****
Henry arrived home right before dusk, the sun was orange against the once blue sky but the smog that often blanketed the town from the towns fair sized industrial area turned the sunset into something more resembling a glass of dehydrated piss. He stopped, straining his ears, rotating his head around like an old satellite dish to pick up the sound he had just caught. Exhaustion had to be catching up with him because he swore his hearing had picked up his dog barking to welcome him.
Sighing he slipped off his brown suit jacket with leather patches at the elbows he used for his public functions, hanging it aside the hall inside his front door. He was a writing agent, one well off, having taken in many big hits. He had tried for Eric Kahn, the famous self published author from Mustang Island, he would have been his closest client and felt he could have taken him guy from famous to rock star status. But Eric had taken an old friend of his as his personal agent and the two of them had gotten along since.
His thoughts fled from his head once more, his ears itched with the insistence he had heard what he hadn’t. Was this his body’s way of missing something normal, something that greeted him on a day-to-day basis? TT had been his dog since it had been a puppy, found abandoned along with a litter of short stocky pits two years ago. His little pink, soon to be white and brown, ball of fur had stolen his heart, and was one of the kindest and sweetest animals on this green earth. It was in his opinion since owning TT that pit bulls received a bum rap and that everyone should own one at least once in their life.
Henry exited his front door and walked around his house to the gate where he had often met with his loud and hard playing friend. He wasn’t in such a hurry to go inside, Sherry was home and she’d still be as heartbroken as he was. He needed a moment or he would be the one starting the sob fest.
The yard was empty, the horrible silence thick and depressing, in his neighbors yard facing the back of Koll’s was an orange tabby that frequented their house. It was a punch right into his chest, he felt his heart skip a few beats when he realized it was this same cat he’d often watch his dog try to climb the fencing for time and time again. Then he heard it.
Three short familiar barks, his heart took another leap before it began to race. It sounded distant, like he was down the street, an impossible and unknown distance or direction, a promise that would become empty when he didn’t find him. The barks issued again, distant, and to his left.
His eyes grazed upon the cat which let out a little ‘merr’ before jumping from the fence, annoyed at something. Five barks this time, shorter, faster, familiar barks that only came when TT had lost his game of chase with said cat without being let outside. That meant he was near. Henry eyed Koll’s house.
He felt his face heat in anger, the psychotic little pathological liar, the stuck up old inbred asshole, there were three dozen other insults he could have thrown at him if he felt he had the time. Koll’s car, a gray boxy Oldsmobile people his age often drove, was in the driveway, meaning he was in there with TT, doing who knew what to him and maybe even planning to kill him. The old fuck had always hated his dog.
He pulled out his cell phone and hit the third number on his touch screen, “Officer Morgan, can I help you?” It picked up.
“Daniel? It’s me Henry.” Henry made his way out his gate and cut across the grass between their houses at a fast walk. He punched the buzzer hard, multiple times. Over his brothers greeting he shouted, “That asshole next door has my dog.”
There was a pause, “Whoa slow there Hoss. Is that the buzzing? Are you sure?”
Henry hit the buzzer again and let it ring while he spoke, “I can hear him in his cellar, he was barking at that Tabby as I drove in.”
“Is, what was his name, Koll? Is Koll home?” there was the sound of rustling and keys beyond Daniel’s voice.
“His cars in the driveway, why the fuck do you think I’m sitting here jabbing at his buzzer?” His voice was edgy, he knew he sounded more than a little pissed.
A large door slammed followed by the echoing of footsteps at a slow run from his brother’s end, “Do nothing Henry. Wait for me!”
Henry shook his head, not caring that Daniel couldn’t see it, he tried the door but found it locked. If this man was a psycho he probably had all kinds of locks and chains sealing intruders out. He knew, however, that he had a cellar, and every house with one within the neighborhood sported small yet manageable windows, kept large enough to escape from in case of fire.
“I will not let him kill TT.”
Daniel cursed something he couldn’t make out, “This is Texas stupid. We have the stand your own ground law aka castle doctrine. Dog theft or not if you break and enter he can put one between your eyes and declare he felt threatened.”
Henry thought about it as he pressed the red end button on the face of his phone before slipping it back into his pants pocket. He thought of turning it off so he could go in unnoticed and surprise the old guy, cold clock him, but what he was about to do wouldn’t be stealthy. Also he might need it for another emergency, like ‘help, this asshole blew my arm off with a sawed-off shotgun.’
The cellar window he came upon in the backyard was just wide enough to allow him to slip through by squeezing, Darwin forbid a fire ever break out in a house like this with an obese man in the basement. Studying the window closer, looking to see if he’d be able to open it from the outside, he noticed he was wrong to blame the original designer of the house, it had been refitted. You could tell where the houses original foundation that surrounded the basement mixed with newer cement around the tops and sides of the little black framed window, shrinking it near four inches. The glass itself appeared tinted and mirrored, the sick fuck didn’t want intruders to see him doing whatever he did there.
Henry stopped to listen, his phone buzzing in his pocket, there was one bark, a single tired yelp. His dog was at the end of its rope, he didn’t know what the guy had done to it, but he’d do twice that to the old man himself.
With a step back Henry turned sideways, lifted his left foot, still in its new leather shoes and kicked, pushing with his other leg to keep balance and add force by leaning into it. The window cracked but his foot rebounded in pain, a large series of spider web cracks had spread across the glass in an oval indent, but it hung.
He rubbed the knee that had taken most of the force of the rebound, cursing under his breath. In the rock and cactus garden that surrounded the entire back of the house he chose a rock the size of his palm, wound up, and pitched. There was a sharp glassy thud and the oval he had created caved in, taking most the glass with it. The glorious sound of his dog barking resumed.
Henry fell to his knees, put his head through the gap, and caught his breath. Koll was lying in a dark drying pool of blood, the air tainted with shit and vomit and everything else that might come from his insides. His face was towards Henry, his eyes half lidded, unfocused but not glassy like in the movies, dull and sightless. Though he was face down he seemed to rise off the ground around his chest by a good inch.
Henry yelped, his dog echoing him, when a firm strong hand reached into his belt loop and pulled him back. He lied on his back staring up at his brother, his face dark against a darkening sky. “The fuck Henry I told you to wait.”
He tried for something, a witty retort, but could only croak out, “He’s dead.”
Daniels mouth dropped, he bent to glance in the window, and stood back, “Shit Henry, you do it?”
“No!” Henry rose from his prone position, “Smell him, he’s hours old! I had just broken in when you pulled me back out.”
Daniel was silent for a moment, “Was it TT?”
He shook his head, “Don’t think so, there’s no blood on him and the guy doesn’t look mauled. Also he’s lying on something, maybe he tripped and landed by a pipe or something.”
Biting his upper lip in thought Daniel nodded, “I have to cuff you and put you in the back of my cruiser now hoss.”
“Daniel!”
r /> His brother held out his hands, “Regulations are regulations. You are the only suspect here and you’re to be detained until my bosses say otherwise.”
So it was that he ended up in his brother’s cruiser, watching as one incredibly happy pit dragged his brother out of the house to be traded off to his own wife to come in for the night. He was at peace, he hadn’t done a thing, his dog was at home, and he’d be out by tomorrow.
His brother climbed into the front seat after talking to Crime Scene, “Sorry about this hoss.”
Henry shook his head, “What was he killed with?”
“Best you don’t know.”
“If I was the killer I’d know anyway, what’s the point?”
“The point is,” his brother said “you don’t know, which means they can’t force it out of you that way, you have a basic innocence nobody can break.”
Henry looked at the review mirror into his brothers eyes, they where hard and blue, always the military brat that had to do things the right way, even if it was the hard way. He glanced towards his own cuffed hands cupped in his lap, “Murdered then?”
After a pause Daniel nodded, “Appears that way.”
The grimace came back, “Doesn’t look good for me?”
His brother shook his head, “Not sure how it looks hoss, leave that to Crime Scene.”
The cruiser ran under the overpass that ran a ring around West Creek’s downtown, and he felt his fate sealed by it, a magic circle sealing in an otherworldly entity. It appeared he wasn’t to get out so easily after all.
Sequa
I woke to the gentle rocking of the greyhound my family rented to transport us to middle of nowhere Texas. If you didn’t know you were still in the state you’d think you had passed into the flat swamplands of Louisiana, though with the moon hidden behind large chunks of clouds, the darkness allowed the countryside to escape any description.
The open window of other passengers let nature’s fingers caress the insides of my nose, and I sneezed. I didn’t care too much for nature, anymore than I cared for the hicks that lived in it. Had the lucky woman getting married not been a close cousin I wouldn’t have bothered boarding this bus. But Grandpa rented us this bus and a whole apartment for us to spend the day in, and paid big bucks to rent out the biggest, most luxurious place for the wedding in the backwater town of Sequa, the town’s auditorium.
A yellow orange flash in the sky caught my eye, at first I thought it might be the last living moments of a burning rock or piece of space junk entering our atmosphere, but as I watched it grew closer, and brighter. The fire ball was close enough to cast a fiery glow upon the road before it snuffed out.
A Chevy truck, old, possibly from the nineteen sixties but in great condition, a green as dark as the night with a wooden fenced in bed, landed upon the pavement gentile as a dove. On the truck bed where there should have been a tailgate sat what was not a man but a purplish humanoid. The thing was meat stretched tight across bone, with sick yellow eyes and no lips covering his bare white teeth. I thought he’d look good in celebrations for the day of the dead later this year. The truck which landed facing opposite the direction we traveled rolled backwards for several feet, giving the creature in the back enough time to nod a wink at me before driving into the darkness opposite us.
My heart beat in my chest hard, I realized as pressure built in my neck I was holding my breath, I let it out and back in sharply. Turning, intent to find out if this was a dream, to speak with someone or force myself to wake up, I found three others who where awake, two cousins and my brother, gawking at something up in the sky. Their faces lit with swirls of colors that seemed to drain the color of everything and everyone else in the bus, leaving reality looking like a penciled drawing. I joined them, to forget my odd encounter for whatever they where viewing.
What we looked up to was mystical, it about beat what I had seen moments ago, if the two were not related. On the sparse cotton clouds in the sky sat buildings, cars, people, going about their business in an inverted world. Here was an ice cream shop, outside it sat a young girl licking two scoops of vanilla atop a waffle cone, in the next cloud was a stretch of highway, the cars seemed to be from another time, like the truck I had all but forgotten.
Then the banks, the houses, the offices and towers where blinked out of existence by a fierce light, much like the fire that once engulfed my visitor, causing us to wince against it. The sky was its lightless self again, the moon peaking around one of the gloomy fluffs of water moisture and dust.
“What the fuck was that?” The driver called back, “An airplane flying too low?” We looked at each other, unable to bring ourselves to explain the wondrous madness we had witnessed. The night drew on for hours before we spoke about what we saw.
My two cousins thought it might have been a prank, a hologram of sorts. Such a thing had been reported to have happened in the Kremlin. If some hack could project a giant see through rectangle mid air actual pictures upon clouds wouldn’t be difficult. But I didn’t think the inverted city looked like pictures and my brother sided with me, we had seen the buildings in full dimensions, from all sides as we moved under them, as if a helicopter passing over them, something I was sure wasn’t possible with current projection technology no matter how advanced.
The sun rose, turning the gloomy darkness into a warm orange, I drifted off to sleep and left the night of oddities to play out in my dreams until we reached the outskirts of our destination. “That’s it!” I awoke to Ryan, one of my cousins, yelling. He was a man two years my younger, twenty four, with a shaved doo. He was head strong and down to earth, such a thing which he had seen last night put him at odds with his views of reality, something he wouldn’t be able to live with long without explaining.
I rose to see what he was shouting about, a good ways off to the right side of the road, before the city limits sign to Sequa, lay a downed hot-air balloon. The thing had once been giant, a colorful mash of tenting, but it had burned, its canvas now a blackened lump of once molten plastic in the grass and a charred basket, I hoped whoever it belonged to had survived.
“What we saw where hot-air balloons, the flash was this thing going up!” he explained, excited at rationalizing the irrational.
The rest of us looked about each other, unsure. Rachel, our other cousin, short, chubby, and Hispanic, spoke up. “I’m sticking with the hologram deal over that, there’s no way what I saw was an illusion cast by some balloon. Tell me this, if it had been balloons, a whole bunch of them, how come the group disappeared all at once?”
Ryan seemed to think a moment, “Maybe the holographic equipment was in the balloon, the flash was it catching fire, and that’s why it crashed at the same time the holograms quit.” His right brow arched, asking for acceptance.
I glanced back to glimpse any large machines resting in the basket, but the balloon now lay hidden by swampy forests.
“Gentleman and ladies,” the driver called “five minutes give our take until our arrival, please prepare yourselves for departure, or not. I have nowhere to go, as your personal chaperon, except to get food.”
Then it hit me, “The truck!” I recalled. There was no way in hell that truck was a hot-air balloon or hologram, it had been real, physical. I could have reached out and shook the hand of the skeleton man, not that I had wanted to. I explained to my three closest family members on the bus what I saw before their vision distracted me.
“Dude, what the fuck?” my brother said, despite being the same age as Ryan, Greg was much taller than I was, with spiky blond hair the likes of a skater with aspirations to be a surfer, and was a little looser with the world than the rest of us. “Someone’s been slipping crap in our drinks bro.”
“You sure it wasn’t a dream?” Ryan asked.
I shook my head, “I turned from it to see ya’ll staring at the sky, there was no way I dreamt what I saw unless we dreamt together.”
“I’ve heard of that,” my brother started, bobbing his head “i
t’s called e.s.p dreaming or something like that.”
Ryan glanced at him, “You made that up.” A jolt interrupted us as the bus jumped a poorly poured drive up to some run down blue-gray apartments in the shape of a giant boxy U. These where the best the city offered and the old building might have been the most dilapidated place I’ve ever been to, I hoped there weren’t roaches, I don’t do bugs.
Our interest in what we had seen distracted us long enough we missed coming into what I assumed was downtown, a series of old brick shops selling knickknacks or closed for good, and a single non corporate grocer. I had a feeling our cousin, Rachel’s big sister, would not live in Sequa for long because the town seemed to be dying, and fast. It was one thing to not have a giant grocer, it was another not to even sport a corporate oil company. I had no idea what Tent Oil was, and I was glad my car hadn’t made the trip to find out.
We made our way off the bus behind the rest of the family, many of them I didn’t know, and were the last to leave. I glanced at the driver on my way out, “You’ll be here for us when we’ve had enough of this place?”
He nodded, grinning, “Ayuh, probably go try to find something to eat, if there’s a restaurant around here with decent food.”
My stomach squelched at the thought of eating, not having packed more than bus snacks. I hoped the meal at the wedding was catered out of town, even Bill-Millers, the McDonald's of bar-b-q, would do compared to whatever the locals offered.
The apartments grew worse as we came closer, you could see the awful banana yellow paint coming through on most of the wood under the somehow older looking blue color that was flaking off as if the building suffered from a bad case of dandruff. In areas the wooden wall had rotted through, the insides full of sponge like termite holes. “Fuck me” Rachel said, “I’m not going alone, hope you boys don’t mind sharing a dressing room with a lady.”
We shrugged, I thought it’d be the laugh of the century if I shot out of there before her, which I was likely to do at one glimpse of any roaches. Our place was on the second floor, outside the U, it sported an old chipped white door and a window fitted with iron bars to deter criminals. I didn’t think crime would be much a problem in a small town such as this, but then again I didn’t think white people jumping the white house fence to get at Obama would become a bi-monthly occurrence, the world was going to shit.
Our room wasn’t as horrible as the outside, the wallpaper remained intact and a plethora of enclosed paper bug traps placed around the floor against the walls gave me hope that I’d find no live bugs. There were two beds, a small TV with a knob and faux wooden paneling, and an empty closet not one of us dared open to find out what lived inside. I feared roaches, or possibly the purple skeleton man from the other night.
“What is this?” Rachel had a giant tube of white cream in her hand.
My brother took a good squint at it and snickered, “Dude…. It’s lube.”
Her brows scrunched up in confusion, “For what?”
With a roll of my eyes I started “Catheters, pills up the butt,” I gave her pause and a smirk, “masturbating.”
Her face turned to pure horror and disgust, she flung it back beside the TV and continued on with her search. Below she opened a cabinet, uttered a curse, and turned from it.
This time it was Ryan who came to inspect, “Guys! There has to be hundreds of dollars worth of VHS porn here.”
“No way!” Greg leapt over, “but I don’t see no VHS.”
“I’d bet they want us to rent it” I said, shaking my head at their enthusiasm.
“Oh no,” Rachel started, turning back, “I’m not watching smut with you guys, fuck that.” This gave us a good laugh, distracting us from the otherwise disgusting vibe of the place we were stripping to our underwear in.
In minutes we undressed out of our T-shirts and jeans and dressed into our matching black slacks and white shirts, except for Rachel who donned a white bridesmaid dress on with floral designs around its belled waist. We were out of the motel with haste, determined to store our clothes on the safe, clean, bug free bus and ride home as we where.
The bus was empty, the driver had left to stuff his face at some mom and pop diner. Thinking about mom and pop I wondered if everyone in this town was a republican, in country towns like these, this close to the Louisiana border, that was usually the case. How ironic it was that those who supported the corporate run plutocracy the fiercest where the ones that faced no true threat from them unless they found oil in their backyards.
We decided the bus was safe alone and headed out after placing our bags within our seats. The auditorium, our destination, was the tallest building in town, standing about four stories tall, and only three streets away we could see our way to the big brown lopsided square. At the first intersection on the main road we stopped, looked left and right, eyeing farmland as far as the eye could see to the left, swamp to the right.
“Careful for horse drawn Amish,” I tried to joke.
Ryan shook his head, a serious look upon his face, “Don’t think Amish can come to towns like this, our foe will drive a confederate flagged truck and drinking moonshine.”
“I’ll take the Amish,” Rachel frowned at us.
Greg headed across, leaving us to follow in tow. There was no traffic to be worried of, the city was oddly lifeless. There were a few cars, a rusted Volkswagen beetle and an Oldsmobile parallel parked near the third intersection, but not a car moved, not a person walked the streets, even our own crowd seemed amiss. Had the rest them gone on ahead or where they dragging behind?
As we passed what appeared the only eatery just past the fourth intersection, an orange bricked Tex-Mex restaurant, I risked a peek inside through the plate-glass windows. The windows where lit up, the white tables set with silverware, the place looked open, but there were no customers and no servers. Our bus driver was elsewhere, maybe he made it to the reception in search for good food. He’d be underdressed, but I couldn’t blame him.
We came upon the structure, immense in size it once held great concerts during the towns golden years, but now, like everything else in this town, its eighty’s style brown paint was chipped, chunks of stone where missing here and there, and the pavement of the walkway was cracked and potted. Still, someone had put a lot of work to decorate over most of the mishaps with streamers, table cloths, posters, and the usual wedding get up. Its age allowed an almost endearing touch to the lattice work and patio furniture brought in, all strewn about with white-peach cloth mixtures within a small patio court yard outside the building.
It would have been more magical if someone hadn’t knocked over a wicker table and a tray of delicious looking cupcakes with it.
“Someone left the cakes out on the ground,” Greg sang, then quit, seeming to remember he was at a wedding. The place was empty, everyone was inside meaning the wedding may have started early, we where late and I was thankful I played no big part.
Rachel rushed ahead.
The door swung open and fell partially from the frame, having come off its topmost hinge, into an empty auditorium that took our breath away. Here and there brown stadium seats that where rowed and metal, as if instead of a wedding we were about to seat to watch the Spurs take on the Lakers, were uprooted and thrown about. The chaos formed a curved line through the stadium, not a soul was around, no soulless bodies either.
“We miss a quake?” Greg asked wide eyed
But the rest of us where too stunned to speak for the moment. Something rattled, dust settled on my shoulder causing me to look up. The stadium lighting was off, the hum of electricity itself amiss, the light we perceived was sunlight coming from three perfect holes in the ceiling of the auditorium.
Rachel followed my gaze and gasped a sob into her white gloved hand, I laid a warm arm around her shoulder, she looked at me, tears and worry dotted her face, “Where’s Grandpa?”
I shook my head, “He’s not here, but there’s no sign of violence, whatever happened I think ever
yone made it out.” The ceiling shifted, drawing our attention “We gotta get out of here, I’m not sure how stable that ceiling is with its new skylight.” I tried to grin, to assure my cousin that everything was ok, but I must have failed because she glanced away.
Back outside Ryan righted the cupcake table, aside from that the courtyard seemed normal, the town was another thing.
When we had come through the town had been in one piece. Now leaving the auditorium courtyard we saw that several of the buildings, including the diner I glanced into not minutes ago, had up to six feet shaved off the tops of them. It wasn’t a clean shave either, but almost wavy, as if whatever carved off the top of them had done so with an upside down vat of acid, able to defy gravity like those cities in the cloud.
“The clouds, do you think this has to do with them?” I asked, not knowing where to go from here. No one answered, no one knew.
“Come on” Greg started off.
“Where are we going?” I called to my brother, following him with the rest in tow.
“Out of here, whatever is happening, it’s destroying buildings, which means it can hurt us right? This isn’t holograms, this isn’t dreams,” he said, more serious than his usual self, marching across the four crossroads. “Forget cities in the clouds or UFO trucks, and realize that what is happening here is what is important, and we need to, shit.”
He stopped as we rounded the drive towards our apartment. The bus was there, but the mid section of it was gone, dissolved like top of the buildings or the holes in the ceiling. I wondered if whoever had done this had such an ability to make things like this, disappear in sections, why tear apart the auditorium instead of dissolving it. Were they looking for something?
“What now?” Ryan was gripping at his head, without logic he was losing touch with his sanity, it was something I had to deal with since his birth.
“Hold on,” Greg started, “the apartments are still ok, that’s odd.”
I nodded, it was, being the only intact place in town I started for them.
“Wait!” Ryan said, “what if it’s their base of operations?”
I shrugged, “Their? Who? What does it matter?” I spun with my arms held wide, “Where is there left to go?”
The rest followed before he did, but he did, not wanting to be left alone. We entered a lobby dressed in blue and brown, molded with age, staff didn’t care to upkeep the public areas any better than they did the rest of the motel. I rang an old bell which made a dull metallic thunk, but it was loud enough to alert whoever was on duty.
Something splashed outside and Ryan walked towards the sliding glass doors leading out to the center of the complex and the pool to check it out. After he left I waited a few minutes longer before leaping the wooden counter.
“You’ll get us in trouble!” Rachel squealed behind her hand,
“Good” I said, jostling drawers without knowing what I was looking for, “then we’ll get someone’s attention.”
I moved about making as much noise as possible, still no one came. Around a small wall insert into the back, I found an empty office, the pc was off, as I noted where the lights. Aside from the emptiness of life and power the place was clean, untouched, nothing appeared dissolved or tossed. Coming back out I shrugged to the duo left, “No one’s home. Where’d Ryan head off to?”
Rachel shrugged but Greg tilted his head towards the open sliding glass pool door. Outside we came to a stone step way that lead to a small raised inlet which housed the aged pool. We found Ryan staring into a pool of gray murky water, his pupils dilated like he was on drugs. “I wouldn’t go swimming in that,” Greg warned in a joking tone, and for my brother to not want to swim in something it had to be bad, since he often swam in puddles that were little more than swamps.
“It stinks” Ryan said, his voice soft as if he was in a daze. It did stink, the odor reminded me of old beer left out in a cooler for weeks, that stale spit like smell.
“Come on” I said, turning from it, but instead Ryan stepped right in. Before anyone could react he tilted forward and landed within the water. Not with a splash, as expected, but with a soft squelch, not with waves but as if he fell into a gel to be sucked down into it otherwise soundlessly.
“Ryan!” Rachel screamed in horror, I held her back from leaping into the stuff after him. The liquid started shimmering and shivering, waves of motion swirled round and round of its own accord. Soon my immersed cousin, with horror dawned upon his face, became bloodless pieces of Ryan, cleanly separated legs swirled to the right, arms spun around left, his head spun towards the middle, then hair, flesh, organs, an eyeball, then tendrils of meat, threads of nerves and then nothing, a bloodless dissolution of his body.
The mass of liquid rose to form a slender tube with a rounded front, where it spun and coiled like a snake ready to spring. It took a swipe at the apartments, pieces of roof and wall absorbed into the things body to be soundlessly torn apart like Ryan.
Rachel was still screaming, agitating whatever we were looking at. I cupped my hand over her mouth, not worrying about her ability to breathe for now, forcing her back down the path while the thing, confused by its rude awakening, swiped side to side in a furor, destroying large swaths of the surrounding building.
Greg followed us, screaming “Shit, Ryan” to himself over and over again. We made our way through the crumbling lobby and back out into the parking lot. There was little sound from the destruction behind, other than the shifting of unsteady wooden walls all was quite, but I was sure it wasn’t safe. That thing had destroyed most of the town, once it caught its bearings it’d come after us.
I took a look around, with our only transportation disabled by the thing the rest of the vehicles in the lot were still in one piece. Still, unless we came upon the lower section of some half dissolved man with a pair of keys in his pocket the cars were useless to us. I realized I was still holding my cousins mouth and let go. She had stopped screaming but was driven into hysteric sobs.
Maybe I was crazy, I thought as I sat her on a wall of cinderblocks surrounding dying brush, the only one not terrified and in shock at the death of our dear cousin. Would I have been this callous had my brother gone for his last dip? I hoped not, I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t freaking out about my cousins death, for now it was about survival and part of me seemed to realize I was the only one able to think clearly, therefore everyone’s only hope.
There was an awful sound of squelching as the thing began to move, followed the sound of wood sliding out of the walls of the apartments and into the thing’s body, how had the thing gotten to the pool without creating giant holes was something I had trouble putting a finger on.
For now there was no running, and I had no idea how to fight it, which meant the one chance we had was to drive it away, but how? I looked at the bus’s two halves, possibly the same way we were driven here.
With Rachel still in hysterics, holding her shoulders and rocking in place, my brother was more or less himself, albeit a sickly green and somber version. “Greg, I need you man,” I came up to him to grip his shoulder, “you with me?”
He looked up, tears dotting his eyes, “Always bro. Shit Ryan man, why?”
I shook my head, “Doesn’t matter now if we don’t want to end up like him. See that brick you’re on,” I pointed to the gray concrete cinderblock he was sitting on top of, “we need to move it to the bus, it might be our only hope.”
Greg’s face lit with confusion, he searched mine for an answer, but I shook my head, unable to give him false hope. He helped me lift the heavy block, much larger than ones I manhandled before, and lug it to the bus.
The front half of the bus was an uphill battle, titled back with the loss of support the rest of itself would have given, we walked the cinderblock to the driver’s seat and sat it down next to the chair. A noise drew our attention towards the apartments, the mass of ooze cleared its way through the building, tearing apart pieces of beds, walls, and carpeting within it, slithering t
owards us, picking up bushes, dirt and pavement as the building collapsed in on itself.
I hoped the keys were still in the ignition and was relieved to find them hanging there, whether the driver had been careless enough to leave them at the start or had been caught within the bus by the monster we’d never know, but he was gone with Ryan, with our whole family and the entire town. That caught in my gut for a moment, the thought of our family, torn apart within the swirling waters of this monster, it was horrifying to know we might be the last ones, my mother, my grandfather, the wedding couple, everyone gone.
I shook the thoughts from my head and cranked the diesel engine to life.
“Shit man it noticed us,” Greg said, until now the thing had been fawning over our weeping cousin, panic edged into his voice. “It’s coming.”
“Good, help me,” we lifted the cinder back up and I put the buss into drive with its long stick shift. “When I say, drop this thing on the pedal, and we’ll hope its weight holds it, then we run, try to make for the back of the bus.”
My brother shook his head at me, “Man you’re some kind of crazy ass brother to have.” He smirked, “Let’s do this.”
We watched the thing slither towards us, picking up grey bits of pavement when its gravity defying body touched down. “Now!” I shouted, we dropped the block, the engine revved, the front wheels squealed. I was thankful that the bus was and older model with front wheel drive, didn’t even stop to think of how this could have failed if it hadn’t been, not being an engineer or a mechanic myself.
The front of the bus pulled away, spitting sparks from where its midsection dragged across the ground, its spinning tires burning rubber and covering the bus in acrid smoke. We ran for it, jumping the small gap into the metal interior of the back end, I gripped the seat I landed on and used it to climb upward, backward, as far from the action as I could.
I turned to watch the bus pull away in a shower of sparks, the snake like ooze chasing it in an angry frenzy. For a few minutes we watched its long tail whip by, and then that too passed by as the thing chased the vehicle down the road, across a field, and beyond some brush. It’d go until it caught the bus, or the bus hit something, hopefully much, much later.
Not wanting to stand in the small groove in the ground the thing made, fearing it was still full of whatever it was, I popped the emergency back of the bus to climb up and out, sliding down its rear and dropping a good five feet to where Rachel watched us with horror that turned into relief. She ran up to us, hugging us, crying, kissing me on the cheek, I held her back before she went into hysterics again.
“I thought you two were dead.”
Greg shook his head, “So did I.”
“We’re not,” I started, I looked at her sad tired eyes, her big day as a bridesmaid turned into a madman’s nightmare, her cream dress ruined “I’m sorry, I know Ryan, your sister, everyone. I feel bad for them, but we have to make it out, the survivors of whatever the hell this thing is, everyone has to know about it. We have to go.”
“Go where?” she asked, “No building is safe, a car is a death trap, once it comes back we’re out in the open.”
I shook my head, “Let’s walk, opposite the way it left,”
“Back the way we came,” Greg seemed to think for a minute, “if we can make the interstate we can get a ride out of here. Of the hundreds of cars on the highway if the thing follows us out its little chance we will be the ones it turns against.”
I nodded, “Good plan as any.”
“Someone’s needs to tell his family," Rachel said.
I glanced at her while we began our walk back through the desecrated shopping center, “We are his family now. Ryan’s gone, his mom and everyone else too, we may be what’s left.”
She shot me an annoyed look, “No, the bus driver.”
“Oh” I felt sheepish, “someone will, the authorities.”
Greg rolled his eyes, “My ass, this is the thing they hide, call it swamp gas. Don’t ask me how they will explain a whole town leveled, and not a body left.”
I smirked at my brother’s anti government suspicions, that was the Greg I knew. With every step I felt calmer, safer. We passed up the auditorium with its abandoned wedding decorations and headed through a residential district for the city limit.
A shadow over took us, it was only a flicker, a quick shadow across the sun, a glob like shadow that sped through the sky, but it was enough to stop us in our tracks. We looked up at the cloudless sky, fear in each one of our faces, searching for the ooze, but it was nowhere.
“Could’ve been a bird, plane, probably not a cloud,” Greg tried to re-assure us, moving on, forcing the rest of us to follow.
The Texan sun beat upon us, I was whipping sweat from my forehead every few seconds. We passed from what little residential existed beyond the city, untouched by the monster, and made our way for the familiar, a way out, if it hadn’t attacked by now we where home free.
We came upon a disabled car in the middle of the road, dissolved from the dirt covered leather seats up, despite the intact state of the surrounding neighborhood. I pulled up an ancient looking pistol from beside the driver’s seat. Ejecting the clip I found it loaded and it didn’t appear to have a safety, looked easy enough to fire too.
“Will that stop it?” Rachel asked.
I shook my head, unknowing, and pushed us forward for the edge of the city.
Greg stopped in his tracks as we escaped the backwater hell, “Shit.”
To our left, behind the now remaining half of the city limits sign, the thing was there, circling in on itself for now, making a squeaking, buzzing noise. It seemed interested in the downed balloon we noted this morning, but it wasn’t destroying it. We dared not move and risk drawing its attention, or do anything that agitated it. I looked for Rachel to see if we’d have to quite her, but her lips where pressed together, thin and white, silenced by fear that turned her face a matching ashen pale.
I looked around, as did my brother, for anything, any way to escape or distract it, and that’s when I noticed it, the only thing in the field other than us four and a balloon, a tanker on its side in the field behind us that had not been there upon our arrival. Its cab dissolved, the back two wheels of the cab and bed rested sideways still attached to the trailer.
But the trailer itself was intact and upright, a long, giant, silver cylinder with TENT printed in red upon its side, gasoline. I turned for it, tapped the others’ shoulders, and whispered “run” before I took off, Greg right beside me. But not Rachel.
I glanced back to see the thing notice us, its large curved end shaking in what seemed to be anger or possible excitement at the renewal of the chase. Had the thing been waiting for us, distracting itself with the colorful balloon till we tried to escape? How intelligent was it?
My thoughts broke at the sight of Rachel still standing in the middle of the road, watching it as the thing slithered mid air, straight for her.
“Rachel run!” I cried, but my cries fell upon deaf ears, even the snake thing didn’t seem to take notice. It coiled around its next victim, who stood still, letting it happen, glancing at me in fear one last time before its coil turned into a swirling glob that gathered her into it, off of the pavement. Her neck separated from her shoulders, her shoulders from her breasts, her abdomen from her waist, waist from legs. No blood, never any blood, it wasn’t like she was torn apart, so I hoped she felt no pain, but I was grateful when at last her eyes dissolved, for until the orbs became tendrils of fraying fibers I felt I might be driven insane with guilt.
Greg grabbed me, propelling me towards the tanker, despite my shock at losing another cousin I joined him in the run. We ran past the tanker, the thing now pursuing us, picking up bits of grass and earth, death on the wind in liquid form closing in after a quick appetizer. Past the truck we kept running until I judged that we were as far away as we dared and we couldn’t wait any longer.
I turned back to watch the monster come upon the ta
nker, it parted through it as I had hoped, dissolving the tanker, taking some of the brown fuel into itself, flinging more into the air around it in a thin spray. Raising the pistol I shot for the tanker, hoping for a spark that would ignite an inferno.
The gun jammed.
I fiddled with the slide for a moment, cursing in disbelief that our only hope had broke. I threw the pistol aside, sunk to my knees in the dry Texan wild grass, and screamed. It may have been “why?” it may have been incoherent garble, I couldn’t say, but then I knew it was over. I hoped my brother was still on the move because he could escape as it took a moment to digests me.
Movement caught my eye, shocking me from my insanity. My brother was on the move, towards the monstrosity, something silver glimmering in the sunlight within his hand. At first I couldn’t fathom what he was doing other than making a hopeless suicide run at the monster, but then I recognized the item, up close I would have been able to see its Chinese decorations, my brothers old lighter, he always said smoking would kill him.
I rose to my feet, a “no” escaped my mouth not much more than whisper. He disappeared with the thing in a flash of orange light that stretched the length of the monster and back behind it, towards the tanker which went up with a concussive thump. The explosion blinded me and hit me with an intense wave of heat mixed with the heavy smell of gasoline.
When at last I could see I was sitting on the ground, feet from where I had once been standing, my skin a lobster red. A grand fire lit the grass towards the town, the whole place, or what was left of it, was likely to go up, the old dry place it was. Whoever the monster hadn’t killed¸ if anyone other than me survived, faced another problem.
I walked towards the inferno, towards the actual cause of it. Within the fire outside of my reach lied the blackened corpse of my brother, not burnt to a crisp, but darkened, as if he had received the greatest tan of his life, his blond hair burned off his head, and much of his flesh peeling with heat. One hand, the one that once held the lighter, cut off wrist too cleanly. The crazy bastard stuck it right into the monster.
I tried to stifle a sob, but it came anyway, tears flowed, the day of horror was over and it was time to mourn, to mourn my brother and my cousins, of my entire family I was the only one left. I walked back towards the road, edging around the fire blown to the North West towards the town by a sudden wind, where I heard something collapse either from the spreading fire or the monsters damage. From there I heard it, the distinctive growl of an engine and glass pack, a gawker come to gawk at chaos, and my way out of here.
Instead of coming from outside the town the black car emerged from the road covered in rolling smoke from the now smoldering town itself. It drove with confident slowness, the driver of the black nineteen nineties Firebird with a red phoenix on its hood had no fear that his car was ever in danger of catching or burning from the intense nearby heat that seemed to part out of his way.
I began to wave him down, but thought twice as he drove by. His windows weren’t tented but I couldn’t see the driver either. Something sat in the driver seat, it seemed shapeless, moving and wavy, like the monster my brother sacrificed himself to, yet I knew it was something different. The thing in that car was much, much worse.
Listening to the prattle of the cheap glass pack installed into the muffler rise and disappear into the distance towards the interstate, I followed suit, not in hopes to catch him but hoping I would come upon the highway, or someone of a more… human nature.