Days of Rain
Page 9
“Yeah. Something's about to happen. Something big."
They stopped at a convenience store and bought a twelve pack of Bud in the can.
"Where we headed, anyway?" asked Jerry once they were back on the road again even though he thought he had a pretty good idea.
"The beach," said David. He cracked open a beer, took a long pull from it, sighed appreciatively. "If I had to bet, I’d say that’s where our friend was headed. Because… Well, there’s one part of the dream I do remember."
"And what’s that?" asked Jerry, opening a beer of his own.
"I was at the ocean."
Along the way, Jerry saw a figure walking hunched over near the side of the road. And he knew—he knew—it was another of the gray men. He felt certain David would stop the truck, felt a profound sense of relief when he kept going.
A number of streets they followed were flooded, forcing them to turn around on more than one occasion and seek an alternative route. Eventually, however, they pulled up next to the stretch of shoreline where David had taken Jerry that night a few weeks back. David parked and killed the engine, grabbed the remainder of the twelve pack and said, "I appreciate you tagging along like this."
They got out and headed to the back of the vehicle as the rain gusted in off the ocean.
We spend any amount of time out here we're gonna be soaked, Jerry realized. Followed by: Oh, well, it's only water.
David opened the tailgate and the topper door then stood aside as the gray man climbed out.
"What now?" Jerry wondered aloud as the dead man ambled away toward the beach.
"Now we play follow the leader."
David cracked open another beer, handed one to Jerry as the two of them walked side by side, trailing ten feet or so behind the gray man. They went south, past the spot where David first introduced Jerry to their “friend.” If they kept going far enough, Jerry knew—A couple of miles or so.—they'd come upon some of Hidden Bay's more desirable beach front property.
"Where do you think he's taking us?" asked Jerry as he wiped the rain from his face, took a long pull from his beer.
"No idea," said David. "We’ll find out when we get there, I suppose."
The gray man walked onward while the two living men trailed close behind. And all the while the rain continued to fall as, before long, another starless night descended.
Tuesday, July 19th
"Mommy. Wake up."
Renee opened her eyes to find Emily standing next to the bed, hand on her shoulder, gently shaking her. It took a moment for reality to reassert itself, for her to realize that, yes, she was awake, that this was really Emily speaking to her, not the dream version she'd been desperately trying to find only moments earlier.
"Honey? What is it?"
She looked toward the nightstand, squinting her eyes against the glowing lamp, trying to discern the time.
3:32 AM.
"Why are you up? Is something wrong?"
Emily grabbed her shirt sleeve and gave it a tug. "We have to go. Come on." Then she turned and hurried from the room.
"Go where?" Renee called after her, wondering if she might still be dreaming after all.
Throwing aside the covers, she wandered into the hallway then made her way to the living room, trying to figure out along the way what had gotten into her daughter. Whatever was going on, she didn't like it, not after the stories she'd heard from the babysitter and other local sources relating the strange and disturbing events of recent weeks—a killing spree and a number of suicides among them—and certainly not after all the dreams that had recently plagued her. She was a bit on edge, to put it mildly. And this sort of strange behavior from her daughter did little to set her mind at ease.
"Look, Mommy!"
Renee gasped when she saw her daughter standing before the open doorway leading out behind the house, pointing and staring into the darkness beyond. She went over and stood next to her daughter, tried to see—despite the fear and the anger taking hold of her—just what it was that had gotten her all riled up in the middle of the night like this.
The never ending storm, thought Renee while staring into the steady downpour. She could just make out the fence at the bottom of the yard, the glow of the moon behind the clouds, and the rolling waters of the ocean stretching away into the distance.
"Down there, Mommy!"
Lightning zigzagged across the sky. And in the sudden illumination, she could see them, just for an instant. People. Dozens of them, standing on the beach, staring out toward the ocean.
"What in the..."
That's when Emily bolted through the open doorway and across the patio, ran with heedless abandon down the yard toward the fence below.
"Emily!"
Renee took off after her, slipping on the wet grass and almost falling before catching up to her daughter mere feet from the fence and the locked gate.
"Emily, stop!"
She grabbed her, wrapped her in her arms and lifted her off the ground.
"No! No! Let me go!" Her daughter thrashed about like a thing possessed. "I have to see. I have to see!"
Renee only tightened her hold.
"Will you stop it? What's gotten into you?"
But it seemed her daughter would not be calmed.
"Let me see!"
Realizing it might make things easier if she gave in, at least a little, Renee said, "Okay. Will you stop fighting me? Please, just stop."
Emily relaxed once Renee lifted her up high enough to grab the top of the fence and peer over it. Renee herself was just tall enough to take in the view on the other side, to see the people scattered across the wet sand, backs to her and her daughter, looking out toward the water as if in anticipation of...
What?
A minute passed. Her arms started to burn with the effort of holding her daughter in this way. Just as she was about to set her down, to drag her back into the house kicking and screaming if necessary, something completely unexpected happened.
A few hundred yards or so offshore, a wide section of the ocean rose up.
But no, that wasn’t quite right. It wasn't the ocean that rose up. Something was lifting up from beneath the ocean's surface. And it was big. Too big for her to properly comprehend in that moment. Lightning flashed and a collective cry went up from the crowd on the sand as the thing continued to push its way up and out of the water. And in that moment, Renee had a premonition: If she stood there any longer, even one more second, the lives she and her daughter had known until that point would be irrevocably changed forever.
With a wordless shout, she pulled Emily away from the fence, turned and ran up the hill toward the house as fast as her legs would carry her. Halfway there, a wall of water slammed into the fence, tore it apart like it had been made from cardboard then washed up over her knees, the force of the wave nearly sweeping her off her feet. But she managed to stay upright, to keep moving, to hold onto Emily until she reached the house, went inside and slammed the sliding glass door closed behind her.
In a blind panic, she grabbed her keys from the coffee table then went out to the garage where her car awaited. Moments later, she and Emily drove away from that place through the darkness and the rain. And she never looked back.
Epilogue
By the time the sun appeared over the horizon that Tuesday morning, the rain had stopped and the clouds had almost completely disappeared. The people of Hidden Bay emerged from their houses and looked to the skies in wonder, many of them seeming to have forgotten what it was like to have so much blue above them. For the first time in weeks, they left their umbrellas at home as they set off for work or school or whatever else the day might have in store for them.
At long last, the storm was over.
Not unexpectedly, during the remainder of the week the unprecedented bout of inclement weather dominated the local news stories, garnered its share of national attention when the true toll of the storm's wrath became known. It was confirmed that forty-seven people had
perished and another sixteen had gone missing while the rains had fallen over Hidden Bay. Many of these met their collective fate when a rogue wave washed ashore during the final hours of the storm. What such a large gathering of people had been doing on the beach at such an odd hour remained a mystery. Stories told by the survivors only added to the surrealism of the entire incident.
"It was monstrous," said a man—identified as Jerry Thompson—to one of the reporters on the scene, words coming out in a rush. "Big as an island. At first I thought it was an island. Then it...” He shook his head, as if trying to dislodge a particularly disturbing image. “It opened its eye.” Here he could be seen noticeably shuddering. "My friend, David, he was right next to me when it happened. And so was the gray man.”
“The gray man?” asked the reporter.
“Yes, he was…” Another shake of the head. “Never mind. When the water rushed in I thought it was all over, that I was going to die. But I managed to fight my way back onto the beach. After that... I don't know. That giant thing... It had disappeared, gone back into the ocean. And a lot of people had gone with it. David… The gray man…"
While those who hadn't been there, those who lived beyond the boundaries of the storm's influence seemed ready, for the most part, to cast aspersions on these testimonies, the good citizens of Hidden Bay were a bit more reluctant to mock any of these stories, no matter how outlandish they sounded.
Because of the dreams.
Those who were willing to discuss such matters would speak of the strange and disturbing imagery that had filled their sleeping minds throughout those days of rain, often leading to bouts of insomnia or an overindulgence in whatever substances they may have used sparingly in the past when they needed to relax.
Officer Phil Greene of the Hidden Bay Sheriff's Department spoke on the evening news about the rash of suicides he'd been sent to investigate, of the one he'd witnessed when a young woman had thrown herself from a bridge into the swollen and rushing waters of the river below.
"I just hope I never see anything like that again."
One of the things he did not talk about during the interview, that he only spoke of on a handful of occasions throughout the remainder of his time on Earth, was the handwritten note he’d found next to the body of an elderly man who'd consumed most of a bottle of drain cleaner during the storm's final days. It was a long, rambling note, taking up the front and back of a sheet of notebook paper. A yellow marker had been used to highlight certain words and phrases such as "the eye" and "leviathan," "the obelisk" and "the frozen wastes." It told of how "the great beast" felt that "the time was near," that the "waiting would soon be over" for its "powers" continued to strengthen, how in recent centuries its abilities "to affect the world of the living" in "real and tangible ways" had only grown stronger.
Officer Greene hadn't known what to make of it, a feeling with which he’d become all too familiar in recent weeks. He tried to tell himself the note contained nothing more than the ravings of a depressed and deluded old man. But he couldn’t bring himself to fully accept this explanation. The words spoke to him on a primal level, gave him the feeling they conveyed some fundamental truth.
As time passed, as the ordinary rhythms of life returned to Hidden Bay, he’d find his gaze drawn to the sky, to that wide swath of blue stretching from horizon to horizon. And he’d wonder how long it would be until the clouds rolled in, until he’d hear the first clap of thunder heralding the storm’s return. At those moments, he’d think about the old man’s note, in particular the final couple of lines, the ones that stayed with him as the days and the years went by, as clear and concise as the moment he first read them:
The rain will fall and the winds will howl as the Ancient One crawls from the ocean, eager to conquer, destroy, and enslave.
Ready to rule at last.
THE END
…for now…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ray Wallace hails from the Tampa, FL area and is the author of The Nameless, The Hell Season, Year of the Dead: Book One, the short story collection Letting the Demons Out, and the One Way Out novels Escape from Zombie City, Escape from Zombie Island, and Escape from Zombie Planet. He also writes reviews for SFReader.com.
Table of Contents
Title page
Dedication
Introduction
Prologue
Saturday, June 18th
Sunday, June 19th
Monday, June 20th
Tuesday, June 21st
Wednesday, June 22nd
Thursday, June 23rd
Friday, June 24th
Saturday, June 25th
Sunday, June 26th
Monday, June 27th
Tuesday, June 28th
Wednesday, June 29th
Thursday, June 30th
Friday, July 1st
Saturday, July 2nd
Sunday, July 3rd
Interlude
Monday, July 4th
Tuesday, July 5th
Wednesday, July 6th
Thursday, July 7th
Friday, July 8th
Saturday, July 9th
Sunday, July 10th
Monday, July 11th
Tuesday, July 12th
Wednesday, July 13th
Thursday, July 14th
Friday, July 15th
Saturday, July 16th
Sunday, July 17th
Monday, July 18th
Tuesday, July 19th
Epilogue
About the author