The Gardens of The Spectre

        White bulbs lined the road in a cobbled mosaic between chunks of sandstone and extraneous ore rusted by the acid rain.  Tufts of sand reached into the far corners of their shadowed recesses, where the slight hint of an oily residue lingered and shone from the slight hint of sunshine.  They were all the universal color, white.  This was contrary to the beliefs from long ago.   After death, what was had become just as it had all along-bone disguised underneath layers of flesh.   They were the product of their own undoing, and proved  that the powers that be would leave the world unfurled  and rain down the acid of their underlying intent while speaking of peace.  From my window, I could see the bulbs lining the broken concrete. The road had erupted in concave indentations with the scattered remains of automobile companies compiling along the strip outside our village.  Our village, once known as El Paso, is located on the border of Mexico.  Most of the city and neighborhoods had been swallowed by the sands and the oil though, so all that remained were a few huts stolen from the abandoned city of Juarez. 

        The hollowed recesses within each bulb glared into a realm of that long-forgotten time when tolerance was but a fragment of humanity.  It was a time where all free men were created equal within the eyes of a god.  The bulbs stare off, glaring at the dusty black cloud of Spectre as it hovered across the horizon following and shielding the sun.   The bulbs seemed to smile, as though happy to be there and to have survived somehow, although they are but a remnant of a time nearly forgotten.   Some appeared as though they were laughing at the misfortune that had befallen our race, while others simply stared out into the darkness to the west, known to the locals as the Debauched Lands. 

        The same smiles lined the paths of all the roads within this world, and they appeared to watch the comings and goings of those who dared to tread past the quarantined comfort zones.   They were the sentinels, the watchers, the guardians of the dead.  Sometimes they moved.  Other times, they observed the red dust storms as they bundled themselves around the villages. 

        The elders thought it best that the remainder of the young folk should resist the temptation to leave and instead, relegate themselves into close-quartered lean-to's and ramshackle huts built from the skeletons of the old buildings in Juarez.  I grew up partitioned from the rest of the world in one of these 'safe zones' where we lived to exist.  Humanity became a breeding stock of cells, fibers, and broken genetics from the compounds that enrich our soil; uranium, plutonium, mercury, sodium, lead-enough metal deposits that could build a subatomic radioactive town in of itself had the acid from the rains not burnt holes through it.  Between the bouts of acid rain, there would be a drought.  The Earth's crust would then sew itself up again, mending the wounds from the storms.  During the storms, it was unsafe to travel; besides the obvious reasons, the ground would become unstable.  A few huts in our villiage had fallen into the oil abyss a few times as the broken crust could no longer handle the weight.  It took longer for those wounds to heal.  Once the ground was stable enough, the survivors would then rebuild.   Thus, our food was grown in pots upon a cement patch that was once a basketball court.  It appears as though the rain cannot penetrate concrete as fast. 

        I look to the distance where the sun hid itself behind the sheet blanket of dust and debris, floating like a macabre zeppelin.  The Spectre.  I ambled down the short walkway leading to the old highway to find that some of the bulbs had turned to face the cloud.  It was as if they were waiting for that ancient godhead to arrive upon the white horse of peace to deliver them.  I knelt next to one of them, a large oblong bulb whose eyes were half buried in an array of debris with smokie butts jutting out of the sockets.   Part of me hoped that it didn't want to see the Spectre any more than I did.  In reality, I imagined a few of the young ones escaped the fence that protected our village to purchase smokies from travelers.  The only ones who dared to travel the roads were ones seeking adventure, or to give word of towns that had fallen, or other notable events.  I imagine the young ones were testing their bravery and hiding the evidence by placing the smokie butts within the cavity.

        I slowly unfastened my belt pack and set it beside me, careful of the spindly amorphous globs of oil that bubbled up beneath one of the crevices in the cement.   The oil had come shortly after the Spectre, hotter than the fires that burn in the pits around the village in old drums, and far more acidic than the rain.  The rain merely burnt holes through the ground into the earth's core.  The elders seemed to believe that the rain fed the beast that lived within the Earth that had awakened during the war.  Humanity realized its presence the moment the oil began gathering in pools where our natural lakes once formed.  Rumors spread that the oceans had been taken, enveloped within an embrace of pupil black, as though the earth had witnessed something that we did not.  We were far too distracted by our hatred for each other.

        I used my fingers to unearth the bulb and pulled.  I could hear the slight tear of tendon and knew that this one was relatively new.  I wondered who it was and where they were now.  I also wondered who had placed them here.  Word from the east told stories of bulbs appearing down every major highway and back road across the country.  I imagine it is the same in others.  Once people were buried, they stayed buried.  From what my father told me, it had always been like that.  When someone died now, however, a new bulb would appear alongside the road with no trail leading there or back.  There was no evidence of human interaction, and the bodies were as they remained, buried above ground in our citadel.  The elders had tried to burn the bodies, yet, the bulbs still appeared. 

        My father once told me he took a shovel to a few of them one morning shortly after I was born.  I was born a twin and was the only one to survive.  In a stupor, my father found himself at the road where he stumbled upon a small fresh orb, bright white as though bleached from the sun for years.  It was clean without even the slightest trace of flesh.  The tendons and cartilage, however, remained.   He saw it turn and look at him.  The pupil black eyes appeared and stared into him; he felt its presence entwined within his soul.  In a bout of fury, he marched back to our small hut, grabbed a shovel, and when he returned he smashed as many bulbs as he could.  He then dropped the shovel and collapsed upon the ground in a heap, cupped handfuls of dry red earth, and poured it onto his head in grief.  I remember the look in his eyes when he told me what happened next, and I watched as the beads of sweat that had appeared upon his brow pour down his nose and into his eyes. 

        The remaining bulbs had turned to look at him, each pouring the gelatinous liquid from their eyes and mouth in a slow acidic hiss.  The liquid burned through everything in its path, save for the bulbs themselves and the shattered remains.  The ooze carried with it the noxious scent of whatever was consumed.  It nearly doubled in size, reaching out like tentacle hands toward my father.  He got up and ran as fast as he could to our village.   The following day, he remembered the shovel.  He returned to find more bulbs had replaced the shattered.  The gelatinous oil had disappeared leaving behind the stain of its presence upon a small bulb that poked through the ground.  The milky-white shell had  faded to a dull grey with the stain of a hand across the top the size of my father's. 

        I looked to the disjointed jaw still buried beneath the ground and watched as the oil bubbled up from it, appearing from within the spaces between the teeth.  I watched as it doubled in size forming tiny limbs that crawled upwards like a spider.  Suddenly, a pain shot through my hand as I noticed the same oil had started dripping into my palm from the bulb I was holding.  I dropped it, and it rolled away like a rubber ball being thrown.  It then stopped and looked at me as I screamed and stumbled backward, wiping what was left of my hand upon the cement.  The oil from the ground reached forward and latched  onto my foot and started eating  through my shoes.  Within seconds, my limbs had become a part of the entity.  My hand had disappeared, replaced with a black sentient spider that swallowed my flesh up to the forearm.   The tentacles reached my chest and lingered upon it, slowly assimilating me into its form. 

        The last thing I saw before I began my watch upon the road watching travelers pass from town to town, was the sun in all its shining glory.  Then there was the Spectre who stepped forward and smiled as it put its dusty arm around my shoulder. 

Cover image retrieved from: http://www.resistnetwork.com/info/journal/post/We-are-currently-researching-the-border-areas-of-Mexico-USA