The Imminent Scourge

by J. D. Anderson

  “So you’re driving us both out?”

  “Look, I already told you you couldn’t stay here long, and now my trust has been betrayed. You got to get out. I can’t keep you here.”

  “You mean you don’t want us here.”

  “Look, lady, whatever—” He sighed. “You see, as soon as there’s two of us, or three of us, or more, we’re a society. And a society’s got to live by rules. Now I set down the rules, and then the rules is broken, and so there’s got to be consequences. That’s just how it is. A society’s got to have rules, and a society’s got to live by the rules—otherwise, it don’t work. So I can’t have you around. You got to go.”

  “Well,” said the woman, looking down, shrugging, and taking the boy’s hand casually, “we’ll get along fine anyway. Won’t we?” This last question she addressed to the boy who seemed not to have heard it. He continued only to stare at Jude with his unchanging, unwavering blue eyes. Jude was utterly defeated as to what the look meant anymore, but it had begun to work on him more acutely than ever.

  “Go,” he said. “Leave now. They come out at night mostly, like I said—you have as good a chance as any if you leave right now to find some shelter or something.”

  The woman pulled the boy by the hand, and the boy finally broke his gaze and turned with the woman and walked out the door.

  “God be with them,” Jude muttered under his breath as he closed the door behind them.

  Then Jude was alone and the house was empty again, although it seemed to be only that, emptiness, and solitude perhaps—not Loneliness, not yet.

  Jude picked the skillet up off the floor—it was cold now—and placed it back on the inert stovetop. He set it down loudly and sighed loudly. He cleared his throat loudly and sniffed loudly.

  “God be with them, thank you, God,” he said, loudly.

  There was not Loneliness, not yet—only emptiness, and solitude…

  Then from outside of the house, he heard a cry—the woman screaming. He went to the door and opened it. As his eyes adjusted to the afternoon light, he perceived the field, and the line of trees beyond, and nothing else. He walked around the side of the house where a hill sloped downward and there was a cluster of bushes. He did not see anything or hear anything. He realized that he had forgotten his gun.

  Then he heard the scream again, and he was able to locate it, back around the other side of the house. He went around and looked again toward the line of trees, the trees from which they always emerged at night. In the distance and in the light, he perceived with some difficulty a dark cluster near the tree line. He ran across the field some distance, away from the house. As he drew closer, he heard the cries again, and at last, he drew near enough to see.

  It was a crowd of them. They had emerged early, in the daylight. And they were huddled together, eating. And the screams had ceased.

  He did not linger to see if they had both been killed—he assumed that they had—nor did he linger to see how they had been killed, how they had been injured, or outrun, torn apart… Knowing that there was nothing to be done, and afraid that they had seen him, he turned and ran as fast as he could back to the house, leapt inside, and closed and locked the door behind him. He knocked his forehead against the wood door and squeezed shut his eyes.

  He was deeply unsettled. What justice demanded was what he had done, yet he felt terribly convicted, as though instead he had just committed a grievous wrong.

  “Why?” he said. “Why didn’t I—why did I—?”

  Suddenly, Loneliness invaded the house and swam in his veins like poison.

  “Was it my fault? Should I have had them stay, even though…?”

  He dropped to his knees, still pressing his head against the door.

  “God,” he cried, hoping to dispel the Loneliness, “God, please, hear me—”

  Loneliness pressed at him, weighing him down with an almost physical strength.

  “I’m doing the best I can, Lord,” he said. “I’m a changed man, I’m a good man…”

  Nothing happened. He attempted for a moment to feel all of the vacant spaces and empty doorways as though they were only that: empty. And he tried to purge his desire. But it was not possible. That he felt Loneliness at all was in itself a wish for un-loneliness, and he could not shake it. And so Loneliness was not only just Loneliness, but also deep and terrible longing—a longing that seemed almost to overcome his faith.

  And although he had not stayed to look, his head was filled with images of the woman and the boy in distress, or in death. He imagined their bodies twisted and mangled, he imagined them torn and bloody. He imagined Treyvon Marsh or Michael Harris or Arionna Willis sinking their grey teeth and their rotten gums into their bodies. He had a fleeting thought that this would stave them off for a while, but he knew that even after they had devoured the bodies, they would not be satisfied. They would come for him again, and soon.

  He turned his body, leaning his back against the door, tipping his head back and closing his eyes. He felt exhausted. He was beginning to get hungry again, but he wanted to conserve food, and he had wasted a whole extra can. He decided to forgo eating. He had done it before, and his hunger had always subsided after long enough. This time, though, he feared for some reason that it would not.

  He managed to wait until the early evening, when the sun had begun to set and the light coming in through the cracks had faded from a warm yellow to a gentle, dying orange. His hunger was too great, probably because of his exertion and adrenaline during the day, so at last, he rose and went to the door.

  Opening the door, he walked out into the fading sunlight and the evening air, which, strangely, seemed not to have cooled much at all. He walked around the side of the house with a vague intention of retrieving more food from the shed, although he already had food in the house. It was more like a habit, or a tic—he merely wanted to see it, to assure himself that it was there.

  He rounded the corner and approached the doors to the cellar, but then stopped abruptly.

  The padlock was open.

  His mind raced, and he thought quickly back to the last time that he had closed it—right after the boy had opened it, mysteriously, and he had closed it hastily in distress. Had he been in too great a hurry, and not closed the padlock firmly enough to fasten it? Had he forgotten to close it altogether? He ran toward it to inspect it.

  A small noise alerted him and interrupted these thoughts, but before he had time to process the sound or even fully comprehend that he had heard it at all, the doors burst open.

  The horde was crouching inside—the faces of his past: Treyvon Marsh, Michael Harris, Arionna Willis, and the woman.

  They had been inside the cellar.

  They had been waiting for him.

  Then they rushed out at him all at once. He turned and fled, knowing that he only hoped to succeed in outrunning them because he was already much closer to the door of the house than they were. He tumbled inside and slammed the door on them, and they seemed to collapse on it the very instant that he did. He fell back onto the floor. Their hands hammered on the door, the walls, the boarded-up windows.

  The hammering seemed to shake the house from all around. He crawled backwards away from the door and walls and windows to the middle of the room. He waited. He did not feel any safer at this distance than he would have had he been right up against the wall. Then, the realization slowly came to him that the floor itself was vibrating.

  They were underneath him.

  They had penetrated the cellar, and it had given them an avenue into the crawlspaces below the floors. They were no longer attacking the house; they had broken through, they were infesting it. There were no barriers left.

  With a terrible rending creak, the nails tore from the wood, the boards bent and snapped, and they broke through from under the floor. Their bodies of corruption erupted out of shattered fragments of the gray wood. The house shook violently, its entire structure weakened, as though it were no longer even connected
to the ground.

  Their breach through the floor seemed to weaken the integrity of the rest of the house. The walls rocked and shook. The plywood rattled and broke away from the windows and the bold angry red light of the evening burst through, flooding the room.

  All of the familiar distorted faces leered in at him from the vacant windows and up over the cavity in the floor. Their hands reached up and took hold of what remained of the floor, and their unnatural bodies climbed up. At the windows, they stuck their legs in and climbed over. They moaned and gnashed their teeth, breathing and snarling and gibbering in senseless hunger. Their vacant eyes sought him out and fixed on him. They coalesced into an indeterminate horde and then separated again, approaching as neither individuals nor as a collective. They drove him deeper into the house, back into the kitchen and still further back, filling the house with the pollution of their dark bodies.

  At last, he scrambled to his feet and turned to flee, but they knocked him down again and he fell backwards against the refrigerator. Their cold, mortifying fingers clutched at his feet and his ankles, and he kicked at them violently and gripped the floor with the palms of his hands, pushing himself back. He kicked one in the face, driving it back into the crowd, but others descended upon him, grasping at his legs. He kicked against the floor to get away, finding himself now on the tile floor of the bathroom. The boards were still in place over the bathroom window and he was plunged into near darkness. He reached for the porcelain base of the sink and pulled at it, drawing his feet and ankles away from them, and heaving his body upwards. One of them clambered in through the narrow doorway to the bathroom and sank its fingers into the flesh of his arm, piercing the tattooed skin, mangling the name written in ink so that it was unintelligible and then nonexistent. He pulled himself up and away violently, gripping the sink. At his weight, the bowl pulled away from the wall and he fell, breathing dust. He felt suffocated in the darkness, as though he were being buried in somewhere cold, underground.

  Others poured in through the door and the weight of them pressed against him, throwing him back against the wall by the showerhead, and with a tremendous crash, they forced him through. The drywall cracked and crumbled, and one of his shoulders struck against a stud in the wall while the other fell freely through the back of the wall, driven back by the pressure. His body turned and he landed on his shoulder on the floor on the other side, back in the living room which was now thick with them. Now frantic beyond all hope and reason, he flailed wildly as their teeth and fingers tore at the flesh of his limbs, kept back only by the violence of his motion, unable yet to get a firm grip on him. His skin was torn and had begun to peel away, and strands of flesh frayed out from the bulk of his arms. Blood fell onto his body from his outstretched hands, spattering his face and chest.

  Then they were upon him, a great number of them, pushing down on his body. The force and the pressure cracked his ribs, and at the same moment, the floor underneath him cracked. The whole house shook, and he fell a little ways below into the crawlspace on top of shattered fragments of the floor, his arms splayed out to the side and the sharp, broken wood dug into his arms from underneath them.

  He was underneath the cross, which was still hanging high up on the dark wall. At his sudden crash, the cross shook off of its nail and fell. His hands were waving about blindly, in unmeasured motion that was not really the result of any sort of rational thought. His gesture was haphazard, and the cross seemed to find its way into his hand despite his frenzy, and with the last of his strength, he took hold of the cross as tightly as he could. The points of the cross pierced his hand, and the sharp pain of gripping it so tightly seemed to numb the pain of the horde pressing on him as they stopped his flailing, seizing his head and torso and tearing his clothes, tearing his skin, cracking his bones. It was as though it had sent a bolt of energy and a last burst of life through him, blurring his vision of all of the faces that had tormented him for so long.

  #

  The sun set lazily, fat and red on the horizon as if engorged, and a hush descended on the little house and the plain of dry, whispering grass surrounding it. The house was empty, and the air outside was still and cool. A lone grasshopper took flight, snapping its wings and rattling in the silence only momentarily. As night fell, a chorus of cricket voices rose from within the dark, towering trees, filling the dome of the sky with singing.

  THE PENULTIMATE

  Nine days had passed since their father had left them. He had left them before, but he had never been gone longer than three days until now.

  “He’ll be back,” Nikki said. “He always comes back.”

  “But he never takes this long,” said Danny. “Something must have happened or he wouldn’t have taken this long.”

  “He never told us that he wouldn’t ever be gone longer than three days. Remember, all he said was, ‘wait for me; I’ll be back.’ You know that might mean that even if he takes a long time, he might come back. We just have to wait.”

  “I’m sure he meant like three or four days. That’s all he’s ever been gone before. Not nine.”

  “You don’t know that’s what he meant.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant. And I’m pretty sure he’s dead by now.”

  Nikki sat against an empty spot of the wall next to a long-derelict refrigeration unit with her knobby knees drawn up to her face and her skinny arms linked loosely around them. Danny faced her from the opposite wall next to an empty candy rack near the checkstand counter. He sat on a box, strumming an acoustic guitar. He was strumming the same riffs he had been strumming for months—from what seemed so long ago, back when they had been in high school together.

  They had taken shelter in a gas station convenience store that lay in between towns. They had driven there on an empty tank, hoping to refuel, but there had been no gas left in the pumps, so they had stayed out of necessity. There were others who had stayed there too. Their father had reasoned that it was as good a place as any, because it was stocked well with food, and the more people who were with them, the safer they would be. However, the number meant that the food ran out fairly quickly and all but their family had eventually left in search of other food and shelter. It was then that their mother had fallen sick and died. Then she had awakened in the monstrous form of the things that attacked and devoured. Their father had not been prepared for it, and it was only after a needlessly long and brutal struggle that he finally crushed her skull and immobilized her. He hadn’t spoken for days after that. And when he finally had, a profound change had taken place. He began to speak often and at length about death. He spoke too about the spreading affliction and had deduced that it was demonic in nature.

  Their father had never been a religious or spiritual man, so this change had taken both Nikki and Danny by surprise. Nikki had shown deference, listening at first out of sympathy, but finally coming to understand him and even agreeing with some of his ideas. Danny listened more out of a numb respect, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but simply allowing the space for his father to talk.

  Amidst all the talk, Danny had grown restless and worried that his father’s lack of action might lead to their undoing. The gas station in which they were holed up was near a military base which covered a vast amount of property, mostly still undeveloped forest. Danny had brought up the proximity of the base and the likelihood that they might find safety, shelter, and other survivors there, but his father had dismissed the idea.

  “You sound like you don’t care,” Nikki said. “You sound like you’re happy if he’s dead.”

  Nikki was the older of the two—she was twenty. Danny, on the cusp of turning nineteen, wore a full beard and was stoutly built, and Nikki had always been very thin, so to look at them, Danny seemed the older until by dint of their interactions their age and relationship became evident.

  “I’m not. I’m just pretty sure he is dead.”

  Danny had been nursing the dream of becoming a guitar player in a band for years, although
he lacked the discipline to practice often. It was only now that they had seemingly limitless time on their hands, and no electricity with which he could listen to the music that he enjoyed, he had actually begun to play regularly. He was rehearsing, perfecting the riffs, and honing his technique. Unfortunately, however, it seemed that playing in a band would not be happening any time soon. Oh, well, he told himself. Society will rebuild itself eventually. There will be time.

  Nikki tired of his playing it over and over, and of the repetitiveness of the riff itself, but it also reminded her of home, of family, of their previous life. For this reason, she enjoyed it in a certain sense, although she was afraid that since he played it now more than ever before, she would come to associate it with their current circumstance, like everything else.

  “Well, you sound relieved or something,” she said.

  Danny stopped at his playing and put the guitar to the side. “I’m not relieved. I don’t hope he’s dead. I guess I’m just… numb. I dunno.”

  Nikki said nothing for a while. She set her long, thin face—which had grown even longer and thinner in the past months—down against her knees and inhaled through the fabric.

  Danny began strumming again.

  “I’m worried,” Nikki said at last.

  “Well, what do you want to do?”

  “What do you mean?” Nikki said.

  “Well, you can sit here and worry as much as you want, but it’s not going to change—”

  He broke off, unsure of his words, giving her instead a knowing look that communicated what he hoped she already understood.

  Nikki’s eyes were cloudy with tears. She nodded and looked down again. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe he is—” She laid her skinny hands to the sides of her head, gripping it through her thin hair. “I just can’t believe—”

  Danny stopped strumming the guitar again and laid it by. He knew that she was mulling over everything that their father had said about death. “One of us will live to see the other two dead,” he had reminded them. “I pray that it’s not me, but the way things are—who can tell?” He had said that he spoke to them often of death because it was important to remember, but the more he did it, and the more Danny thought about it, the more he thought that he spoke about death because he was still grieving the loss of their mother, and it was his way of processing it, of dealing with the pain. So he had begun to dismiss the words. But the words had come home. And now both Nikki and Danny were wondering who would be the second-to-last, and who would be the last. And if it were only a matter of time, then perhaps it was time that was of the essence.