Tales from the Canyons of the Damned: Omnibus

by Daniel Arthur Smith

  ~*~

  EYE IN THE SKY

  Daniel Arthur Smith

  ~*~

  Kelly Martinez had been covering midday traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway for Channel 11 when the shelf cloud appeared. The twerp back at the station said that bad weather wasn’t due to hit for a few days, if at all. Kelly knew better than to listen to his own station’s weatherman. But apart from the low ceiling, the airspace was supposed to be clear. A fast-forming cloud on the island of Manhattan wasn’t exactly an anomaly. He’d seen temperature shifts in the midtown canyons produce rolling fog banks as quickly as a block of dry ice subliming in water. But those banks always formed—no matter how rapidly—at around six to seven hundred feet. What made this arcus cloud, this huge saucer of dark purplish gray, an anomaly, was that it appeared to have spontaneously formed high above midtown—as a super cell.

  The lightning coming down on midtown was visible clear across the island, and as he flew closer, he could see that the storm appeared to be exactly centered over the Empire State Building. And this storm cell was showering the building with more lightning than he’d ever remembered seeing a single cloud spit anywhere.

  Kelly didn’t hesitate.

  He’d flown through plenty of fist-in-the-gut storms before. They called him Crazy Kelly back at the station for a reason, but there was always a reward—this footage was going to be golden. They were going to air it, he had no doubt of that. They’d already said as much when he told them he was going in. And he was confident on the stick—his flight plan tight—he would just fly low and slow, and be ready to rotor in the event he caught a strike.

  Midway across Central Park is when things became weird. The lightning bolts that had arced the sky were no longer striking in random directions. They’d become synchronized, begun lashing in a constant pulse, like one of those Tesla coils he’d seen in school when he was a kid. All of the bolts were focused on one point.

  “Sparrow to the Nest, Sparrow to Nest. Do you have my feed?”

  There was a pause.

  “Nest Eleven. This is Sparrow. Are you there?”

  “Kelly. This is Clark. What the hell is that thing?”

  It was Clark Mathews, producer of the Channel 11 news team.

  “I don’t know? Are we on the air?”

  “Your feed is. We’re not. How close can you get?”

  “Nest Eleven.” Kelly’s voice was distant, distracted. “I’ll pull in as close as you like.”

  “I want to know what that is.”

  “You can see it,” Kelly said. “It’s a big blue ball, just floating there. All electric-like.”

  Chopper 4 was coming up to midtown from the south. Kelly and Willy—4’s pilot—had a running game. All of the pilots did. Kelly circled to stake a claim. That’s when he saw the man lifting from the deck of the 86th floor observation platform.

  “Are you seeing this, Clark?” Kelly asked.

  “The whole country is. We patched into the network thirty seconds ago.”

  Crazy Kelly had grown up uptown. Went into the service, where he learned to fly. One place was no better than the other. But he’d never seen anything like what he was witnessing now. A huge horrific ball was far above the spire, a good fifty feet above where the man was suspended. Suspended—no other way to say it—with his arms and legs spread wide, hanging in space. And then the ball formed a column of liquid chrome, a great finger of chrome, angling right out of the side, climbing out to the world, as if the innards were creeping, oozing out and away. The cockpit of the chopper was cool, but Kelly felt a sweat break across his forehead. He felt the thick beads forming beneath the band of his Yankees cap. That big horrid ball was somehow alive, and it was not good, and he felt it was not good, and part of him wanted to pull the joystick and dart that bird down and out of the sky.

  But he couldn’t.

  Kelly had to see.

  His heart was thumping hard.

  The long, thick chromium wand had a target. It reached out for the flying man—the scrawny blonde man in the white tee shirt and jeans—slowly, cautiously, and then washed over him.

  The chopper jerked forward. Kelly had jarred his stick.

  “Are you all right, Kelly?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

  But he wasn’t. No way was he all right.

  That long probing chrome arm had reached out and cocooned that skinny guy, enveloped him, absorbed him. Kelly glanced up to the origin of the liquid chrome, the hideous floating ball. It was gone. The process had only lasted moments, yet Kelly felt the time stretch on. His throat was dry.

  He looked for the man in the white tee shirt again, but he was gone.

  No, there he was, on the observation platform. There were others, too. Of course there were. Kelly hadn’t looked for anyone else. What was he doing, the tee shirt man? How was he standing there? And what was that all around him? Were those downed wires? Somebody was down next to him. Someone in uniform.

  “Kelly, what do you make of that? Is it a stunt?”

  “I don’t know. I want to get closer.”

  He looked to his ten. Willy was bringing the Channel 4 news chopper up to the observation platform. The white tee man was conscious. He must have heard Willy because he was looking right at Chopper 4. And then he did the craziest thing. Something that chilled Kelly.

  The skinny man in the white tee shirt turned his head to Kelly and waved at Channel 11’s bird in the sky.

  Kelly was a good forty feet away and the rain was beginning to smear the glass pretty good, but those eyes. What was with those blue eyes?

  And then it all fell apart.

  Tee shirt man walked away from him, back toward the group of people huddled to the side door, and from nowhere—at least nowhere Kelly could see— a maelstrom of electrical… What? Wiring? Lightning bolts? They filled the entire platform. A dark-haired man in beige shorts and a blue shirt—Kelly had a real good look at him—flew from the group. Flew up and over the high fence of the observation platform as if lifted, pulled and lifted and moved, and held by a long, bright blue vibrating lightning bolt. And when the bolt was finished, the man fell. Fell from the 86th floor. Then there was another, and then another. Rag dolls being tossed by the electrical bands.

  Willy slid his chopper back, but not before one of those electric snakes lashed out at him. Chopper 4 dropped farther back and down.

  “C’mon,” Kelly said. “Rotor.”

  Then, as if they were alive, two more huge arcs reached for Willy and held him, stalling the blades. Kelly had never seen a lightning bolt hold like that. But these weren’t like regular lightning bolts, they were solid arcs, coming from some transformer, some weapon he couldn’t see.

  The blue electric bands strangling Chopper 4 let loose, and the lifeless bird began the tumble to 33rd Street far below.

  Kelly’s headphones were blaring. “You gotta get out of there! Get out, copy, get out!”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” Kelly said. “I’m outta here.”

  He checked his three and nine to be sure he had room to hover out and began to maneuver left.

  He’d barely moved when it hit him, and it was hardly noticeable.

  As clear as a concussive explosion, a visible cascade of power bubbled from the observation deck, symmetrically outward in all directions. The magnetic pulse fried Kelly’s electronics. His bird bobbed, but was designed to take a hit. His fingers flew to the switches, off, off, off, down the line, and then on, on, on, and then Crazy Kelly was okay. A sigh left his chest and then a chuckle. He had lost fifty feet. No joke in midtown. No joke ever. He brought the bird back up.

  He was done.

  Only the shielded electronics had survived. The feed was out, the radio was out, he was done and going back to the pad. He turned the bird toward the East River and eased his foot down on the pedal.

  Crazy Kelly didn’t know what he’d just seen, didn’t know what’d happened to Willy, didn’t know what kind of weapon that w
as—but he’d find out after touchdown.

  Or so he thought.

  Because Kelly was never going to reach the pad, and he was never going to touch down. At the instant his bird flew above the southeast corner of Central Park, a great black blanket covered the bubble of his craft. He’d seen the Plaza below, the huge glass cube of the Apple store to his right, and the acreage of Central Park to his left—and then nothing.

  The chopper stopped with sudden crack, the engine moaned loudly, the blades shattered. All was black, there’d been nothing in front of him. What could he have hit? He waited for the fall. He didn’t fall. The last thing he heard was the crushing of the glass and steel around him, and then he felt the unmistakable familiar sensation of going up, up, up.

  ~*~

  SOLE SURVIVOR

  Jon Frater

  ~*~

  The supple leather of the sofa shifted beneath Jeff Walker as he returned to consciousness. He blinked a few times at the billiard table only a few feet from his face. No light but the diffuse gray of dawn, what seeped through a persistent mist. He hadn’t seen the sun in days. “Still alive, then,” he croaked. “Great.”

  He’d set up a nest in the lounge next to the restaurant on the building’s third floor. His backpack and jacket lay on the floor next to him. He was tempted to just lie on the couch, but they’d be looking for him soon. The screaming knife-wielding crazies had moved further north since the city’s new owners had taken charge, but roving bands of Slicers still came down here. Nearby buildings had been broken into and ravaged along with their occupants. Jeff had heard screams at night. Nearly every night. Better not to linger.

  He needed to keep moving.

  He gathered his things and rolled onto the floor. His clothing stuck to him like honey on fur. He had no idea what he smelled like. He’d gotten so used to his own stink he had simply stopped noticing it. He concentrated on moving down the corridor that led to the glass floors of the restaurant. He filled up a few water bottles from the sink in the kitchen, grateful the water pressure was still on. He wouldn’t start to crack the bottled water until the lines failed, a decision he’d come to on day one and had stuck to. He filled his backpack with power bars and headed to the fire exit, up nine flights of stairs, to get to the library. Jeff had reading to do.

  The rear of the library was a series of tall, wide, single-pane windows overlooking the southeastern corner of Manhattan. The entrance to the Holland Tunnel lay directly below his building, on the other side of Canal Street. A few cars littered the streets and parking lots, some empty, some not. The Empire State Building lay to his right, glittering in the morning sun. Behind his building stood the Freedom Tower, or The Hub as it was now called. The new seat of Fortress Manhattan.

  Three weeks since the electronics had burned out, the mists descended, the blindness swept over the world, and the building emptied out. Jeff wondered most about the Hub. The constant texts he received on his cell had encouraged him to reply and head on over. He’d be assigned useful work and fed as a reward. Jeff ignored the chatter. But the new Powers That Be had a point. He couldn’t stay here forever. Eventually, the supplies would run out.

  Jeff stared out the window, scanning the terrain for the umpteenth time. New Jersey lay beyond the river, true, but the mists swept across the water, hiding the predators that now lived beneath it. Jeff saw movement every now and then, long dolphin-like things with teeth. Patches of bodies floated by as well.

  Worse, things lived in that mist. Rarely did they show themselves, but now and then Jeff heard the crash of breaking glass and then a resounding thump or series of thumps as if something was feeling around inside the building. Once, he had even seen wriggling tentacles, two-ton bloodworms. Jeff avoided windows and found a classroom with a lockable door to hide in when that happened.

  ~*~

  Early on—after the blindness had lifted—he’d seen groups of people gather to brave the Holland Tunnel. Office people mostly, men in blazers and dark slacks, women wearing high heels and carefully corporate handbags and jewelry. A crowd of maybe a hundred climbed down into the tunnel, cautiously, carefully, picking their ways through a dense column of stalled cars. None had returned. But the next day, red ooze had begun leaking out of the tunnel, covering the asphalt below Jeff’s building like a rust brown carpet, like mold slowly but surely growing toward him. The ooze was still there, still red, and still crept toward him. It filled the street, nearly reaching the sidewalk below, which meant there had to be a lot of it down there.

  He wondered what was pushing it up toward the street and then forced that thought down, pounding it into the lowest reaches of his brain.

  Better to not think about it.

  Jeff sighed and stretched, or tried to. His entire body ached and his face, covered by a twenty-day-old beard, itched madly. He scratched his face, his scalp, his forearms. Another day in the city without power was all the hell he cared to deal with right now.

  His stomach rumbled. The twelfth floor’s vending machines had long since been ransacked and emptied. The freezers in Feed, the yuppified restaurant on the third floor, had been a good source of real food for days after the power went out, but there’d been too much for one person to eat and the leftovers had long since gone rancid. Plenty of dry goods as long as you liked dry cereal, chips, cookies, and power bars.

  Once, Jeff had enjoyed those things. Not anymore.

  Jeff was waiting for Sam to arrive. Sam was in the habit of buzzing the twelfth floor several times a day, swooping out from the mists above the city to dive bomb the library, veering away from the plate glass at the last minute in an awesome display of flying skill. Jeff didn’t know whether it was a mating dance, a challenge, or if Sam simply saw its reflection in the glass and thought it was another of its species. Birds crashed into plate glass patio doors and skylights all the time.

  He found that he wanted Sam to come by. At the moment, Sam was Jeff’s only friend. He didn’t know if Sam had friends of his own. If he had, he hadn’t brought them by. Yet.

  In the meantime, Jeff kept his station. He’d been working for the Talent Corp. Library for eight years, mostly as a systems librarian but offering reference services for three hours a day four days a week, too. Technical Services in library-speak. Inventory management is what they’d have called him in the world of business. The books were his responsibility. Now that everyone else was gone, they were his. Not the best collection for this situation: too many volumes about sociology and not enough about how to fix broken electrical appliances. But home was in Queens and there was no way to get there, no working phone to call with, no radio to transmit from or to. His wife, Lisa, six cats, a sister and brother and their spouses, kids, nieces, nephews, cousins, a mother, all beyond his reach.

  He could leave. Just take the fire stairs to the basement, then walk out onto the street, pick a direction and walk. He’d practiced the moves in his mind a thousand times, even gone and done it once. He just couldn’t convince himself that it was better out there. At least the library was familiar. He knew where everything was. Plus, he enjoyed the company of books many times more than that of people.

  Even that didn’t really matter. Yes, the books were here and yes, he’d been an avid—almost a compulsive—reader his whole life, but unlike Burgess Meredith on the Twilight Zone, there wasn’t all the time in the world to read. He merely had until his food ran out or something found him. A ticking clock still hung over his head, a countdown leading to his own end.

  Jeff wondered off-handedly how much time they’d spent in thought about things that ultimately didn’t matter. About climate change and gas prices and conservative vs. progressive politics. About Marx and Engels and Friedman and Smith. About Batman vs. Superman and why Zack Snyder insisted on turning bright, optimistic universes into gritty brood-fests. On their last morning together, Lisa had insisted that Patton Oswalt was right: Batman was the only DC superhero who was allowed to brood. No one else in that ‘verse could do it. Superman
was many things but he did not brood. Jeff agreed with her on that score. Christopher Reeve was the only Superman worth caring about. Not that it mattered now.

  Thank you, Lord, he thought. Thank you for making sure that Zack Snyder will never make another superhero film. You did good. This one time, you did what we asked you to do.

  Now, Lord… I just need one more favor…

  A high pitched squeal followed by a wet thump drew his attention. “Sam!”

  Jeff’s friend hovered just beyond the glass barrier. Sam had clearly not evolved on this planet but its dimensions and shape gave Jeff the impression of a massive manta ray, flapping its triangular wings to stay aloft. Unlike a true ray, Sam had strings of tentacles surrounding a mouth wide enough to swallow a bowling ball in one gulp, ringed with teeth like steak knives. Red, pupil-less eyes stared at him from the tops of narrow stalks.

  “Dude! You’re here!” Jeff said, smiling. “It worked!”

  As if on cue, Sam spun and flapped his way in a wide circle, brushing near the window where Jeff stood several times, drawing closer to the glass on each rotation.

  Another screech, and this time Sam bumped up against the window, tentacles stroking the glass, and seemed to grip it, needle-like teeth grabbing and holding the glass. Wisps of black smoke rose from the window as Sam hovered, wiping the material like an evil window washer.

  Oh please… oh God… oh please…

  The glass finally weakened enough for Sam to punch his way into the building. Tentacle tips bore down on the holes he’d worn through the window pane and pierced the glass. They forced their ways through the holes, wrapped themselves toward the center, and, with a noisy crack, pulled an oblong sheet of glass out.

  The wind and chill October air of the new Manhattan stormed through the library, lifting magazines from their racks and whipping newspapers across the tables. Jeff stood like a statue, watching attentively as Sam dropped the glass and reached again into the library, this time wrapping his tentacles around Jeff and pulling just as hard.