by Nate Kenyon
“Look,” Sue said, tapping the glass on her side. I hit the brakes and stopped halfway up the hill, pretty little village shops on either side. In one of the unbroken store windows, someone had written THEY’RE COMING on the dusty glass.
“Should we check it out?” she said. “What if someone’s alive in there?” Her leg was jiggling up and down, and I wanted to reach out and stop it with my hand. I could feel the nervous energy pouring off her, and it made me uneasy.
I stared at the glass, and what looked like a fine spray of dried blood next to the letters. “We can’t help them, Sue,” I said. “Besides, it could be a trap. We have to keep moving.”
“Sure,” she said. “Okay.” But her leg kept jiggling, and she kept her gloved hand against the passenger window, as if waving good-bye.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I put the Jeep back into gear and started creeping up the hill, a sour feeling in my stomach. The Geiger counter kept ticking, slightly faster, then dropping back, and I resisted glancing at the screen every thirty seconds.
Past the center of town, I turned right on Route 27 toward White Falls. The fire station on the corner had all its doors up, the interior pitch-black, a ladder truck parked sideways across the entrance, but there was no sign of anyone alive. The hose was uncoiled and lay on the ground like a fat gray snake.
There was another accident near Wiscasset High School, and I had to take the Jeep up onto the grass, bumping over rocks and skirting the trees. Sue let out a little shriek as something scraped the side of the SUV, and for a moment I thought of skeletal hands reaching out from the shadows.
“It’s just a tree branch,” Tessa said from somewhere in the back. Of course she was right, but it was my father I imagined just then reaching up from the grave, even in death trying to keep me from getting back home again.
As we neared White Falls a few minutes later the sky grew even darker, and I remembered my dream of the night before, the clouds opening up as I ran for the shelter of the porch, the rain on the roof like fists knocking.
We reached the bridge and swept through the deserted town center as we followed the river past the church and restored graveyard and toward the old Mill Inn. I couldn’t help but think of the events that had torn White Falls apart years ago and what it had meant to my family. I was only three and couldn’t remember any of it myself, but the repercussions had reverberated through my life like ripples in a pond. I was feeling them even now.
My mother wouldn’t speak of it until after my father died, but I’d heard plenty about what happened from others in town, the storm and destruction of the flood from the dam’s collapse, the missing bodies and the violence, and the wilder rumors that nobody who had lived through it would talk about anymore: stories told second-and thirdhand around campfires about the ground down near Black Bog being diseased, a gathering place for evil. As a younger boy, I’d always thought that the people who believed those stories were crazy, but now I thought about Sue’s grandfather in his kitchen, and I shivered.
Maybe it wasn’t so crazy after all.
“It looks…like…” Sue said. “Pete—”
“Don’t,” I said. I felt the final coil of that knot inside my chest loosen, and the world tilted dangerously around me. I clenched the steering wheel so hard my fingers ached. Sue’s family was originally from Boothbay, and she and her mother had moved to White Falls when she was ten. She knew about the town’s history, but she hadn’t been here back then. She couldn’t possibly understand what my parents had been through.
How it had torn them apart, and led to everything that happened after.
I can’t face that, I thought. Not now, not here.
And yet wasn’t that exactly why I had come this far? I had been ignoring the truth for too long, and if I had any chance of surviving, I had to stand before my own demons and see things through to the end.
I turned left at the inn and we wound up the hill past the old high school, then past the elementary school and the historical society. Beyond that, open farmland stretched for half a mile before the woods began again, and we came to my driveway.
This was nothing like my dream. There was no Volvo upended in the ditch, and the woods along the driveway weren’t green, but brown and dead. The road itself was smooth too; it had been grated just a month ago, and the washboard gravel and potholes that tended to form after weeks of spring rain had not yet come to the surface.
The driveway made several twists and turns, all of them as familiar to me as the back of my hand. I remembered walking down this drive as a child to catch the school bus at some ungodly hour of the morning, how frightened I would get with the woods closing in on either side, and me alone in the early dawn mist. It had seemed like it went on forever back then, like I would never reach the end, and the prospect of getting my father’s belt if I missed the bus made it even more terrifying.
I made the final turn and there was my house overlooking the field, looking small and hunchbacked under the threatening sky, shingles aged and gray, everything covered with the now-familiar ash. Two windows on the second floor were broken, but it looked otherwise intact.
I pulled the Jeep up near the steps and stopped. It seemed impossible to believe that I was finally here, after all this time. Now that I was, I wasn’t sure what to do.
“I’m coming with you,” Dan said.
“No.” I shook my head. “I need to go in alone.” My heart was thundering in my chest so hard I thought it might burst. My mother was probably inside there somewhere, but there were no signs of life, nothing that would indicate she had made it through the attack. I remembered how we had left things that night, the terrible argument and how I’d treated her, after all she had done for me. It seemed impossibly cruel that she would have died without hearing me say I was sorry, and telling her what she meant to me. And yet it seemed like too much to hope that this could end in anything but a bad way.
Before I could lose my nerve, I grabbed the shotgun, opened the door and got out.
It was colder out in the open air, but there was no wind. I took two steps and Dan was out of the backseat and slamming the door behind him, grabbing hold of my arm and spinning me around. “Listen,” he said, “okay? Just listen.” He was shaking, sweat dripping from his hair inside the hood, his eyes bloodshot over the mask. “I want to help.”
“I can’t,” I said. “You don’t understand. It has to be me. Only me. Please.”
He blinked twice, hard. “I’m—I’m not going to be here when you get back.”
“What do you mean?” I said. But I knew, of course I did.
“I…I can’t—fight them anymore.” His fingers dug into my arm hard enough to make me wince. “They’ve gotten hold of me and they’re not going to let go. God, it itches, so bad, you—you can’t imagine…Pete, you…you don’t give up, you hear? You keep going. For me.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the Jeep, and lowered his shaky voice. There was a tinge of desperation in it that I didn’t like. “And you watch out for Sue,” he said. “I can hear them inside her. It won’t be much longer.”
“Oh Jesus.” I looked at her through the glass, hunched over that Geiger counter again, her legs and arms still jittering like a hyperactive kid in math class, and I felt sick to my stomach. I’d touched the hives on her back last night, and I’d known what they were, God save me. I just hadn’t wanted to say it out loud. She’d gotten it from that bug sucking at her, and the black cloud whirling out of Jay’s diseased mouth, and I’d made love to her, and goddamn if the entire world wasn’t falling down all around me without a way for me to catch my balance.
“I’ll take care of myself,” Dan said. “Don’t you worry about that. But I don’t think Sue’s strong enough to do the same when the time comes. And I think there are others around here…I can hear something. It might be cold, but it’s still daylight, and they’re awake. So you watch your own ass.”
I nodded. “Okay. I will.”
“Good lu
ck.” Dan reached out with his good arm and hugged me. He clutched me tight, as if clinging to a buoy in rough seas. He was burning up even with the temperature dropping outside and it came at me right through the suit, his body slippery with sweat under the nylon and trembling so violently I could barely hang on. I held him anyway, wondering if this would be the last time we saw each other, and when I stood back again and looked at him I thought it would be appropriate to end this way; Dan standing upright like a good soldier through all that pain and gritting his teeth, staying strong for me, for all of us.
I felt like a little boy playing men’s games, and the idea of Dan not being there to lean on left me dry-mouthed and weak. The real tragedy of life was that people took each other for granted far too often.
“Your dad would be proud,” I said, and as much as I tried to keep them inside, the tears spilled out on my cheeks. With my gloves and hood on, I couldn’t wipe them away, and so I let them fall.
I left him standing there, outside the Jeep, and went inside the house, and after the door slammed shut behind me I thought I heard a single gunshot, but I couldn’t be sure.
Inside, I nearly lost my nerve, my legs going weak and my heart stuttering in my chest. I felt a panic attack coming on hard, and I swallowed and tried to push it down, calm my breathing and remain alert.
The smell trickled through the gloom of the front hallway, drifting to me even with my mask and hood on. A sour, spoiled stench like food gone bad. It reminded me of Sue’s grandfather’s house, and what we had found there. I didn’t want to think about what that meant.
“Mom?” I said. I stood still and listened to my own voice die away into silence. I felt stupid saying anything out loud. It was wrong, like yelling in church, and I thought of bottomless canyons dropping away into darkness, and the depths of my own heart, black at its center like a withered apple core.
As I passed the entrance to the kitchen, I heard a noise behind me, and I whirled around. Tessa was standing inside the front door.
“I wanted you to stay in the car,” I said, surprising myself with my own vehemence. “You’re not welcome here.”
“But you need me.”
“I don’t need anyone.”
“You know that’s not true, Pete,” Tessa said. She took a step forward, and then another. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, needing support. As long as I’m here, you’re never alone. Stop trying to fight it. Stop pushing me away.”
I shrugged. I’d depended on Tessa for so damn long, I didn’t know where I ended and she began. I felt so tired, so small and helpless, just a little boy who needed his mother. My head felt like it were going to split right down the middle, the sharp-as-nails headache boring through my skull. I wanted to scream, but I was shaking so hard I couldn’t get a decent breath.
Tessa took my hand, just like she always did, and when I felt her touch me it was like a key turning in a smoothly oiled lock.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get this done.”
She led me to the basement door. It was closed, and when she reached out to open it, I drifted back in time, my sight doubling, then tripling, the echo of years past pulling me down.
The door yawned open to reveal a black hole. The steps were darker than I remembered, but, of course, they would be, without any lights to burn and the sky outside the windows so gray and thick. I hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight, and as I stood on the edge of that abyss I cursed my own stupidity. The world seemed to hitch and speed up until I was dizzy with the spinning, a topsy-turvy carnival ride, and I teetered there, dangerously close to losing my balance.
Like father, like son. I was confused at the chunk of wood in my hand, until I realized with a start that it was the shotgun. I blinked down into the shadows.
There was something at the foot of the basement steps.
For a moment I saw the body of my father again, and I stifled a scream. But the shape dissolved into the outlines of a wheelchair, on its side and looking badly misshapen, as if it had taken a nasty tumble.
Like a machine on autopilot (good old Pete, ignore the problem, it’ll go away), I reached out and flicked the light switch on the wall up and down. Nothing happened, of course, the power had been out for weeks and we didn’t have a backup generator hooked up to the house like many families in White Falls.
“Momma,” I said, but this time my voice was a cracked whisper. I stood there in a moment of terrible indecision, as the smell of something stronger wafted upward and found its way through my mask.
Hiss, pop. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe, the hood closing in on me and cutting off my oxygen, my lungs burning. I dropped Tessa’s hand and pulled off the hood, yanking the mask off my face.
“What are you doing?” Tessa cried, but I ignored her as I gulped the cold, stinking air, the sweat drying quickly on my skin. This was good, this was much better. The smell was sharp, thick and foul enough to bring tears to my eyes. But I could see more clearly without that damned hood in the way.
I ignored Tessa’s protests and hurried down the steps, watching my footing in the treacherous darkness, and at the bottom I picked up the empty wheelchair and set it upright. One of the wheels was too badly bent to function, and the whole thing leaned drunkenly to the right, as if ready to collapse upon itself.
I turned to face the deeper shadows.
Our basement had been my father’s domain. He built things as a hobby, chairs and cabinets and little wooden boxes, but he was drunk most of the time down here and none of them had ever been particularly good. His work area dominated one entire wall, everything still the way he’d left it the day he died, floor-to-ceiling shelves book-ending a sturdy bench with a corkboard above for hanging tools, and drawers underneath. The floor was painted cement, easy to sweep up when the wood shavings fell. There were a few old gardening tools leaning in the corner.
On the opposite side, crammed into a smaller space, were my mother’s canned goods, homemade pickled green beans and jellies, soups and other supplies, and scattered throughout the basement were wooden support columns as thick around as my thigh. Windows were set high in the concrete walls, but they let in very little light.
As I stood looking around, all these once-familiar things became threatening, indistinct shapes lurking in the dark. Any one of them could have been my mother’s body, but I moved toward the food-storage area, knowing instinctively that she would have crawled as far away from my father’s creations as possible.
In the left-hand corner, crammed into the space between the wall and the shelving unit, I found her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
She had lived for a while that way. Empty bottles of jelly and beans and soup were scattered across the floor. She died upright, her back against the concrete, head slumped to her chest, wearing her favorite nightgown that was now black with decay.
There weren’t enough shadows to cover her. I stumbled away from the terrible sight, reeling, my hand fluttering to my own throat. I felt a final, irrevocable shattering inside, a crumbling to dust.
You were always my little baby. You’re fragile, Pete…Sometimes I need to save you from yourself.
I made a noise like a dog with a bone in its throat, and was horrified to realize that the old laughter was there, close to the surface.
The sound of footsteps on the stairs and a beam of dancing light made me whirl around.
Sue was coming down the steps fast in her hazmat suit, flashlight in her hand. She reached the bottom and pinned me with the beam, flicking it to my mother’s body, then back at me again.
“Oh, no,” she said through the hood. “Pete—your mask—”
“What did you do with Tessa?” I said. I took a step toward her. I couldn’t see very well with the light in my eyes, and I didn’t realize I’d raised the shotgun until she used the flashlight beam to point at it.
“Tessa?” she said. “What? I—I don’t understand. You’re acting crazy. Please, put the gun down. I want to help.”
I adv
anced on her, an unreasoning fury overwhelming me. “Everyone wants to help,” I said. “What the fuck do I look like, some kind of charity case? You think I can’t take care of myself, that I’m fundamentally weak, or broken, a goddamned psycho, is that it?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I—I don’t—”
“What did you do with Tessa!” My spittle speckled her face mask as I reached out with my free hand and grabbed the front of her suit. She was crying now, her face a bright cherry red under the mask, shaking her head back and forth. She pushed at the gun with her hands, trying to direct the barrel away from her midsection, but I kept it rammed in place.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she screamed. “Stop it stop it stopitstopit—”
I shoved her away from me, and she stumbled and fell onto her back, the flashlight tumbling to the floor and rolling away, tick, tick, tick, the beam of light washing across the artifacts of my past and making them bulge and fade and shiver before it came to rest against the wall.
I stood over her, pumped a shell into the shotgun’s chamber and pointed it at her face. “You’re infected,” I said. “I felt it when we were making love last night. How long, Sue? Were you ever going to tell me? Or were you just going to let them infect me too?”
She was sobbing uncontrollably, her gloved hands going to her hood, clawing at the zipper. She pulled it off, then her mask. “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh my God. I can’t…breathe.” She sat up, moaning, clutching her knees to her stomach, rocking, her body trembling like a tuning fork that had been struck hard, and as her head fell forward I could see the hives on the skin of her neck. “Dan’s dead, he killed himself out there and I saw him do it. He put the gun in his mouth and blew his head off. And then they…they ate him.”