by Lee Thomas
It was then that I understood the nature of his malady; the long days of illness had been a transformation into this thing, this man unnatural in the manner of the grim sailors who emerged from the ocean to feed. Had this same monstrous fate befallen the other workmen, those who had vanished from the northern camps? Though possible, I didn’t think it the case, as no reports of debilitating illness had come with the news of their disappearances. If anything, I found it more likely that the other men had ended as the Lieutenant I’d found beneath the cage of a Mangrove’s roots had. Though whether Graham shared his inhuman state with the others was of little concern. Before his flight, he’d looked upon me with eyes scoured of humanity. I wanted to believe that he’d remembered our friendship, our camaraderie, and that was what had convinced him to spare my life, but I had nothing to do with his decision to soar away from the train: He feared the storm and the towering wave it was sending over the beach to devour us all.
A man bellowed down at me and I felt fingers on my slicker, and they forced me away from the train, fearing Graham or another like him had returned to finish me. I spun and saw the train’s engineer in the open doorway. His mouth was open as wide as any human’s I’d ever seen and he waved desperately in my direction, throwing quick glances over his shoulder as he did so. I waded another step away, still confused.
To my amazement two glowing orbs rose above the train. They seemed to be the faces of angels, gliding through the night, radiating the soft glow of salvation amid Hell’s maelstrom.
They transfixed me. I stood in awe watching them rise higher and higher, and for a split second I imagined they belonged to the Mother of Blood and her infant, returning to bring me some fresh message.
But the lights were not faces. They were the headlights of a truck snatched from the motor pool. As the vehicle rose higher, the lights dulled and flickered before burning strong again. I saw the wall of water on which the truck rode. It climbed taller than four men, seeming to fuse with the sky above, woven by ropes of vicious rain.
I sloshed forward, pushing against the current and leapt at the waiting hands of the engineer. My shins scraped over a metal step, and I scrambled forward knocking the engineer off balance as I fought my way into the train’s engine, and I didn’t stop until I reached the far door, where I curled in a fetal ball and awaited death.
Across the way, the engineer righted himself and slammed the door closed as the wave crashed over the train. The coalman stared at the window behind me, his thumbnail clamped between his teeth. The great iron compartment shivered and shook and teetered and the world beyond its glass went black as the depot lights drowned in the wave. Metal shrieked in my ears as the wheels beneath us bent with the force, and then all was oddly silent.
I woke shivering in a cold puddle of water, still curled like a baby. My muscles throbbed a uniform misery through my body and bright flares of pain erupted on my brow and shins and neck when I uncoiled myself on the floor of the locomotive engine. I blinked rapidly because a glare of gray light hurt my eyes. I shielded them with a palm and another great anguish erupted at my shoulder. I groaned and tried to get to my feet, but only managed to slide my legs around, effectively propping myself against the wall until I was again ready to attempt standing.
In time the harsh grayness resolved into morning light playing through the screen of the window. A few dark clouds stained the white sky. I wondered on the whereabouts of the engineer and the coalman, but the consideration proved little more than a mental blink as I came to realize neither the storm nor the sailors who’d come with it had ended my life. The last thing I remembered before the womb of sleep had enveloped me was a rush of water leaking around the door. Then my mind had seized like an overheated engine, stalling all thought and sensation. My eyes had closed, expecting never to open again. But now it was morning and while my body felt as if it had gone under the wheels of a car, I was alive, though I refused to believe I was safe.
Eventually I made it to my feet and found myself looking east, where the choppy ocean waves bit only the share of beach they were typically allotted. The camp, however, was gone. Cabins had been washed away, leaving behind only fragments of wood where modest quarters had once stood. Debris from the ocean—strands of spinach green seaweed and foul looking timber—lay where my shack and those of my friends had once stood. Nature had taken the highway project to trial, and had found us reprobate. For our guilt the evidence of our existence had been erased by wind and wave.
Turning away, I winced at the knife-points of pain in my legs. Upon recovery I gazed through the far window of the engine and encountered a vision of atrocity.
Unable to trust my eyes, believing the train’s window to be nothing more than a movie screen on which a lie had been projected, I crossed to the door and opened it. With great effort, I descended the stairs into a cool morning breeze and found that indeed the sliver of land had become the site of a massacre. To my left a stand of mangroves had survived the storm, and men, like pieces of drying laundry, draped the topmost branches, left there in the wake of the massive wave. Slabs of devastated housing littered the land before me. Splintered fragments and walls hardly blemished, lay sprawled amid the beach grasses and sand as if the entire camp had been lifted into the sky and thrown earthward to shatter. But for as terrible as these sights were, the worst awaited me when I completed the sweep of my gaze.
On my right I saw the rest of the train. Ten cars, many still connected to one another lay on their sides fifteen yards from the tracks in a jagged line. Smashed windows faced skyward. I walked toward this nightmarish vision and tears burned along my cheeks.
All of those people—the workmen, their families, Bainbridge and Leonard and the others who comprised the fraternity of the past year of my life—had found their salvation in the seats of those cars, only to have it cruelly washed away. The weight of the locomotive engine had kept it upright and protected from the wave, but the passenger cars had fallen like a toy cast aside by a bratty child. I wanted to believe some of the people had survived, but that would have been a concession to Hope and she had manipulated me for the last time.
So I walked toward the north, veering away from the worst of the wreckage. The post office still stood as did the school. A few of the heartier buildings further along also remained, but the camp was decimated. Gone. Erased from the face of the earth. And when the engineer called for me to stop, I ignored him and continued northward, following the highway I’d helped build through a landscape of grief as the sun burned through the light film of white clouds to gloat over the magnificence of life’s cruelty.
Tuesday
The irony was lost on none of them as they drew straws. Six of them sat before the fire, hands trembling as they plucked the matches from one boy’s fist. Outside their attackers groaned and pounded on the walls of the cabin.
They’d thought the mountains would give them isolation from the plague, and to some degree it had. There weren’t many of the ravenous dead at their door, but there were enough, especially since those inside were fragile.
The food had run out last Tuesday—a week ago, now. Empty cabinets and cupboards.
Even the occasional insect eluded their desperate fingers and their saliva-soaked tongues. The six understood the hunger fueling the dead outside. The short straw would fix that hunger, if the remaining five were brave enough to eat.
About the Author
Lee Thomas is the Bram Stoker Award and two-time Lambda Literary Award-winning author of The German, Ash Street, Torn, The Dust of Wonderland, In the Closet, Under the Bed, and many other books. He lives in Austin, TX with his partner, John, his cat, Buster, and his dog, Mina. Find him on the web at leethomasauthor.com
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