by Edward Lee
Ambulances sat with lights athrob, while National Guardsmen stretchered out corpses they’d found in the rubble. A strange tarped pile lay near what looked like a demolished tavern: More dead bodies, Ashton thought, but then—
He jerked the car to a halt, jumped out, and ran.
“Ashton! Where are you—” Father Greene got out and chased him, hurtling over tree stumps, debris, and more bodies.
“That car!” Ashton yelled. “Look!”
Huffing, the older man peered and spotted a silver sedan sitting half squashed under rubble from the tavern. Rhode Island plates, he detected.
Ashton plowed into the mess, throwing planks, heaving rubble aside. “I’m pretty sure this car belongs to Professor Sonia Heald! It’s the car she and Hazel drove up here in!”
Please, God, please, Greene prayed, prying planks away. Don’t let my daughter be in that car. No one inside could’ve possibly lived.
“Thank God, it’s empty,” Ashton said, and slouched on his knees. “But it’s got to be the right vehicle.” He pointed to the Brown University sticker on the cracked windshield.
“This cabin they went to,” Father Greene inquired. “We’ve got to find it.”
“Wilmarth’s cabin.” Ashton dusted himself off. “We’ll have to ask a local...if any are still alive.”
They meandered back out to the parking lot. “Keep looking around,” the pastor said. He hefted his prayer book. “I suppose I’d better do my job,” and he approached the tarp-covered corpse pile and began to read the Intercessions for the Dead.
When Ashton saw a man coming down a side road, he ran up. It was an old man, bent-spined. He hobbled along bearing a suitcase.
“Sir, sir! I’m trying to find the Wilmarth cabin,” Ashton begged. “Do you know where it is?”
“Waal, ee-yuh, I dew, young feller,” the codger said, and wiped his brow. Advanced age and a life of hard work had wizened his face.
“Jest up that road theer, but...I en’t gonna lie to yew, son. I walk by theer this mornin’ and it’s...waal, it’s destroyt.”
Ashton slumped in place. “Have you seen a young woman, early-twenties? Red hair, slim, nice figure? Or a woman with black hair, a pregnant woman?”
“New, son. Curn’t say’s I have.” When he wiped his brow again, Ashton noticed a clunky crimson ring on one finger. “Good luck, young feller. I’se got to go. En’t many heer survived last night, but they’re drivin’ me aout.”
A car horn honked; Ashton saw an old pickup with several rustic types inside. He helped the oldster stow his suitcase in the back. Then the old man squeezed into the car. “Could’a ben wuss, I s’pose but, son, be keerful ‘roaund heer. Be bettuh for yew to leave.” The truck rattled away but not before Ashton noticed a similar scarlet ring on the finger of the weathered driver.
A stench was rising, an odd one...like fresh meat and rotting meat together. When squawking was heard overhead, Ashton looked up to see great swarms of crows circling, hundreds of them. They want to eat, the student thought. He jogged back to the pastor just as a military truck roared by, its rear load-bed stacked with occupied body bags.
Father Greene was making the sign of the cross over several more bodies. The corpses’ limbs appeared burned somehow, charry, yet the bones showing were bent and oddly yellowed. One corpse, wearing a Boston College shirt, had a head that looked melted. “What could cause that? ” Ashton asked.
“God knows,” came Greene’s solemn reply. “I’ve seen several bodies like that already.” He reached down—
“Keep your hands away!” barked one of the soldiers. It was a sergeant who strode over.
“Sergeant, any idea what—”
“It could be some sort of corrosive,” the poker-faced troop told them. “We don’t know. Almost everyone from the residential section is dead, and most of them looked burned like that.” He grabbed a stick and prodded a dead, fat woman’s bowed shinbone. It jiggled as if something had turned it rubbery.
“Corrosive?” Ashton asked. “This was some kind of a freak storm. What could corrosives have to do with it?”
“Look, Father,” the sergeant said, “I know you’re concerned here, but it might be better for you to clear out till we can get things in better order.”
“All right, Sergeant,” the pastor agreed. He nudged Ashton by the arm and veered back toward the car. “This might be our last chance,” he whispered. “What did the old man say?”
“That Wilmarth’s cabin was destroyed,” Ashton repeated.
“But we’ve got to look nonetheless.”
“The road’s up here...”
More trucks roared by, corpse-laden, while more ambulances moved in. Blanched-faced EMT’s stood drained or knelt grimly before still more corpses. The stench was rising with the sun. It didn’t take long in heat and humidity like this; Father Greene had seen as much in Bosnia.
“The road’ll probably be blocked by fallen trees,” Ashton observed as they approached their car.
“We’ll drive as far as we can, then walk the rest.” Greene gripped his cross till his knuckles whitened. All this death—everywhere, but I KNOW Hazel’s still alive. She’s GOT to be.
“Hey, Father, look at this...”
Ashton had picked something up and handed it to him:
“Jewelry box? Snuff box?” Greene turned the empty object around in his hand. “It seems to be deliberately lopsided—look, the angles are all off.”
“Looks like gold maybe.”
Greene squinted at the curious hieroglyph-like designs on it. He didn’t know why but he didn’t like the look of them. On the top was a faint engraving of—
Greene shuddered as if sickened.
“Gold or not it’s...not for us.” He only sensed something awful about it, something bankrupt of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. He dropped the peculiar box and stomped it flat under his sole.
What he could see of the road leading past the town looked clear. Father Greene took one last look around. All those bodies. All these people dead. His faith was tempering—he was mad. He ground his teeth as he looked to the sky. In the name of CHRIST, God! After all I’ve done in Your service for my WHOLE LIFE, could you PLEASE let my daughter be alive, damn it!
When he looked across the car’s roof, Ashton had broken into a sprint, yelling, “Holy shit!” and commenced to running up the road.
Where’s he going? Greene’s brow furrowed. He looked up the road—
His heart quaked.
A waif-like woman staggered toward them, her eyes opened in a thousand-yard stare. Her hair looked filthy but its color could not be denied: oxblood red.
“Hazel!” Ashton croaked. “Thank God you’re alive!” Ashton nearly collided with her. He wrapped her up in an embrace, tears welling in his eyes. “Oh, shit, we were so worried.”
When Father Greene’s disbelieving stare snapped, he ran toward them. Impossible. A second ago I looked up that road and she was nowhere in sight... He wasn’t about to argue, though. But it looked like Father Greene had just run up a big marker with God...
“Ashton?” Hazel mumbled. She clung onto him, weak-kneed.
“Are you all right?”
“I...don’t know...” Her shock-wide eyes flicked to her father. “Oh, dad!”
Greene hugged his daughter as he never had. “Honey, we thought...,” but he let the words dissolve. She was covered with some indescribably foul-smelling muck. “Hazel, were you sick?”
“What’s all that gunk on you?” Ashton asked.
“You don’t want to know,” she whispered.
It didn’t matter. Father Greene’s prayer had been answered, his greatest wish. But Hazel seemed teetering now. Probably dehydrated, probably hasn’t eaten anything since last night. “Let’s get her back to the car, Ashton.”
No sooner had Greene said the words, Hazel’s knees went out. Ashton hoisted her up in his arms and carried her to the car.
They arranged her prone in the back seat. Father Gree
ne grabbed a bottle of water, which she half-drained in one gulp once she’d re-composed herself.
“Honey, where are your friends?” Greene asked.
“Huh?”
Ashton knelt before her. “Sonia Heald and Frank Barlow–you know. Hazel, where are they? Are they—”
Hazel looked out into space. “Gone.”
Father Greene knelt as well, and gripped her hand. “Honey, Ashton’s going to take you away now. He’ll get you checked out at the nearest hospital, then he’s going to take you back to Providence—”
“No,” Hazel blurted.
“Hazel, what are you talking about?” Ashton questioned.
She cleared her throat. “I have to stay here...”
“There’s no here, Hazel!” Ashton exclaimed. “There was a storm last night—”
Did she smile sarcastically? “No storm, Ashton. It was...something a lot worse than a storm...”
“The point is, honey,” he father cut in, “everyone here is dead.
Come back home.” He smiled at her. “Come back to God...”
Hazel looked back at him. “I’m not worthy of home, dad. I’m not worthy of Ashton, I’m not worthy of you, and I’m especially not worthy of God.”
“Nonsense! Why do you say that?”
She glanced to Ashton, rolled her eyes, then glanced back to her father. “I’m erotomanic, dad. You probably don’t even know what that means—”
“Hazel, just...forget all that,” Ashton tried to stop her.
“I let myself be raped, dad. I submit to gangbangs.” Her eyes never blinked as she stared her father down. “I beg men to choke me while they’re fucking me. I drink their piss, dad. So...I know damn well God could never forgive that.”
“Of course He can!” Father Greene said without even being taken aback. “He forgives worse than that every day.” He squeezed her hand harder. “But you have to take the first step. Think about it, honey. Okay?”
Hazel gulped and nodded. When a car idled by, she jerked up and looked out. It was a long, beat-up sedan jammed with people. The trunk had been tied down over a stack of suitcases.
“Survivors,” Ashton uttered. “Evacuating.”
“Not survivors,” Hazel said under her breath. “Agents...”
“What’s that, honey?” Greene asked.
Did a man in the passenger window actually wink at Hazel? Another weathered, redneck type. Father Greene’s stare narrowed on the man’s hand as it hung out the window. He wore the oddest scarlet ring...
Hazel moaned and fainted.
“She’s exhausted from all she’s been through,” Ashton observed. “The terror of the storm, witnessing all these people getting killed.”
“And realizing that her friends are probably dead,” the minister finished. He closed the door and came around. “Take my daughter out of here, Ashton. Check her into the hospital, make sure she’s all right, then take her home.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll get a ride out tomorrow.” He turned and saw a bevy of National Guardsmen bearing more corpse-laden stretchers out of the woods. “By the looks of things around here”—he held up his Book of Common Prayer—“I’ll be able to make myself useful.”
“Well, all right. If you’re sure. I’ll call you on your cell once I’ve gotten Hazel looked at.”
“Thank you, Ashton.”
They both stalled in place. More black birds swarmed overhead, and more sirens wailed in the distance. Farther off, they heard helicopters.
Father Greene’s face became stamped with disdain. “This is an evil place, Ashton.”
“I know. I can feel it...”
“It even smells evil.” The stench grew miasmal. “It smells...”
“It smells like the devil took a giant shit here.”
Greene’s shoulders slumped. “Not exactly the words I would’ve chosen but..yes. You’re quite right.”
A few more words, then they parted. Ashton backed the car up, then turned onto the main road and drove out.
When two more wan-faced Guardsmen marched by with a stretcher, Greene blanched at the corpse on it: a man, whose entire ribcage seemed stripped of flesh. The bones beneath were cindery yet yellowed and bent wildly out of place, like melted plastic.
“Aw, fuck!”
“Shit, man!”
Greene looked to the commotion. Several soldiers thrashed out of the collapsed woods; they all looked disgusted. When the sergeant asked, one of them said, “We just found a dozen more bodies over there, under a wall. I can’t hack this shit, sarge!”
Father Greene sighed. He opened his prayer book again and began to recite, “‘Oh, God, whose mercies cannot be numbered, accept our prayers on behalf of the souls of thy servants departed...,’” as he walked without encumberment toward the excruciating scene...
Epilogue
NEPTUNE, NEW JERSEY
TWO MONTHS LATER
Night-watchman Wally Gilman and bus-driver Joe Sargent stared intently between the curtain-gap at the window of Room 18 at the McNaughton-Regency Motel. Joe had his penis out, was slowly masturbating as the scene within progressed: three men and two women preparing to perform cunnilingus on the room’s very nude and very pregnant tenant. She lay on the bed, buttocks at the mattress edge, knees pulled up to make the sensitive aperture between her legs as accessible as possible.
“Unmotherfuckingbelivable,” Joe whispered, finessing his penis.
Yeah, Wally agreed. It disconcerted him, though, that Joe’s dick was considerably larger than his. What a ripoff... But of the scene inside?
Wally didn’t know what to make of it.
Right now a beer-gutted redneck in a wife-beater T-shirt was kneeling right between the pregnant chick’s spread legs. Shiny black hairs spouted up around the pink cleft. The cleft glimmered.
“A pussy-eating party in a fleabag motel,” Joe muttered. “And on a pregnant girl ta boot. Man, it doesn’t get better than this.” The sounds of his masturbation rose.
“Yeah, but Joe, it doesn’t make much sense, does it?” Wally queried. “Those guys in there are backwoods rednecks and so are the two women. What’s the deal with them coming here in the middle of the night just to go down on a hot preggo and leave?”
Joe frowned over his shoulder. “You’re complaining? Who cares? It’s probably some kinky swingers club or something.”
Wally considered the idea, not terribly convinced.
The moon shimmered down. Wally felt antsy, heebie-jeebied, like someone was watching them from nearby. But when he looked at the scrubby bushes behind him, of course, no one was there.
“Oh, fuck, man!” Joe whispered fiercely. “Look at this shit!”
When Wally peered back into the gap, his mouth fell open.
So THAT’S what they’re doing.
The guy in the wife beater, now, had his hand stuck up to the wrist in the pregnant woman’s cooze...
Joe enthused, “Man, this ain’t no pussy-eating party. It’s a fisting party!”
And so it seemed.
Wife Beater traversed his hand in the pregnant’s chick’s vaginal vault. He pushed...
Next thing they knew, the dude’s hand was two inches past the wrist, three, then four...
Neither Wally nor Joe uttered a sound as, just a moment later, the dude’s arm was stuck up the woman all the way to the elbow.
“Can’t believe what I’m seein’,” Joe whispered.
“What’s he trying to do? Give her an abortion?”
When Wife Beater withdrew his arm, there was a large scarlet crystal in his hand.
Then he stood up, put the stone in a bag, and made way for the next in line.
Joe had stopped masturbating by now. The spectacle had gone from being erotic to outright gross. And more than that, too: inexplicable.
It was a bun-haired fat women who was next to slide her arm into the pregnant’s woman’s sex and withdraw a scarlet crystal...
Joe had never looked so off-kilte
r when he turned and leaned against the wall, his face a mask of either fret or confoundment.
His whisper, now, was a fear-traced etch. “Wally. What the hell is going on in there?”
“I. Don’t. Know.”
“There’s something really wrong here, man. That chick ain’t pregnant. She’s got a fuckin’ uterus full of red rocks. They look like giant fuckin’ rubies, man.”
Wally stared. “I. Know.”
“I’ve never seen anything so fucked up in my life...”
That statement would prove a fitting epitaph for Joe Sargent, for they were the last words he would ever speak. Wally had spoken his last as well, though he wasn’t aware of it just yet. He was taking one more peek at the inconceivable scene on the other side of that dingy window:
A third visitor was extracting a crystal from the pregnant woman’s plump vagina...
How many of those things has she GOT in her? came Wally’s morbid question.
He turned to look at Joe again just as he received another queer inkling that someone was watching them. He had no time to scream, nor did any synaptic activity in his brain have time to even consider what he might be looking at. It had actually been standing there all along, though invisibly from another phase-shift: a slug-skinned, tentacular abomination in a scarlet robe and hood. Simultaneously, the thing had slipped a tentacle-arm about each man’s neck, and with a quick constriction—
pop!
pop!
—both Joe Sargent and Wally Gilman’s neck-bones were separated, severing the spinal columns. The final image to register in Wally’s brain was the marauder’s face: swollen lips on a bulbous forehead, eyes implanted on corroded cheeks, all set in the countenance of something rotten.
“Sneb ngal’n shubb,” the thing uttered, and then a para-dimensional egress opened rather like a malformed zipper. Wally and Joe were shoved into the egress, then the egress disappeared.
This repulsive servitor—whose name it still thought of as Frank—–peeked into the window.
The last agent of the night, a Bosset’s Way resident named Jervas Dudley, was just now withdrawing a crystal from Sonia Heald’s multipurpose womb.
