Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous: Tim Marquitz (38 page)

“All the grass and the trees are just about dead around here.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So, what about all the cattle? What about the birds?”

“I guess we’re gonna start findin’ them dead too.
Anyway, price of burgers’ll go up.”

On the sixth day of darkness Walter awoke to a gunshot. The paymaster
had gotten into the armory and deep throated an M-4. Walter didn’t
see the body till it was under a sheet, but he saw two grunts mopping
the brains off the wall. They were like strands of uncooked pork.
Only six days. Jesus, what did he think was happening? The guy didn’t
really believe it wasn’t going to end, did he?

Walter noticed he felt pretty dry, though it was cool enough to see
his breath. His nostrils were crusty, and he drank more water than
usual. Everybody did.

“Trucks are supposed to come back tomorrow,” Timms said
over cards. “Maybe Mackey’s got your dog.”

It was the only news they had.

That night it rained.

It was such a change, the whole base woke up to watch it. Walter saw
lights going on all over.

He went outside and stood under the awning in his underwear and
smoked, watching a bunch of the young guys running out in the middle
of it laughing, getting a game of football going.

He smiled at their antics, but the smile fell after about a minute,
when their skin started to turn black.

The rain was black.

The guys out in it, there were maybe a dozen or more, they noticed it
too, and pulled their shirts up over their heads, those that had
them, and started to run for cover.

They didn’t get very far before they started collapsing. Walter
had seen it happen once at a fight. A boxer got knocked out on his
feet and his legs actually undulated like in the cartoons before he
fell like a sack of bones.

These guys all started skidding to the pavement, splashing in black
puddles.

A couple idiots ran out to try and get them and the same thing
happened to them.

Then some guys in ponchos and hoods went out and dragged them out of
the rain, under cover.

Walter heard a lot of yelling, a lot of shouting, and the phones
ringing all over the base. The loudspeaker crackled on, warning
everybody to stay indoors.

Walter went back inside and watched through the window.

The black rain came down hard, pattering on the roof and gushing out
the spouts. It made the discarded football bounce around on the
ground like it was forlornly looking for somebody to play with it.

He tried to see the guys lined up on the ground across from the
barracks. The medics were working on them, but he couldn’t see
well through the dark rain. There was some kind of a commotion. He
heard yelling.

His phone rang and he jumped.

It was Timms.

“Hey, Walter, you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, sarge. Hey, these kids were out playin’
football … ”

“I know, I know. Look, just stay where you are, okay? Don’t
go out in the rain.”

“Yeah I heard.”

Timms hung up.

Walter went back to the window and jumped again as he heard automatic
weapons going in long bursts, saw the protracted muzzle flashes
jetting across the way.

Then they went quiet.

He tried to see, but couldn’t through the dark rain.

Walter sat down on the cot, listening to it.

He didn’t know when he finally went to bed, but when he woke up
it was about five in the morning and the rain had stopped pattering.

He heard a lot of engines going and looked outside to see a line of
guys in green Level A Tychem suits walking ahead of a fleet of vacuum
trucks, sucking up all the black water pools.

Walter chewed his lip a little, then went and put on his hip waders
and slicker and opened his door.

Nobody seemed to take any notice of him. The hazmat guys were even up
on the roofs with industrial shop vacs sucking the roofs dry.

He went to Timms’ office.

“Jesus, Walter, I told you to stay where you were.”

He had on one of the hazmat suits, the cowl off.

There was an M-4 on his desk.

“What the hell’s going on, sarge?”

“That shit, that rain, is toxic. You didn’t get any on
you, did you?”

“No. I saw a buncha guys playing football last night ... ”

Timms opened his drawer, the bottle there clinking.

“They’re fucking dead, man.”

Walter had figured that out.

“What happened? Why were they shot?”

Timms looked sharply at Walter.

“They were poisoned. They were dying. It was a mercy killing.
Listen, you can’t tell anybody you saw that, okay?”

Walter nodded and started to sit down in the chair.

“Wait! Don’t sit there, man. Look, go take that rubber
shit off. I got a Tychem suit you can have.”

When he’d changed, Timms was drinking right from the bottle and
the rifle was under his arm.

“Is it gonna rain again?”

“I don’t fucking know,” said Timms.

“Anything about the trucks?”

“The what?”

“The trucks. Are the trucks coming back today?”

Timms looked at Walter as if a second pair of eyes had just opened
where his nipples were supposed to be.

“I don’t think they’re coming, Walter.”

“What the hell is happening?”

“I don’t know. I thought the rain would get rid of the
cloud at least. But look at it! Just look at it!”

Timms went over to the window and splashed it with whiskey.

“They’re saying the fuckin’ lakes and the water
tanks are full of that shit. All we got is bottled water from now
on.” He sighed. “I hate the taste of bottled water.
Tastes like plastic.”

There was a flat clip clopping of automatic fire from across the
post.

“Shit!” Timms said, dropping his whiskey and picking up
his M-4. He shoved past Walter and went outside, digging out the keys
for a hummer parked out front.

“Hey, sarge,” Walter said, jogging behind. “How
about you let me drive?”

Timms turned around, wild-eyed, thought about it, and nodded.

“Yeah, okay, we’ll take your car. But let’s fucking
go. Key Gate. Step on it.”

Walter drove until they’d reached the Key Gate, the west
entrance of Fort Sill. He wasn’t the sort of guy that usually
drove towards gunfire. When they rounded the corner and burned up the
road, they could see two Army rigs blockading the gate with lines of
soldiers on top firing down. A pair of lights were set up on either
side of the blockade angled down at the entrance, and a couple more
were sweeping the fence, beams cutting the darkness.

“What the hell is going on?” Walter said, suddenly
afraid.

“Keep going,” Timms whispered, that wild light in his eye
getting brighter. He locked and loaded his M-4.

As they sped toward the blockade, an MP rushed out with his weapon to
block their path.

Walter skidded to a stop, ducking behind the steering wheel as the MP
ran up yelling with his rifle up, red in the face, so amped up Walter
couldn’t even understand him.

Timms got out the passenger side and slammed his door.

“At ease, corporal!” Timms hollered.

The MP backed down when he saw Timms.

“Sir, I got orders not to let any civilians near the gate.”

“What’s the matter?”

“They’re coming up from Lawton and the surrounding
ranches, sir. The infected. They just walk right into the bullets.
But if they get close … ”

“Fuckin’ A,” Timms said, looking toward the gate
where the roar of machinegun fire was unending.

He turned then and slapped the hood of the DPW car.

“Get back to Lodging, Walter. I’ll see you later.”

Then Timms was trotting off with the MP, back toward the gate.

As Walter turned the car around, he caught a glimpse under one of the
trailers blocking the gate of scores of corpses on the ground. More
than he’d ever seen.

He peeled out and roared back toward Lodging. Nobody took any notice
of him.

Walter didn’t feel like stopping there though. There was
nothing to do there but sleep. He’d go crazy listening to the
gunfire from his room. His hands were shaking at the wheel. He needed
to occupy his time.

He parked by the north barracks, pulling right up to the side and
leaving the battery on so he could see to work by the headlights. He
got his toolbox and the last pressure vacuum assembly out of the back
and deposited it by the old one on the side of the building and stood
smoking in the high beams. The gunfire was still going. Jesus, what
was happening?

Walter finished his cigarette and stamped it out, then decided he had
better check the latrine for leakage before he started.

He got his flashlight out of the car and went in through the front
door.

Rows of white metal bunks, the thin green blankets still uniformly
made, and empty lockers met him, lined up in orderly formation on
either side of the wide bay. The floor bore a huge scroll motif,
outlining the Army’s Seven Core Values. He let his flashlight
play down the words—loyalty, duty, and respect—before
he headed for the latrine.

He rounded a corner and opened the door to the latrine. His foot
splashed in the dark.

He cursed as with another step the water sloshed over his boot.

The recent rain must have caused another back up, or maybe a pipe had
burst. He reached out instinctively for the light switch. Nothing.
The power to this grid must have been cut. His hand came away wet and
he wiped it on his shirt in disgust.

He frowned as the sewage smell met his nostrils. It was particularly
bad. He was going to have to call somebody with a wet-vac to come in
and …

And that was when he remembered the rain.

Walter pointed his flashlight down at the water and the beam did not
show the tiles beneath the surface. The water was entirely black,
like a lake of crude oil, ominous. Little ripples moved up and down
the floor from his step.

He caught his breath and started to slowly back out of the latrine,
conscious of the sound of the water lapping against his ankles.

Timms had said the black rain was toxic.

Walter didn’t have the mask of his suit on, or the gloves,
which he’d taken off to drive. He wasn’t even buttoned
up.

He stumbled backwards out of the latrine and his wet booties squeaked
across the bay, leaving black tracks smeared across the Seven Core
Values.

Outside at last, in the cool dark air, he went around to the side.

Walter felt strange. Cold. He coughed and shivered, and when he
stepped into the headlights of the car, he froze.

His hand, the hand that had touched the light switch in the flooded
bathroom, was entirely black.

He felt sick and retched uncontrollably, vomiting up his breakfast,
along with a startling quantity of blood.

As the painful heaving subsided, he stood doubled over with his hands
on his knees, and watched the blackness creep swiftly up the veins of
his arm.

He wretched again, and this time it felt as if his insides were
tearing free and joining the exodus over his tongue. He collapsed
entirely, losing all muscle control.

As he convulsed on the grass, Walter’s brain was struck through
with flashes of fire.

In the center of each burst came a flood of understanding, not as if
something were being made known to him on purpose, but as if his very
essence was being evicted, and he gained impressions of the thing
that ousted him in passing.

He saw a world of red fire skies choked with rock vapor over cracked
black ground, which seeped the Black Water, and his human mind
understood that he looked upon the earth in its earliest eon,
billions of years before his birth.

He was not Walter Coombs, but the Black Water itself. Though his
human mind tried to give the Water a name, tried to bestow upon it
some form or reference, he could not. The Black Water was. It always
had been, until the Light came (and the word
Light
was a curse
in his mind, as filthy a name as any he could conceive). The Water
was the tranquil nothingness and the hand of Light had forced it into
blasphemous, unnatural form.

Then ages flowed as if time lapsed, like a movie montage, and he saw
a dark dot in the angry red sky that grew swiftly larger until it
filled the horizon. There was cataclysm and apocalypse, and fire and
torrential rains of ash as two planetoids collided.

This was the Invasion. This was the Dread Weapon, hurtled at the
Black Water by the Power out of Space.

The top of the earth blew off, shedding fragments into the void. The
Black Water that had managed to retain its true shape coalesced,
clinging to the molten chunks of planetary debris and riding out the
dizzying centrifugal forces of fledgling gravitational wells for
eons, weaving a buoy in space, spinning a preserve that became a
sustaining, encasing reservation of rock and dust, peppered and
battered by flights of meteors and micrometeors.

The moon.

Below, its homeworld became a cursed land of churning oceans and
green ground, and the nutritious life-giving silicates were entombed
in miles of crust, covered in snowy mountains. The Black Water
watched as stromalites pumped the first wisps of oxygen into the air,
paving the way for perverse living forms that shambled out of the
oceans, growing over immeasurable time from prokaryotes and sliding
across the world like vermin.

Then the Whistling Invaders came at last to the world they had
prepared with their terraforming planetoid Weapon, their great seed.
The mysterious, terrifying floating polypous entities, colonizing the
earth below with sky besieging basalt pillars, fading in and out of
perception as they went about their incomprehensible errands.

Out of the stars came the hideous Vegetable Things, erecting their
sprawling cities with the aide of the Black Gelatins, and in their
shadow the Reptilians and the Apes also rose up and built their own
emulating cities, only to have them wiped out when the Floating
Whistlers flattened them all with monstrous winds and the Vegetable
Things unleashed their colossal technologies in counterattack, until
the earth was frozen in snow and all the great civilizations had
crumbled.