.