The Hell Season

by Ray Wallace

  “That must have been awful.”

  Ron nodded again. “Yeah, it was bad. I still see them sometimes in my dreams. When I dream, that is. Not very often, thankfully. At least that I can remember. Because, to be perfectly honest, I just don’t sleep all that much. Not since I went over there. Not since I’ve been back. Because there was other stuff to be sure. Other dead bodies. Other killings. A good friend of mine taken apart by a roadside bomb. Stuff I don’t want to go into. Stuff that keeps me up at night. I like to go on walks, sometimes around three or four in the morning. Nobody up and out but me for the most part. And, well, here’s what I’m getting at... The past few nights I’ve gone out and I’ve seen your friend Gerald standing near the edge of that damned hole, looking in. And ever since the other day, since the zombies attacked and all those people died then came back… He’s had a few friends with him. Looks like it might be all of them, all the ones who’ve been resurrected, as a matter of fact, just standing there, watching, like they’re waiting for something, you know?” He paused. “The whole thing’s got me a little concerned is all.”

  “Yeah, I could see how it would.”

  “I just thought you should know about it, maybe keep an eye on him, on the others, see if it looks like they’re up to anything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s been quiet these past few days. You know, nothing bad happening. Too damned quiet, you ask me. I’m sure you feel the same way. This shit isn’t over, whatever it is. No, not by a long shot. Something’s coming. Maybe something big. And your friend there might know something about it. Could be that he’s in on it.”

  “Gerald? I don’t think so. I mean, the guy died, right?” Thomas frowned. “Okay, I’ll say it. I killed him. And then he came back. Out of that damned hole in the ground. As did the others who were killed. I don’t think it’s any big surprise that they might be acting a little strange. Do you?”

  Ron leveled a deep, penetrating stare his way. Then he pursed his lips and sighed. “Maybe they’re not up to anything. I don’t know. How can we know anything for sure at this point? But do me a favor, will you?”

  “If I can.’

  “Just keep an eye on him. And the others. Can you do that?”

  Thomas didn’t think it was asking too much. It was always better to be safe than sorry, wasn’t it? “Sure, I can do that.”

  They shook hands and walked back to the party.

  For the rest of the night Thomas fought the urge to have a drink.

  *

  It was well past midnight by the time the celebration wound down. The lights were finally extinguished around one-thirty, the generators turned off. Everyone agreed that the following morning would be a good one for sleeping in. Although, after lying there for what had to be two hours, Thomas was starting to wonder if he’d be able to sleep at all. Too much on his mind. His talk with Ron, for starters. There was Dana,too, sleeping just a few feet away in her own bed. He could hear her gently snoring on occasion, the sound oddly comforting. He wasn’t sure exactly where their relationship stood. They were friends, of course. He had to admit that he found her attractive. In another lifetime he may have even ended up with her instead of Julia. If he’d met her first, of course. If he’d never met Julia. The thought filled him with a deep sense of guilt. Even if it was only a thought it was still a betrayal, wasn’t it? A very small one but there nonetheless. Like some of the similar thoughts he’d had in the past, back before Julia was taken from him. There’d been other women—hell, one of them the wife of a work colleague—who’d struck him as attractive, intelligent women he wouldn’t have minded spending some time with. Again, if he’d never met Julia. Just thoughts, nothing more, but they’d always left him feeling guilty. Because the bottom line was that Julia was perfect for him. He had been the luckiest man in the world to have found her, to have had his love reciprocated by someone as special as her. He’d never cheated on her. Never really considered it. Not ever. But what if she didn’t come back? Would there ever come a time when he’d be able to be with another woman? Would he ever want to? And there was the guilt again. It was too early for such musings, wasn’t it? She was coming back. Or he’d be going to her, wherever she was. He’d find her and the children if it was the last thing he did. He’d die trying, if it came to that. He almost laughed. What if he couldn’t die? Look at Gerald and the others. What if he just kept coming back, time and time again, unable to die even if he wanted to? What then?

  And then there was what Ron had said about things being too quiet lately, about something big possibly happening. Plenty there to keep him awake.

  He turned his thoughts to his parents, pictured them in their house up north, located just outside of Pittsburgh. His mom puttering around the kitchen, baking bread or cookies for his dad and the neighbors. His dad sitting on the porch smoking his pipe, wondering when he could get down to Florida to spend some time with his son and the grandkids. It was a good image, a happy image that he struggled to hold onto. But there was another image too, the one in which his parents’ house, the place that Thomas had called home for so many years, was silent, devoid of life, where two sets of sleeping clothes lay empty beneath the covers of his parents’ bed.

  As he lay there, Thomas noticed that his throat felt a little sore. He coughed into his pillow so as not to wake those sleeping nearby. Just as he was about to get up from the bed to get a drink of water, he heard the sounds of someone stirring. Lying still he opened his eyes and looked out into the darkness toward Gerald’s bed, saw the man’s dark form getting to its feet. A minute later, Gerald was wandering off toward the front of the store. Thomas was pretty sure he knew where his friend was headed. What was it that really drew him out there like that? he couldn’t help but wonder. What did he and the others see when they stared down into that black, impenetrable abyss? Did they see the abyss staring back, as Nietzsche once so eloquently declared? Or something else? Something that only their experience with death allowed them to see, to comprehend, to face without running screaming into the darkness?

  Eventually Thomas slept. He was plagued by cold and comfortless dreams filled with dark and dreary landscapes through which he walked, utterly alone, toward a promise of comfort he was never able to find.

  CHAPTER 7

  Saturday, July 3 to Saturday, July 17

  Shouldn’t have drank so much last night, was the first thought to go through Thomas’s head when he awoke. His head hurt. Real bad. Then he realized that it wasn’t just his head that hurt. He hurt all over.

  Groaning, he opened his eyes then immediately wished he hadn’t. The dim lighting of the room around him flashed into his brain like a laser fired directly into his retinas. He groaned and closed his eyes tight against the pain. Just how much did he drink last night? Then he remembered. Nothing. He didn’t drink any alcohol at all. So what was this? What was with the terrible pounding in his skull, the nausea churning in his stomach, the ache coursing throughout his body?

  “How do you feel?”

  The words were like hammers striking anvils next to his ears.

  He moaned in reply.

  “That good, huh?”

  “Quiet,” he whispered, the effort causing a flame to tear through his throat. “Please...”

  “Oh, yes,” said the voice in a much gentler tone. “Sorry about that.”

  “Water,” was the next word he said.

  “Sure, here you go.”

  Thomas recognized the voice.

  “Gerald?”

  A thin laugh. “At your service. Don’t get up. Just turn your head. There you go.”

  A cup of water was pressed to Thomas’s lips and he drank like that lying down, wondering if he could summon the strength to get up if he wanted to. Which, right about then, he did not.

  Jesus, what was wrong with him?

  “A few of the others have gone to the hospital for antibiotics,” said Gerald. “One of those who went is a nurse. Angie. Tall, long black hai
r? They should be back soon. In the meantime, here, drink some of this.”

  Another cup was pressed to Thomas’s mouth, this one smaller, made of thinner plastic. He swallowed the thick, licorice flavored liquid it contained, some sort of cold and flu medication.

  “Hopefully that will help. If it’s any consolation, you’re not the only one who’s sick. Far from it. Well over half of our numbers have come down with… whatever it is you’ve come down with. And I have to tell you, it’s no ordinary flu or anything like that. At least none that I’ve ever seen. The bruises on your face and arms, on the bodies of the others too. It’s like you’ve been physically beaten by… oh, I don’t know, some angry spirit that walked among us during the night.”

  Thomas coughed, a deep racking cough that sent sharp waves of pain throughout his body. Once the fit had passed he spent a minute getting his breath. Then he asked, “What time?”

  “Late. You’ve slept the entire morning away. Half the afternoon. It’s past three o’clock.”

  “Damn,” he said. And then, quite mercifully, he drifted off to sleep once more.

  *

  As a child, I suffered a few what I guess could be called rather serious illnesses. There was the bout of chicken pox. A couple of years later, when I was nine years old, I came down with a case of the measles. The following winter there was the ear infection. And then, when I was thirteen years old, there was the strep throat that led to me having my tonsils removed. That last one was a doozy, let me tell you. I couldn’t swallow anything that didn’t come in liquid form for more than a week. I pretty much survived on soup broth and ice cream and water. The ice cream wasn’t so bad, I guess, but it was small consolation for the searing agony that accompanied any attempt at swallowing during that time, especially the first four or five days or so. I lost fifteen pounds that week, fifteen pounds I didn’t know I had to lose, skinny little twerp that I was. Yeah, it was a rough time, alright. I’ve been told that having one’s tonsils removed as an adult is even worse. But even that, I’m sure, could not compare to the illness that I and a good number of my fellow survivors were forced to suffer through during the heart of that terrible and hellish summer.

  *

  The days passed in a fever dream, a phantasmagoria of terribly vivid images inflicted upon both his conscious and unconscious mind. It was difficult to tell what was real and what was imaginary. There was so much pain. Even with the medication brought back from the hospital. Thomas was put on an IV because by the second day of his illness he could not swallow anything at all. Water felt like liquid metal pouring down his throat. During the daytime he drifted in and out of consciousness. When he slept he dreamed, dark terrible dreams that offered him little solace from the agony of waking. Throughout much of his ordeal—which lasted for more than a week he would later discover—he was sure that he was going to die. And would that have been such a bad thing? Look how well death had treated Gerald and the others who had been killed and resurrected. They were young. Whole. Untouched by the illness that ravaged many of the survivors—another fact he would not become aware of until later. As much as the prospect appealed to him at times during those torturous days, it also filled him with a deep sense of misgiving. How could he be sure that those who had been resurrected were really the same people they were before they had died? Maybe they were some sort of clone or doppelganger, imposters dressed in the flesh and memories of the people they were only pretending to be. Maybe the souls of Gerald and those killed in the zombie attack—if there was, in fact such a thing as a “soul”—were at this moment somewhere else entirely. Maybe they were in the Hell he had visited during the hallucination he experienced after inhaling the powdered bug corpses. Or maybe they were wherever his wife and children were. Heaven. Or some alternate dimension. Or another version of this town, this world, where all these terrible events were hopefully not occurring. Maybe he was the one that was missing from that other world, the real world, leaving his wife and children confused and saddened, wondering where he could have possibly disappeared to. Maybe, maybe, maybe… Too many maybes with no real answers. One explanation seemed as plausible as any other. Although there was one thing he knew for sure: he didn’t want to die. There was no certainty that he would be resurrected, after all. There was always the possibility that there was only a specific window of time in which such a miracle, if that was the appropriate term, could have taken place. Maybe there would be no more resurrections. Even if he could be reborn the thought still frightened him. By its very nature the process rather profoundly changed a person. Death. Rebirth. Rejuvenation. How could it not? Thomas was quite happy with the person he was, thank you very much. So he held on to life, agonizing as it had become, with whatever strength he could gather. And he endured. Oh, how he endured.

  The nights were worse than the days because at night he couldn’t sleep. At least it didn’t feel like he was asleep. He was aware of his surroundings, painfully so. He could feel the illness ravaging his body. The sounds of his suffering companions—the coughing, the raspy breathing, the moaning—seemed an endless tumult in the nighttime stillness. The one thing, however, that truly made him wonder if he was actually awake, or if maybe the fever was burning away his sanity, were the ghosts.

  For the most part, the spirits that visited him in the night were strangers to him. Old men and women. Middle-aged. Couples in the spring of adulthood. Teens and children. The sight of the children in particular got to him as he had not seen any since his family had disappeared. A ghost would materialize out of the darkness of one of the store’s aisles, its form enveloped in a dim glow, then walk over and stand next to where Thomas lay. It would stare down at him, not speaking. He wouldn’t say anything either. Not because he didn’t want to. No, in fact he wanted to very much. He wanted to ask these visitors who they were and what they wanted. But he couldn’t. The fire in his throat robbed him of even the merest hint of a whisper. So he just stared back. They didn’t frighten him, frail, transparent things that they were. They emitted no feelings or intentions of ill will. Maybe some level of curiosity. Beyond that, they displayed no emotion whatsoever. On average, each wraith would only visit him for a few minutes. Then he or she would turn and disappear back down the aisle from which he or she emerged and another ghost would appear. And the cycle would continue throughout the night until he eventually fell into an exhausted slumber or the morning sunlight, exceedingly frail this far inside the building, made its way back to him.

  Some of the spirits seemed vaguely familiar to him, like people he may have passed in the grocery store or at the gas station or maybe even the liquor store on occasion. A few he recognized. His neighbors, Ed and Sara, who lived just next door, Bill and Jane from down the street, all of whom had been over to Thomas and Julia’s house for the occasional cookout or Sunday afternoon get together when football season was in full swing. He came to surmise that the ghosts were the spirits of the people who had lived in this town, who had disappeared the same night Julia and Robert and Jenny had, the friends and loved ones of all of those who were now living—and many of whom were suffering—within the walls of this sprawling megastore. He kept waiting for Julia and the kids to appear but they never did for which he was simultaneously devastated and grateful. He wanted to see them so badly. But not like this, no, not like this. They had haunted him once already and that was enough. He had no idea why they didn’t make an appearance. Maybe because none of the spirits were really there at all, were only figments of his fever-ridden imagination. Maybe some part of his subconscious mind had decided to save him any further pain his family’s presence might instill in him. Maybe, maybe, maybe…

  The days passed like that, one agony-filled minute after the next, ripe with visions and dreams and visitations from the lost souls of the town. It was a wonder he didn’t lose his mind completely during his ordeal which finally ended one day when the fever broke. He sat up on his sweat soaked mattress and asked Gerald in a harsh whisper—the man was sitting in a nearb
y chair—if he might have a glass of ice water and maybe a cup of soup.

  Smiling, Gerald told him he most certainly could and went off to fetch what Thomas had requested. He came back with Angie who took his temperature and removed the IV and told him what a miracle it was that he had actually pulled through the way he had. The bruising that had marked his skin was still there but he was told that it had noticeably subsided. His body continued to ache but not as badly as before. Many of the others had not been so lucky, she told him. Some had slipped into comas. A number had died. And they had not, as of yet, emerged from the great hole that Gerald had climbed out of upon his resurrection.

  “We still hope,” Gerald said.

  Thomas ate his soup and then got up and walked around for a bit with Gerald’s assistance.

  “Dana?” asked Thomas, not seeing her immediately.

  Gerald led him over to an area near the toy section where the comatose patients had been placed in rows of beds. There were nineteen of them. Dana was there, lying on her back, eyes wide open, staring into nothingness, her breathing wet and raspy, the skin of her arms and face mottled with bruises.