by Ray Wallace
“Oh, damn,” said Thomas. He sat there on the floor by her bed for a while, holding her hand. At some point exhaustion overcame him and he began to slip toward sleep. “Come back to me, Dana,” he said just before he lay down on the floor and dozed off.
*
By Tuesday, the thirteenth, Thomas was feeling pretty much human again. He’d been up and about for a few days by then. Tired, sure. Not his usually peppy self. But fairly active and that’s what mattered. On the one hand, the sickness had seemed to come and go so quickly. On the other, it felt as though it had lasted a year or longer. He found that his joints still ached a bit and he was turning in at night somewhat earlier than usual.
“Not surprising,” Angie had told him, “considering what you’ve been through.”
Thomas figured she was right. He was happy that he’d been able to survive his ordeal. The same couldn’t be said for a number of those who’d also gotten sick. Nearly a dozen dead, their bodies slowly crumbling away into powder, taken outside and allowed to be carried away by the wind. It was an odd and confusing situation for Angie and her crew. Should they hold a memorial service for someone who might return from the dead? In the end, they had settled on a short litany involving the words “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…” Then they would head back inside to continue caring for those who still needed their help.
Thomas spent some time each evening at Dana’s side, talking to her a little, holding her hand. She was on an IV, had been hooked up to a heart monitor. Her caretakers had done a hell of a job plundering the hospital. They’d brought back syringes, various types of medicine, bandages, anything they thought might be useful in fighting this plague and whatever other unforeseen injuries or illnesses might arise.
Tanya was occupying a bed near Dana’s. She too was in a coma. Ron had brought her over to the Wal-Mart the night they had both fallen ill. He had pulled through much as Thomas had, was just recently getting up and about himself. Tanya hadn’t been so fortunate.
“Looks like the majority of those not suffering from any of this are the ones who came back from the dead,” Ron said to Thomas. They were outside in the parking lot sitting on the lowered tailgate of a small Japanese pickup truck. Ron was drinking a beer, Thomas a soda. It was a few hours past sunset and Thomas was feeling the fatigue set in. The night air was hot and thick. The days had continued to heat up over the past week-and-a-half, topping out at a hundred and ten earlier in the afternoon. How much hotter could it get? There’d been no rain for a couple of weeks now. Thomas almost wished a bloodstorm would roll in, anything to help alleviate the heat. But then he imagined what the excessive heat would do to all that blood and shuddered. If no regular rainstorm came along to clean it up then it would undoubtedly linger in the air for days, every breath tainted with its cloying, coppery odor…
“Yeah, it seems that way,” Thomas agreed. He recognized the accusatory tone in Ron’s voice, as though he held those who had been resurrected responsible for the illness in some way. “And a good thing too. If everyone had gotten sick I wonder if we’d have made it, if we’d be here talking right now. They did help to look after us, remember?”
Ron nodded in agreement, albeit a bit reluctantly. He took a sip of beer. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for what they did. But I still have this feeling… I don’t know. Something isn’t right with them. Something I can’t put my finger on.”
“Yeah, they died and came back to life. Not the most normal thing in the world, I would agree.”
Ron grunted a laugh. “I suppose…”
They sat there for a few minutes without talking. The silence of their surroundings was absolute. No cars. No dogs barking. No wind. It was like the whole world was holding its breath, just waiting for something to happen. A shooting star crossed the night sky. Another one. Thomas’s daughter, Jenny, would have insisted that he make a wish. There was only one thing in the world that he wanted anymore. For some reason, he didn’t think a wish was going to make that happen. He tried anyway.
“Look, I trust your instincts,” said Thomas, breaking the silence. “I’ll continue to keep an eye on them. If I notice anything strange…”
“Strange… Hmmm. Yeah. Not really even sure what I’d consider all that strange anymore. They’d have to pull some real fucked up shit to get my attention at this point. But if they do… I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Ron drained the last of his beer, crumpled the can and tossed it onto the ground. He belched long and loud and laughed a little bit. Thomas was surprised to find himself laughing too. Anything to find humor in these days.
*
The next morning, Dana regained consciousness. So did a dozen others who’d been comatose along with her. She lay there blinking for a while. Thomas and Gerald were at her side. Angie was busy checking on all her patients. After a while Dana sat up. Thomas took her hand, asked her how she was doing. She didn’t say anything, just looked at him as if she wasn’t sure who he was. Then she glanced around like she wasn’t sure where she was either, like she’d been away a long time, had only now returned from somewhere else entirely. Thomas didn’t find the idea all that far-fetched. Maybe she had been somewhere else this entire time. Somewhere much different than this, the waking world. Somewhere terrible, most likely, judging by the way things had been going lately. The rules no longer applied anymore. The week-and-a-half she’d been under, fed through a tube, urinating through a different one—the care Angie and her few assistants had been able to administer went beyond commendable—may have seemed like an eternity from her perspective. Or no time at all. Only Dana knew. And for now, it seemed, she wasn’t talking. Thomas patted her hand.
“When you’re ready,” he told her. “No sooner, alright?”
Then he and Gerald left her as Angie came over to check up on her. Thomas was relieved to have her back but that look in her eyes, that thousand yard stare, it had him worried.
“What do you think?” he asked Gerald as they neared the front of the store, stopped to face one another at the end of checkout line number twenty-seven.
“I don’t know,” said Gerald. “Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“You know Ron doesn’t trust you.” The words were out before Thomas even realized he was saying them. “Not just you. All of those who died and came back.”
“Oh?” Gerald seemed genuinely surprised by this. He smiled. “I guess I can understand his concern. His military training and all that. Always on the lookout for a possible threat. Although I wonder what sort of threat he thinks we are?”
Thomas shook his head. “He’s not sure. It’s just a feeling…”
“I’m sure his feelings served him well in the past. He was involved in a war, after all. Sometimes your feelings are all that save your ass, I would imagine.”
“Aren’t we in a war now?”
Gerald paused to consider this. “I guess we are at that even if we’re not sure exactly who—or what—the enemy is. I can assure you and your friend, however, that it isn’t me. It isn’t anyone here. We’re all in this together. Whatever this is. Working against one another accomplishes nothing. To survive, we all have to cooperate. I think everyone here understands that. At least I hope so.”
“I hope so too,” said Thomas with a sigh. “Because you’re right. We’ve got enough trouble without there being dissension in our ranks.”
“Our ranks, huh? Spoken like a true soldier.”
It was Thomas’s turn to smile. “I’m a quick learner, I guess.”
Gerald was about to say something else when a great roaring sound erupted from outside the building and the ground started to shake.
*
Growing up near Pittsburgh, the worst that Mother Nature ever threw at us was the occasional heat wave in the summer and the blizzard one could expect at least once every winter. As a child, neither of these occurrences ever seemed to have much of a negative impact on me. The latter, in fact, was a much celebrated event for
it almost inevitably meant that there would be school closings and I—along with my friends—would get to enjoy an unanticipated little vacation. I can remember waking up on certain mornings, pulling back the curtains of my bedroom window and seeing the snow falling heavily, the ground already deep with it. Then I’d race out to the living room and turn on the radio, listening as the list of closings was read. There were few feelings of exhilaration to rival those that came when the name of the school I attended came issuing from those speakers. Within moments, I’d be on the phone calling my friends, planning the day’s sledding and various other winter related activities. My mom would have to remind me to eat breakfast and shower before said activities were undertaken, such was my level of excitement. Of course, not hearing one’s school announced among those that were closed for the day had an equivalent emotional attachment to it, although a much more somber one.
After I moved to Florida and started a family, I got to experience a hurricane for the first time. When word of its approach was announced, Julia and I did like most of our neighbors and used sheets of plywood to board up our windows. We stocked up on water and supplies just in case the storm turned out to be “the big one”—like hurricane Andrew which wreaked havoc throughout South Florida—and we were without power for days if not weeks. Well, as it turned out this particular storm was not “the big one.” It was a category three, did not hit us directly but still dumped plenty of rain on us and whipped up some nasty winds for more than a day. Locally, no major damage was suffered by the time it was all over but there were a few moments—like when I saw a small, uprooted tree and pieces of somebody’s lawn furniture blow across the front yard—that made me a little nervous. Since that first hurricane, I’ve experienced a few more, one that was a bit more powerful, none of which I would classify as a serious danger to either my family or myself.
The good thing about heat waves and blizzards and powerful storms, I’ve come to realize, is that they usually announce their approach. They have a certain predictability to them. One has only to turn on the news to be properly warned and to take the appropriate precautions. Not so with an earthquake. They can come on without a moment’s notice, destroy streets and buildings and lives in mere seconds. The very thought of the ground beneath one’s feet turning treacherous is an alarming one to be certain. There is nowhere to run or hide from such an occurrence. That’s why I’ve never had a great urge to live in or really to even visit certain places in California. As a teenager, I did my research, trust me. I read the horror stories about people swallowed by sudden fissures in the earth or trapped beneath the rubble of fallen buildings. No thanks. I’ll take my predictable catastrophes any day. Sure, there are always plenty of things to worry about no matter where you live. But the one thing you don’t have to think about while living in Florida is what to do in case an earthquake strikes.
That is until the day came when the world changed and just about anything became possible.
Anything at all.
*
Thomas was lucky, he realized later, after the roaring and the rumbling and the shaking subsided. They all were. The building, constructed to meet hurricane code, certainly, but never with an earthquake in mind, survived the chaos relatively unscathed. Shelves were toppled. A few windows shattered. Ceiling tiles fell like leaves on a windy autumn day. Some lighting fixtures crashed to the ground. But the roof did not collapse and no one was seriously injured. A few bumps and bruises and minor lacerations. Nothing that Angie and her cadre of caregivers couldn’t handle. All in all, the quake lasted only about thirty seconds or so. At the time, however, it had certainly seemed much longer than that to Thomas.
After Gerald helped him to his feet, the two of them and at least a dozen others walked toward the front of the store and out through the exit doors to see if the generators or any of the surrounding buildings had suffered damage. Ron was already out there, arms folded across his chest, looking toward the road and the great hole in the earth from which so much trouble had recently issued.
“Will you look at that?” he asked.
Concerns for ruined buildings or generators were instantly forgotten.
“My God,” somebody said, the fear in the voice plain for everyone to hear.
Lying in the road, so large that it nearly blocked the entire view of the repair shop where Ron and Tanya had been staying, was a giant worm, its tail only a short distance from the great hole in the ground from which it had obviously only just emerged.
“Well, I guess we know the source of the quake,” said Gerald.
The worm had to have been a good hundred feet in length. Its skin was a pinkish color, like that of a common earthworm. Its girth was more or less constant along its length until it reached the identically rounded ends at head and tail, making it difficult to truly know if one end was, in fact, the head and the other the tail. Its flesh was wet and glistening, almost oily in appearance, and steam could be seen rising along the entire length of its body and dissipating into the air above.
“Yes,” said a graying, middle-aged man Thomas knew was named Bruce. “Giving birth is always a noisy process.”
More people emerged from the store to view the monstrosity lying in the road. The thing didn’t move, not at all.
“Is it dead?” people wondered aloud.
After about ten minutes of observing the worm’s immobility, Ron said, “Aw, fuck this,” and started walking over toward the thing. Gerald and Thomas exchanged a look then followed a short distance behind. Thomas could hear others hesitantly following them.
Ron stopped about twenty feet from the worm somewhere near the middle of its length. Thomas and Gerald came up to stand on either side of him. From here they could discern a low gurgling sound emanating from the creature. Also, this close to the thing there was a noticeable stench one would associate with an open sewer.
“I don’t think it’s dead,” said Ron. “That sound… like it’s digesting or something.”
“So what, it’s just sleeping after a good meal?” asked Thomas.
Ron shrugged. “I don’t know, why don’t you go give it a jab and find out.”
Thomas didn’t find the comment all that humorous.
The ex-marine moved a few steps closer toward the worm.
“Ron…” Thomas said in way of warning.
“It’s alright,” said Ron, not turning around.
“Not if it rolls over on you.”
“If it moves at all, I’ll be sure to run away as quickly as I can.”
After moving up next to it, he reached out and placed his hand on the creature’s hide, jerked it back in surprise. “Man, that’s hot.” He stood there for a few moments, not saying anything, just staring at the wall of glistening flesh before him. Then he waved Thomas and Gerald forward. “Come check this out.”
A bit hesitantly, the two friends came forward.
“What is it?” asked Gerald.
“Lean up close,” said Ron. “Take a look.”
More than a bit apprehensively, Thomas held his breath against the stench and did as Ron instructed.
“Do you see that?” asked Ron.
Thomas nodded as a heavy feeling of dread settled over him. He turned around and pushed his way back through the crowd that had gathered nearby, people asking him what was wrong. He couldn’t find the words to speak, to let them know what he had seen, or thought he’d seen, suspended within the presumably watery innards of the great slumbering monster. There were figures in there, human sized figures floating inside the worm, just visible through that slightly less than opaque skin. As he’d watched, Thomas had seen one of the figures spastically wave its arm. And where the face of the figure directly before him was located he could have sworn that he’d seen a mouth, stretched wide in a scream. There was only one assumption he could make, that these were the people, his fellow survivors, who had succumbed to the illness and had not been resurrected. Until now. The very thought of it sickened him to the core of his being. And h
e felt an even greater sense of gratitude for Angie and the others who had not let him die, who had allowed him to escape this latest torment.
*
Three days went by before he realized that he’d been wrong.
As each day passed, the worm’s flesh grew steadily more transparent and its stench grew ever more repellent. Maybe the heat had something to do with it, Thomas mused. By now the midday temperatures were hovering around a hundred and ten degrees with oppressive regularity. Or maybe it was exposure to the sun itself, the great creature not used to life—or whatever semblance of life it still held onto—above the surface of the Earth. Whatever the case, the humanoid figures within the worm became increasingly discernible as the days passed. It became ever more obvious that they were not, in fact, the bodies—dead or alive—of those who had been killed by the recent plague. No, the figures floating within the body of the worm could only be described as demonic in appearance. And they were growing at an alarming rate.
The figures were tall and thin with long heads, pointed chins, and the beginnings of what were obviously horns growing from the top of the skull. The skin appeared to be a dark red color. From the rear it could be seen that each of the creatures had a tail emerging from the small of the back. What looked like a very thick intestine wrapped around a bone like a human spine ran nearly the entire length of the worm. Smaller, fleshy tubes branched off from the intestine and were attached to every one of the creatures at the base of the neck. The unborn things flailed about on occasion, like human fetuses trapped within the womb.
