The Fall

by Michael McBride

  Revving the engine, the dropped the truck into first and lurched down the driveway.

  She was going to need to fill the tank if she had any hope of making it to Nevada. She could feel her body being summoned east as though by a string sewn right through her chest. And the only thing she could imagine out in the desert was Las Vegas, where she assumed many a man had shed a tear over lost fortunes. That, combined with the undeniable urge to head east, made perfect sense to her while absolutely nothing else did.

  It was a plan. Or at least it was the start of one.

  She couldn’t bring herself to look back in any of the mirrors as the flames lapped the side of the barn from her father’s charcoaled corpse, rising upward along the wood while blown embers already took root on the roof.

  VI

  Eugene, Oregon

  JILL COULDN’T GET THE IMAGE OF THE SORORITY HOUSE OUT OF HER HEAD. It had come to pass exactly as her vision had foretold. The bodies…tortured and bleeding…heaped in massive piles of humanity…all of the death…how could she possibly have known?

  She stood before the emergency room entrance to the hospital, the automatic doors opening and closing on the bloated body lying facedown on the sensor pad. The swollen sides were already starting to leak a pus-like fluid where the door continually bit at the flesh.

  The others were somewhere inside, yet for the life of her, Jill couldn’t bring herself to step over that corpse. She had the most overwhelming sense of impending dread, as though within lay something unfathomably evil, something that stilled her chest even outside the building as though some vile crept out along the dead breath expiring from the opening and closing mouth.

  Getting there had been a chore in itself. The streets had been clogged with stalled cars, the occupants sitting lifeless amidst the shattered balls of glass from the windows and windshields. Turn signals flashed uselessly. Hoods were crumpled around trees and hydrants firing bitterly cold fountains of water into the air. Bodies littered the streets like so much refuse left out on the curb. No faces arose from the vacant demolished eyes of the houses, staring lifelessly down upon them as they drove across the lawns. Only sirens and alarms raised their voices in defiance, but even they fell eventually silent.

  Ray had repeatedly dialed 911 on his cell phone as Darren had driven them in his black, hail-bludgeoned Blazer through the messes of cars, climbing over curbs, knocking down mailboxes and shoving parked cars aside with the bumper so they could pass, yet the only response he seemed capable of receiving was that same hiss of static he reached from the home phone.

  Tina had insisted that she was all right, though the wound looked like an infection waiting to happen. The sides of the ragged laceration were nearly closed, congealing around a tangle of hair, scabbing over in a rough mass. Ray insisted that she go to the hospital regardless. Perhaps it was because that was the only thing resembling a plan that he could concoct, or maybe he just couldn’t have stood in the house staring across the street at Rick’s body as it swelled from within even a moment longer. He’d resigned to the fact that everyone across the street was dead and his mother more than likely was as well, but everyone couldn’t be dead. He was sure of it. In his mind, he was convinced that once they made it to the hospital they’d find a team of doctors and nurses triaging thousands of injured people in every available room and the lobby, expanding into haphazardly assembled tents and lean-tos in the lot and along the lawn.

  He’d still been clinging to that hope when he led the others across the corpse in the threshold into the ER.

  Thuck.

  Thuck.

  Thuck.

  The door continued to try to gnaw through the body.

  Turning, Jill stared across the parking lot through the drizzle of sizzling rain. There was no sign of life out there. The lights flashed atop the idling ambulance in the intersection in contrast to the nearly purple lightning strobing the sky, but the siren had already died. The driver looked as though he’d tried to leap from the vehicle, but succeeded in only making it as far as the asphalt, where the car that crashed into the side of the ambulance was parked atop his legs. There were no birds flitting by beyond or bedded down in the trees freshly beaten of their leaves. No chirping or twitting or cawing. No engines roared and no tires squealed over the constant din of engines all over the roads idling themselves into oblivion. There was no music, no laughter, no yelling or screaming, nothing. Only the hissing of the smoldering rain raising accusatory fingers of smoke to the sky, the patter on the long awning over her head, and the door’s ceaseless chewing on the body.

  “Jill,” April whispered from the other side of the doorway.

  Jill turned, already able to read the sadness on her best friend’s face. Her dark eyes were sunken into pits of darkness like bruises, her cheeks swollen and red from the deluge of tears. Her lips trembled, but she’d already cried herself out on the way over. Nothing was left now but futility and despair.

  “There’s no one here, is there?” Jill asked softly, already knowing the answer.

  April only shook her head.

  “Please come in with the rest of us,” April whined, closing her eyes to try to reinforce her courage.

  Jill looked at the corpse between them, the sickly white fluid expanding in the fine grooves of the rubber plate.

  She couldn’t envision it like she could her sorority sisters dying on the lawn, but there was just something about this hospital that made her feel every bit as sure that something terrible was about to happen within.

  “April…”

  “Please, Jill,” she whispered. “We all need to stay together.”

  Jill raised her eyes to meet her friend’s; they were so wide, the tears spilling in rivers.

  “Okay,” she finally acquiesced, scooting her sluggish feet as close to the body as she could manage, then raised her right foot, bracing herself on the door frame, and lunged across. The intense feelings of fear amplified exponentially as she took her first steps into the lobby and was accosted by the horrific stench of death. She couldn’t imagine that a worse smell existed anywhere else in the entire world. It reminded her of when she’d returned home from vacation as a child to find her hamster dead in the cage, only multiplied by infinity.

  She retched and pulled her shirt up over her mouth and nose.

  “Where are the others?” Jill gasped.

  “We can’t get through the door to the emergency room, so they’re trying to find a way around,” April said through the sleeve she held over the bottom portion of her face.

  Jill walked over to the door beside the Plexiglas-enclosed reception desk and jerked on the handle, but it didn’t even budge. Holding down the call button beside the door produced little more than a buzzing sound that droned on somewhere beyond.

  “It’s magnetically sealed,” April said. “We already tried it. There’s a lady behind the desk back there, but she’s…um…not going to be able to help.”

  Jill peered through the glass beyond a desk riddled with paperwork. The chair had been overturned; the nurse sprawled on the floor through the doorway leading back into the unseen facilities.

  Bug carcasses marred the clear divider in bloody smears.

  “Nothing down there either,” Darren said as he emerged from the hallway behind them, startling Jill so badly she nearly left her feet. “There’s the same kind of locked door in the main lobby and all of the people at the admissions desk are dead.”

  “We should leave,” Jill whispered.

  “You’re going to be a doctor, Darren. You could stitch up Tina’s head,” April said, her right eye starting to develop a twitch.

  “Yeah, but that isn’t the kind of thing you learn until medical school. I’m still trying to get through microbiology and chemistry.”

  “I can sew,” Jill whispered, so quietly that the others questioned whether she had said anything at all.

  Ray limped into the room, supporting the majority of Tina’s weight against his side. She still looked
pale, but at least she was able to hold her head up on her neck without looking like she was going to drop it.

  “They’re all dead,” Ray said plainly, his face lacking anything resembling emotion.

  He lowered Tina into one of the chairs against the far wall by a row of vending machines and plopped into the seat beside her, burying his face in his hands.

  “I’ll be alright,” Tina said, gently stroking his back. “It isn’t even bleeding any more. See?”

  He looked up at her, eyes welling with tears, then leaned his head on her shoulder.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked, eyes dropping to the floor, loosing the tears he’d until then held at bay.

  “We need to get out of here,” Jill said, looking back to the front doorway. “Something bad is going to happen he—”

  “And go where, Jill?” Ray shouted, jumping to his feet. “Look around you! Everyone’s dead! Where in the world could we possibly go?”

  “I’m afraid—”

  “This is about more man tears, Jill! This is about what in the hell—”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said this is about more than fear, Jill! This is about what we’re going to do to survive! What if whatever germ or disease or who knows what killed these people is still floating around in the air? These bodies are just breeding bacteria and waiting to explode! What are we going to do then, Jill, huh? What the hell are we going to do then?”

  “Shh,” Tina whispered, taking him by the hand and easing him toward her. “It’s not Jill’s fault.”

  “I know,” he whispered, sitting back down and bringing her hand to his cheek. The contact was about the only thing binding him to reality. “I’m sorry, Jill.”

  She just nodded, still on guard after the verbal thrashing.

  “How did you know to get us in the hot tub?” Darren asked softly. “What would have happened if we hadn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” Jill said. “Sometimes I…sometimes I have déjà vu. Not premonitions per se, but sometimes…I see things.”

  “Is that what happened earlier?” April asked. “Back at the house, when you…you know…when you freaked out?”

  Jill nodded and turned away from them.

  “What did you see?”

  “Bodies,” she said, her voice barely audible. “All over the lawn… Broken... Bleeding. Heaped in front of the house. Just like they are now. Only… Do you hear something?”

  There was a low buzzing sound that she could feel vibrating the air around her as much as hear.

  “Only what?” Ray interrupted.

  Jill held up a finger and cocked her head.

  The buzzing was steadily growing louder, as though the bowels of the earth beneath her feet rumbled with hunger.

  “What, Jill?” Tina asked.

  “Only…they were covered with mosquitoes.”

  She walked up to the smooth glass plane and traced her hand across it, knocking crusted insect bodies to the floor while she stared beyond at the nurse lying black and bloated on the ground.

  “More man tears,” she whispered, but the words were consumed by the buzzing.

  She whirled in time to see them explode through the open front door; locusts, tens of thousands of them, filling the air like smoke. Closing her eyes, she threw herself to the floor and wrapped her arms over her head. They pelted her body like buckshot, lodging in her hair and scurrying all across her, tiny sharp feet poking and prodding like needles. Her skin grew damp as tacky fluid was spewed from tiny mouths, clinging to her like oil.

  Jill screamed, but only succeeded in drawing a pair of the creatures into her mouth. They scurried onto her tongue before her instincts snapped her teeth together, crunching their exoskeletons and leaving her spitting chunks to the floor.

  It sounded as though there was a jet engine directed right through the open doorway, the buzzing rising to a furious roar.

  She couldn’t even bring herself to try to look for the others, as even the slightest movement brought an assault of insects slamming into her face.

  And then, like a dream, they were gone.

  The silence was painful, interrupted only by choked sobs.

  Jill slowly raised her head from the floor, looking to the others. Ray covered Tina on the floor, trying to shield her head with his elbows while blocking the entrance to his ear canals with his palms. He looked tentatively toward the door past her, dripping with what looked like tobacco juice, a sheen of it shimmering on his exposed skin and clothing.

  “Is everyone okay?” Darren asked. He was flat on his stomach on the floor, slowly unlacing his fingers from atop his sapped hair.

  April whimpered beside him, nodding hard enough to loose the tears drawing clear tracks through the brown crud on her face.

  “We should get out of here,” Tina gasped, sliding out from beneath her boyfriend and spitting a mouthful of ochre fluid onto the white tile.

  “Where are we supposed to go, huh?” Ray snapped, immediately regretting his tone. “Sorry…it’s just that…I don’t know. Even if we go home, what are we supposed to do then? And if we don’t go home…where would we go?”

  “More man tears,” Jill said, looking to the others from beneath lowered brows.

  “What in the hell would Mormons have to do with this?” Ray spat.

  “I said, more man…” Jill stopped. Her lower lip slipped between her teeth to be gnawed contemplatively. Her face wrinkled as she tried to work it out in her head. “Mormon tears.”

  “You’re starting to scare me, Jill,” April said, swiping her palms across her sticky face and slinging the fluid to her sides.

  “Could it really be that simple?” Jill asked, closing her eyes.

  None of the others knew what to say.

  All eyes were fixed upon her, the room positively silent.

  “I know where we need to go,” Jill said, looking to each of them in turn. The sight of the sparkle in her eyes against the otherwise glimmering brown skin was positively unsettling.

  Bang!

  Jill flinched and slapped her hands to her ears as April let out a scream. Spinning, she locked eyes with it before it could raise another heavily scaled fist to pound at the Plexiglas. It had eyes as bright as the sun reflected from a placid pond, seething with black globs like a fresh hatch of larvae. A large flap of skin trilled beneath its broad black chin, streaked with orange like a cutthroat’s gills, shivering like a matador’s cape. Black skin glistened as though the body was recently dipped in crude oil, long black spines standing erect like a Mohawk of blades over the top of its head and down its back, curling from its shoulders as it stood atop the nurse’s desk.

  Bang!

  It struck at the glass again, the entire pane shuddering in the frame. Enraged, the thing buckled back its head and opened a mouth full of way too many sharp little triangular teeth, letting out some sort of scream that spattered the glass with saliva.

  In one swift motion, it raised that same arm, curling long clawed digits toward the ceiling, and slashed through the flimsy paneling. Sparks flew from the overhead light as shards of glass and powdered tiles fell down all around the thing’s head. Crouching, legs tensed beneath it like powerful springs, it leapt straight up, disappearing into the ceiling.

  “What in the—?” Darren sputtered, but April already had him by the hand and was sprinting toward the doorway.

  Another black, now only vaguely humanoid shape slammed into the clear divider with a thud, stumbling backward a step while shaking its head to clear it. It quickly leapt up behind the first.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Ray screamed, jerking Tina all the way to her feet and sprinting for the door.

  Jill stared straight up in paralyzed terror at the scraping and scrabbling sounds coming toward her. Ceiling tiles bowed downward, cracking and falling away. Long lighting fixtures exploded with sparks, dropping from their moorings to dangle by their exposed cords, the bulbs shattering all around them with loud popping sounds.

  �
��Jill!” Tina shrieked as she raced past, managing to grab her friend’s hand just long enough to whirl her around.

  “There’s no time!” Jill screamed, forcing her trembling legs to a sprint to try to keep up. She didn’t even look down at the body propping the door open as she raced right over it, her weight squishing out white ooze like canned cheese.

  Something thumped to the ground behind her a heartbeat before she heard the clatter of nails like a dog chasing her from behind.

  “Get in!” Darren wailed, his voice cracking. He brought the Blazer’s engine to life with a roar, the tires squealing as they kicked pebbles across the parking lot. April was only halfway in the car when it started to move. She barely managed to scamper over the passenger seat and throw herself into the back before Ray was shoving Tina up behind her, shouldering her rear end to force her back enough to allow him to follow.

  “Wait!” Jill railed.

  The automatic door shattered behind her, sending shards of glass skittering past her and across the parking lot. She let out a shrill scream, but managed not to look back over her shoulder. She could see in the terrified looks in both Ray’s and Darren’s eyes that she really didn’t want to know how close they were behind her.

  Nails clattered from the asphalt as fast as a horse’s hooves behind her.

  She lunged for the side of the Blazer. Ray managed to get an arm around her chest while shouting for Darren to hit it. Jill could only loop her arm around the frame of the window in the passenger door, holding on as the open door swung outward away from the vehicle, nearly pulling Ray right out behind her as the car rocketed forward.