It moved with the litheness of a monkey. But this was no wild jungle. This was a manmade, concrete jungle, complete with walls and windows and wide asphalt roads shooting this way and that; and overhead hung tangles of wires and light poles, and the intricate gadgetry powering the once impressive rush of human purpose.
The purpose had vanished. As had the humans. But Michael could sense it around him. The silence was deafening, but Michael knew that somewhere it was waiting, and waiting...
and biding its time till that one final tick-tock of the clock when the world would come crashing down faster than a comet from Hell.
Michael slowed his breathing. His gun was held out in purpose. He had to be ready, because when it came, it came with a full head of steam. It wouldn't slow till it was dead. And hell or high water, the damn thing was bent on living.
"Come on out... you sunnavabitch..."
There was a shriek.
Michael whipped around so fast, his neck could snap. He was going to take it down and burn it like the i—
Teeth—a tunnel of fangs and death—swarmed his face.
###
Michael Petrone jerked up, half expecting to see the being in front of him, with the darker-than-blood blood and the ghoulish face and venomous eyes. But instead there was silence.
He was sitting in his cop car, and he was burning. His shirt was completely stained now. Dehydrated beyond belief. His air conditioning wasn't working.
Michael rubbed his eyes. How long had he been out? The dreams were becoming more detailed. They were growing, all stemming from that same horrid seed.
He peered out to the distant gate surrounding the far end of the police station. The fields beyond with the shrubs were empty. There had been figures there before, he knew he had seen them. He wasn't mistaking this—he had seen them wide and clear.
Michael looked to the sky. There was a rip in that sky. The murderous red was spilling out.
###
Faucets dripped, leaked. The wheeze of rusted pipes emanated from somewhere beyond stained walls. An array of porcelain sinks and identical mirrors lined the front. A window of rippled glass to the right of the stalls on the back wall refracted sunlight.
Malcolm Ghulic stood at a sink. He stared into the mirror. His face was translucent. Deep, sunken bags below his eyes revealed blackened, spindly capillaries beneath the flesh. He took a grating inhale. The veins swelled against the translucent flesh of the face; every miniscule vessel and its surrounding sinew bulged as if he were a slug bearing its innards.
The irises of his eyes were almost completely gone. Malcolm hung his head as he coughed and muttered a curse under his breath. He took another deep breath. "Get it together, come now..."
This was a most peculiar situation. He touched at the spot again, right on the lobe. This liquid could be the result of many circumstances. He had to maintain a calm and levelheaded disposition. Now was not the time to lose it.
Malcolm stared into the mirror once again. The face staring back was not his. It had the deathly, ghoulish, pitted eyeballs of a fevered being. A being losing its human connection. Losing its life—a sure but steady draining. Malcolm felt his heart strain.
"Come on, you have this... you have this. Now come on..."
One could repeat again and again, letting it become a mantra. The focus was integral. Remembering to breathe and release, always breathing and feeling, continuous in one's absorptive flow. Malcolm calmed himself. This was not the way to go. No, no, no...
Never like this.
He looked into the mirror at that all too unfamiliar face, with a mind that he knew must have existed beyond. If he could find it, he would do so agreeably.
The viscous crimson fluid was oozing from both ears now. It mixed and mingled in the sink, and Malcolm watched it twirl, down, down, down. The blood in his head, swelling, squeezing, was going whoosh whoosh whoosh...
He gripped the edge.
And the light came back. The sounds of the pipes, everything. The feel of the porcelain and the soft drip of the water.
Malcolm took a breath. He had returned to the external world. Despite the death and the veins, Malcolm was coming back, and he couldn’t keep from smiling. The ghastly image in the mirror was okay. Terrible, but Malcolm was holding on.
Little did he know, in 5 seconds his brain would pop.
###
We've stepped into a goddamn freak show
Tyler was holding his head in his lap, feet jittering. He didn't know what to do. Audrey simply sat on the ground to his left. They had thought about calling 9-11. They had considered it, but what was the point? Nobody was picking up. The cellphone reception was out of whack, the landlines F-ed.
Nearby, the soccer field had an empty grandstand for the very few fans who ever came out. There was a booth at the top where Fridays and Saturdays some local guy would announce for the game and throw in his version of a clever 'play-by-play.'
Today, the only thing coming across the intercom was the fizz...
the drowning white noise fizz.
Tyler blinked.
From a distance, students filtered out, almost one by one, from a single brick appendage of the school. The fog had lifted some minutes ago, very quickly—too quickly. Now, as Tyler squinted his glazed eyes against the scalding sun, he was no longer sure if what he saw, moving at a drift, were actually students.
First off, there was no swinging of the arms. The figures didn't seem to move their legs either. These bodies in the distance almost looked pulled by something invisible, something calling them on. A procession of vertical smudges in a sea of red.
Tyler closed his eyes. He could feel the familiar numbness rolling back in. And everything was becoming so bright again. The sun was impossibly red—as if rising over the desert, where it also seemed impossibly big. But what about that scar in the sky? Tyler massaged his eyelids gently.
"We need to call my father."
Audrey had been saying the same thing the whole time, but Tyler didn't want to hear it. She had repeated so many times... how many times? Every time she did so, her voice seemed even more hollow than before.
Tyler couldn't make sense of what he had seen just minutes ago. Audrey had come to them first, right at the small ditch along the far southeast corner of the soccer field. There was a rusty fence there that you could squeeze under if you wanted. It was usually used by the soccer and football guys if they had parked their cars on the other side and didn't want to walk all the way around.
Today, this ditch corner was something Tyler had never seen. Two bodies, grey and bony like cracked rock, were sprawled there. The clothes were discarded right at the spot too. Around those shriveled human forms there had been red. A dark crimson sludge, all over. Spattered on the trees and the grass and the torn fence, and blotching leaves and flowers and even some of the sidewalk right on the other side.
Tyler had managed to only puke once. Audrey—nothing. She had simply walked away, saying nothing, and since then had been in the same spot, mumbling about "father" and how they needed to go.
Tyler turned to the girl. Her pupils were so inhumanly small. His, by comparison, were probably dinner plates, but there was nothing he could do. If she didn't want to take another one, she didn't have to. Besides, sooner or later she'd be begging for a zip.
Tyler took a breath. After all, that's what junkies did. Even the high functioning ones. They could never go long.
He rubbed his head, remembering those bodies, just 20 feet away or so. God was he thirsty, and hot. Why was it so hot? He looked to the sun with its otherworldly bloodiness. He could imagine people with paint buckets splashing human blood all over the sky, and then, with a quick burst of wind, blowing it dry—so that it stuck.
But Tyler couldn't distract himself. No matter how badly he wanted to think of the heat and the students and the absolute eeriness of everything around him, his mind could only think of one thing. As hard as he tried, he could only think of one thing:
The bodies. And the way their faces had ended up. Like pumpkins, he thought. As if somebody had taken a giant hammer straight to two pumpkins. Like they had just… exploded.
###
Jean legs moved swiftly through the underbrush. Twigs snapped, leaves rustled. There was strained breathing. Streaks of green and dark grey. Trees passing, breathing. Strained and painful. Sweat dripped from a loose, stained shirt.
The breathing slowed.
Feet slowed, thickets coming to a gentle sway.
Barkly Mendbrook stood on a precipice. He was thinner now, bordering on scrawny. A smile was etched on the kid's face, as if drawn in with an exacto knife; a deep, cutting smile. Far below him, the metropolis, nestled in foothills:
Smatterings of cornfields, like urine stains. Buildings and homes and roads like dots and veins, gray and black, and interspersed briefly with color. Blown manholes like Cheerios were all over the road. And a rich, red goop had burst from the sewers.
But all of it paled to the glow of the bath.
He looked to the sky.
The heavens were ripped open all the way across the monochromatic gray of the clouds. It seemed a rift; but more closely, a zagging-zigging pattern: As it pulsated, brightening the world with its crimson bath, Barkly could hear the voices moving in his head.
They were friendly to him, unlike most to have come before. They did not ask him to do the unthinkable—to struggle to be like everybody else. They did not make Barkly feel wrong for being different. He didn't have to fake at human words. He was celebrated for who he was, for the lovely creature nature had made him to be.
It was the others who were to be punished; righted for their wrongs. It was the others, the others who had teased and sneered and looked upon Barkly with disdain and bewilderment his entire life—these were the ones deserving of the coming shadows.
Barkly smiled. He had been given an opportunity that few would ever know. He glanced at his translucent flesh—for the first time in his life he could see his veins. For the first time he could move and sweat, anything that a normal person with just an average physique could enjoy.
Barkly couldn't stop from smiling as he bowed his head in reverence:
"Thank you, Father. Thank you."