Hellworld

by Tom Leveen

  I pause, trying to edit myself on the fly while still dedicating resources to figuring out what just went wrong with Charlie.

  “They were dead,”I say. “We found their . . . you know. Remains.”

  At least I haven’t lied yet. Not directly. To specify what happened doesn’t seem useful.

  But Dad has other ideas. He pulls his hand away from me and scoots back in his chair, dumbfounded.

  “You found the ark?”

  I would’ve choked on my drink if it’d been in my mouth. Instead I just choke on air.

  “Wh-what?”

  “You did,”he says softly. “John wasn’t going crazy. You two, you really found it, didn’t you?”

  I lurch to my feet and stumble back away from Dad. “What are you talking about? How did you know about that?”

  “Dad must’ve told him,”Charlie says from behind me, startling me.

  “John told your mother,”Dad says. “She told me. Then he told us both, next time we were all together. We laughed about it. He sounded like a crazy man. I’d never seen him act like that before.”

  Charlie takes a chair opposite Dad at the table. “What exactly did he tell you, Mr. Booth?”

  “I don’t recall exactly. Quantum physics, alternate realities, the creation of the universe . . . no. Multiverse. That’s what he called it. My apologies, Charlie, but honestly he came close to raving. Annie almost canceled the shoot.”His head dips. “I wanted her to. I should have made her.”

  “Daddy, please, stop. You can’t go there right now. Please.”

  Dad picks up his head. Good. He’s still with us. He gazes across the table at Charlie, though in the shadows, I still can’t see his eyes clearly. Sort of disconcerting, like those poker players who wear sunglasses and don’t move their faces, so you can’t tell where they are looking.

  “John was right, wasn’t he?”Dad says. “And you found it.”

  “Yeah,”Charlie says, barely above a whisper.

  “That’s why all this is happening, isn’t it?”

  Dad’s insight cuts me like a razor, like the spectres had done back in the cave. I think I managed to fend off one certain emotion with large amounts of terror, adrenaline, and panic. Now that I’m home, now that I know Dad is safe, that certain emotion finally lands, and lands hard: guilt. A tangible thing, the weight of two bodies, the onus of countless souls pressing down on my ribs, caving me in.

  “It wasn’t intentional,”Charlie says.

  Dad holds up a weak hand. “Doesn’t matter. It’s here now. So what are you going to do about it?”

  “Charlie wants to kill someone,”I say spontaneously, I guess to try and alleviate the crushing weight inside me, push some blame somewhere else. It doesn’t help.

  Charlie glares at me. “I didn’t say that. All I said was that the word ‘sacrifice’ kept coming up in Dad’s notes, and that it didn’t mean anything.”

  “How is your old dad these days?”my father asks with uncharacteristic sarcasm.

  I gasp as I realize what upset Charlie earlier.

  “He wasn’t there,”I say in disbelief, not that it was true, but that I had somehow blocked that truth from my mind this entire time.

  “No,”Charlie says. “He wasn’t.”

  “Where is he, then?”

  Charlie shrugs, just a bit. “No clue. Been trying to figure that out since it happened.”

  “No sign? No trace of him down there, anywhere?”

  “Not that I saw. I mean, we could have missed something, who knows? But I didn’t see him.”

  “You say there are notes?”Dad asks. “Something that might help?”

  “Notes, yes,”Charlie says. “Whether they’ll help or not, I don’t know. Nothing has so far, but like you said, it sounds like raving, most of it.”

  “Dad?”I say. “Are you sure you’re okay? I don’t mean to . . . it’s just, you sound . . .”

  “Lucid?”Dad asks, and, surprisingly, adds a smirk.

  “Honestly, yeah.”

  “I’m okay, Abby. Better than okay, maybe. I know things have been hard here, and I’m not saying they won’t be again, but it’s funny how the end of the world clarifies a man’s priorities.”

  I sit back down in my chair. He leans forward and touches my cheek with one finger.

  “Hey,”he says. “You saved my life. I know that. And after what I’ve seen today, I’m in no hurry to die.”

  “I’m sorry,”Charlie says, lifting his palm off the table. “What exactly do you mean ‘what you’ve seen today’?”

  “I mean that you’d have to be a fool not to see that those things out there aren’t from this world,”Dad says. “Which at least opens up the possibility that there’s something else, too. Something good. There has to be, to counteract it.”

  “God?”I say.

  “I hope so, at least,”Dad says. “I hope so.”

  No one adds anything else for a minute. Then two. And well into a third.

  “So what now?”I ask. “We find a church? Try praying?”

  “Stay here?”Charlie counters. “Unpack the Jeep and stay put?”

  “Or go fix it,”Dad says.

  “Fix what?”

  “Fix what’s wrong out there. In the world.”

  “How would we do that?”Charlie says.

  “Oh, I’m not sure it’s even possible,”Dad says. “But if you find your father, that would probably be a good start. Any ideas?”

  “No. No, not at all. It’s been five years. He could be anywhere. Alive or dead.”

  “I’m sure he’s alive,”Dad says. “We’ll just have to figure out what he might have been thinking, retrace his steps. He’s out there.”

  I almost smile. I haven’t heard Dad sounding so optimistic since . . . well, I guess that went without saying.

  I reach for his hand, noting again how cold it has gotten. Then I notice a small spot of something dark on the tabletop.

  “Daddy, are you bleeding?”I pull back his sleeve.

  Yes. He’d been bleeding. Past tense.

  In fact, everything about my father is past tense.

  30

  Then

  * * *

  Without stopping to think, we all slid down the embankment toward the movement we’d seen. Honestly, at that moment, I think we were acting independently of one another, not caring if anyone else was coming along or not. The floor sloped down at nearly forty-five degrees, so we slid on our butts all the way down, knocking gravel loose as we went. Some distant part of my brain pointed out we’d have to find a way to climb back up this slippery slope, but mostly I didn’t care. I didn’t think the others did either.

  Our families were down there. In the dark. Alive. Moving around.

  It did not occur to me—not for one instant, not for one heartbeat—that there had to be something very, very wrong with this situation.

  Five years, and they were . . . what? Living down here in a commune? Taking eight-hour treks to the surface for food and water? Had they all collectively agreed to hide from us, from the world, for all this time? In the dark?

  It was so wrong, so contrary to common sense, yet not one of us said it—none of us even hesitated to slide toward them. I guess when you miss someone, you just lunge for a thread of hope, no matter how thin.

  Nor did we say anything else. We didn’t shout their names, try to get their attention, ask if they needed help first. We just slid down toward them. Unstoppable.

  We reached the bottom of the slope after maybe ten seconds, and stood up side by side, shining our flashlights around. Alex’s beam found someone first.

  “Mom?”Alex whispered. My heart would’ve broken for the awe and pain in his voice if, a moment later, the beam of my light hadn’t caught my own mother too.

  They were working.

  All of them. Their clothes hung ragged and faded off them, as if they’d never changed since that last day.

  I didn’t care. My mother was alive, on her knees, digging in the dirt
with both hands, hair hanging in her face. She shoved small piles of dirt into some kind of pit nearby, where I heard the pebbles and dirt tumbling down . . . but not landing.

  “Mom,”I said and took a step.

  This cavern stretched out at least two football fields long, half that in width. Piles of dirt and rock lined the outside edges where the floor met the wall. The floor beneath shone brown and tan, shot through with tendrils of black. And so very, very flat. Almost like glass. Not accidental, not natural.

  But those were details I took in only peripherally. All that mattered at that moment was Mom. And I was going to go to her.

  Except someone grabbed my arm. Charlie.

  “Wait,”he said. “Look.”

  I started to shake my arm free, but my gaze fell on Alex’s mother. She crouched nearest, bathed in the soft glow of our four flashlights, not quite lit up. Like the others, she dug in the dirt, slow scoops, which she’d pile up beside her, off the smooth rock floor. She still wore a blue scarf that had frayed like a rope noose around her neck. At first I just wondered crazily what they were looking for. Then I wondered how they’d survived for so long in this cave. Then I wondered what happened to their hands.

  Because their hands—

  My breath caught somewhere in the middle of my lungs and sat there, heavy and dead. I heard Alex gasp and Selby give a little whine. Someone said, “No.”

  Bones. Just bones for hands. The skin and sinew and muscle had been worn away and all rotted off long ago. Even their skeletal fingers, which through some malevolence were still able to bend and flex, were starting to wear down, the tips rounded from five years of digging.

  “Oh, God,”Selby chanted. “Oh God, God, God—”

  I couldn’t stop myself. I tried but couldn’t. It wasn’t the last thing I’d regret doing, but it ranked up there.

  “Mom!” I screamed.

  They stopped moving.

  All at once, like a switch had been flipped.

  Then, as one, they turned to face us. Slowly, as if mesmerized, their movements strangely in sync.

  When I saw my mother’s face, my hands came up and covered my mouth. From the corner of my eye, I saw Selby shut her eyes and spin away, while Alex clutched his stomach and gurgled. Charlie froze solid, eyes wide. It became clear why the thermal camera had not detected any heat.

  Like dried corn husks, the flesh of their faces had desiccated and drawn tight over their skulls. Their eyes had long since dried up and fallen out. Or maybe disintegrated. Their mouths were hollow holes the size of fists, their teeth like long yellow pieces of corn. They looked like unbandaged mummies.

  “We . . . gotta go,”Charlie stuttered.

  “It’s them,”I said involuntarily. “We can’t, it’s them.”

  “Not anymore,”Charlie whispered.

  Then they came for us.

  31

  Now

  * * *

  The way the candle lit the room, I didn’t see it before. Or maybe I just didn’t want to. Maybe I disassociated the swirling black and green in his eyes, dismissed it as a trick of the candlelight. Maybe I didn’t see it at all. I don’t know.

  My father’s forearm is slit from wrist to elbow. It isn’t a gory wound, just a thick line of black, caked with scabbing blood. But he isn’t bleeding currently. And I know, either by deduction or just instinct, it’s because he has precious little blood left in him.

  Charlie gives a guttural curse and flings himself backward just as Dad, or what is passing for Dad, flips the table up toward him with a roar. The tabletop catches Charlie clean in the chest, sending him pinwheeling back into a counter.

  I squeal and fall backward myself, scrambling to get away, but my legs fill with molten lead and pin me to the tile. I vaguely hear Selby shouting in the living room.

  Followed us, I thought distantly. The animator followed us from Riley’s, and Daddy was already dead, has been for a while, or maybe it’s another thing something we haven’t seen yet and Daddy was gone before we even talked on the phone—oh God, Daddy, I am so sorry.

  My father—the thing pretending to be him—snarls and leaps on top of me, clasping my throat in both frigid hands.

  “Where is he?” the thing roars, and its voice comes from a pit of torment, some spirit tortured for millennia.

  I claw at the hands, try to pry them away, and can’t. It allows me only the barest of breaths. My father’s face contorts into a mask of hate that forces spit from its mouth in rivulets and its lips to almost split apart.

  “No—”I manage to squeak, and that’s all.

  “Where is he?”

  Tears, or possibly blood, trickle from the corners of my eyes as I keep clawing and kicking at the demon above me. I can’t do anything. I make no impact, leave no mark.

  The thing lifts my head off the tile and holds it close to its mouth. Fetid air cascades into my nostrils and coats my tongue with the black pepper–and-cinnamon taste I remember from the cave.

  “We know who you are.”

  A bare moment later, it’s flung off me and I can breathe again. I also realize I’m suddenly deaf. Only after that do I feel the thud of the rifle going off.

  Charlie takes a step over me and fires the rifle again. Unable to help myself, I turn my head to watch my father’s body jump with a spasm. Charlie fires again, and again, and again. Daddy’s body jerks and jumps like he’s having a seizure. The next shot is dry, but Charlie pulls the trigger anyway. After a few moments in which Daddy’s body does not move, I climb unsteadily to my feet and back into a wall. My hearing slowly fades to normal, and I hear Charlie swearing gruffly and still pulling the rifle’s trigger. He sounds as demonic as the thing in my father had.

  I stay put. Eventually, with one last incoherent scream, Charlie throws the rifle at my father’s lifeless form, and stands, heaving hard, shoulders drawn back as if awaiting another attack.

  The attack doesn’t come . . . but we both watch a black cloud issue from Dad’s mouth, just as it had from Dr. Riley. I shrink back and cover my mouth, as if to prevent it from getting into me. From the corner of my eye, I see Selby standing up with her hands over her ears, eyes fixed on the cloud hovering above Dad.

  The smoky black-and-green cloud whirls and twists, jerks and dances, then slides from the kitchen and disappears under the bottom of the kitchen door, out into the night.

  So, I think. We can’t kill them. We can’t kill any of them.

  I don’t move. I barely breathe, partly for fear of Charlie insanely attacking me, and partly because my windpipe feels crushed.

  Charlie suddenly loses strength, and collapses to his knees.

  “We—don’t—know—”He coughs. Finally, he shifts around to look at me. “We don’t know who to trust,”he says, wiping his mouth. “The guy on the radio might have been with them. Maybe they cleared the road for us. Maybe that wasn’t luck. Maybe they wanted us here. We can’t trust anybody.”

  I lick my lips. Taste bitterness. Spit on the floor. Then turn and walk carefully into my room and fall onto my bed.

  A few minutes later, just before passing out, I feel someone get in beside me, behind my curled body, and assume it’s Charlie. Except at that point, I don’t care. If it’s a zombie or a monster or a ghost and this is the end, that will be just fine.

  32

  Then

  * * *

  “Stop it!”Selby screamed.

  She wasn’t even looking at the things our parents had become; she still sat hunched over, gripping her hair, her eyes squeezed tight. Some atom of my brain not devoted to the horror of what we were witnessing said, She believes now. Now she’s a believer. And it’s her worst nightmare.

  Somehow, her scream triggered Alex. Not to run, not to scream himself, but to do what I intended a second ago.

  He went to his mother.

  Alex rushed toward her, weeping openly. Like he couldn’t see or had already dismissed the decayed state of his mom’s body—body, because whatever they were, t
hey were not alive. Alex smacked into her just as his mother got to her feet, and wrapped his mom in a bear hug.

  I heard a sound like pencils snapping, dozens of them, all in sequence. It was the dry xylophone cracking of Mrs. Trinity’s rib cage and spine. Some sort of purple-green fume erupted from her leathery mouth and coated Alex’s face as if forced from long-dead lungs. Her body bent backward and dangled from Alex’s arms like a rag.

  And yet, even with her back broken, Alex’s mother still reached for him.

  The bones in her hands still clenched and flexed as if surrounded by invisible muscle. For a second, I allowed myself the luxury, the total beauty of the idea that this was all on television, that we were being pranked unlike any prank before. Must-see TV. Any minute, giant floodlights would pop on and everyone would come out laughing. . . .

  Mrs. Trinity’s fleshless fingers sank into Alex’s throat.

  Alex stood still, petrified by the sheer terror of having crushed his mother’s bones. Motionless, his eyes giant in disbelief, Alex did nothing while his mother drove her skeleton hands into either side of his windpipe. Alex gasped and choked and at last released the mummified body, grabbing instead at the fingers digging into his skin. Blood poured instantly from the wounds, and Alex dropped to his knees, taking the horrific body of his mother with him.

  By that point, Selby had knelt on the ground, her back curled, arms over her head for protection. I wanted to join her, but could not make myself move.

  Charlie at last reacted. He raced forward and attacked one of the things, perhaps once a cameraman, shouting and kicking out with one foot. The shot connected with the man’s withered face, which disintegrated into dust, leaving a gaping, awful hole. The result caused Charlie to bellow in disgust and step back as the cameraman lumbered awkwardly to his feet and stepped toward Charlie, arms upraised, skeletal fingers seeking—still moving, still animated by whatever stygian force was working in this sunless place.