#
Sully remembered that time had been lost. He remembered that he had yet to return to school from Christmas break. He had yet to celebrate his thirty-first birthday in February. He had yet to even celebrate New Year’s Eve. Anna had not given him the first draft of her new story that she projected to be ready at the end of next month. Next month was January, not April. Because this month was December, not March.
It was dark now. Sully remembered that he was not driving Monica to meet her mother. He had dropped her off a little while ago. He was now on his way home. He had become tired and pulled over to rest his eyes. He got the car back on the road. And again, Sully would not make it. He was far too shaken from experiencing his worst fear, all too materialized in the dream, vision, or whatever the hell it was.
Was it an omen? It didn’t matter. He would assume it was. Fuck getting over the fear. He could fear his life away, so long as Monica would still be with him.
Sully hit the next hotel exit. He didn’t have to sit in the car this time, though. He was able to function. He thought that might be due to the clarity. If it was an omen, then he would simply not let that omen be fulfilled.
But then he thought it was more than the clarity that allowed him to function. It was more that what he had just been through went far beyond the threshold of what he was willing to consider and willing to feel. Maybe he was just suppressing it, because if he really let it come to the surface, it would destroy him completely, just as it would if it had been real.
He would not think on it again this night. Instead, he went straight to bed and fell right asleep. In his dreams, the coma men were not in the mist, and he was able to breathe and move around.
#
It had not been a white Christmas. In Oklahoma, it rarely was. Sully had seen two that he could recall. Now, a few days after Christmas, driving home, Sully got to see the little flakes. They melted when they hit the ground, but it was still nice to look at, adding character to the plains, which seemed to stretch out forever. Not far after Oklahoma City that snow stopped. The show was over, and Sully knew he had to think about the things stabbing at his mind. There would be no trance this time, driving on the sleepy interstate. He would have to think and think hard.
The night before he had suffered the worst experience of his life. Nothing he remembered in his waking life and no nightmare he could think of touched it. The tornado had been hard, but it was something he could bear; the fear of death was something he could bear. The monster, the thing from the sky that had tormented him on the second trip, was something that he could handle. Its threat had been horrifying in the moment, but the threat of it returning had not been enough to stop him from making the trip again, living his life.
But last night. Last night he had known what it would feel like to have his daughter taken from him. It had, like the other visions, seemed so real. But worse than that, was that its scene was in the future. It seemed like an omen. Make the trip again, and lose the most important thing about you. It was a fear that you didn’t know for the first part of your life. It was a fear that changed you. From the first time you saw that little face, the first time you saw its belly bob up and down and saw its eyes open, unless there was something terribly wrong with you, you feared losing that more than you feared the depths of any hell.
“My worst fear,” Sully said out loud, driving down the road. He was not a shrink. He was a mathematician. He didn’t understand the way the mind worked, how far it could go, what crazy could be. Flashbacks seemed feasible enough. Evolutionary programming. Your mind’s way of saying, hey, I need you to remember this, so you don’t let it happen again. But the totality of this went beyond flashbacks. It was more than a memory of the night when he had met the tornado. The thing from the second trip, his daughter dying, they had nothing to do with the tornado.
Or did they? Symbolically. The monster, like the tornado, had come from the sky. And to do what? Snatch him up. Make things black. And Monica. Was his mind so desperate in its attempts at self-preservation that it had linked traveling with the fear of all fears? That seemed like a rational explanation. At least, it seemed as rational as he could come up with right now. And it made him feel a little better. An idle threat was a lot easier to swallow than a horrific omen.
The high-tone of his cell phone brought him from his thoughts. Anna maybe. Or possibly Faith, calling to say that they had made it safely to their place. That would be nice. The vision had increased his fatherly protective sense. He had wanted to know that Monica was safe ever since.
Sully hit the button, said hello, and then was surprised to hear neither of the expected female voices.
“Sully,” his father said.
Sully had to take a few seconds to gather his thoughts. Then he said, “Yeah, Dad. What’s going on?”
“Where you at?” his dad asked with urgency in his voice.
“Not far past OKC. Why? Is everything okay? Is Mom okay? Anna?”
“Oh. Yes. They’re both fine as far as I know. I was just wondering where you were at. I was wondering if you had seen the mess up on Thirty.”
Sully was intrigued, and for more than one reason. He wanted to know about the mess on Thirty. But he also wanted to know why his dad would do something so uncharacteristic as to call him about such a thing. It would be more like his dad to wait until the next time he saw him. His mom might call, but even she would wait until he got home. And there was something with his dad’s voice, a kind of nervousness.
“What happened?” Sully asked.
His dad took a few seconds to answer. Sully thought he could hear a slight strain in his breath. “Another propane explosion. This time a truck. Massive thing. They’re still cleaning up the mess.”
“Wo!” Sully said and then waited. When his father said nothing, Sully asked his next question. “When did it happen?”
Again, his dad took a while to speak. Then he said, “Late last night.”
“Anyone we know?”
His dad was quicker this time. “Oh no. Don’t even think the fella had business around here. Must have come off the interstate looking for a rest stop to park at.”
“I guess so,” Sully said.
They were both silent for a few seconds, then his dad said, “Well, I just thought I’d let you know, in case you were close to it.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“All right, Sully. We’ll see ya.”
Sully hung up his cell phone. For a little while, he continued to wonder about his dad. But he gave up on that when something else entered his head. It was something that he thought he never would have considered had there not been other pieces of madness in his life. But now it was something he could not ignore. He had now made three trips, and there had been three deadly fires, each time, while he was gone. One was nothing. Two was a coincidence. Three was a pattern.
#
When Sully got home, he found Anna at the dining room table, sitting in the middle chair. A look of want was on her face, but it wasn’t the look she had when what she wanted was him, that look that said she would take him, like it or not—and he always did. This look actually contained a question. Cattycorner to her was the short stack of papers.
“It happened again,” Anna said. “I didn’t want to write another short story, but this one showed up, and I couldn’t resist.”
A magazine was going to publish the last short story she had written. The pay wasn’t really worth her time, but the publicity would be good.
“I’ll read it immediately,” Sully said, answering the unspoken question.
“Thanks,” Anna said.
Sully took the manuscript back to the bedroom. It absorbed him immediately. He read it, page by page, over his head, as he lay flat on his back.
A small town had been hit by a strange affliction. Several of its residents had become catatonic, standing or lying around, not speaking or otherwise communicating with anyone. With no explanation, and suspecting terrorism, the government sent in a tea
m of medical experts to investigate. The experts arrived to find the entire town afflicted, but now they were moving. Men, women, and children were digging holes in the ground. They would not respond to the investigators in any way. Stunned, but confident in their gas masks and body suits, the investigators decided to look into it. A series of clues led them to a house in the center of town. When they found nothing in the house, they realized that they had been tricked, but it was too late.
They came outside to find themselves surrounded by hundreds of mutated snakes. These snakes looked about like any bull snake would, a few feet long, brown and black, a tube for a body. But these snakes had heads about the size of baseballs, and they were fangless. The snakes attached themselves to the investigators and sucked like oversized leeches. But no blood or anything else corporal came from the investigators. When the snakes were done, the investigators were zombies. These zombies then joined the other zombies in building new dens for the snakes to live in. The snakes then discussed plans to extend their colony before the humans could figure out what was going on and use technology to destroy them.
Finished, Sully returned to the dining room, where Anna was still at the table, now munching on a salad.
“So?” she said.
“All right,” Sully replied, pulling up a chair. “I think I got it.”
Anna laughed, but Sully barely noticed.
“The reptilian mind in very primitive. Snakes don’t think that much. They’re basically reactive, instinctive.”
“Sure,” Anna agreed, smiling, letting him know that he was onto something.
“Now, your snakes have somehow developed a bigger brain. They have the higher cortical areas that would allow them to use higher reasoning. They can think like humans do.”
Anna nodded. “Well, actually, they’re a little more advanced, but keep going.”
The snakes had been able to use some sort of telepathy to get the human zombies to do their bidding. So Anna was right; they were more advanced.
“But snakes don’t have a spirit,” Sully said. “At least, according to popular religion and the needs of your story, they don’t.”
Anna nodded enthusiastically.
“So they sucked the spirits out of the humans.”
Sully stopped and thought about Anna’s previous story and what she had told him, then said, “That’s why the humans became like drones. Their spirits were removed, but their lifeforce remained. They became like vacant lifeforces. Alive in the physical sense, but empty, thoughtless shells, good for nothing but obeying orders.”
They stared at each other for a few seconds. Then Anna said, “You got it figured out. Now tell me what you think about it.”
Sully had to refocus his mind on a different line of thinking. Anna had asked for more than the riddle’s solution; she wanted to know if he had had a good time.
“It’s great, hon!” Sully said. “Send that puppy off.”
Anna nodded. “I’ll get right on it.”
Sully’s mind drifted. He thought of his visions and the coincidences of three fiery deaths. And of all the people to discuss this with, none would be better than Anna. Anna could look at things in a different light. Anna had made the transmudane her livelihood. But somehow, Sully couldn’t talk to her about it right now. He remembered thinking he hadn’t told Anna about the earlier things, the tornado and the beast from the sky, because he thought he needed to do this alone. But he was now positive that wasn’t the case. His silence was caused by fear, and his fear was unlocalized. He couldn’t point to a reason. It was like traveling had been, and in many ways, still was. He didn’t know what his fear protected from or even whom it was meant to protect.
“Sully?” Anna said.
Sully came from his mind and to the person sitting at the table with him. “Yeah, babe.”
“Is something wrong?” Anna asked with a look of concern on her face.
Maybe he would understand his fear more tomorrow. Maybe they could talk then. “No, not at all,” he said.
#
The coma men are waiting. Their lights shine in the mist. Their faces and bodies are featureless, just light in the human form.
Sully awakes.
#
Darkness. There had been pain. But now the pain was gone. He was left with a slight electricity. He tried to move but could not summons the strength. He could not breathe.
But he was alive. He knew he was alive, because he could sense himself, his body, inside that tingle of electricity. But his body would not obey him. So weak. He felt very little connection to his muscles. Sully realized that he was dying.
He focused, trying to find energy. He had to move, somehow, to alert Anna to get help. Energy did come, but just enough to open his eyes. With the energy also came pain, sharp, running through his body, pulsating, knives through his veins. His vision was blurred, but he could make out his location. In front of him the moonlight shone through the windows of his bedroom.
Anna? He realized that she must be behind him, asleep in bed, oblivious to his pain, oblivious to the fact that he was dying. He focused, and with that the pain grew, as if every vein in his body would soon split open. But he was able to gather enough energy to bring one hard breath. With that breath, he turned his body, just enough to set it rolling. The momentum carried him enough that he was facing the opposite direction.
But Anna was not where she was supposed to be. She was beside the bed, looking down on him, blurry, but there. Could she possibly know? Did she know that he was dying? She wasn’t moving. She just stood there, while he was suffocating.
He searched. He had to find more energy, one last spurt to alert her. He focused, but there was nothing. Even the pain was dwindling away. He tried to force himself to feel it, to have pain, to be alive, but to no avail. He was slipping away, right before Anna’s eyes, and she didn’t even know it.
Or did she know? Why was she standing there, when she should be in bed with him? Had she, herself, caused his condition?
Whether she had or not, she was now all he had, the only risk that he could take.
He saw her blurry image move away.
Pain! Sully thought. He stopped trying to feel and tried to remember. What had the pain felt like?
It was there, just enough. He forced something up from his lungs, some sound that he himself could not hear, but he knew he had made a sound, because Anna had stopped. She had been alerted. But would she come to him now?
Yes. The image of her approached him. It got right up to him. Then it came right down in his face. But the image was not what he expected. It was hard to make out what was right in front of him. But that face didn’t look like Anna.
It was too white. Glaringly white.
Darkness passed in front of his eyes, and that darkness stayed for a little while.
#
The coma men are there. One is coming to him. But all is peaceful, and he’s floating away. Darkness.
#
Again, he was suffocating. He didn’t want to go through this again. But what could he do?
Breathe, Sully thought, and to his surprise, the air came. It came hard at first, like it had sought him out and had dammed up on the outside, waiting for the gate of his body to open. He welcomed it, all that he could let in. He opened his eyes. He saw the moonlit windows.
There was unlimited air. There was no pain, and Sully stopped panicking. He took a couple of minutes to get his air under control.
“Just a dream,” he whispered. He rolled over to cuddle with Anna, but Anna was gone. As it had been in the dream, Anna was not in bed with him.
Sully got out of bed. He walked through the dark room and then through the dark house. The lights were on in the study, so that’s where Sully went. Anna was on the couch there. She was on her back, wearing only a T-shirt. She was asleep. Pale. Peaceful. She would have looked dead, if not for the slight bobbing of her chest. Her hands were folded over a paperback down by her stomach.
“Anna,” Sully s
aid, standing over her.
Anna’s eyes came open. Then, for a few seconds, she oriented to her surroundings. She sat up, the book falling onto the floor. She looked around a little more, then looked at Sully and smiled. “I couldn’t sleep. I got up to read and must have fallen asleep.”
Sully forced himself to smile back at her. What had he just been through?
Anna got up and wrapped herself around him. Even in his state of confusion and fear, he still noticed her breasts against him.
Anna pulled his head to hers. Sully thought of how the last thing he remembered, the last thing before the awful nightmares, was that they had had sex. And now, the way she was touching him, how good it felt, how good she felt, he couldn’t resist. Right there, on the couch she had been asleep on, they had sex again.
There were no more nightmares that night.
#
Sully arrived at his parents’ house a little before noon the next day. It was the last Sunday of the year. The Little Axe Baptist Church was holding its annual post-service social to usher in the new year. And on this Sunday, every year, Sully’s dad stayed home from church, because whether it was the last week of the regular season, or the first week of the playoffs, the last Sunday of the year was one of the most critical for the NFL.
His mom was at the church social, of course. Anna, who was not big on either the NFL or church socials, had opted to stay home to put the finishing touches on her new short story and visit the websites of a few horror magazines.
Sully walked in to find his dad in the living room, sitting in the loveseat, a TV tray with a beer on it in front of him.
“Cold ones are in the fridge,” was all he said.
Sully walked back to the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of beer. He came back to the living room, where they watched the pregame show.
“Cowboys might just get in this year,” the old man said.
Sully, thinking he had heard something in his dad’s voice, looked at the man. His eyes were bloodshot and his body overly relaxed. He had missed it when he first got here, but now it was clear. His dad was drunk.
Sully had always known his dad to drink, but rarely heavily. And he had never seen him drunk this early in the day. He tried to pretend he didn’t notice.
Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner Page 22
