The thunderclap faded.
But the gray light remained…
…and that was when they heard the sound: a crackling like ravenous flame, huge as it welled up to bury the silence. The world’s largest wad of cellophane, crinkling slowly in the hand of an angry god. Black static, edging in from another dimension.
Coming up from the water below.
Drew turned to look at Boonie. Boonie’s answering stare was uncharacteristically blank. What the fuck…? Drew watched him mouth, but the sound refused to carry. The barrel slipped out of his grasp and thundered to the truck bed on its side. Drew winced, felt it rather than heard it.
And still the roaring drone persisted, maddening: more liquid than static, the longer he listened. He turned toward it, staggering for the gate: head muzzy, body voltaged numb. The roach dropped unnoticed from between his thrumming fingers.
As Drew stared out over the edge.
At the terrible source of the sound.
The fish were trying to get out of the water. There was no other way to describe it. They were literally throwing themselves into the air: leaping up and flailing in desperate but fleeting defiance of gravity. As if they were trying to spontaneously evolve, evolve into birds who could fly off to heaven, evolve into anything that could possibly escape and survive.
Nowhere.
No way.
He watched in horror as the water beneath them began to bubble and churn. Then the gray light flickered, faded to black.
Behind him, Boonie let out a scream.
Drew turned just in time to see the drum rumbling toward him, picking up speed as it closed on the edge. It was the one that had slipped from his cousin’s grip, but it wasn’t the only one moving.
The whole back of the truck was a flurry of jittery motion, the last dozen barrels rocking and shuddering on their bases. As if something had come alive inside of them.
As if that something wanted out.
Drew barely managed to sidestep the drum as it thundered past him, disappeared over the side. There was one long, astonishingly pregnant moment of roaring silence.
Then the drum broke the surface, like egg-drilling sperm. And thus was the new world conceived.
born of poison
raised in poison
claiming poison for its own
it rose
a miracle of raw creation
hot black howl of life and
death intertwined and converted to
some third new option
agony blip with an echoing tail
so long it seemed to have gone on forever
only now the tail was wagging the dog
dredging up silt and sewage
bursting metal eggshell skins in a
riotous shrapnel dance of
power surging self-aware
gathering mass assassinating shape
infesting polluting corrupting
in hideous birthday celebration
it rose
already killing
and stared into the face of its maker
Drew was less than six feet away from the rail when the massive liquid blowback erupted: a solid pillar of displaced fluid that shot from the creek to the peak of Black Bridge in a fraction of a second. It towered above him and stayed there, impossible: fracturing physics, disemboweling logic.
Coalescing into form.
The creature loomed, not freeze-framed or static but swaying like a wind funnel, an enormous oily serpent. Against the black sky, it did not look real; but he could feel the incredible life-shredding charge of its presence, pulsating in the air. It made every hair on his body stand on end in total, mortal terror.
And then the lightning struck, releasing him utterly from his sanity. In the light, he could see all too clearly the things that suffered and swirled within it. Could see the rusted struts and rotted shells of the barrels: skeletal, clawing. Could see the multicolored Rorschach toxins that were its blood and soul.
Could see the hundreds and hundreds of fish: not dead, no longer alive.
All of them staring. At him.
With new eyes…
Then the lightning decayed; and before he could scream, the black wall descended upon him.
Boonie dove off the side of the truck in the second before it hit. He was still in the air when several tons went WHOOOM and splattered across its bed. He couldn’t see what happened to Drew. He didn’t need to see to know there was nothing he could do.
Boonie was heavy, and plummeted fast. He hadn’t had time to plot a course. The railroad tracks came up to meet him, head-on and far too quickly.
He got his arms up and tucked his body enough to keep his neck from snapping; all it cost him was a splintered clavicle and, on the second bounce, some teeth and lip, the two merged together in a wet hard bone-shard buckshot hail that gagged him as he rolled, came up, instinctively assessed the situation.
No motion from the truck, except for the steam curling off the exterior. The door was still open; the cab was still vacant; the headlights still glared. Beyond the truck lay Toad Road and escape; the other way just led deeper into the Black Bridge woods. He could drive one whole hell of a lot faster than he could run.
That pretty much wrapped it up. Boonie vaulted for the cab, keeping one eye on the railroad ties and the other one peeled for forty-foot monsters. There was a harsh static crackle in the air that kept getting louder, the closer he got. It wasn’t the sound from the creek, so it didn’t mean shit.
It was the radio, he found out when he hit the driver’s seat. Starview 92 had disintegrated into ear-splitting hiss. Bad sign. He grabbed the stick and jammed it in gear. Nothing happened. He laid on the gas and got dick.
“GOD DAMN IT!” he bellowed, grabbing the keys and grinding the ignition. “GO…!”
That was when he noticed the rivulets, moving across the windshield. Not down. Across: a lateral, spider-webbing motion, like a hundred liquid tentacles gripping the cab. He stared in slack-jawed dumbstruck awe as the glass started to steam. The liquid compressed impossibly against the pane and squeezed.
Boonie dove for the passenger side, grappling with the handle. All around him, the safety glass starred. He cracked the door open, started to bail…
…as the windows blew inward: a blinding, razored spray…
…and then he was out the door and running, running for his life, a thousand tiny septic barbs of shrapnel lodged in his face, his hands, his neck and back and legs that tripped on a tie and brought him down, all two hundred and forty-seven pounds of him, shrieking pain as his scar-pitted Frankenstein’s former right knee smacked cold steel rail…
…but he couldn’t stay down or the game was fucking over, so he pistoned back up to his feet and hobbled with all his might, ignoring the pain, ignoring the everywhere tingle that turned to burn, terrible burn in his eyes, left eye stinging sharp and wet and bleeding, bleeding from within…
…and still he ran, trading the rails for Toad Road mud, screaming out prayers to sweet baby Jesus as he stumbled through puddles of primal rain. Running from the devil in his own back pocket.
Running till he dropped…
PART TWO
CHAPTER TWO
One hundred and eighty-eight thousand souls adorned the rolling stretch of God’s country that was Paradise, Pennsylvania. It was just over nine hundred square miles of sprawling, picturesque land, with the rugged hump of the Appalachian foothills sweeping across the west and the wide rocky expanse of the Susquehanna River to the east.
Paradise was the nexus point of the region’s major east/ west, north/south arteries, which made it the natural nerve center for trucking of every stripe. Big rigs rumbled in and out constantly, ferrying the essential ingredients of the good life east to Philadelphia and New York; south to Baltimore and Washington; north to Harrisburg and Allentown; and west, down the turnpike, to Pittsburgh and the Ohioan heartlands beyond.
The outer townships were mostly made up of farms, factories, an
d forestland, green hills and hollows sparsely populated and broken up by strip malls and sleepy one-horse hamlets that accounted for maybe thirty-seven thousand out of the total population.
Another seventy-three thousand or so clustered around the industrial parks, which in turn gave way to wave upon wave of dense-packed, self-replicating suburbia: houses and lawns and houses and lawns, gradually shrinking in size as the neighborhoods crested the hills and entered the valley that marked the city proper. There they packed in, tighter and tighter, until the lawns at last evaporated into puddlesized patches or disappeared altogether.
The City Reservoir, on the south side of town, was the highest elevation and the site of the Paradise Water Company’s vast standing pools. If you stood on the crest of the hill and looked out over the valley, a vision spread before you: lights twinkling in the deep blue predawn hush, a quintessentially American picture-postcard jumble of church steeples and smokestacks, homes and factories and parks and schools.
Seventy-eight thousand people lived and dreamt there: along narrow one-way streets and shady tree-lined boulevards; in the crumbling tarpaper Penn Street shanties and cozy Cape Cods of College Avenue; in the tastefully renovated Market Square townhouses and lush Georgian abodes of Linden Boulevard.
From the posh palatial estates of Wyndham Hills to the paper-thin walls of the Paradise Rescue Mission—and everywhere in between—one hundred and eighty-eight thousand hearts beat through the night, ticking off the moments of a lifetime.
Paradise boasted a low cost of living and an unemployment rate a few tenths of a point below the national average. The last thirty years had seen a steady growth in the black and Hispanic communities—and, more recently, a proportionately microscopic Asian influx—but despite all this, as well as a strong, prosperous Jewish community, local government and industry still remained in the firm Protestant grip of the same Dutch-German hands that had wrested this land from the Indians.
This was a land of faschnachts and pig roasts, of country clubs and county fairs, of ladies’ invitational golf classics in dichotomous tandem with tractor pulls and trailer parks. And like much of the noncosmopolitan East, Paradise County was notorious for its stodginess and slow-moving resistance to change: a temperament shared by its upper and lower classes alike.
Once you got past their roots, however, it was television that truly shaped and defined their culture: from CBN to MTV, PBS to HBO, with network news, halftime shows, and prime-time fodder in dominion über alles.
It was, in short, America.
And, like the rest of America, Paradise slept: well past the wee hours, to the break of Sunday dawn. Across the city, across the county, one hundred and eighty-eight thousand lives lay down together in isolated slumber, unconsciously intertwined.
And not a one of them ever even saw it coming.
CHAPTER THREE
Gwen opened her eyes, suddenly awake, the phantom remnants of REM-stage sleep still clinging to her thoughts like a shroud.
In the dream, black birds: thousands of them, their iridescent wings and harsh cries filling the sky as they swooped and soared in a figure-eight pattern.
Over and over, over and over…
The image faded, dissipating like morning fog and leaving Gwen with a strange sense of dislocation, of consciousness arriving a split second before identity. For a single elastic moment, she didn’t know who or where or what she was.
Only that she was.
Alive. Awake.
Here.
It was an altogether curious feeling, disorienting but not entirely unpleasant. She allowed herself to steep in it for a moment, let it flavor her perceptions without bias or preconception.
Then she felt the kick inside.
And it all came flooding back.
My name is Gwen Taylor. I’m thirty years old. I’m in my bed, in my room, in my house.
It kicked again: a small solid thump deep within.
And I’m going to have a baby, she amended.
The dislocation disappeared: a puff of subconscious synapse flotsam vaporized by thought. Gwen yawned and stretched in the big brass bed. Her sleep-tossed ash-blonde hair flowed across the pillow; her clear gray eyes were elegantly framed by the tiniest hint of smile crinkles.
She was a strikingly attractive woman, though you’d never get her to agree with that lately: nine months in and she felt more like an anaconda with a hippo lodged in its digestive tract. Not to put too fine a point on it, the words dingo ugly were the only ones she trusted to accurately convey her selfimage, and there wasn’t a damn thing Gary or anyone else could say to change her mind.
On the other hand, she felt pretty honest-to-God good today: very snug and happy and loved, with only a slight case of nausea to keep things in real-life perspective. The baby had dropped on Thursday, its head lowering into her pelvis in preparation for the homestretch. It took some of the pressure off, made her feel a little less bloated and unwieldy, most assuredly heightened her sense of anticipation.
“Won’t be long now,” she whispered to the growing form inside her. “You’re gonna like it here.”
She peeked out from the covers, entertaining the notion of just lazing around all day. It was a gray morning, from her vantage point; the old casement windows rattled as the wind pressed against them, trying to get in; a stray slice of predawn light shone cold through the part in the curtains, illuminating the dust motes that swirled in the air.
The ceiling fan overhead twirled lazily, recirculating heat. The house was a three-story frame structure off the Starview Road in East Manchester township, ten miles north of town. It was over a hundred years old, lovingly refurbished by Gary and Gwen until it just oozed warmth and character and a clear sense of home.
Their room was on the drafty side, bigger since Gary’d knocked the back wall out, reducing the available bedrooms in the old farmhouse from four to three but opening the space considerably.
Besides, she thought, running her hands up over the swell of her belly, a guest room and a nursery’s all we really need. We’re only doing this once.
The baby kicked again.
Gwen turned toward Gary, who lay still sleeping beside her, his body concealed in a mountain range of rumpled down. “Gary,” she whispered. He stirred and mumbled something unintelligible into his pillow. She reached under the cover and tickled him. “Gary?”
Gary grumbled and stirred, but did not wake. She paused for a moment, just watching her man.
To those who knew him, it was hard to believe Gary Taylor had really hit thirty-seven; judging by energy level alone, he came off at least a dozen years younger. But seeing him at rest like this—with his personality temporarily on hold—she could see his years, and all the pressure he’d been under, etched in the craggy lines of his face.
Gary was a long, lean, lupine man with a rugged fighter’s mug, softened by gentle eyes and a droopy paintbrush of a mustache. His hair was black and thick, silvering slightly at the temples and thinning into a widow’s peak high on his forehead. When he rolled toward her, the pillow side stayed smushed, sticking up like a tar baby’s mop.
Gwen smiled and reached under the covers, squeezing him. “Gary, you ‘wake?” she teased.
He opened one eye, looked balefully at her with it.
“Spike kicked,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Three times.”
Gary blinked once, twice. He was waiting for enough blood to circulate into his brain to be capable of speech. He’d been up late the night before, called into the station at the last minute again by some technical problem that Bob the Knob couldn’t deal with. “Mmm,” he mumbled. “Mmph.”
“He said he wants to see his old man,” Gwen said.
“Mmph,” Gary reiterated, burying his head with the pillow. “Not if he doesn’t let me sleep, he doesn’t.”
“He’s not the only one,” Gwen said slyly, ignoring him. Hormones surged in the ninth month, though God only knew what for; they tweaked and tickled her erogenous zones like th
e haunting whispers of phantom limbs.
It wasn’t arousal, exactly; at this point, she often found it hard to believe that she’d ever really be turned on—in the old-fashioned sense—again. Instead, she felt a keen need to be made to feel attractive: to assuage the irrational anxieties and be reassured, through the medium of physical contact, that she wasn’t really too loathsome to live, and that Gary might still be able to love her somehow.
She reached between Gary’s legs, got a handful of nice thick morning boner. Gary, for his part, groaned and smiled. No rest for the wicked, evidently. He opened both bleary eyes and looked at his wife, who smiled and worked him beneath the sheets. “I swear,” he growled throatily, “you are incorrigible.” She laughed, a sly little guttural chuckle.
Gary reached out and felt the firm round hardness of her belly, the fullness of her breasts, which had swelled half again their normal size over the course of the pregnancy. He looked at her; sleepy-eyed, big-bellied and disheveled, she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen in his life.
“Mornin’, momma,” he said.
“Mmmm,” Gwen said dreamily. “Love you.”
“Love you back,” he said. Gwen leaned forward a little and Gary daubed her with morning-mouth kisses: feeling the liquid silk of her lips, tasting the familiar musky sweetness of her neck.
Gary’s take on sex these days was a benign flip side to Gwen’s. Arousal wasn’t exactly what he’d call it, either: he felt less turned on than enormously protective and profoundly nurturing toward her. She was his lady love, after all; and the only critter that even came close in his affections was just about ready to poot forth from her loins.
Right now, he could love them both with one sweet motion, and give Gwen the reassurance she most desperately needed.
You couldn’t get any more damn convenient than that.
“Anything special planned today?” he asked, as she spooned his cock against her backside, guided him between her legs.
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