The Hell Season

by Ray Wallace

  Someone had moved a few stoves over near the beds and plugged them in to extension cables running back to the portable generators in front of the store. He turned on one of the burners, set down the pot, opened the cans of ravioli and poured them in. Dana and Gerald kept him company while he cooked then joined him in a bowl of pasta a few minutes later when it was good and hot.

  “Not overly impressed with the explanations some of our fellow survivors have come up with?” asked Gerald, nodding his head toward the group of people still arguing about God and aliens and government conspiracies. He raised his bowl, scooped up a forkful of pasta.

  “Just never saw the point in arguing about things that have no answers.” He blew on some of his ravioli to cool it down before tasting it.

  Gerald gave him a look but didn’t say anything. They ate their meal in silence.

  *

  The time had come for Thomas to go see the hole. He didn’t want to. The very idea filled him with a palpable sense of dread. But he’d always heard that the best way to conquer one’s fears was to confront them. Besides, he figured it would be a good idea to check out the place where all the recent horrors had originated.

  After breakfast and a quick bit of freshening up with a washcloth and some soap and water, Thomas walked out through the front doors of that sprawling superstore, Dana and Gerald accompanying him. They made their way across the mostly deserted parking lot, over to the sidewalk that ran along the wide thoroughfare that fronted the store, and down the couple of blocks to the hole. The floodlights were off, the generators silent. Some other people were already there—two men in whispered conversation, another man and a woman. Thomas wondered, not for the first time, about what had happened to Ron and Tanya. Were they in hiding somewhere? If so, he couldn’t blame them. Or were they unaware of the fact that a group of survivors was staying at the Wal-Mart? Whatever the case, he wished that they were here. His sense of dread was growing and he would have felt just a bit more comfortable knowing that Ron and Tanya’s military experience could be called upon.

  As he looked around, took in the sight of the people there, he couldn’t help but wonder why no children had been left behind. No doubt that some of the conspirators he’d listened to earlier could offer up a theory or two. What about all the animals? He hadn’t heard a dog bark or a bird sing once during the past few days. He could only imagine the increasingly outlandish explanations awaiting him back inside the store.

  All such musings were forgotten as he found himself standing at the edge of the hole. The first image that came to mind was one of a monstrous throat or some other such orifice. The sides of the opening were a reddish brown—some sort of clay, here, in Florida?—and gouged as if by randomly wielded shovels and picks or by many years of scattered erosion. Like he’d been told, the damned thing was a good fifty feet across. Its far edge was less than twenty feet in front of the entrance to the McDonald’s there. Some of the business’s parking area had been devoured by the opening. And the smell... It reminded him of the hallucination he’d been subjected to by the insect corpses, of his descent into Hell. There was a strong odor of sulfur and decay carried upon the wisps of steam drifting upward. He found himself breathing through his shirt which he lifted up to cover his mouth and nose. The sun was making its way up the cloudless sky and the morning air was already heating up but it was even warmer here near the opening, so much so that Thomas noticed that he was starting to sweat rather profusely.

  “You climbed out of that?!” he asked Gerald, his voice slightly muffled by his shirt, the very thought of it causing him to shudder.

  “I sure did.”

  “Wow.” It was all he could come up with for the moment. He was having no trouble imagining the bloodstorm and the bugs and the snakes all pouring forth from this very place. In fact, standing this close to it, it made all the sense in the world.

  Feeling a moment’s inspiration, he bent down and grabbed a fist-sized piece of rubble near his foot, inched his feet right up to the edge and gave the rock a nice little underhanded toss into the hole. After it disappeared into the darkness below he listened intently for what must have been a full minute and never heard the stone hit bottom.

  “All the way to Hell,” said Gerald. Thomas didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, but he’d been thinking the same thing.

  The other people who’d been standing nearby came walking over. One of the men, a balding fellow wearing glasses who looked to Thomas like he would have been right at home working in a law office, said, “You should be careful. No telling what you might stir up down there by doing that.”

  As if on cue there came a noise from the hole.

  “What was that?” asked the man who’d just issued the warning.

  Nobody said anything for a few moments.

  Then it came again.

  “Sounds like somebody moaning,” said Dana from where she stood a short distance behind Thomas.

  And, yes, that’s exactly what it sounded like, somebody moaning, whether in pain or pleasure or hunger it was hard to tell. The sound echoed as it was expelled from the hole, giving it a strange, multi-layered quality as if it came from multiple sources.

  “We should probably get out of here,” Thomas heard someone say, one of the people who had been there when he arrived. It may have been one of the most intelligent ideas he had ever heard. He started to back away from the hole, keeping his eyes on the opening, not sure he wanted to let it out of sight lest whatever was down there reached the surface without his knowing and took him down from behind.

  After moving back about ten steps he detected movement at the edge of the hole right where he’d been standing. A hand reached up and grabbed at the blacktop of the road that ended there. The fingers scrambled about for purchase then another hand came up followed by the head of a woman then her shoulders, torso, hips, legs and feet. She lay there for a moment as if gathering her strength then got up slowly like she was ill or exhausted. The most obvious detail about her was that she was naked. She was young, thin, her skin dirty and bruised in places, her long hair hanging limp and haggard down over her shoulders and breasts. The woman moaned and something else moaned from the pit behind her.

  Other hands reached up from the hole. Other arms appeared, other heads and other naked bodies. It wasn’t long before a crowd of people had appeared. Ten of them. Twenty. Thirty. All of them bruised and battered to various degrees. All of them moaning.

  “Margaret?” Thomas heard someone say. As he continued to back away from these newcomers, a man walked by him toward a gray haired woman who had just climbed up to the surface.

  “My God, Margaret!”

  The man reached out toward her.

  “I can’t believe it! You’ve come back!”

  He took the woman in his arms and Thomas could hear the sound of weeping. The woman, Margaret, did nothing to console him. She just stood there, moaning. Then she opened her mouth wide and bit into the man’s neck. He screamed and tried to pull away but the woman wrapped her arms around him in a firm embrace. The man’s cries became louder and higher pitched as the woman pulled her face away, now bloodied around the mouth, a sizable chunk of meat held in her grinning maw.

  “Lucius?” Thomas heard someone say behind him. Then someone else: “Elizabeth?” He turned and saw that a dozen or so people who’d spent the night at the Wal-Mart with him had gathered to witness the spectacle. They too had spotted loved ones among those who had emerged from the pit. Even after seeing what the old woman had done they still came forward, driven by an overriding desire to be reunited with those they had lost.

  “No!” Thomas shouted at those walking past him. “Turn back! It’s not what you think!” He grabbed at the handgun he’d been keeping in the front of his pants lately, remembered that he’d left it in Dana’s car.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Dana as she reached out and grabbed his arm, her eyes wide with fear. “Please.”

  “Yes, let’s,” said Gerald f
rom beside her.

  Thomas was about to go with them when he turned for one last look at the horde of naked and injured people headed his way. And that’s when he saw her. The breath caught in his throat and he pulled himself from Dana’s grasp. No, it couldn’t be. Could it? It isn’t really her, he tried to tell himself. The way she walked, limping badly, practically dragging one of her legs her. The vacant expression on her face. She looked so thin. So vulnerable. Seeing her there, exposed like that, all he could think about was going to her and covering her nakedness and offering what aid he could, holding her and never letting go.

  Over Dana’s and Gerald’s protests, he went to her. Other people had started to scream now but he paid them little mind. There was only one thing that mattered now and it was right there, less than a dozen feet away, waiting for him.

  “Julia,” he said and moved to cover the distance that separated him from his wife. She held her arms outstretched before her and he was only a few feet from her now, reaching out to take her hands in his. That’s when the side of her head exploded. She collapsed at his feet, brains and blood forming a thick puddle where she lay. He staggered back, horrified and confused by what he’d just seen.

  It was then that he noticed the chaos surrounding him, the moans and the screams and the awful sight of people being bitten and clawed and, in one case, a woman on the ground with three of the naked newcomers crouched over her pulling at her clothes and her flesh. Then there was a crack! and another crack! and a naked woman went down with a red, wet hole in the middle of her forehead and a man was spun about as some invisible force punched him hard in the shoulder.

  Gunfire, Thomas realized. Someone’s shooting into the crowd.

  Then Dana was next to him shouting the name of her previously missing husband: “Bill! Bill! Over here!” Thomas grabbed her and started pulling her back, pulling her away from the body of his dead wife and the increasing number of those naked and hungry things that continued to emerge from the hole in the ground. Amid the chaos Thomas came to the realization—and he fervently hoped it was so—that more than likely these were not their loved ones but vile facsimiles of them. That like the bugs and the snakes, they had been created to deepen the anguish of those who yet lived in this town. By whom and for what purpose, Thomas still did not know. What he did know was that he and Dana and Gerald had to get away from this place as fast as they could.

  Dana resisted his efforts to pry her away and so he forced her to look at him and amidst the terrible din of that place he told her, “That is not your husband. That was not my wife. We need to get out of here. Right now. Do you hear me? Do you understand?” It dawned on him that this was a role reversal of the previous night, that now it was him saving her. He saw that somehow he had gotten through to her. Or, more than likely, she knew that something was not right with any of this, that as much as she may have wished it to be, it just wasn’t. She nodded her head then they were walking away as the moaning sound continued to grow, as the gunshots rang out and the world continued to become a more bizarre and increasingly miserable place.

  Once they had put a little distance between themselves and the crowd they heard an amplified voice shout, “Thomas! Up here!” He looked toward the auto shop across from the Wal-Mart and saw two figures standing on the roof. The shooters. He didn’t have much of a problem figuring out who they were. As he and Dana and Gerald approached the building, Ron leaned out over the edge and said, “Around back. There’s a ladder.” Then he lifted his rifle up to his shoulder and fired another shot into the crazed mob over near the pit.

  They circled the building and found the ladder standing against the back wall. A black extended cab pickup truck was parked nearby. Thomas went up first followed by Dana and Gerald.

  Ron and Tanya stood at the far side of the roof near a knee high wall that ran along the edge there. They each had rifles with telescopic sights pressed to their shoulders and were popping off shots. As Thomas approached them he saw a megaphone lying next to Ron’s booted feet. He was dressed in army fatigue pants and a green tank top. Tanya was dressed similarly. Thomas walked over and stood a few feet away from the duo, covered his ears with his hands and watched as they fired round after round into the now seething mass of people near the hole.

  “Fucking zombies!” shouted Ron as he turned and looked at Thomas, gave him a tight smile and said, “Good to see you again, man.” Thomas could just hear his muffled voice through his hands, nodded his head and said, “Good to see you too.”

  Then Ron went back to his shooting and Thomas stood there with Dana and Gerald and watched the carnage. Even at this distance it was a disturbing sight. People were brought down by groups of the “zombies,” as Ron had dubbed them. Not that Thomas could argue with this moniker. It was just like those Romero movies he used to watch when he was a kid over at a friend’s house. His own parents would never have let him watch them. Night of the Living Dead. Dawn of the Dead. Day of the Dead. Not to mention all the countless knockoffs. And now here he was, seeing it happen for real. The Pit of the Dead, or some such nonsense. Watch in terror and disbelief as the survivors of an inexplicable apocalypse are terrorized by the reanimated corpses of their dead loved ones…

  From here, Thomas couldn’t tell if the bullets were hitting those who had risen from the pit or those who had come to greet them. He could only hope that Ron and Tanya were as good of shots as their confident stances and attitudes led him to believe. He saw a few survivors manage to break away from the melee and run back toward the Wal-Mart across the street. But many of those who’d gotten consumed by the fray, figuratively and then literally speaking, never stood a chance of escaping. The zombies continued to crawl out of the pit, naked and bruised and shambling. Over and over again Ron and Tanya pulled the triggers of their weapons with mechanical efficiency, reloaded when necessary. The sun climbed into the sky and the day became unbearably hot. Eventually, Thomas turned his back on the carnage and walked over to where the top of the ladder peeked above the edge of the building. He sat down, his back against the low wall there, did his best to not think about Julia and how the sight of her—or that broken and terrible replica of her—made him feel. Dana joined him and he placed an arm around her shoulders as she leaned against him and wept for a while.

  Finally, the shooting stopped and Dana was able to dry her eyes. The sound of a mindless, collective moan could still be heard. Thomas had no way of knowing if it came from the injured who had survived the attack or more of the walking dead.

  *

  Of all the movie monsters, I’d have to say that zombies scared me the most. There was just something about them, their seemingly insatiable hunger, their sheer numbers, their mindless and relentless perseverance, and the fact that they were once just regular human beings like me and the members of my family who, through no fault of their own, were reduced to such base and repulsive creatures. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, all of them could be and were romanticized at one point or another. But not zombies. Not much to romanticize about a walking, hungry corpse, I suppose. Those movies always gave me the most terrible nightmares. In them, the world was overrun with the undead. My mother and father had been turned into zombies and were trying to get in through my locked bedroom door so that they could convert me too or maybe just have me for dinner…

  Looking back over all that I have written so far it dawns on me that I was a bit of a strange kid. I have to shake my head at some of it, thinking back to how naive and impressionable I used to be. But now I wonder if all the weird stuff I was into has helped me deal with, to some extent, what ended up happening to the world I once knew. Like all the movies I watched were training films of a sort that managed to prepare me in some small way for the sheer, awful craziness I would one day have to endure.

  *

  Ron and Tanya were prepared for the blazing sun and persistent heat. Inside a duffle bag similar to the one they’d had the first time Thomas had met them, they’d brought supplies once again, a bottle of su
n block among them. Thomas applied it liberally and gratefully to the exposed skin of his arms and face and neck, even along the part down the middle of his hair. There was water too and more Granola bars.

  “Wow, you guys think of everything, huh?” said Gerald.

  “Part of the training,” said Tanya with a shrug.

  There wasn’t much to do up there on the roof except talk and wait. The walking dead were everywhere down on the ground, kept climbing out of the hole and wandering around. No one wanted to risk going down there.

  “Don’t worry, they’ll drop at some point,” said Ron from where he sat in front of Thomas cleaning his rifle. “Then they’ll dry up and blow away. Just like the bugs and the snakes.”

  “Not like the bugs, I hope,” said Thomas. He couldn’t look at Dana as he spoke the words.

  “Well, the snakes didn’t leave any hallucinogenic dust behind,” said Ron. “Maybe it was just an insect thing.”

  Thomas was glad that someone seemed to have it all figured out.

  “Good God,” said Gerald, wiping at the sweat running down his neck and forehead. “It’s a damned oven up here.” He took off the t-shirt he was wearing and draped it over his head. “Can I get some more of that sun block?” Tanya tossed him the bottle and he applied a thin coat to the pale, unblemished skin of his torso. “I really do owe you one, Thomas. It’s so good to be young again.” He patted his flat and toned abdomen.