Resurrection #1

Tim Curran


Copyright 2012 by Tim Curran
Smashwords Edition

1
This was Witcham in the teeth of the storm: 
A bog of sucking black mud and rising waters. The rain had been falling for four days nonstop and just after ten that night, it reached its peak. Truth be told, it did not just fall, it hammered down from the heavens. It sprayed and lashed and turned the roads to mud and filled cellars and pissed in through every available crack. Bolstered by sixty-mile-an-hour winds, it ripped off roofs and punched in windows and blew doors right off their hinges.
By midnight, the cement wall hemming in the swollen Black River completely collapsed, sending a wall of water rushing through abutting neighborhoods. Particularly River Town, a historic part of Witcham. And not just water, but filth and debris and sewage from backed-up drains. Terrified, as their houses crumbled around them, people ran out into the streets and were driven under the rippling mud and lost for good. Block by block, the lights blinked out one by one like somebody had drawn a single, masking shade. And then there was just darkness and wind and destruction, the rain pouring down.
The darkness, however, was not absolute.
It was spotty, a murky dreamlike half-light cut by elongated shadows. And had you been able to withstand the onslaught out in the open, you would have seen that wall of water strike Hillside Cemetery with incredible force. The hills it sat on did not just gently erode away, they dissolved. They disintegrated, exhuming things best left buried, creating a massive mudslide of bodies and headstones and rotting caskets that washed down into River Town, engulfing the neighborhood in a deluge of coffins and corpses. Tombstones speared through the walls of houses, caskets erupted through living room windows, and hundreds of cadavers ended up in the flooded streets, some standing upright in the mud and others caught in trees and bushes and wedged in doorways as if they were preparing to knock.
This was not just a night of fierce storms and flooding. This was the night the dead came out of their graves.

2
Later, Alan Sheeves wished dearly that he’d just gotten out like the others.
Meg was pregnant and the waters had been rising for days, but he had steadfastly held to the idea that the rain would stop and the waters would simply recede as they had other years. But that didn’t happen. Maybe down in his gut, he knew it wouldn’t. There had been no sleep for either of them that night. Just a tense cuddling with Meg under the covers. The both of them holding on for dear life as the storm battered the little house, making it shake and tremble on its foundation. The rain sounded like pellets. Like thousands of pellets striking the house.
And then, around midnight, as darkness and rain licked at the windows, a rumbling. A roaring wall of noise as the river burst its banks and rolled through the neighborhood, washing houses away and uprooting trees and vomiting the charnel waste of Hillside Cemetery into the streets.
Alan and Meg became aware of that when the picture window downstairs shattered and wind and chill rain blew through the house. 
“Alan…” Meg said. “Alan.”
“Probably a tree branch. I guess I better have a look. You stay here.”
But Meg wasn’t staying there. She threw on her robe, the thick terrycloth one, and went with him. Eight months along, it was no easy bit for her going up and down the stairs. Alan had even offered to set up a bed in the living room for her, but she’d have none of it. But that was Meg. Eight months pregnant or not, she would not let it slow her down or alter her lifestyle anymore than necessary.
The lights were out, but Alan had seen that coming. He had flashlights by the bed and a couple gas camping lanterns all primed and ready to go. Flashlight in one hand and lantern in the other, he moved down the narrow stairs, smelling the water and the night and something else that just did not belong: a putrescent odor. Like something had died and been washed into his house in the dead of night.
In the living room, water spraying into his face, he stepped around the fragments of glass while Meg waited behind him.
“Be careful for godsake,” she said.
Setting aside the lantern, Alan put the flashlight beam on the thing that had broken his window. Not a tree branch at all. But an oblong shape, a box dripping water and covered in mildew and clots of earth. A coffin.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“What?” Meg said. “What is that?”
“It’s…it looks like a—”
“A casket,” she said for him, a note of panic just beneath her voice. 
He swallowed. “Goddamn Hillside must have washed out of all things.”
He stepped forward, panning the light over the intruder to his happy little home. The box was old, pitted and discolored. It must have been in the ground for decades. Thank God it hadn’t burst open and spilled…well, spilled anything onto the carpet. It was wedged through the window tightly, just wide enough to slip through the pane. It was probably only a matter of shoving it back out.
You seriously want to touch that thing? 
But he knew he didn’t have a choice.
There was no way in hell Meg would sleep with a goddamn casket stuck through the side pane of the picture window. She was a good kid in every way, but she was also a little on the superstitious side. Partly because of her Catholic upbringing and partly because she liked to read books that scared the hell out of her.
“Let’s get out of here,” Meg said. “I don’t like this, Alan. I’m not too adult to admit that this is freaking me out.”
Alan chuckled. “We can’t leave, Meg. Not right now. There’s nowhere to go to.”
“All the same…”
“All the same nothing. I’ll just push it back out.”
It was the only thing he could do. There was no other choice. Outside, beyond the windows, a river of black water was flowing through the yard. The rose bushes were gone along with the picnic table, the street invisible. Nothing out there but rushing water and bobbing debris. Maybe alone he might have chanced it, but not with Meg. Not with Meg.
Behind him, she lit the lantern.
“Don’t touch it, Alan. Please…just don’t touch it.”
“I have to.”
He went over to it and put his hands on it. Jesus, it was cold and slimy. The wood was soft. It gave under his fingers and he didn’t like the idea of that. The idea that he might give it a good push and his hands would go right through it, his fingers brushing up against a polished skull or rotting grave clothes. Sucking in a sharp breath, he placed his hands flat on the slimy wood and applied some pressure. The box did not move. But the wooden panel at the end bulged inward an inch or so with a mournful, unpleasant creaking.
Meg was breathing hard. “Alan, just leave it there. Do you hear me? Just leave it there.”
He looked back at her. “Meg, it’s just a wooden box. That’s all it is.”
“I don’t like it.”
“C’mon, it’s harmless. If it was full of Tinker Toys it wouldn’t bother you, would it?”
“No, Alan, it wouldn’t,” she said, her tone of disapproval growing. “But I’m pretty sure there’s no fucking Tinker Toys in there.”
He just shook his head. The rain was still falling hard out there, but the wind had lessened. That was a good thing. At least the house was no longer shaking. He pressed his hands back against the box, feeling an almost atavistic repulsion against touching it. He gave it a shove. Then another and another. It wasn’t moving.
“Now what?” Meg said.
“Now I push a little harder.” He smiled. “No harder than pushing out a baby.”
“Ha, ha.”
“I’ll get it.”
“Just leave it there,” she said again.
“If I leave it there, you’ll never get any sleep and you need your sleep.”
“Like I’m going to sleep anyway. In case you haven’t noticed, Alan, there’s a coffin trying to get into my living room.”
Funny. Well, she might have been eight months down the road, but her mouth still worked just fine.
Bracing his feet, he put his hands back on the end of the coffin and gave it everything he had. The box moved maybe an inch or two before the panel bowed in again and a trickle of black water came oozing out, running over the back of his hands. He yanked them away like he’d been scalded, letting out a little cry. God, of all things. Drainage from a coffin.
Meg giggled into her hand. “It’s just a wooden box, Alan. That’s all it is.”
He chose to ignore her amusement. Yes, it was just a wooden box hammered together in a casket factory somewhere and a spider was just a spider, still you didn’t want to go touching one if you could help it. And you sure as hell did not want to grab a fat, juicy one in your palm and squeeze your fist shut until that spider’s soft body pulped in your hand and brown juice ran between your fingers. And the coffin—and the slime running from it—gave Alan about the same sense of aversion and disgust.
But it had gone beyond that now.
At first, he was hesitant to touch it. Then merely revolted at its feel. But now he was simple pissed-off. The storm wasn’t bad enough. The damage to his house and yard were not enough, now he had a fucking coffin stuck in his window. And that sonofabitch was going back outside whether it wanted to or not. He put his hands on the box again and this time, he really put his back into it—his back and his upper body strength, which was considerable after working in a lumberyard these past twelve years. The panel almost completely collapsed, but before it did the box moved five or six inches, enough so that most of its length was hanging out the shattered window. Gravity did the rest. The casket balanced precariously there for a moment or two, and then fell out the window.
“Ha!” Alan said.
It hit the water with a great splash, stood straight up and down like a ship about to go under, bobbed for a second or two, then righted itself, twisting in a lazy circle as the current found it and carried it away. It joined the gently rushing river of filth and bobbing things. Then was gone from sight.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said. “Just needed some convincing was all. A little push to show it who was in…”
Alan’s words dried up in his mouth.
For one crazy second in the glare thrown by the flashlight beam, he’d thought somebody was standing out in the street. But that was crazy. Nobody could stand out there. At least not for long.
“What is it?” Meg said.
“Ah, nothing.”
And it was nothing. Just a shadow or something swept by in the current. That’s all. There was nothing out there now but that black, oily water and all manner of flotsam caught in its pull.
“Look at your hands,” Meg said.
Alan did. They were muddy and dark. “Grab me a towel from the kitchen, will ya?”
“You’re not going to wipe that crap on one of my towels.”
“Meg, please.”
Sighing, she turned from him and then stopped. Stopped dead as he stopped himself. He could not have just heard what he’d thought he’d heard. Not on a night like this. Not in a storm like this. It just couldn’t be. But then it came again: a slow, insistent pounding at the front door. Thud, thud, thud.
“Alan…”
But he ignored her. There could not be anyone out there knocking. Not tonight. It just wasn’t earthly possible. He had a mad desire to take Meg by the hand and run upstairs, pretend that he had not heard a thing.
But that was silly…wasn’t it?
The porch angled away to the side, so he could not see who was out there from the living room window.
“Don’t answer it,” Meg whispered.
The pounding came again. An almost mechanical sound.
He walked over to the door, something seizing up inside him, his belly pulling up like it wanted to fill his throat.
“Alan, please…”
But it was too late, because his hand was already gripping the knob and his other was undoing the latch. Behind him, his wife made a weird, moaning sound. Without further ado, he opened the door to what waited out there.

3
Any given night in the summer or fall, had you been out walking down Angel Street in Witcham’s River Town, you might have noticed a garishly painted edifice squeezed dead center of a group of false-fronted buildings between 12th and 13th Avenues. Though the block featured everything from pawnshops to fried chicken counters, there was no mistaking that particular establishment with its bright scarlet façade and gold scrolling along the roofline. The sign board read: COSTELLO’S MUSEUM OF MORBID MEMORABILIA in antique lettering. 
From June through October, it was strung with red, yellow, and white bulbs and calliope music played from speakers over the door. Its proprietor, a somewhat seedy character named William Barney, was from a long line of carnival and circus performers. Though he had not labored on the midway for thirty years or more, Barney—as his father and grandfather before him—had amassed a sizeable collection of souvenirs and mementoes from those heady and raucous days of yore.
Step inside and the walls were plastered with old circus posters and railroad show banners and sideshow accordion boards advertising everything from bearded ladies to three-headed goats, half-girls and half-boys, fire-eaters and armless wonders and alligator men. You could view the skeletons of giants like “Sky-High” Lester Brown to those of dwarves like Wee Willie Wilkins in their respective, neon-lit caskets or marvel over the death masks of Bobby the Frog-Boy and Slim Gerou, the Caterpillar Man. And if you were especially daring, you might want to investigate the body cast of Laddy the Human Larva or see firsthand the implements of old-time torture shows and view a photographic panorama of the lives of rubber men and monkey girls and nail-eaters. 
As can be inferred, Barney’s collection concentrated mostly on the more grim and sensational aspects of carnival lore.
On dusty shelves and scattered over tabletops there was an exceptional collection of natural and decidedly unnatural wonders. Everything from embalmed devil-babies to stuffed mermaids, the tanned hides of man-eating snakes and giant rats, shrunken heads and ossified hands.
There was another room in the back that drew most of the museum’s business. And for an additional three dollars, you could go inside and view Barney’s collection of bottled babies and pickled punks. In jars and glass vessels and tanks of preservative were human and semi-human curiosities, things that had died at birth, things unborn, and things that could never have lived in the first place. They were lined up on shelves and lit by red light bulbs to enhance atmosphere and lend an uncanny, otherworldly illumination to things most definitely uncanny and otherworldly—freak births and bucket babies, parasitic twins and monstrous fetuses of every description. Drifting in their oceans of brine, here were things with too many limbs or not enough, one-eyed and two-headed and six-fingered, squid-babies and spider-babies, a menagerie of flesh twisted and mutated into the most abnormal shapes.
Costello’s Museum was just down the road from Hillside Cemetery and of all the buildings on that block, it took the worst beating. Its façade, which was little more than reinforced plywood and joists, was obliterated by the rushing wall of water, mud, and debris that had burst the banks of the Black River and pretty much sucked up everything in its path. The water crashed through the museum, destroying Barney’s collection of oddities and spilling into the Parlor of Pickled Punks, with such force that nearly all the vessels and jars were shattered instantly. The backwash sucked everything out into the streets, out into that river of foul water and falling rain.
And for some time, up and down Angel Street, monstrous things that had not been free of their liquid prisons for decades were exposed to what fell from the sky. Things that had haunted the dreams of generations were set loose upon the world. They bobbed and drifted and long-curled limbs unfurled…

4
Bodies.
Oh, Jesus Christ, look at all those bodies.
That’s what Heller was thinking as the enormity of it all sank into him, piercing him and making him want to shove his fist in his mouth to stay the scream that begged to get out. A mire of bobbing bodies and mud and filthy black water and coffins. 
Standing there in that dirty rushing water, rain spraying into his face, he said, “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Next to him, Miggs just said, “Can’t say that I have. Now keep moving.”
Yes. Yes, that was important. Heller knew that much. They’d been sent down here to knock on doors and urge people to leave because the river was cresting the wall and the sandbags were failing. It was the sort of shit job you pulled when you were a cop. Not even an hour into it, the wall had burst and that enormous wave of silt and water and grave matter came rumbling down on them. It hit the cruiser and spun it like a top, carrying it away like a paper cup. If it hadn’t wedged up against a house, it might have flipped right over. As it was, they had a hell of a time getting out without being carried away.
At least now, the ferocity of the flooding was spent. The water was still deep, but its current was gentle. Thank God for small favors.
But it was a mess.
Just an absolute mess. Entire houses had come apart like jackstraws. Trees and light poles came down. Cars were carried away. Anything that wasn’t tied down was swept away along with a lot of things that were.
They still had their long-handled flashlights, though.
Miggs moved across the street, playing his light around. And what it revealed was a horror. A stone monument with a cross at its apex was jutting from the muck outside a café along with a couple smaller stones. Caskets were drifting past, bumping into one another along with the wooden wreckage of things that might have been caskets once. Across the street was a little neighborhood convenience store and two corpses, one naked and the other dressed in black rags, were standing upright in the doorway where the wall of water had deposited them. The roof from somebody’s house had gone through the plate glass windows of an insurance office and there were ragged, stick-limbed things trailing from it.
This was a nightmare, an absolute nightmare.
As they plodded along, Heller felt things bump into his legs in the water and he just didn’t want to know what they might be.
“Gonna be a hell of a job to clean this up,” Miggs said into the wind.
Oh yes. It certainly was. When the waters retreated, there would be a lot of mud and in the mud…oh, Heller didn’t even want to think about it. But one thing was for sure, if they thought that he was going to be down here fishing stiffs from the muck, they had another thing coming. He wouldn’t put up with it. He’d go to the fucking union.
“Hold it,” Miggs said.
Something came floating past…another corpse. This one was pretty fresh, floating like a board, legs together and fingers still intertwined at his or her breast. Miggs’ light passed over it and Heller saw yellow bone where the face should have been. It passed on by and he started breathing again.
“C’mon,” Miggs said.
The wind was picking up, whipping and howling, throwing rain around in a wild thrashing tempest. The street was a churning shadowy sea of mud. It came up past their thighs. Slopping and stinking and just as black as quarry mud. Good God. A river of sewage and foul water and grave waste. The smell of it was absolutely nauseating.
They were making for a little saloon that rose up out of the water. It would be a place to wait this out, anyway. Heller followed behind Miggs and then something caught his legs and he almost fell into the drink. He tried to untangle his feet, but it was like he was caught in fishing line.
“Help me for chrissake,” he said.
But Miggs wasn’t helping him; he was laughing. In the wind and rain, he was laughing at Heller’s predicament as he scrambled around, trying to stay on his feet, trying to shake whatever had snared him up. Not that that was any big surprise. Miggs made it no secret that he did not like Heller. From the first day he’d been partnered with him, the older man had looked down his nose at him. Heller thought it was because he had only three years on the force and Miggs had something like twenty. But that wasn’t it at all. Heller asked him once what his problem was and Miggs, being Miggs, had told him. “You’re a fucking whine-ass, Heller. Everybody knows it. I don’t know how I pulled a guy like you, but you just keep your pissing and whining to yourself and we’ll get along fine.”
And now Miggs was just loving it.
“Asshole,” Heller said to him, stuffing his flashlight into his belt and reaching down into that filthy water and taking hold of what had him. It felt like sticks. Like wicker or something. He yanked it up the best he could and it wasn’t wicker at all, but the ravaged skeleton of a woman with long trailing black hair sprouting from her skull, something held together by scraps of gray meat and wound up in threads of her funeral dress.
“Yah!” Heller said and fell right into the water.
He’d stepped right into her, got his feet trapped in her ribcage. Stinking water in his face, his bicycled his legs until he felt that grim baggage break free.
“Oh, ha, ha, ha!” Miggs said, his light on Heller. “You ought to see the look on your face! It’s priceless!”
Heller scrambled to his feet, pawing mud off his raincoat. “Let’s just go,” he said, wanting nothing better than to take a punch at his partner.
Another coffin swept past them and this was a recent interment. In the yellow half-light coming out of the sky, he could see it was black and shiny still, the brass handles not tarnished in the least.
“That’s a nice one,” Miggs said, finding it all a little too amusing. “Don’t you think it’s a nice one, Heller?”
“Oh, shut up.”
Finally, they reached the saloon and climbed the steps up out of the water. The door was locked, but Miggs blew it open with his 9mm. Inside, it was dry. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke and old beer. A wonderful smell after being out in the streets.
Heller heard a creaking sound. “Hell is that?”
Miggs shook his head.
The back door burst open like a stick of TNT going off and a tide of surging ebon water flooded into the bar room in a tidal wave that knocked Miggs off his feet and put him under. Heller let out a high, girlish scream, swimming for the door, managing to squeeze through before it wedged close. Miggs came up gasping, alone, trying to fight his way through the flood. His drenched fists hammered uselessly against the door as the water rose and rose. Finally, he got it open enough to squeeze through. A tide of water came with him.
“Back to square one,” he said.
Dripping wet, the mire sluicing around him, Heller said, “What the hell happened?”
“How should I know?” Miggs said. “Maybe we opened that door and it created a vacuum or something. Must have been a lot of water caught behind that other door. Who knows?”
“Miggs,” Heller said. “Miggs.”
“What?”
“There’s…there’s someone over there.”
Miggs turned around, put his light where Heller was pointing. And, yes, there was someone over there near the telephone pole. A kid up to their chest in the water.
“Hey!” Miggs said. “C’mere! You can’t be out in this!”
But the kid—a little girl, Heller saw—was not moving. She just stood there and so very stiffly, he thought she might be just another corpse. But then she moved. 
Miggs went over to her.
“No,” Heller told him, tensing suddenly, “don’t.”
But Miggs went anyway, grumbling something under his breath. 
Heller wasn’t sure at first what was bothering him about the kid, but now that he squinted his eyes in the rain and got his light full upon her, he saw all right. She was just a little thing, a little girl with fine blonde hair…only there were great empty patches on her scalp and her face looked like wax melting off a skull. Just distorted and hideous, punched with two black holes for eyes.
But Miggs did not see that with the rain in his face.
“Gimme your hand,” he said, reaching out to her.
“I’m cold, mister,” the little girl said and her voice was congested like her lungs were full of leaves. 
“Miggs!” Heller cried.
But it was too late. Miggs took hold of her hand and as he did so, his entire body tensed. Maybe he felt the coldness of her flesh or maybe he saw her face…but when he took her outstretched hand in his own, gripping it, it was like pulp. It came apart in his fist, black juice squeezing out between his fingers.
He let out a scream and Heller fell back and over at the sound of it. When he came back up, there was nothing but Miggs’ flashlight being carried away down the street. Nothing else. No Miggs. No little girl.
“MIGGS!” he shouted. “MIGGS! MIGGS! MIGGS!”
But there was nothing but his own voice echoing out, empty and morose.
Oh Jesus, Oh Jesus Christ.
That wasn’t a little girl, a voice shrieked in his head. That was a dead thing, a living corpse…
Heller’s mind just went blank and he stumbled through the flooded streets, splashing and falling, his eyes drawn into narrow slits against the rain which hit him in sheets of needles. He kept moving, things bumping into him, his throat constricted down to a pinhole so that he could not even cry out. Then there was a building in front of him. A tall building that had been a hotel. He pulled himself up the steps and through the door and it was just black inside, black but dry.
Breathing hard, he pressed himself against the wall, trying to get his bearings.
Okay, okay, he had to find a door, find a room to hide in. It was the best he could hope for.
He still had his flashlight and that was something. He held it in his hand, ready to thumb the button…but he didn’t. Part of him was afraid that the light would be seen. And not just by that awful little girl, but others like her.
For there was no getting around one thing: the dead were in the streets of Witcham now. And some of them weren’t lying still.
Heller stood there, soaking wet and shivering. He had the flashlight in one hand and his 9mm Beretta in the other. He knew he had to find a place, a place he could hide. Though his mind was certainly not firing on all cylinders, his instinct was nearly electric. It told him that he must find a little hidey-hole, a corner he could push himself into. One that was defensible. There he would wait until first light. For surely the living dead had to crawl back in their graves when the sun came up.
Christ, the hotel was so unbearably dark.
It was like being shut in a closet. He had to take a chance. He thumbed the switch on his flashlight. He saw a few doors set in a corridor winding off to his left. Okay. That was a start. He clicked the light back off. He moved down there, opened the first door. Inside, mops and pails, boxes and shelves of cleaners. No, that wouldn’t do. Barely enough room to stand. He tried the next door. Shoving his 9mm into its holster, he gripped the knob and opened it. He put his thumb on the flashlight switch…and paused.
He heard a sound in the lobby. The sound of someone…or something…brushing against the walls blindly as if they were looking for him.
No time.
He stepped inside the room and—
The floor fell away beneath him and he was tumbling, slamming into steps and cracking his elbow and then his head, galaxies born in his brain in great nebular explosions. And then water. Sinking into it, plunging down into midnight depths, his face brushing a muddy bottom.
He came up like a rocket, gasping and clawing and sending waves rolling in every direction.
Stupid goddamn idiot…you’re down in the cellar.
It was so incredibly dark. Just one rolling shadow and it was hard to say where the water stopped and the air began. The darkness was thick and creamy and oddly suffocating. The water was up to his chest now, his nostrils filled with its rank odor. Trying to make sense of it all, Heller made for the wall, figuring he could guide himself back to the stairs, extricate himself from this mess.
He had his gun, but the flashlight was gone.
This was not good. He’d made a lot of racket in his descent. Whoever had been in the lobby must have heard him. Knowing this, Heller just froze up and listened. He could hear nothing up there. Nothing at all. But behind him, there was a splashing sound. He wheeled around with his gun. God, the darkness. Like trying to see through a tarp. Another splash off to his left. He absolutely panicked this time, smelling dead things around him. He jerked the trigger on the 9mm, shooting blindly. In the muzzle flash, he saw that the stairs were quite a distance away.
Okay, make for them.
He moved through the water, pushing aside a couple floating boxes. No more splashing save his own, just that cutting silence. The noise he made was like thunder. It unnerved him so much that he stopped. And the splashing stopped just after he did. And that meant, that meant…
Somebody was following him.
Somebody was standing right behind him, dogging him in the water. He swung around, bringing his gun up. Hands touched his face, his gunhand…hands that were soft and terribly moist.
He pulled the trigger, catching some hulking thing standing there in the muzzle flash. Something reaching out with gnarled hands, ribbons of flesh hanging from them. He screamed and lost the gun and those hands were on him. Half out of his mind, Heller fought back. Clawing with his fingers, going almost instinctively for the eyes. His fingers hooked into empty eye sockets that slopped with something like mud and tore into mucid flesh that had the consistency of raw pork fat.
Then he was in the water, half-swimming and half-stumbling. Something bumped into him and he realized it was his flashlight. He came up with it, clicking it on and the light showed him a man standing a few feet away. His eyeless, ruined face was grayish-white, swollen, set with numerous holes from which water trickled. A couple black beetles emerged from his eye sockets and ran down his face. He grinned at Heller with blackened teeth.
And it wasn’t just him.
A dozen other heads came up out of the water now, strands of hair hanging in cadaverous faces. 
“Oh God,” Heller heard his own voice say.
Then a woman vaulted up out of the water right in front of him, spraying him with stagnant slime. She was dressed in rotting cerements, her face little more than a skull grown with fine green moss. She reached out and took hold of him, pulling him in close and then her mouth opened in a contorted oval like that of a lamprey and she vomited a stream of black silt into his face, blinding him, making his skin burn like it was rubbed down with lye.
Screaming, he fell back in the water.
And she went with him.
They all did.
Ten minutes later, just silence and dripping in the cellar. That and a few ripples. Heller’s flashlight floated around in a lazy circle, the light gradually dimming.

5
Amongst the wreckage floating along Angel Street, there were dozens of white, nameless things that until quite recently had slept away the ages in jars of serum and formaldehyde. What was in the rain and in the water saturated them, filled them, overflowed them. The things—unpleasant and grotesque to the extreme—bobbed in the waters, puckered and pickled and bleached of color. And then the most extraordinary thing happened: in those dead, dreaming husks, there was activity. Eyes like peeled grapes opened and malformed faces grinned, fingers like scratching sticks reached towards the sky along with other things that were not fingers at all. There was motion and movement and a dread awareness.
And in the shadowy organic soup that flooded River Town, things were born and lived that were never intended to see the light of day.

6
In the thick, listening darkness, Meg waited.
Waited there in the empty house, something unwinding inside her. She felt loose and rubbery, held together by sheer force of will. She was trying to remain calm. Trying to keep herself steady, trying not to panic. But with what she had been through, that was like standing ground zero in a blazing building and trying not to singe your hair. Her heart was pounding and her nerves were frazzled and there was a curious rushing sound in her head that she figured were her nerves, fully aware and fully electrified like they had never been before in her life.
Alan was gone.
Yes, Alan was gone and she was hiding upstairs in their bedroom with a gas lantern burning on the nightstand. Maybe the light would attract attention, the wrong kind of attention, but she could not bear to be without it. Bear to be alone in the darkness in the great empty house, listening to the rain fall and the water lapping against the walls.
She was petrified, drawn deep into herself now that Alan was gone. Now that he had opened the door…and some malefic long-armed shadow had pulled him into the night.
She kept trying to breathe like they’d taught her in birth classes. The baby wasn’t coming yet…thank God…but there were other breathing exercises they’d taught her to stay calm. And she needed to stay calm. She needed to stay calm for baby. Because if she got herself too overwrought, it would effect baby. They were one now and she had to remember that. She had to stay calm, she had to—
Oh dear God, what’s happening here? What’s this all about? What happened to Alan? What was it that grabbed him? What dragged my husband out into the night?
Easy.
She had to take it easy.
She was thinking many bad things now. Not so much thinking them, but feeling them, knowing them to be true. Knowing that there were things out in the water. Awful things. Faceless, hungry nightmares like that crazy shit she read about in those horror paperbacks she could never seem to get enough of.
She tensed.
Tensed again.
Downstairs. A noise. No, not just a noise. Not a board creaking or something rattling in the wind. Something far beyond that. This was the sound of invasion: somebody was in the house. Somebody had come in from out…there. Somebody that was now standing at the bottom of the stairs, just breathing. But not breathing like they were out of breath, but breathing with a congested sound like an old man with pneumonia. Yes, a clotted, wet breathing.
Meg tried to calm herself.
But it wasn’t working. She tried to tell herself that this individual might have been somebody that had come to rescue her, but she didn’t believe that for a minute. Because whoever had entered her house in the dark of night was not a person, but a thing. Something dirty and dripping and evil.
Oh please, God, make them go away, please make them go away.
But they were not going. They were standing down there. She could hear the water dripping from them. It sounded like blood running from a slit artery. Yes, they were standing down there, perhaps smelling for her, casting about like a dog for scent.
And now they had it.
They were coming up the stairs. Yes, very slowly and maybe even painfully, dragging their feet from one step up to the next. When they pressed those feet down they made a squishing sound and water ran from them.
Oh yes, closer…and closer still.
Yes, they knew where she was and the trod of those feet was quicker now.
She knew she could not scream.
She could only wait as everything inside her withered away, tears rolled silently from her eyes, and she held her swollen belly in her hands, praying and praying.
The door began to open.
In the lantern light, she saw a hand grip the edge of the door, spidery fingers slip around it. Gray water ran from them. The hand was white and puffy, the flesh almost transparent and set with a tracery of livid purple veins.
Then a voice, waterlogged and full of slime: “Looks like I got a live one.”
Meg started to scream and she could not seem to stop. At least until that grim form towered over her, dripping foul water, and a terribly moist and flabby hand was pressed over her mouth.

7
The rain was falling and the dead were rising.
At least, that’s what the crazy bastard on the radio was saying. He called himself Brother John, inviting everyone to make “offerings of flesh and blood to the Holy Father”…though never being exactly specific as to who that was. Maybe God and maybe the Devil and maybe Dr. Seuss for all anyone really knew. People were complaining about old Brother John, but he was broadcasting on a pirate station at odd hours and the FCC were having trouble tracking him. Particularly since his station seemed to be a mobile one.
But what the hell? The city was losing its mind and Brother John was just another symptom.
Sighing, Mitch reached over and parted the shade, got a good look at the streets of Witcham.
Even at midday the world was gray and misty. The rain was still falling, water sluicing along the curbs and filling the gutters, carrying leaves and sticks and garbage down to the iron-toothed mouths of stormdrains, which themselves had backed up now, creating lagoons of whirlpooling water and clotted debris.
The rain was falling and the dead were rising.
Of all things to say.
Well, he was half-right, Mitch decided, pulling off his cup of coffee and going back to his paper. The rain certainly was still falling and according to the Weather Channel, it wasn’t about to stop. For nearly a week it had been coming down like piss from a leaky pipe and from what they were saying, it would go on until the end of the week. Already, parts of Witcham were underwater…or nearly…and what was another seventy-two hours of this deluge going to bring?
“Mitch.”
He started, spilling a few drops of coffee in his crotch and swung around. Lily was standing there. Her red hair, always so fiery and brilliant, looked like old coals barely holding their heat today. Her face was pinched from sleep and her green eyes no longer sparkled. The luster was gone from them, worn away by time and tribulation. But that was Lily these days, a reflection of the beauty she’d once been, but just a reflection. It had been that way ever since— 
“Mitch,” she said again. “Did you hear that? Did you hear what that guy on the radio said?”
He pretended he hadn’t. Pretended he didn’t know that Lily had been listening to the radio in the other room just as she had been pretty much since the rain began. Listening to that especially irritating Jesus freak prophesying doom and gloom.
“No,” Mitch said, “What did that nut say now?”
Lily blinked her eyes rapidly. “He said…he said the rain is falling and the dead are rising. Why would he say that, Mitch? Why would he say something like that?”
“Because he’s about three plates short of a picnic, honey.”
“I don’t like it.”
She had enough going on in her head; she didn’t need that idiot making things worse for her. Mitch only wished he could get his hands on that sonofabitch. He would’ve kicked his ass on general principles.
“Shut the radio off,” he told her. “Or switch stations. Christ.”
“But what he said—”
“I don’t give a shit what he said. Last night he was talking about the righteous building a fucking ark for chrissake. You want me to get some two-by-fours and plywood, start making one?”
“But, Mitch…Mitch, Chrissy’s out there,” Lily said very slowly. “She’s out there in that…that rain.”
Mitch swallowed. 
Chrissy was fifteen. She could handle herself. These were the things he wanted to say to Lily, but didn’t dare. He was almost afraid of how she might respond. Well, she’s not your daughter, is she? She’s mine and I worry. I can’t help it, I worry. Lily might have said something like that. Now and then she could still get up the gumption to be hateful, to be cruel, but when she did, Mitch knew, you had to grin and bear it. All those anti-depressants the docs had her on, they were doing funny things to her head. Mostly, she was withdrawn and glassy-eyed, but now and then she’d have mood swings so severe they were almost scary…as if all those drugs were bottling up everything inside her, all the things you should be letting out when you were grieving. And now and again, they got out, all right. And when they did, cover your head and hope for the best.
Jesus Christ, Mitch, he thought, she lost her twin sister two weeks ago. There’s a connection between twins you can’t begin to know. It’s pulled the rug out from under her and shit down her throat. Be patient, just be patient. She’ll come back. Sooner or later, Lily will come back to you.
Sure, and that’s all he really wanted. The way he was feeling, the rains could wash Witcham right off the goddamned map if Lily would just get her feet under her again. 
Lily before her sister’s death was full of piss and vinegar. Her red hair burned hot right down to its roots. She was a very passionate, energetic woman who took no shit from anyone. Now she was quiet, almost submissive, all that hot blood sucked right out of her and replaced with something tepid and watery. Mitch wanted the old Lily back, needed her back. He would have given his left nut and most of his right to have her suddenly snap out of it, to see those green eyes blazing and her mouth set sharp. Jesus H. Christ, Mitch, look at this place, will you? I drop the ball for a few weeks and you throw in the towel? Get off your dead ass and give me a hand cleaning this place up. You’re not in the Navy anymore and you’re not out on the boats, so let’s snap to it.
Mitch looked at her, wanting to tell her things, but he didn’t dare. Lily was gone and this frightened, shivering thing had taken its place.
One look in those eyes of hers pretty much stripped his gears. Lily was afraid of everything these days and if you looked in her eyes or listened to her long enough, that fear, that rampant paranoia, could almost be infectious. Yes, certain parts of the city were flooding, just as certain parts of the Midwest were, but Chrissy was a sharp kid. She’d be fine. Maybe Chrissy was his stepdaughter, but he loved her like she was blood. And nobody could dispute that.
Mitch sighed. “You want me to go looking for her?”
Lily hugged herself, opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Then she sighed. “Yes…no…I don’t know, do you think you should?”
“Sure, why not. She take her cell?”
“Yes, but she’s not answering.”
“Don’t worry about that. Lot of the city is out of service now. We’ll probably be next, way this storm is going.”
Chrissy had taken off early that morning with a couple friends of hers, Heather Sale and Lisa Bell. They were going sightseeing around the city, seeing if the low-lying areas really had water up to their windows like people were saying.
“Mitch, it’s just, you know, the things people are saying…all those stories. I start thinking those things and I can’t seem to stop.”
Sure, all those goddamned rumors and that idiot on the radio was the black icing on a very ugly cake.
Mitch stood up, pulled on his rain slicker. “Don’t worry, Lily. I’ll find her.”

8
The rumors.
Well, they were flying hot and heavy, of course, and the conspiracy theories were rife. The facts of the matter were that an unprecedented storm system was sweeping over the Midwest and the main rivers—the Ohio and the Mississippi—were swollen and bursting their banks. Not that any of this was much of a surprise, for so many smaller waterways emptied into them. In Wisconsin, you had the Fox and Wolf Rivers, the Menominee and the big old Wisconsin herself. All of which either drained into the Mississippi or the Great Lakes and all of which were either past flood stage or quickly approaching it.
A little closer to home—Witcham, that was—you had the Black River which had already overflowed its banks and attempts by the Army Corps of Engineers to suppress those turbulent waters with sandbags and dike systems were only partially successful. The Black was flooding and Witcham just happened to lie in the Black River Valley. About five miles outside of town, the Black had been dammed to form the Black Lake reservoir which powered a hydroelectric dam run by Wisconsin Electric which in turn supplied not only the city and outlying areas with power, but cities as far south as Madison and Eau Claire. In an area where the average rainfall was roughly 28 or 29 inches, some sixty inches had fallen in the past four days and the Black Lake reservoir was near to cresting. Even diverting water into the elaborate series of nearby spillways had only lessened the danger minutely. Back in the old days before the dam was built in 1934, Witcham, which lay in the Black River floodplain, was swamped regularly from heavy spring rains and snowmelt. Particularly, River Town and Bethany, both which sat roughly dead center of the city on opposite sides of the river itself.
And now those days had come again.
Just two nights ago, a huge section of the cement wall that contained the Black River had utterly collapsed, sending a huge wave of water into River Town that had washed away houses and Hillside Cemetery to boot. That was ugly business. Some thirty people were missing. Drowned, sunken in the mud, who really knew? But the real unpleasant part of that was when Hillside went, some three hundred graves were swept into the city…along with what they contained.
And that was bad, of course. In fact, it was quite horrible.
But it was none of these things that fed the rumors cycling through the city like cold germs making the rounds. It was something else. On the opposite side of the valley, tucked away in a heavily forested hollow, was the Fort Providence Army Reservation. It had housed a cavalry battalion in World War I, been transformed into a POW camp for captured German soldiers in WWII, passed to the Army National Guard in the 1960s, and then around ’78 or ’79 been absorbed into the Army Medical Command and became a high-security installation that the Army claimed was involved in “advanced battlefield medical research.” To locals that meant everything from germ warfare to genetic engineering to alien autopsies, depending on who you asked and how much they’d had to drink. No one really knew what went on there. You couldn’t get with a quarter mile of the fence without MPs all over you.
The third day of the rains there had been a tremendous explosion at the base. The boom was heard and felt in nearby Witcham where it was said the impact actually knocked people out of their chairs and birds right out of the sky, if you could believe that. Mitch’s Barron’s next door neighbor—a pensioner and all-round fussy prick named Arland Mattson—claimed that the explosion felt like God himself had picked up the valley and shook it out like a dusty rug. But Mattson did have the gift of exaggeration. 
Mitch himself had felt it roll right through his house and rattle his windows. But he wasn’t about to give the explosion more than that.
The Army claimed a fuel tank had exploded out at the base and there was no need for concern, as the base fire brigade was handling it. The blaze was under control within an hour, end of story. The explosion made the local and state news, and was even briefly mentioned on CNN.
Right after the explosion, Mitch stepped outside in the pouring rain like everyone else and even in the gray haze of the storm he had seen an odd yellow-green cloud hanging over the direction of Providence. Some people said it sparkled like wet quartz, though Mitch had not seen that. The rain had dissipated it almost immediately. But one thing was for sure, an acrid and sulfurous stink had blown through the town for hours afterward. And Mitch had told Lily that it had not smelled like fuel oil, but the world’s largest rotten egg fart.
And here, then, the rumors and wild tales got their footing.
The explosion was not from a fuel oil tank, but a mishandled tactical nuke and that yellow-green cloud had been a mushroom cloud seething with radioactive fallout. When mention was made of that awful stink, the story changed. It wasn’t a nuke, but a tank of lethal weapons-grade chemical agents that had gone up, maybe phosgene or chlorine gas. And that really got people going in Witcham. They claimed to see rains coming down that were either red or luminously yellow directly after the explosion. Mitch hadn’t seen any of that either, but he had noticed a peculiar almost ochre tint to the sky for several hours afterward.
The night following the explosion, Mitch tramped out to the alley through the spreading puddles with a couple bags of garbage and Arland Mattson had been standing in his garage.
“C’mere, Mitch,” he said. “Got something you’re gonna wanna see.”
He was standing there in hip waders and a red-and-black checked hunting coat, an old green cap with ear flaps on his narrow head making him look like a yak herder. Sitting on the concrete slab around him were dozens of mason jars full of water. Mitch was figuring he didn’t want to know anything about it, because since his wife’s death, Arland had gone from being casually annoying to a full-blown eccentric. 
“You see what I got here? In all these goddamn jars?”
Mitch swallowed, shaking rain off himself, hoping it wasn’t urine. “No…what do you got?”
“Water,” Arland said. “Goddamn rainwater what fell from the sky.”
“Oh,” Mitch said, not wanting to follow that particular thread because Arland was the world’s oldest conspiracy theorist. He said there were holes in the ozone because NASA kept shooting rockets through it and that the neighborhood cats ritually broke into his locked garage and pissed all over the tires of his Buick Century just to spite him. Mitch never did ask him how those pussycats handled the lockpicks.
Arland was proud of his jars of rainwater. “Full of contaminates, Mitch. Stuff from those secret experiments at that goddamned Army base. See, I got it from a reliable source that the Army is using Witcham as a guinea pig, spraying us down with chemical warfare stuff to see what happens to us.”
Arland wouldn’t say who his reliable source was. He only pressed a finger to his lips so Mitch would know it was all strictly hush-hush and that you never knew who might be listening. Arland said that a tank of that goo had exploded and that was why it was raining so much. Mitch didn’t bother pointing out to him that it had been raining for like three days before the explosion.
“They been working that goddamned shit into our water drop by drop, spraying us down with it. That explosion was an accident, you know, but it plays right into my hands. Now the air is saturated with that shit and it’s coming down in the rain. I’m going to take these jars to a guy I know, then we’re gonna sue the goddamn government.”
Mitch believed that part because Arland was always trying to sue somebody. He’d tried to sue Mitch twice. Once because Mitch’s leaves were blowing into his yard and another time because the limb of the big oak out front was overhanging his yard and dropping acorns all over his freshly-cut lawn. 
“No sense in running away,” Arland said. “We’re all contaminated now. Every one of us.” He proceeded to open his shirt and expose his sunken, white-haired chest which was set with a half-dozen blotchy looking sores. “See them? That’s contamination. At night…at night, them bumps, they move. And when I took a shit this morning, I saw things crawling in my turds. They were like…hey, where the hell you going, Mitch?”
But Mitch was already vaulting through his yard, the rain finding him and drenching him. Arland called out to him that it wasn’t too late to get in on the class-action suit, but Mitch decided he’d pass.
So, those were a sampling of the rumors making the rounds. Some weren’t that crazy and others were considerably more so, but in general they formed the absurd folkloric tapestry of the city as the rain continued to fall and fall.

3
Mitch toured the city in his Jeep Cherokee, taking in the wreckage.
The wreckage of his hometown which was considerable.
Witcham was a mill town of about 80,000 people, a good chunk of those not there for the industry but because of the campus of North-Central U downtown. It was split into some five neighborhoodsEast Genessee, Crandon, Elmwood Hills, Bethany, and River Town. The latter two occupied the lowest tracts of land abutting the river and were now flooded. Mitch lived over in Crandon, about four or five blocks from the house he’d grown up in. Crandon was up high, but given that the entire city lay in the Black River Valley, it was probably only a matter of time before even the high ground was underwater.
He went from neighborhood to neighborhood, the rain coming down so hard at times he had to pull over. Even when it wasn’t hammering down, it still fell in sheets of gray mist. A lot of streets were now blocked off by orange-striped sawhorses with attendant flashing battery lights and even a few old flickering smudgepots in some locations. And these streets invariably led down into the lower lying areas of the city where the standing water came right up to the tops of porches and sometimes even windows, the roofs of cars and the cabs of abandoned trucks poking from the murky pools which were clotted with leaves and branches and all manner of debris.
Mitch paused at a few of these streets—Cobb and Huron and Ripley—and actually climbed out into the rain to view the flooding firsthand. It was amazing. You could hear about it and read about, but until you actually saw it you could not appreciate what had happened to Witcham. If he hadn’t known the city was flooding, he would have thought it was sinking. Standing behind the sawhorses that blocked off the entrance to Cobb Street, he followed the pavement with his eyes downhill until it was lost in a filthy lagoon of water.  Down there, it looked dark and dirty and desolate. Rows upon rows of neat whitewashed houses were slowly submerging, trees and flagpoles and high fences jutting forth like the masts and prows of ships sinking into some great stagnant sea.  And farther down, the closely-crowded tall and narrow brick buildings lining Cobb were going under, too. Being three- and four-story structures, it would take time, but Mitch could see it happening inch by inch. Even now, storefronts advertising videos and dry cleaning and fried chicken were washed by a dark lake of rising water.
It looked deserted down there and it was for the most part, but people were still living in the upper stories, a few lone rowboats moored to roof overhangs and canopies. He could even see a few people standing on roofs. Some smartass had nailed a couple of signs to the newel posts of his porch. HOUSE FOR SALE, CHEAP, one read and the other said, INDOOR POOL, NO XTRA CHARGE.
Even in the face of catastrophe, people still had a sense of humor.
This made Mitch smile, but the actual flooded neighborhoods wiped that smile away real fast.
Curious and knowing none of this was getting him any closer to tracking down Chrissy—who was probably at the West Town Mall on the other side of the city, no doubt, sampling some stuffed pizza at Sbarro’s or trying on skimpy tops at Pac-Sun while her mother chewed what remained of her fingernails to the very nubs—he started down the hill towards the rising water. Its surface was scummed with leaves and garbage and grass clippings, the bloated bodies of a few dead cats and dogs bobbing in the swill along with shingles and sections of vinyl siding stripped from houses by the wind. Now and again, he saw a few snapped-off tree limbs floating along with an odd assortment of junk: car tires, plastic garbage bags, a pink flamingo or two, a child’s plastic swimming pool…dozens of other unknown, leaf-caked items.
If and when the water did recede, it was going to be a real mess.
Cobb Street led away underwater into River Town, being the oldest part of the city and one of its most low-lying. All those quaint Victorians put up by the pulp and mining barons back in the 19th century had been turned into trendy restaurants, high-end apartment buildings, and museums. Now they crouched in an oily sea of black, stinking water, slowly rotting away. The seagulls—whom usually clustered along the riverbanks and held court at the town dump—crowded for space on rooftops with pigeons, liking the rotten smell of the water and all the dead things coming to the surface.  In the far distance where the land dipped towards the Black River, Mitch could see the gables, weather vanes, and sooty chimneys of structures now completely sunken in the mire.
And seeing this, he had to wonder how many bodies were out there.
The bodies of those lost in the flooding and all the bodies disinterred from Hillside Cemetery. Christ, it was like some floating graveyard down there from what he was hearing.
And how many of those submerged rooms were peopled by swollen, waterlogged corpses which circled sightlessly in the darkness and bumped along ceilings or pressed white fish-nibbled faces up to sunken windows? And how many would there be before this ended?
He stared out at that rank tidal pool which was a secret, foul ocean filled with secret, foul things dredged up from the river bottoms and cellars and dark places. He had an ugly feeling that there were going to be things in that water that people were not going to want to see. Things left stranded by the receding waters that were not going to be pleasant to look upon.
Something shifted beneath the floating carpet of leaves about ten feet out like a log rolling over. The leaves piled up, but would not part to reveal what it was. Slowly then, the hidden shape began to move in Mitch’s direction, gliding along just beneath the surface, leaves rising in a swell with its motion.
He did not wait to see what it was.
He climbed back up the hill and jumped behind the wheel of the Jeep, hitting the gas and fishtailing in the slick streets, almost hitting a parked car. But he did not slow down until he was well away from the flooding. And only then did he realize how hard he was breathing or that his heart was hammering.
What was moving under those leaves?
He didn’t know, but he had an ugly feeling in his belly that he was going to find out. Sooner or later.

4
Two hours later, Mitch had not tracked down Chrissy.
He cruised the lots of the West Town Mall and the chic shops and game emporiums near the University, but saw no sign of Heather Sale’s little VW Bug. Despite the rain and wind, people were still out, still shopping and still spending money. But Mitch reminded himself that these were people from Wisconsin, the sort that rode out the blizzards and subzero chills of January and February. As children, they’d grown up as he had with ice skates in one hand and a sled in the other, shoveling paths through hip-deep snow just to make it to the street. They were a tough and healthy lot that did not fold-up very easily. And if you could survive winter in the far north, rain sure as hell wasn’t going to stop you.
Mitch almost felt like some kind of stranger as he toured the neighborhoods. The city he had known his entire life simply felt different. Try as he might, he could not dismiss that rather absurd idea from his head. The city did not feel inviting, did not feel familiar, it felt tense somehow as if its hackles were raised and its muscles bunched…as if it was expecting something, bracing for the worst case scenario.
He could not shake the feeling.
The sense that something bad was about to happen, that the engine of catastrophe was even then idling, waiting to crank up to full rev when the time was right.
Even though he had not smoked in nearly three years, he found himself reaching for his cigarettes, wanting something, needing something that would put his nerves back in orderly rows.
Whiskey, a voice told him. A taste is what you need.
He began to feel a little better when he got back into Crandon, saw all the houses lined up on the streets, Chatterly Park and the water tower, Franklin High and the rain-swept football field behind. In the distance, he could see the stacks and chimneys of the mills and foundries that kept Crandon and much of Witcham alive.
On a whim, he hung a right on Michigan Avenue and cruised The Strip, the local designation for Crandon’s business district. Bowling alleys and hamburger joints, furniture stores and office buildings. Lots of little neighborhood bars tucked in-between with Pabst Blue Ribbon signs hanging out front.
He pulled to a stop in front of Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus and mainly because he saw a familiar vehicle parked out front—a green Dodge Ram pickup with a bumper sticker that read I BRAKE FOR STRIPPERS.
He covered his head, running through the rain and into the long sheet metal Quonset that housed Sadler Brothers.

5
Inside it was warm, smelled of wood smoke from the massive wood boiler in the back which Chum and Hubb Sadler had burned long as Mitch could recall and mainly because they were too cheap to pay for gas. There were canoes and little duck boats dangling from the walls, racks upon racks of hunting clothes, fatigues, raingear, and winter boots set in-between. Portable ice shanties crowded next to ice augers and racks of fishing poles, glass cases filled with everything from Israeli flags to Russian canteens and paperweights made from .50 caliber shells.
Sadler Brothers had been sort of a landmark in Crandon since long before Mitch was born and being that was forty-four years before, that was saying something. There was something about the place he’d always liked. It made him feel calm, helped him get his feet under him. He supposed it had something to do with all the hours he’d spent there with his old man when he was a kid. Sadler’s was always the first place they went when they were planning a camping trip or getting ready for deer season or the annual guys-only fishing trip up in the cabin on the Wolf River.
Mitch caught sight of Tommy Kastle leaning up against a rack of snowshoes, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, his dirty and raggedy Milwaukee Brewers cap cocked at a rakish angle on his head. Tommy had bought the cap ten years before and claimed he wouldn’t buy another until the Brewers took the pennant. He was chatting it up with some old man who was apparently trying to read the instructions for a flashlight he was buying.
The old guy looked over at Mitch. “Believe this crap? Goddamn instructions are in Chinese or some shit…what the hell’s this country coming to?”
Tommy didn’t seem to hear a word he said. “So they want both forties I got up on Pullman Lake. I go, well what do you got in mind? The paper mill guy, he goes, well, we’ll log off both forties and then replant ‘em both for you. I go, with what? I got hardwood up there. You boys clear-cut oak and birch and you re-plant fucking jackpine. He goes, sure but we pay you for your hardwood and we seed pine in there. I go, I don’t want no fucking scrub pine on my land. He goes, well that’s our offer. I go, well, shit, sounds more like rape than a deal to me. If you want to fuck me, how’s about kissing me first?”
Mitch laughed under his breath. Same old Tommy.
The old man went on his way, muttering about the goddamn Chinee strangling the whole country.
Tommy turned and saw Mitch. “Well, Jesus Christ, look what the frigging cat dragged in. How you been, Mitch?”
“Hanging in there. Saw your truck out front.”
“Well, what’re you thinking about this business? Goddamn flooding? Ain’t it just the pisser?”
“Sure is.”
Tommy said that it wasn’t about to get any better, if what they were saying was true. Way he’d heard it, people were already pulling up stakes and getting the hell out of the Valley…not that you could blame them.
“Not you?”
Tommy laughed. “I ain’t going anywhere. I got me a boat and if worse comes to worse, I’ll be living on it. Got room for you, too, Mitch.” He pulled the unlit cigarette from his mouth and then put it back in. He looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Mitch. Christ, I heard about Lily’s sister and what happened. Damn, now that’s a tough spot. How’s the old girl doing?”
Mitch had a mad urge to lie. To lie his ass right off. But when he opened his mouth, all he could say was: “Not so good, Tommy. She’s having a hell of a hard time with it. You wouldn’t recognize her.”
Tommy just nodded. “They were tight, man. Even for twins they were tight. What was her name? Marjorie?”
“Marlene.”
“Right. Jesus, what a thing. I feel for you and Lily.”
That was followed by maybe ten seconds of uncomfortable silence. Poor old Tommy, he didn’t know how to handle things like this. He was your average blue collar guy with your average blue collar guy’s sense of compassion. It wasn’t that he was some hardassed redneck with no sympathy, it was just that he’d spent most of his life keeping his emotions on a high shelf in the closet where they wouldn’t cause any trouble and when he did take them out, they were damn rusty and he was damn clumsy trying to put them to work. It was like pulling a car out of a garage every few years and turning it over, expecting it to pull a smooth and sweet idle when what it invariably did was sputter and shake and miss, cough lots of blue smoke.
But that was okay. Tommy Kastle was the salt of the earth, in Mitch’s opinion. He’d do anything for you. Give you the shirt off his back or an extra kidney, whatever you needed. Mitch could see it in his eyes, the warmth and empathy that just couldn’t get past his lips. And that’s all Mitch had to know.
Tommy cleared his throat. “All I can say is that I’m sorry about that mess, Mitch. And that’s all I’m gonna say. We go any farther with this, we’ll have to break out the fucking Kleenex and hold hands, watch goddamn Oprah together or something.”
Mitch burst out laughing. “God, but you’re an asshole.”
Tommy grinned, back on ground he knew well. “My mother said to go with your strengths.”
Mitch was feeling better. Those creeping heebie-jeebies seemed to have crawled off his spine now. He felt okay. He felt hopeful and wasn’t entirely sure what had been squeezing his nuts in the first place. It was good to be with Tommy. They’d grown up together. Traded skinned knees and Little League baseball for long hair and Black Sabbath records and then traded them again for the trappings of the working class: callused hands, mortgages, and middle-aged paunches, all that wonderful childhood idealism buried in the same hole with plans to be rock stars and NFL running backs. Maybe that stuff was buried, but if you looked real close at Mitch and Tommy, you could still see it twinkling in their eyes when they were together. There was a connection between them, an understanding. They’d grown from the same roots and all these years later flowered the same buds.
Tommy asked Mitch how things were going over at Northern Fabricators where he worked. Mitch was a machinist, a C & C lathe man.
Mitch just laughed. “Well, you figure that one. Northern is over in Bethany and we’re closed until things dry up.”
Tommy said it was the same at the wireworks out on Junction Road. Goddamn flooding. Closed until further notice. “I’m just glad I’m a single guy. No mouths to feed. All I got is me.”
Mitch just nodded. Tommy liked to say things like that, but underneath you could almost hear the sorrow of his existence echoing out like a slow and distant thunder. 
“Lookit goddamn Hubb over there, will ya?” Tommy said.
Mitch did.
Hubb Sadler was the last remaining Sadler brother, Chum having dropped dead behind the counter almost fifteen years before from a coronary occlusion. Hubb sat on a metal folding chair behind the long glass counter, sucking off a bottle of oxygen to ease his emphysema which was greatly acerbated by the fact that he went in at over three-hundred pounds. Not a good thing when you were on the downside of seventy. His eyes were gray marbles pushed into narrow draws, his head shaped roughly like a jar and capped with a crewcut that was startlingly white. His face was seamed and deeply-etched with diverging lines. The only time the oxygen mask came off was when he needed to reel out a string of profanity at someone.
The Sadler brothers had done well for themselves, yes, but they’d both been miserable, evil-tempered sonsofbitches every day of their lives. A legacy Hubb kept alive.
Some college girl, maybe eighteen or nineteen, was working the cash register. She had brilliant blue eyes and a head of long, curly black hair that hung over her shoulders. Her breasts were large and high, pulling her shirt up even as her jeans rode low on her hips. Every man in the place was getting an eyeful of her flat belly and pierced naval.
“Jesus, lookit that shit, will ya?” Tommy said. “I don’t remember ta-tas like that when I was young. Bet she makes her own gravy. Look at Hubb! He’s just eating that up, sitting back there while she shakes her can in his face.”
Hubb did look pleased. But Mitch was thinking it wasn’t because of the girl, but because of the sales he was racking up. People were standing in line with raincoats and boots, lanterns and freeze-dried food packets, sleeping bags and plastic tarps. Old Hubb hadn’t made a killing like this since Y2K.
“What would you say if I told you I was taking her out tonight?” Tommy said.
“I’d say you were a lying sonofabitch.”
“And you’d be right.”
Hubb sat there, holding court with a couple other old-timers: Hardy and Knucker. Both in their seventies, they were regulars at Sadler Brothers. Hardy was probably one of the finest bullshit artists in Crandon and Knucker, well Knucker was just Knucker. For many years she’d been known simply as “Knucker’s Old Lady,” but after Knucker himself—Pauly Knuck—had passed on, she inherited the coveted crown.
More people came through the front door, a blast of wet chill coming in with them. They joined the twenty or so that were already milling around, ready to spend their money and flash their plastic.
Some guy neither Mitch nor Tommy even knew came right up to them, rain dripping off the brim of his bright yellow baseball cap. He looked worried, his eyes darting around. “Phone’s are all dead,” he said. “TV’s off the air. What the hell’s going on? Is it the weather?”
“I’m thinking so,” Tommy told him.
“Well, I’m not liking it,” was all he said to that.
He marched past them, going for the bins of freeze-dried food. He grabbed a couple boxes of packets, then took a hatchet off the shelves, stood there staring at it. Everyone who passed by got to hear how the phones were dead and the TV was off the air. It was to be expected, Mitch figured, but you could almost see the panic threading through the store.
“Radio’s dead, too,” some teenaged kid announced, a waterproof poncho tucked under one arm.
Hubb pulled his oxygen mask off. “Try that fucking radio,” he told his college girl. “Go ahead for chrissake, turn the cocksucker on.”
Nervously, she tried the radio on the shelf above Hubb’s head. Then she tried the phone, shook her head.
Hubb scowled. “Well, what in the fuck next? Jesus H. Christ!”
“Yup,” Hardy said, “seen this shit before. The Red October of fifty-two. Weather got funny like this. Summer was hot. Wicked hot. Fall was too cold. By Sept 15, we had an inch of snow on the ground. Then that Red Rain came. It was ugly, by God, it was ugly.”
The college girl was intrigued. Possibly a bit naïve, too. “What happened? Did it really rain red?”
“Ahhhhhh…don’t encourage him, honey,” Knucker said. “He’ll go on all day if he has an audience.”
Hardy ignored her. “Sure did, missy. Pissed outta the sky red as blood. Poisoned wells and rivers and killed twenty people. That was nineteen-fifty-two.”
“Ahhhhhh…forty-nine that was,” Knucker said, not looking up from her crossword.
“Fifty-two.”
“Forty-nine!”
“Fifty-two, you stupid old bat! I should know! That was the fall my kid brother got electrocuted up on the roof.”
“Ahhhhhh…your brother lives in Sauk City.”
Tommy laughed. “Goddamn Hardy. What a guy. Red Rain, my ass.”
Hubb looked over at college girl. “What’re you fucking standing there for, sweet cheeks? We got cockfucking people here! Chop! Chop!”
Back on went the oxygen mask.
Tommy shook his head. “That silver-tongued devil. He just has a way with the ladies.” He laughed and turned back to Mitch. “Least the radio’s off the air. You been hearing what Brother John’s been saying?”
“Yeah, I heard all right.”
“Last night it was to build your own ark and today it was something about the rain falling and the dead rising. How you like that shit?”
Mitch said he didn’t like it at all.
But what he was thinking about was Lily. How was she going to be handling this? Christ, she wasn’t holding herself up these days with much more than a wet straw and with no radio and no TV, phones down, she might just lose it completely.
“I should be getting back home,” he said.
“Sure,” Tommy said. “Don’t want to be leaving your family, not with all this shit happening. Especially Lily, you know.”
Mitch was going to leave, but he didn’t. He wasn’t exactly sure why. His wife was probably needing him and if Chrissy had come home, there was every possibility they would start fighting. Chrissy was a good kid—smart, witty, and oddly urbane for a fifteen-year old—but she was still a teenager. And if God had ever created a more self-serving, sassy, and selfish tribe than teenagers, Mitch didn’t want to know about them. Lily wasn’t up to putting on the gloves and knocking Chrissy down to size the way she needed from time to time. Not these days. And Chrissy? Well, her teenage drive of self-pity and vanity had amped up to full power these days and it was very hard for her to sympathize with her mother sometimes, particularly when she had trouble seeing anything not reflected in her hand mirror.
So, Mitch should have left and made ready to play referee, but he didn’t. He stood there, almost wishing Tommy would volunteer to come home with him.
“It’s that goddamn Army base, that’s what it is!” somebody said. “That’s what this is all about!”
Tommy and Mitch turned. They both saw the woman doing the talking. She was maybe forty, her hair dyed so blonde it was white and set in a spiky ‘do like summer grass baked dead and dry. She had to go in at an easy two-hundred but had decided to squeeze herself into a cherry-red skintight set of Capri’s and matching sleeveless terrycloth blouse. An outfit like that might have looked spectacular on the college girl behind the counter, but on this one the profile was that of an over-nourished gourd.
Tommy, ever the mature adult, started giggling soon as he saw her. “Ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.”
Her face was going about as red as her outfit as she stabbed the air with one straining, pudgy finger. “The government’s behind it all! That explosion with the nuke or the poison gas out there at Providence! You think they want word of that getting out? You think they want you people here telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there about these funny rains? Course they don’t! That’s why they’re locking us in here!”
Tommy laughed at her. “Jesus Christ, lady, that was three days ago! You think they’re just getting around to clamping down on us?”
“Who asked you?” she said to him, jabbing the air in front of his face with that finger. Her face was flushed almost purple now, sweat beading her brow. “Why don’t you just stay the hell out of it?”
Tommy laughed again.
“Guess she told you,” Mitch said.
“Guess so. Fucking Hot Tamale.”
Another doomsayer, just what the goddamned city needed, Mitch thought.
But people were ringing around her, their common sense telling them to laugh it off, but something else telling them to listen, that this woman had something important to say. Most people claimed to despise suffering and atrocity, but they loved things like that, Mitch knew. If it disgusted them or frightened them or disturbed them, well, dammit, that was a pie they wanted a piece of and they intended on cutting into it for seconds, thank you very much. It was the same sort of thing that made children ring around some older kid as they described in graphic detail the maggots in a dead dog’s head at the side of the road or what their sister’s hamster had smelled like after they dug it up a week after it was dead. 
“They’re loving this shit,” Tommy said.
And they were.
They had suckered their mouths to the soft white underbelly of dread and were feeding on it, on the horror and dark prophesy that crazy fat bitch was slinging like grisly leftovers.
Tommy shook his head. “I had a cousin like that. Linda. Everything was death and doom with her. She’d get worked up about any old thing. She had a gas pain in her stomach, she thought it was cancer. A plane flew too low, it was crashing. She smelled smoke, her house was on fire.”
“What happened to her?”
Tommy shrugged. “She got leukemia, I think. But then a plane crashed into her house and she burned up with it.”
Mitch just shook his head.
“The phone’s won’t work,” Hot Tamale said, “because they’re not supposed to work! Can’t any of you see that? This goddamn valley is full of death and the Army don’t want us leaking it! So you know what they’re doing? They’re shooting stuff into the air, signals and vibrations that screw-up your TV and radio and phone signals, they’re, they’re—”
“Jamming frequencies?” someone suggested.
“—that’s it! That’s it exactly! Jamming our frequencies so we’re cut off while all that crap they sprayed in the air or blew up settles down on us and makes us all sick! If you’re smart, you’ll go to your families and get out while you can! Because by tonight, there’ll be no way out! Nothing to do but wait here to die! Do you hear me? Wait here to die!”
She made a mad rush for the front door, leaving a heady and slightly nauseating wake of strawberry perfume. Three or four others followed her. Everyone else just sort of stood around foolishly, feeling silly, and dispersing gradually like an offensive odor. 
Tommy said, “Jamming our frequencies, my white ass.”
He made a big show of looking around on the floor.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mitch asked him.
“You smell that perfume? Christ my eyes are watering and my nuts have shriveled up. Just checking the floor to see if she left a puddle.”
They both laughed, but there was something almost nervous about their laughter. Tommy was looking a little tense like maybe he would have felt a lot better right now if he had just drilled Hot Tamale right in the face and been done with it. 
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Mitch said.
And that’s what they were about to do when they heard the sound of squealing rubber and somebody screamed and a Dodge Intrepid came vaulting the curb, knocking the front end of Mitch’s Jeep aside and slamming right through the front of the store.
And then all hell broke loose.
6
Some distance from Crandon, in the flooded and smelling byways of River Town, the corpse of Meg Sheeves had been adrift for almost two days. What had come into her house that night, a dripping and faceless thing freshly exhumed from a watery grave at Hillside Cemetery, had been quite merciful, all things considered. There were many things it could have done to her as she began to scream her mind away in a shriek of black noise. Many horrible things. But what it did, it did almost instinctively, and this just to silence her. It placed a single moldering and oozing hand over her mouth and held it there until she stopped moving. Until there was only the slushy sound of its own breathing and rain striking the windows. 
Meg, quite dead, sat there in bed, her blue eyes wide and panicked and lifeless. And what had been growing in her womb these eight months died with her.
Then, for no other reason than sheer amusement, the thing that had come in out of the storm tossed Meg’s corpse out the window and into the water where it had been drifting ever since. Bathed in the peculiar amniotic waters that had taken River Town, fish had been at her, as had other nameless things. The flesh been stripped away from her back and throat. Birds had pecked her face down to a grisly deathmask. 
And although she was very much dead and would not reawaken, her corpse began to move. It shuddered in the water, shook itself like a wet dog, and then went still again. She floated spreadeagle, her mauled face, breasts, and swollen belly like separate islands breaking the surface. The largest of these islands began to shake, began to pulse with almost rhythmic undulations as something wriggled its way out of her birth canal. Threads of tissue and slime coagulated in the water like egg whites and then something hairless and pale emerged. Water and blood glistened atop its bulbous head. It opened its gray, cloudy eyes. Shaking and gasping, it coughed out a flux of liquid and jelly and pulled itself atop its mother’s corpse like some fleshy and puckered monkey.
Then without further ado, drool hanging from its seamed mouth, it began to feed.

7
“Well, fuck me,” Tommy said.
The Intrepid had buried itself into the front of Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus like a torpedo spearing into a submarine. The store was, after all, nothing but a sheet metal Quonset held together with screws and rust that shook in the wind so it wasn’t surprising that the car slammed right through it. Right up to the driver’s side door as a matter of fact, taking out the front entrance, flattening a display of rubber rafts and sending a couple mannequins in fly fishing gear pretty much airborne.
Mitch was one of the first to the car, followed by Tommy and a dozen others, all talking at the same time, all asking what the hell had happened here. What was going on? This guy drunk or on drugs? 
“Probably crack,” said the guy in the yellow baseball cap, the one who’d announced that the TV and phones were out.
The guy behind the wheel was a kid of sixteen or seventeen with a pierced eyebrow and a Social Distortion T-shirt on. The Intrepid had barely stopped rolling before he was trying to kick his door open. But it was wedged in a snarl of mangled sheet metal. There was rolled insulation hanging all over the roof of the car like the Quonset had vomited it out in its death throes.
“Somebody get a goddamn crowbar over here!” Mitch called out.
The kid was trapped in the car, blood all over his face and necklaced at his throat. He was just out of his mind, kicking at both doors and pounding at the windows, leaving bloody fist-prints on the glass.
“Take it easy, son,” Tommy told him. “We’ll get you out.”
The others gathered were talking about calling the police and 911 until someone reminded them that the phones were all dead. 
“I got a CB in my pickup,” a guy with a beard and a ponytail said. He made for the back exit.
A crowbar appeared and by then the kid behind the wheel had settled down a bit. He was just sitting there with a glazed look in his eyes, staring forlornly ahead. Tommy kept talking to him as Mitch bent the sheet metal back. You could say a lot of things about Tommy Kastle, Mitch figured, and most of them would have been true. But when somebody was hurt or needed help, he was always there, not a smart comment or salty crack to be heard. That’s the kind of man Tommy Kastle was.
“Oh my God,” said Mindy, the college girl, her bosom heaving. “Oh my God, oh my God…what happened to him?”
“Ahhhhhh…I’m guessing he ain’t having his monthly, honey,” Knucker cracked and there were a few nervous chuckles.
It went right over her head as Mitch figured most things probably did. She looked like a sweet kid—honestly concerned about the driver of the Intrepid—but most there had already drawn the conclusion that this girl wasn’t much sharper than your average dessert spoon. Someone else told her to get out of the way, called her Malibu Barbie, and she told them her name wasn’t Barbie at all, it was Mindy.
Mitch worked with the bar, bending back the sheet metal which groaned and snapped. The wind started pushing a wet mist through the aperture the car had created. All around him, the crowd that had gathered was pulling back, some leaving altogether and there was a good reason for that: Hubb Sadler was on his way over.
“What kind of cock-knocking clusterfuck is this?” he wanted to know, suddenly very spry for an old man dependent upon oxygen. He came over with the aid of his cane, his face red and popping with gnarly-looking purple veins that made his white hair look almost luminous. “Holy H. Jesus Christ! Lookit the front of my cocksucking store! Who in the diddly-hopping, mother-raping Christ is going to pay for this fucking mess?”
He looked pretty much like he was about to suffer the same malady that put his hot-headed brother in the ground. He kept swearing and spitting and wheezing, using every form of the word “fuck” he could think of. And when the old well ran dry, he started making up new ones.
“Take it easy for chrissake, Hubb,” Tommy told him.
Hubb turned on him, slapping a pair of helping hands out of the way. “You shut your cock-fucking mouth, you know what’s good for you. Ain’t this my mother-cocking store? Ain’t I got a fuck-sucking right to wonder whose gonna pay for this mother-cunting damage?”
Mitch just ignored him. Not much save a towel shoved in Hubb’s mouth would shut him up. That or a good old-fashioned coronary. He kept ranting and gesticulating and wanting to know what kind of dick-shitting driver this slit-cocking kid behind the wheel was anyway.
Mitch was wondering a few things himself as he freed the door.
There was a whole heaping helping of blood on the kid and Mitch was thinking it wasn’t from the impact with his Jeep or barreling through the front of the store. Sure, the Intrepid’s front-end was smashed pretty good, the gold paintjob scratched and gouged up from the sharp sheet metal, but that was about the only damage. Something had happened to the kid and he was thinking it wasn’t from the crash. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been good.
Mitch finally got the door open and the kid pretty much fell into his arms. He half-carried and half-dragged him into the store, and laid him out on the floor. What people remained finally got the picture. They brought over a sleeping bag and wrapped the kid in it.
“Hey!” Hubb cried out, more veins popping on his brow. “Who’s going to pay for this cunt-fucking merchandise?”
The kid was breathing real hard. His mouth kept opening and shutting like a fish gasping for air. His eyes were wide and unfocused. He was drooling and shaking and weird spasms ran right through him from time to time like he was getting irregular jolts of electricity.
There was a siren whining out in the distance, but it seemed to be getting no closer. Somebody said help was on the way. A few seconds after it first shrilled, five or six gunshots rang out. It sounded like they came from only a few streets over.
“What in the hell’s going on out there?” somebody said.
“Christ…are we under attack?” Yellow Baseball hat asked.
Tommy looked over at him, said, “Shut the hell up already.”
The kid was coming around now. Mindy had brought a first aid kit and Hubb wasn’t happy about that either, because those cunting bandages cost money. Mitch used alcohol wipes to clean up some of the blood, then a hot washcloth Mindy also provided. She was on her knees next to the kid, an arm around his shoulders. He was still shaking, but he wasn’t having the fits anymore.
Mitch got most of the blood off his face and discovered that there were scratches that began at the kid’s forehead and were scraped right down his cheeks. If he didn’t know better, Mitch would have thought a human hand had caused them. Four scratches that had thankfully missed his eyes.
Sure, he thought, like some maniac with sharp fingernails had tried to peel his face off.
The kid shuddered, looked at Mitch and then at Tommy. He swallowed and shook his head, looked over at Mindy and then at Hubb, Yellow Baseball Cap, and the three or four others gathered around. “We…we were over near River Town, me and my mom…we were over there,” he started saying, eyes going real wide and lips hooking in a sneer. “Our place, man, it was flooded out…but not real deep…me and mom, we waded down there to get some things. Water was up past our hips and…and they came out of the water! I saw them, I tell you I saw them! They came right out of the fucking water! Three of ‘em just came right out of the fucking water, stinking and muddy and they took mom! They just grabbed her! They were smiling! They…they didn’t have any faces…they didn’t have any fucking eyes!”
He started crying and Mindy held him, held his face tight against her chest and Mitch was figuring there were more than a few jealous men standing there. He kept sobbing and shuddering and nobody was saying much. What the hell could they say? Somebody came out of the water, he said. Three of them. Three people and they didn’t have faces, didn’t even have any eyes.
“Kid’s fucking overwrought, that’s what,” Hubb said. “No faces…what kind of campfire fuck-wongling is that? Jesus and his ugly sister, what the fuck is that?”
Tommy looked at Mitch and they held each other’s gaze a moment. Something might have passed between them, but neither really wanted to acknowledge that or what they were thinking.
When the kid had calmed, Tommy said, “Those people, they scratch you like that?”
The kid started panicking again and it took Tommy, Mitch, and Mindy to keep him sitting down. He told them in a high, whining falsetto that those things had come out of the water. And he emphasized things, made sure they realized he wasn’t talking people here. Those things came out of the water and just took his mom. She screamed and they pulled her under. The kid fought, got scratched, and then two more came after him. He barely got into his car and away before they got him.
Operative question here was: what were they?
“Police will be here soon,” Tommy said. “Just take it easy.”
“I bet they’re not coming,” Yellow Baseball Cap said.
This guy was starting to get on Mitch’s nerves. They had some real problems here, they didn’t need this doom-and-gloom shit. Not now. But he did think about what Baseball Cap said. What if the cops weren’t coming? Jesus, what then? Course, they had to be coming. That dude with the ponytail went to call them on his CB.
Hubb had retreated to the safety of his counter, joining his posse of Knucker and Hardy. They were trying to get a radio station in and getting nothing but static.
Mitch was getting that bad feeling he’d had earlier. You could put a lot of that down to the stress of the flooding and the mad bullshit with the kid here, but he was thinking there was more to it than that. Sometimes, sometimes you just knew in your guts when things were going south and his guts were wrapped tighter than a fat lady’s corset.
Maybe it was his imagination.
Then something thudded into the side of the store.

8
Everyone jumped.
It came again and sounded roughly like fists pounding out there, dozens of fists. Except it wasn’t at the walls, it was at the back door. The fists kept beating. And then, for no reason, they stopped and what came next was a scraping sound like several hands out there were trying to scratch their way in.
Hubb picked up a baseball bat. “Stay away from that fucking door,” he said.
No problem there. Nobody had moved an inch.
“Is that door locked?” Mitch asked.
“Damn straight it is.”
That scratching sound picked up intensity.
The kid let out a helpless giggle. “I think…I think they’re here.”
Mitch was staring at him, wanting to say things, but unable to find his voice. He looked from the kid to the door back there to where the car had opened up the wall. If, say, somebody was out there and they wanted in, well, it would be real tough to keep them out. He realized this as the cool, damp wind from outside sent a chill up his spine.
Just a dog out there maybe, he found himself thinking, grasping at straws that evaded his fingers. That’s all it is, just a goddamn dog. Why are we acting like this?
Then at the front of the store there was the sound of feet running, people shouting. Before anyone could so much as move, a few forms pushed their way in, bending aside the sheet metal flap Mitch had wrenched with the crowbar. Mitch didn’t know what he was expecting. Maybe people without faces or eyes, but what he got was almost comic relief.
Hot Tamale was back.
She’d brought her boyfriend or husband who was a skinny little guy in a powder-gray cowboy hat with silver cleats around the shaft. There was a stunned blankness to his features.
“What the hell gives here?” Hot Tamale said. 
“Kid had a breakdown or something,” Yellow Hat said. “Drove his car right through the wall.”
The scratching at the rear door had stopped now and Mitch let out an audible sigh. A few others did, too.
Tommy and Mitch got up and went over to the flap Hot Tamale had pushed open. They pulled it back and looked out into the streets of Crandon. The rain was coming down harder than ever, drumming on the sheet metal shell of the Quonset. It fell in blowing curtains, pooling in the road, flowing off the smashed driver’s side quarter panel of Mitch’s Jeep like a river. It brought a dirty mist with it and between the two, he could barely see the storefronts across the street. 
“I guess…I guess we’ll wait until it blows over,” Tommy said. “Then we can get the law over here and you can get back to Lily.”
Mitch nodded automatically. Despite all that had happened, his mind kept coming back to Lily and Chrissy, hoping they were together even if they were pulling out each other’s hair. The thought of Lily alone without her beloved TV or radio or even the phone was scaring him. And what was maybe scaring him worse was the idea that Chrissy was out in the city somewhere. She was with two other girls, but…
They were about to turn away from the flap when Tommy said, “What’s that…that somebody out there?”
Mitch craned his head closer to get a look. The wind threw rain in his face, but he blinked it from his eyes and saw…saw a couple forms standing across the street. It was coming down pretty hard, but it looked like there were two people standing on the sidewalk across the street. Just standing there in the torrent, getting drenched, but not seeming to be bothered by it. They were facing towards Sadler Brothers and Mitch had the crazy idea that they were staring at him.
“Don’t know enough to get out of the rain,” Tommy said, but there was something lodged in his throat that made his voice sound squeaky as if there was something he couldn’t seem to swallow down.
“I wouldn’t go out there if I were you,” Hot Tamale said.
Of course, everyone was looking at her. Hubb and his posse. Mindy and the kid. Yellow Hat and a young couple who’d come in for battery lanterns, Jason and Gena Kramer, and stayed. Even Tommy and Mitch. Hot Tamale liked to be looked at, liked to be noticed. She liked to be the center of attention and here she was yet again, gathering the faithful around her like an old lady preparing to preach hellfire and damnation.
Mitch saw that cord twitching in Tommy’s neck. When Tommy started losing patience, he generally didn’t get angry; he got mouthy. He pulled off his cap, ran fingers through his sparse graying buzzcut. “Yeah? And why shouldn’t we go out there? C’mon, give us your wisdom, you nutty bitch.”
“Tommy…” Mitch muttered.
Hot Tamale turned on him, her lips pulling back to reveal very nice, very even teeth that were just as yellow as piss in a snowbank. Lots of coffee and cigarettes there. Her left eye narrowed and the right was wide like a shiny new quarter. “Listen, Mr. Mouth, if I want any shit out of you I’ll squeeze your head. So do us both a favor and shut the hell up.”
Tommy grinned. “And if I want any lip out of you, tubby, I’ll rattle my zipper. No, on second thought, I’d chew off my own dick before I’d let it near you. So why don’t you do all of us favor and quit preaching the death gospel. We got enough problems here. Shut your pisshole or I’ll shut it for you.”
Mitch almost burst out laughing.
Jesus, they were facing off now like a couple of kids on the playground. Hot Tamale’s face was redder than her outfit and she was sweating again. Tommy just smirked at her. She’d pegged him right, though. In school, Mitch remembered, he’d been called The Mouth. He was always smarting off and often to the wrong people. But you could never shut him up. You could kick his ass on Monday and on Tuesday he’d been telling you to go fuck your sister. Tommy was slow to anger, but if you pushed him into a corner, he’d come out swinging…sooner or later. Mitch had never known him to hit a woman, but he was guessing that Tommy had already decided Hot Tamale was not of that gender.
Maybe she saw that, too. She looked at her man, gave him a little shove. “Herb? Herb, are you going to let him talk to me like that?”
Herb jerked like he’d been slapped. His eyes were glassy and bovine under the brim of his hat. He looked senseless and numb like he’d just been shot up with Seconal. “Whahuh?” he said.
Mitch stepped in-between Tommy and Hot Tamale. “Okay, lady, tell us why we shouldn’t go out there.”
“Cops’ll be coming,” Hubb said. “That hippie with the ponytail went to get ‘em.”
Hot Tamale laughed, but it was a low, evil sort of laugh. “Oh really? Well, wake up and smell the coffee, people, because he didn’t make it very far. I just saw him. He’s lying out there next to his truck and something chewed half his face off.”
That landed and hit hard. Everyone seemed to suddenly be moving a little closer together like kids around a campfire that have just been told an especially unpleasant horror story. There was an almost communal dread slinking through them as it occurred to each and every one that maybe the cavalry wasn’t coming after all. That Hot Tamale had been right in the first place and they were on their own.
  Even Tommy kept his mouth shut.
“You don’t believe me?” she said, vindicated now. “Then step out there and have a look. While you idiots were chatting it up in here, that guy was dying out there. Something got at him and I’m willing to bet that something had teeth.”
Yellow Hat had pulled in closer to her now. He was her kind of people and he went to her like a metal filing to a magnet, falling right into her orbit. Chances were, he would never break the gravitational pull of her big ass and bigger mouth. And probably wouldn’t want to. But that was fine, that was to be expected, Mitch figured. Yellow Hat was one of these guys who do not look for the silver lining behind clouds, they looked and expected to find misery and often did. And with that in mind, his despairing little brain was easily assimilated by that of Hot Tamale. They went together like dirty bellybuttons and lint.
“You’re talking bullshit,” Mitch said, knowing nobody else was going to.
Way he was thinking, maybe she was right about a few things, but she’d have to prove it.
“Oh, am I? Why do you think we ran back in here, bright boy? You think we missed you and your brilliant conversation? We came back because we had to come back! Our car wouldn’t start two streets over and when that rain started hammering down, when it started to fall those things started coming out like goddamned earthworms. I saw ‘em. Herb saw ‘em. And they weren’t people. You hear what I’m saying to you? They weren’t people!” She was breathing real hard now and nobody dared interrupt and she liked that just fine. “You tell ‘em, Herb. You tell ‘em what we saw.”
Herb swallowed something. Maybe a wad of gum the way his throat bobbed. When he started to talk, he spoke in a very calm and controlled matter like he was just reading from a cue card. “The rain started coming down real hard. We got to our car and it wouldn’t start, wouldn’t turn over. And I was thinking, boy, now we’re never gonna get over to the Wal-Mart. And I wanted to go to the Wal-Mart because they had the Moundses bars on sale. You buy one pack of Moundses bars and you get the second pack free. But the car, she wouldn’t start and then I see the lady. The lady was standing right next to the car in the rain, just looking in the window at me. She was dripping wet, the water running off her. Her face was white like a clown and there were holes in it. She was smiling, too, and she had black teeth like them wax Halloween witch teeth. She was…she was real scary-looking, you know?”
Despite the droning narrative, Mitch was picturing it all and it made his flesh crawl. First the kid and his faceless people and now this. Now this. What the hell did it mean?
The rain is falling and the dead are rising.
That passed through his mind at almost hyper-light speed and he let it go because he could not let himself think things like that.
“Tell ‘em what else, Herb,” Hot Tamale prompted. “Tell ‘em what else.”
Herb cleared his throat. “That lady…she slapped her hands against my window and they sort of splattered. When she pulled them away, there were strands of goo like snot stuck to the glass from her palms. It was like cheese, I thought, like hot pizza cheese hanging from her hands…except, well, I don’t think that stuff was cheese at all. Then, well, we got out the passenger side and we run back here where there was people.”
“Did…did that lady follow you?”
But Herb said he didn’t know. He never looked back.
Now this was the time where somebody would laugh in Tamale’s face, Mitch thought, but nobody was laughing. They had drawn even tighter together, it seemed. Herd instinct. Like a bunch of gazelles sensing a circling lion. They were all looking panicked except for Tommy who just looked irritated. Mitch almost expected them to bolt and run, but when they did, he figured they would do it together. In a herd.
Mindy was sobbing now and the kid—they still had no idea what his name was—was making a funny, almost choking sound in his throat like maybe there was a scream down there that wanted to come out. If you had to peg the atmosphere right then and there, you would have said it was one of confusion. Maybe some fear and uncertainty, too, but definitely confusion. Even Hubb didn’t look like he had the heart to start swearing about it all.
Tommy stepped away from the rest of them. “Well, I’m not listening to anymore of this bullshit. Halloween ain’t for over a month yet and I’m not in the mood for it. So leave me out of this crap, girls.”
“You think it’s that easy, Mr. Mouth? You think you can hide behind your big mouth?” Hot Tamale put to him and her words were sharp enough to amputate fingers. “Because that’s what you’re doing and we all know it! You’re scared yellow and you want to think we’re all crazy, eh? Well, we’re not crazy, you stupid moron, we’re not crazy at all! But, go ahead, be a big man and go out into that rain! Go ahead! I dare you! I dare you!”
“All right, that’s enough,” Mitch said before she double-dared him.
Tommy laughed. “If you don’t shut your fucking pisshole and shut it real soon, bitch, I’ll shut the fucker for you. You and that pussy boyfriend of yours.”
Mitch pulled Tommy away from the pack before things got ugly. The others stepped back further into the store while they went over to the damaged wall. They stood there, asses up against the hood of the kid’s Intrepid. And for a long time they did not say anything.
“Soon as that rain lifts,” Tommy said, “I’m making like the sheep and getting the flock out of here.”
“I’m with you,” Mitch said.
Tommy pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. Hubb right away started reprimanding him about smoking in the store and Tommy popped him a bird. “You leave these monkeys alone long enough,” he said, blowing out a column of smoke, “and real scary shit’s going to start happening, Mitch. That pig in red hots, she’s the rotten apple in the barrel. She’ll have these stupid bastards looking for a witch to burn, you give her time.”
Mitch nodded. “I can’t wait here much longer. Lily’s probably out of her head as it is.”
“I’ll go with you when you leave. About time I stopped and said hello. Besides, your Jeep ain’t going anywhere.”
Mitch felt better. And not because he had a ride, but because maybe like the others, he wasn’t fancying the idea of being alone out there…not that he believed any of that bullshit, of course.
Tommy pulled off his cigarette and yanked aside the flap. “There’s more…people out there, Mitch.”
Mitch saw them standing in the rain, those same gray and dire forms. Except more now, maybe five or six total. And though he did not honesty believe all that Stephen King bullshit he’d been hearing today, he knew looking at those people that there was something definitely off about them. They were standing funny, the rain running right over them, like mannequins somebody had left out in the storm. Too intense, too fixated on the store and the two men watching them. That kind of patience was disturbing.
Tommy said, “Shit.”
Those people were crossing the street now.
The waiting was over.

9
Mitch watched them coming with rising anxiety.
“What the hell do they want?” Yellow Hat said.
“They want us,” Hot Tamale informed him.
And that was it. The floodgates of panic were opened, because even those that didn’t squeeze up to the sheet metal flap with Tommy and Mitch knew that what was about to happen was going to be really, really bad. Hardy started praying under his breath and Mindy let out a long, shrill scream. Yellow Hat ran to the back of the store and then ran right back. Hot Tamale stood there defiantly like she was enjoying it all and Herb stood there with her like he did not have a clue about any of it.
Hubb, who had gotten most of his left knee shattered in the Korean War, seemed to realize that battle was about to be joined. “Those cockfuckers want to break up this party? Well, fucking peachy, let’s tan their hides.”
He wasn’t worrying about his merchandise now. He had his baseball bat and although he did not sell firearms, he had just about everything else and with the help of Tommy and Jason and Gena Kramer, weapons were passed out: axes and hatchets, machetes and British Army police billyclubs. Mindy took the kid over behind the counter because he and she were in no shape to do anything.
But the others, they stood their ground—Mitch and Tommy, Hubb and his two elderly chums, Hot Tamale and her boyfriend, Jason and Gena Kramer, even Yellow Hat. They stood in a loose half-circle like some kind of savage gauntlet, scared but cohesive, ready to kill anyone or anything that made it through the rupture in the store’s front wall.
Mitch waited at the flap, watching the intruders coming.
They moved with a slow and deadly intensity, drenched and ragged things with hair hanging in their faces. Like Hot Tamale’s boyfriend said, those faces were bleached white like floaters pulled from rivers. Even their lips were colorless. But their eyes, dear God, they were black and glistening like glass eyes dipped in India Ink. They did not blink. They were glaring and set and merciless. You could not reason with eyes like that or the fathomless murky brains which compelled them.
“You come in my motherfucking store and you’re dead!” Hubb called out to them, not seeing them from his position, but no doubt feeling their odious presence. “You better stay out there, you cocksucking hippies!”
Mitch felt a manic laughter bubble in his throat. Hippies. Now that was rich. 
He pulled away from the flap when they were only feet away.
He stood there with the others, amazed at how perfectly the Intrepid had penetrated the front of the store. The sheet metal had been pushed in, bent, but it had not been torn apart really. It had just conformed itself to the intrusion of the car. And except for the piece Mitch had bent to get the door open, you could not see outside unless you yanked that flap back.
And was that a good thing or a bad thing?
There was a great thud as the things hit the front of the store. It was as if, in those last few feet, they’d decided to rush the building and see if they could simply burst through the front like the car had. They hit the outer sheet metal wall and just began to pound and scratch at it with an almost idiotic glee. Mitch had seen their eyes, had seen what was behind them, and although there was nothing in them remotely human, there was cunning and craft and a cold, almost mechanistic sort of intelligence. He had seen it there like sputtering candlelight in a dim, webby attic. The sense that while these people probably would never write a great sonnet or design a suspension bridge, they understood tactics just fine.
Of course, at that moment, they were not practicing any.
More like pissed-off children trying to force their way into the candy cupboard. To hell with subtlety and logic, let’s try brute strength here.
The sound of those fists hammering on the sheet metal exterior boomed like thunder and in combination with the rain pounding on the roof, the inside of the store was just a hive of echoing noise. But then as quickly as it had started, it stopped.
No more hammering.
No more scratching.
Just the rain and even that had lessened a bit. Somebody let out a gasp of air and somebody else cleared their throat. That silence from outside was not just loud, it was screaming. They could hear the rain dropping into puddles, an occasional finger of wind rattling the roof. Nothing else.
Tommy looked over at Mitch and Mitch just shrugged.
Had they gone? Mitch didn’t think so. They were out there, all right. He could feel them somehow and he thought he could hear one of them breathing with a gurgling sound like backed-up drainpipes. Sure, brute strength had failed, now came subtlety. They were waiting out there with an almost inhuman patience, just waiting for somebody inside to peel back that flap and then they’d grab whoever was fool enough to try it.
Tommy looked like he was considering it, but Mitch shook his head.
“Wait,” he said.
“Is there any other way in here?” Jason Kramer asked.
Hubb told him there was not. Only the locked back door and the front door where the car now had inserted itself. No windows. No nothing.
Mitch tried to swallow, but there was no spit left in his mouth. He was feeling that cold rain blowing in around the car and shivering, thinking about Lily at home and what she would do if some of these things came knocking like trick-or-treaters.
Nobody had relaxed, it was too soon for that, and that was a good thing because the things out there were trying again. A single bare arm pushed aside the flap and began searching around like a blind man looking for his cane. The arm was dripping wet and just as white as tombstone marble, set with tiny round perforations like somebody had been pounding nails into it. As white as it was—and it was white, a bloodless white lacking any pigment—it was also mottled gray in spots with tiny bumps like clusters of minute toadstools and you could clearly see a dark purple vein tracery beneath the skin.
“Shit,” somebody said.
Another arm joined it and another and another, until there were no less than six of those anemic-looking limbs pushing aside the flap, white fingers searching around like albino spiders for something to fasten on to. Mitch could just imagine them pressed up together out there like a bunch of kids reaching through a hole in the fence, trying to find their ball on the other side. Now and again, he caught a glimpse of the bodies they were attached to, saw a distorted blur of a face or the whipping, wet hair of a woman.
A couple more hands joined in the fun now, only these hooked around the flap of sheet metal and began trying to widen the hole. The metal began to groan. If these individuals just stopped and used their beans for a moment, they would have quickly realized that you could have indeed gotten into the store one at a time and very easily. The hole just wasn’t big enough for seven or eight bodies at once. But there was greed at work here like piglets all trying to squeeze in on the same nipples at the same time.
One of the arms was slit open by the jagged edge of the flap and Mitch saw that no blood came out, just a trickle of something black and watery that the rain instantly washed away.
It was enough, by Christ, it surely was.
Mitch and Tommy in the lead, everyone waded in. People were grunting and swearing and shouting, swinging axes and machetes and clubs at those snaking arms. They recoiled with the impact, but kept coming back, flaying and clawing and scratching. Tommy brought down his axe, caught one of those hands between the car door and his axe-blade and severed three fingers. The hand pulled away, stumps spitting that black goo. The fingers themselves landed on the hood where they wriggled like white worms. Mitch laid open an arm from wrist to elbow and nothing came out but that inky sludge. A spray of it struck Jason Kramer in the face and he screamed like he’d been scalded by acid. He tripped and fell, red welts rising on his cheeks where that liquid had struck him.
Most everyone fell away as more of that blood flew and one grasping hand darted in and grabbed Tommy by the wrist..and with enough force that his own hand flexed open and he dropped his axe.
He tried to pull away, an almost hysterical cry coming from his mouth: “Mitch! Mitch! Get that fucker off me!”
Mitch brought his axe down with an overhead swing as the arm tried to pull Tommy towards the opening. The blade caught the arm right at the bicep and cleanly severed it, the axe head traveling right through it and shattering the driver’s side window of the Intrepid. The arm let go and dropped to the floor and everyone jumped away from it because it was not at all dead.
Tommy fell back, rubbing his wrist and the indentations of those fingermarks.
The arms retracted and then came in again. Mitch and Hubb kept pounding away at them and they were pulled away and then there was just silence out there. Mitch thought he heard those things running off through the puddles, but he could not be sure. The flap was bent wide open, though, and there was nothing out there but the falling rain.
Everyone was breathing hard and shaking their heads, but they did not speak.
Those fingers had finally stopped wriggling and just looked dead.
The arm was still thrashing, though, fingers waving and scraping, muscles and tendons standing taut beneath that horribly white flesh. It flopped and jumped in a pool of that black filth and then went still.
Hot Tamale looked about as pale as the arm and Gena Kramer looked ready to throw up. She held her husband as he held his face and then she turned and did throw up.
Hubb opened his mouth as if he was going to say something, and then just closed it again.
Everyone was pulling back into the store wordlessly, giving that arm a very wide berth. There was not a biologist among them, but they did not need any scientific training to tell them that a severed human limb could not live after being cut off. There might be few shudders as its nerve endings pissed the last of their electricity into the muscles, but that was about it. But this particular arm had been alive, very alive. Disconnected or not, if it had found a throat to strangle, it would have done just that.
Tommy lit a cigarette. “Think…think I saw that movie about the living arm,” he said in a dull monotone. “Except it was set in the Arctic.”
“And it was an alien arm,” Hot Tamale said.
“Got ripped off by dogs,” Herb added.
Mitch looked at them and burst out laughing. Not everyone joined him, but most were smiling at the very least. Hubb laughed so hard Mindy had to wheel his oxygen tank over so he could grab a few puffs. 
But the good humor, which was really just some hysterical after-effect of the shock and horror, died out when Yellow Hat opened his yap and said, “What the hell is going on in this town?”
Which, Mitch thought, was the first intelligent thing he’d said.
Nobody answered him, so Hot Tamale took the bait. “Just like we saw out at our car,” she said. “All white and dead-looking…you know what that means, don’t you?”
“What?” Mitch said.
“Zombies. Those things are zombies.”

10
Mitch waited for Tommy to say something smartassed, but he didn’t. 
Zombies, for chrissake. Of all things. Mitch wasn’t ready to swallow that one, but then on the other hand, he sure as hell did not have a better explanation. Zombies. Sure, he’d seen the movies. They dragged their dead asses around, munching on people. But they were slow, dull-witted, and almost comical. These things had not been slow nor comical. They had been fast and able to use rudimentary logic. In those movies you just shot them in the head and that was it. Mitch had an uneasy feeling that a bullet to the head would not be enough this time around.
Listen to yourself! You’re acting like those…those people were the walking dead! You can’t honestly believe something like…can you? Well, CAN YOU?
But he wasn’t sure. Not sure of anything. He walked over to the severed arm, stared down at it. It looked just like a dead arm. It was almost phosphorescent it was so terribly, unnaturally white. He could see the fine black hairs curled on the forearm, the matting of lines on the palm. He kicked it and it flopped over with a slapping sound.
“Be careful,” Hot Tamale said. “It might be alive still.”
Mitch jabbed it with the handle of his axe. The flesh gave like normal flesh. He jabbed it a couple more times and it did not move. Then he prodded the palm and the entire arm flexed obscenely and the hand grabbed the axe handle. Not just grabbed, but held on tightly. He could see the tendons straining at the wrist. He was horrified, yet fascinated. It could not be alive, not really. This was some grotesque reflexive action and nothing more. He tried to shake it loose, but it held. At least for a moment or two, then it relaxed and thudded to the floor.
Mitch just stared at it.
Maybe he needed this, needed to see that this dead arm still had life in it when such a thing was blatantly impossible. Maybe the idea of that unlocked something in him and let him accept the idea that, yes, the rain was falling and the dead were rising. Sure, and the dish ran away with the fucking spoon. Disgusted as he was, he could not look away. He felt like Alice peering through the looking glass and seeing a distorted, impossible world on the other side.
“Fuck this shit,” Tommy said.
He came over with his axe and started swinging it and pretty soon Mitch was joining him. They chopped the arm to white fragments, sweating and grunting, but feeling that it had to be done. The arm was just an arm, just so much meat they had chopped up. It had muscles inside and bone. 
When they had finished, all those scattered bits of meat began to move, they trembled and squirmed and the bone thudded against the floor. It was like it wanted to put itself back together again.
Mindy saw the whole thing and just kept shaking her head. “No, no, no, this can’t happen,” she said, her eyes wide and filled with tears. “This can’t happen! This isn’t possible! No, no, no, no, no—”
She went down to her knees, wailing a thin and strident scream. Hot Tamale went to her, pulled her to her feet and shook her roughly, turning her away from the remains.
“Get a hold of yourself!” she shouted in her face. “This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better!”
Hubb had had his fill. He came over with a can of Coleman lantern fluid and liberally drenched the remains. He struck a stick match and tossed it at the mess. There was an eruption of flame and the flesh bubbled and blackened, issued plumes of greasy smoke. The stink of burned meat was nauseating. When the flames died out, there was just a lot of black and crusty remains.
“Somebody get me a cocksucking shovel and a pail,” he said.
Outside the rain had subsided now to a drizzle. Mitch went over to the flap and wrenched it open further. Nothing out there now but the fading light of day and puddles spread over the street several inches deep.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Tommy said.
A car came rolling down the street then and they saw it was a police cruiser with the emblem of the Witcham force on the doors. It passed right by the store, then braked and backed-up.
“Well, it’s about fucking time,” Hubb said.
The cruiser stopped in the middle of the street and two cops got out wearing blue rain slickers and plastic bonnets over their caps. They just stood there in the flooded street looking at each other and the car jutting from the front of Sadler Brother’s Army/Navy Surplus.
“Well, how are we going to explain this mess?” Jason Kramer said. His face was red from where he’d been struck by the black goo, but his wife had swabbed it with burn cream from the first aid kit. He looked like he’d be all right.
“In here,” Mitch called out through the wide-open flap.
The cops started over and that’s when Mitch noticed that the sky was looking funny. Strange. Something. That peculiar ochre haze was hanging above the town just as it had after that explosion out at the Army base. And at that moment, the rain started coming down again.
“Oh shit,” Tommy said.
The rain that was falling now was not normal rain. It was yellowish and sparkling. As it struck the two cops out in the street, they began to dance around like they were standing on a hot plate. They jerked about like marionettes, trying to cover their faces as if a swarm of hornets had descended on them. One of them cried out and fell right in the street. The other tried to make it to the cruiser and fell against it.
Mitch saw his face.
He clearly saw it.
No, not ordinary rain but more like some kind of toxic acid rain. For as it struck the cop’s face, it actually burned holes in it and the flesh went almost liquid like hot wax. The cop’s outstretched fingers were…were melting, the skin hanging off them in strings.
He slid down into the puddles and stopped moving.
And as quickly as it had come, that bizarre yellow rain stopped. It sparkled in the puddles for a moment or two and then it dissipated. It had come with a sharp, acrid stench and now that was gone, too. Nothing else.
“Don’t go out there!” Hot Tamale said.
But Mitch did and Tommy followed him. The drizzle falling was just a drizzle now, chill water and nothing else. They went over to the cops and they were both dead. Their faces were pitted from the rain, contorted and misshapen like they’d spent the night in a tent full of hungry mosquitoes.
“Hell is going on in this town?” Mitch said.
But Tommy just shook his head. “I don’t know, but I’m thinking we’re in some very deep shit.”


…To be continued.

Resurrection #2 available soon from www.severedpress.com