Rupture Zone
As I pulled up in a snarl of dust at the barrier, the idiot wandering around in the cacti yelled at me. I’d seen him as I approached, but I was coming fast and didn’t have time to ponder the notion of some fool hoofin’ it out in the middle of nowhere under the murderously scorching sun. I leaned out of my open jeep wanting to know what the fuck was going on. I had someplace to go, and now I had a barrier and this character all in the same stroke of karma.
I’d no idea where I was anymore—New Mexico? Arizona? All I knew was Jagged was coming hard—a goddamn right metaphor for her—armed to the brim, and salivating for my blood. What’s worse, her gas tank was nearly twice the size of mine. I had two full metal cans bouncing like jugs of nitro in back, but she had four if I remembered right. Bitch. Always on top of it. Another right-on metaphor.
“What the hell do you want?” I said to the man as he trotted up gasping for air, bent over himself, long streaked hair hanging almost to the ground. I swear I could practically see the vapor rising out of his head. My right hand stroked the handle of the expensive Israeli handgun I had stolen from Jagged, favorite hobby of hers. Clock on the dash said ten past, and that was fucking high noon.
“Can’t,” he heaved. “Can’t…go in there...past the barricade.”
“Why?”
“It’s the rupture zone,” he managed to get out all in one stream.
“What the fuck is that?” My hand on the steel relaxed. He seemed a harmless customer.
He looked at me through curtains of hair so that I couldn’t get a fix on his expression. “You ain’t from around?”
I chuckled. “Yeah. Lately, around in circles.”
“You ain’t got no radio?”
The fuck was bothering me with his suspense routine, though I didn’t think it was intentional. I got the impression he’d lost a few cells along the way. I knew a little bit about what that lifestyle did to you. I had a mirror. Hadn’t bathed or moteled maybe in a week, but I had the rearview, at least half of which was still usable after the bullet she’d put in it.
I turned on the radio, stock job out of some other fifteen-year-old car. Crackle, sssss, crackle, crackle…Lack of an antenna and an abundance of oblivion will do you a lot of hiss. “Just spill it, man,” I growled at him.
“I—they’re—it’s a war zone now.” He gestured. “Hey, if you stand up in there, you might be able to see this end of the thing.”
I gazed out beyond the barrier and saw nothing but dust and scrub and cactus. Nonetheless, I stood up in the jeep and, under the visor of my hand, surveyed the flat landscape.
“Follow the road with your eye,” he said, pointing. “See the crack in the earth, runs right across it?”
I did now. It looked like a mutant version of the fractures that covered the whole slab of desert.
“Earthquake?” I asked him.
He shook his head, very slowly, very deliberately, as though it were nothing so pansy as a something-point-something.
I fell into my seat, shifted into gear and rode the accelerator against the brake, signaling to the dude you comin’?
He shook his head, hair all in his face, eyes wide like I was the freak.
Maybe I was.
Spinning desert all over the guy's peyote-stained clothes, I went round the barrier and off in search of hope in the fangs of the spider. War zone? Didn’t know what the fuck it meant, but it sounded like a good place to lead Jagged. There hadn’t been another road for more than fifty miles, and that last junction no doubt had my tracks all over it. I’d seen her once yesterday—her truck, that is—cresting a vapor-warped hill in the bullet-blasted rearview. She’d be along shortly, and Mescal back there would tell her all about it.
“Come on, Jag, come on, Jag,” I sang as I sped across the flat. I’d no idea the hell I was committing myself to. But I knew hell. Jagged was fucking hell incarnate.
The crack became a black grin in the earth, growing meaner and meaner as I drew closer. The ragged, heat-soaked blur of its lip became an undulating flutter of motion. I soon saw that the culprits were vultures teemed along the rupture’s rim, jabbing at the ground, like getting their grit for digestive purposes.
I braked late in the approach, scattering the bastards from my side of the ravine over to the other. Jesus, it was wide, at least thirty feet across. To my left, maybe a hundred feet from the road, the end of it could be seen, dry wrinkled corner of the mouth it was. To the right, it stretched on and on, widening to at least twice the gap in the road.
Stepping to the brink, I saw what the scavengers had been tearing at. Pieces of dried, collapsed matter that might once have been tubular and bright like the coils of intestines lay draped around and over the brink of the ravine. Whatever moisture the stuff had contained was all but gone, leaving what resembled snakeskins without scales. I reached down and picked one up, losing my equilibrium for a second as my eyes slipped past the husk into the black bottomlessness of the abyss. It was cool in the heat, yeah both the mouth in the earth and the material I held.
A gunshot ripped across the desert, its source behind me, its echo swallowed by the killing heat. Jagged had arrived, dude with the hair was dead, probably because he reminded her of me. Well, fuck you, Jag.
I jumped back in the jeep, took off in the direction of the near end of the crevice, looking back towards the barrier. The wooden frame was coming asunder as my eyes found the spot, a heat-captured, slow-motion event beneath the front end of her big truck. The fear like heights in the groin and alley darkness in the gut took hold of me. A fear familiar as the image of her face when she got the notion one sex-drenched day, in some bizarre, acid-paranoid moment, that I was banging her recently moved-in sister—like I needed that monkey too.
That monkey was dead now. Like at least three others—including Sunshine back there—that I knew about. Love is a many splintered thing.
Sliding around the end of the chasm, I pointed the jeep at an angle for the road again. In the distance, on the knife-edge horizon, the shapes of man-made structures materialized. A glance back showed Jagged coming fast. Maybe she’d be so intent on me spitting my little cloud of dust, that she’d run right into the hole. We can dream, even when we live a nightmare. Ahead, the group of buildings became a shabby town, a few old cars resting between the first of the buildings and my racing jeep. I looked back again before I reached the cars, noted she had made it around the crack, then thump, I hit something.
Reflexes slamming on the brakes for me, I clutched the wheel tightly as the jeep went sliding, screech-grazing the side of a station wagon before coming to rest facing back in the direction of the ravine, the barreling truck, and the thing I’d hit. The thing I’d hit writhed on the street. I fussed with the shifter, leg shaking crazily, grinding the gears to bone meal. As I finally got it in first, I spun forward, close enough to look down at the body, my heart hammering a ritual song. I felt the fist that resides inside come plunging up through my throat as I stared at the thing.
Long, gangling, with naked worm-like flesh and a sickly pearlish palor, it managed through all that to somehow possess humanoid characteristics. Its hips suggested it was bipedal, but the limbs were fantastically long, particularly the upper pair. Its features were grotesque to the degree of absurdity, with a flat, sort of winged upper face, while the lower part protruded in a snout large enough to contain the huge, ferocious, demonically keen teeth that gnashed wetly in the creature’s jaws. Its eyes, lacking irises, were entirely pearly like its body, bulging from their sockets as they marked me. But maybe strangest of all were the tubes of moist, pulsing tissue that protruded from the top of its head, entering again behind the wings of its flounder face, and the whole bunch of coils twisting in a Gorgonian ecstasy.
Time was wasting. I l
aid hard on wheel and pedal, jerking her around back on track. Tearing through the center of town, I registered broken windows, debris strewn along the street, the absence of people, then I had to make a quick decision as a fork appeared in front of me. I chose right and was suddenly plummeting across the empty wastes again, reflections of the fucking apocalypse.
The fury of Jagged’s pursuit grew in the mirror, and there was nowhere to go. I raised the Israeli handgun the bitch had been so proud of and prepared to go down firing. Two clips fell out of the glove box, one into my shaking hand, the other to the floor. I fished around for it, pushing it almost out of reach, finally managed to curl my fingers around it. When I came up, Jag’s truck dominated the rearview and the sound of gunfire and exploding glass filled my ears.
I ducked down again, steering blindly with one hand, firing with the other. The first round glanced off the roll bar, ringing like a missionary at the door. As to the rest of them, sweet Jesus only knew how none of that flying lead, from my gun or hers, pierced the gas cans. Jagged began pounding on her horn, to add to the confusion. I might have been in the path of stampeding elephants, so noisy and imminent was the storm that descended. It all became one big drowning noise, the gunfire, the horn, the engines, my own yelling; I had to come up for air.
Through the dust and the bullet-riddled windshield my eyes fell on the yawning rupture in the ground ahead, that fucking black grin splitting the whole world apart. I swerved left, braking, skirting the awful wound in the desert. The world turned up, the sky sideways, and blackness came up out of the hole and devoured me.
~
I started from unconsciousness, a wet, spat-out Jonah, but it was my own sweat and blood that covered me. My skin was badly sunburned and the moisture was no comfort. I rose crookedly, but intact. The jeep was on its bars some eighty feet away, in the dust. A look to my left revealed a broken Ford truck wedged in the ground’s gaping grin, even blacker now because evening had arrived.
In the twilight the desert was ashen; the stars appeared around a bright half moon. Blood fled down my neck from a wound reopened. Strange cries, wails, sounded in the distance. Vultures laughed off sleep in a rigid circle over the ravine. I began to walk that way. The idea that in another place I might have survived this thing, chase, wreck and all, teased me, amused me. Maybe I was somewhat delirious, but the fear was elsewhere. And the survival instinct seemed foolish.
Jagged hung from the driver’s door of the truck, which appeared to have exploded open on impact. She hung in space, legs trapped inside the cab, head and arms reaching towards hell. Even so, an extended moan escaped her. I realized she could not have been hanging there with the blood filling her head all this time. She must have fallen out fairly recently, pulled by gravity, a wrong turn in her fever, a shift of the truck itself precariously spanning the gap.
I surprised myself with the thought of crawling out there for her. I surprised myself by pitying her. The memory of our arriving at this last crossroads in our lives flashed through my head. The horn. Her laying on the horn over and over again, almost as if she had been trying to warn me of the ravine. I halted at the edge of it, watching her body in space, swinging ever so slightly. A spasm passed from her shoulder to her hand, a feeble noise slipped from her mouth. With another look up at the vultures, I decided fuck her. Fuck you, Jagged.
A creaking shift in the hulk startled me. I looked down in time to see a second long-fingered hand reach up out of the blackness to join one that had already grasped part of the truck’s frame. The creature’s face turned my way as I leapt back, fear returning in one great wave. Its pearly eyes were luminous in the darkness, its teeth reflecting the light of the night sky as they parted in strings of viscous fluid. But it was in the other direction the creature went, causing the truck to tilt and moan as it found holds in the undercarriage, moving hand over hand as if on a rope in an obstacle course.
I moved slowly backwards, but I could not steal my eyes from the sight of it. When the creature reached the door, it swung up into the cab, found purchase with its legs, then dropped upside down so that its face was directly opposite hers. As two of the pulsing tubes separated from the sides of its head and plunged into her ears, its mouth closed over her scream and it began devouring her.
The choke that escaped me caused it to turn for a brief moment, and I saw the rapture written in the shocking orbs of its eyes, the blood and flesh in its teeth, the gaping hole in Jagged’s face. Then the demon was on its meal again, head thrashing with the voraciousness and vigor that went into the feed.
As I finally got the right signals to my feet, I caught sight of another one of the creatures appearing over the lip of the chasm. My legs got tangled up, I hit a cactus and fell. My head instantly swiveled to see what plans this new arrival had. Halfway out of the pit, its body abruptly sank and another creature came riding over its back. Following that one came another, then another, and suddenly dozens and dozens of them, clawing and pulling at each other as they all strived to be the first over the brink, hands coming away with the tubes that coiled on the heads of those in the way.
My eyes went up to the still-circling vultures, the memory of the scavengers I had witnessed at work earlier coming back with force. Jesus God, how many of these devils had bled out of this rupture in the earth?
Lights appeared in the distance, out beyond the overturned jeep. Headlights. I leapt to my feet and ran. The creatures’ heads lifted to watch the prey a moment before they gave chase, lanky legs producing strange spider-like strides, while their trunks had an ape-like, lumbering movement somewhat contradictory to their gangling frames. In flight my skin was on fire, and my working muscles and bones sore from the bruising and battering my body had taken. But worse by far was the pain in my head. Ripping fucking pain, no doubt from the injury that had left me unconscious for hours.
I shot by the jeep, wishing I had time to unbelt those gas cans, which had survived the crash thanks to the roll bars. An avid smoker of non-tobacco products, I’d a lighter in my pocket and the will to set the fucking universe aflame. The gun would be nice too, but God knew where that had landed.
A metallic noise which I knew in advance belonged to Jag’s truck caused me to look back. Covered in the spidery fuckers, the hulk came unwedged at last, plunging into the abyss. But it was what was happening in the foreground that really piqued my interest. Pick your fucking poison. The creatures had multiplied, strike one, and closed way too much ground, strike two, in the seconds that had passed. So much that I could distinguish individual sets of eyes bobbing in the night, teeth snapping in anticipation of the frenzied feast to come.
The report of a rifle preceded the crashing of one of the creatures to the desert floor. Another, opening a gouge in the pulp of the night air. Now a whole torrent as the vehicle that bore the gunmen drew close enough to be recognizable as a pickup. Figures in the back leveled rifles, shouts rose over the riddle of bullets. But it was a brief hope as I felt the first of the long, reaching tendrils of their hands graze my back. Lead whizzed by my head. War zone was right on. Adrenaline pushed with an amphetamine insistence, but it wasn’t going to be enough. Goodbye Jagged, goodbye me, please let my circle of hell be far from hers.
The weight behind me—I couldn’t tell if it was one of them, two of them, or the whole goddamn army—drove me to the ground, desert searing my face as I slid across it. I turned to meet my death, to be introduced to it proper, to watch its robe swirl in the motionless wind and its sickle catch the light of the moon. Yeah like that, moon running like honey along the blade, falling in a long heavy drop.
The teeth and face before me exploded, bringing me instantly to life again.
“Get in the fucking truck, asshole!”
I turned against guns blasting like cannon fire around me. Arms reached out of the back of the spinning truck, dragg
ing me up onto the open tailgate. My head struck the rim of the bed, bringing me even more awake, and I turned to see the fuckers falling like targets at a shooting range, only in fluid and meat, and teeth, fucking teeth, shattering in their misshapen skulls. “Hell yeah,” I kept saying. “Hell yeah, you fucks!” As I watched them fold under the butts and barrels of rifles, the crash guard and the big tires of the truck.
“Anything in the jeep we might need?” one of them asked me.
“Gas?” I said.
We sped to the jeep. Men jumped out, cutting the belts, hauling the jugs aboard. A few last pops at the dispersed remainder of the devil mob and we moved away towards the sweep of sky ruled by the moon.
In the silence that settled, the temptation to ask questions flared and then died. The faces that stared back at me were worn to their frames. Eyes that had glinted as the gunfire rained were now dull and lifeless, routine. I became aware it wasn’t the moon we were following but the wound in the earth that produced the vile. We were hunting.
There was only one more incident along the rupture, near the road I had driven in on, a few choicely placed shots in the heads of the scattered few we encountered, no passion really, no victory yells. Then we were beyond the rupture with only the moon in front of us. Again I felt the urge to ask, again it went away. There weren’t any answers. Not in this game. If anything made sense anymore, I suspected it was the staying and battling it out, the protecting your own.
We rode for several miles before the silhouette of a town came into view. This one had lights, which meant life—totally unlike the one Jagged had chased me through. I began to see the slightest changes on the faces of the men as we got closer, as if here at least was something in a world gone mad.
A Dirge for the Temporal Page 8
