Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous: Tim Marquitz (44 page)

The lights failed as one. For a moment Alan thought the dark tide had
reached the power station, but through the window the distant lights
of James Hill still burned.

At least we still have the lights . . .

Jane screamed. And then, a click and the beam of a flashlight stabbed
out. Her white face looked at him over the blinding light. Somehow
she had swiped one of Fred’s flashlights as she escaped the
room.

“I knew I loved you for a reason.” Alan found a grin.

“Let’s go.” Alan stood up. His feet burned, as
though circulation were returning after near frostbite.

No-one had to ask where. They slept on the roof.

By ten o’clock the morning sun drove the darkness from the
foyer. Alan leaned over the low wall at the edge of the offices’
roof-space and watched the blackness retreat along the street. By
noon it appeared to have gone as far as it would go. Half of Ashton
lay submerged in the night-stuff. Alan imagined who might walk there.
Lucy, with her blonde hair and red lips, leaving the building as the
tide ebbed, haunting the dark streets by the underpass, her red eyes
watchful.

“I have to go down.”

“You’re insane!” Jane held his arm. Ben seized his
leg. “No! Daddy! Don’t leave us.

“We’ve got to get to a higher place,” Alan said.
“The dark could reach us if it comes in higher tonight. I need
to go down and check if it’s safe. I need to find us a route to
James Hill.”

“That building is closer.” Jane pointed to a tower three
blocks over. It looked to be thirty stories.

“Maybe. But there might be a way out from James Hill. A way to
the mountains. If we get to the mountains we can put thousands of
feet under us, not just a couple of hundred.”

“I want you to say,” she said.

“We have to go.”

“I know.” Jane pushed the flashlight into his hands. “Be
careful. Come back.”

She unhooked Ben’s arms from Alan’s leg and held him
while he cried.

The dark tide had almost reached the roof. Alan found the mark just
below the ‘roof access’ sign. The paint remained only in
shreds. The plaster looked blistered. The stairwell stank of rot, the
sulphurous reek of moldering seaweed.

Alan paused at the door to the top floor. The image of Fred and
Lucy writhing in their sleep sacks rose in his mind. He saw them
twisting as the darkness washed over.

A dull thud. From past the doors, from down the corridor. A noise.

“Oh Christ.” He felt hollow. Terror had cored him.

For an age Alan stood without motion, waiting for the sound to come
again.

“I have to check.” He said it out loud in the hope it
might not be true.

If he went past without checking ... something might go up the stairs
while he looked for a path to higher ground.

His hand trembled as he pushed the door open. He eased it, not
wanting to make a sound. The thing squealed like a bastard on
corroded hinges.

“Shit.”

Alan crept up to the door of the office they had slept in. Black
handprints marked it, and a dent below the handle looked to have been
put there with a sledgehammer. The daylight from the stairwell window
made little impression in the corridor. Alan turned the flashlight
on.

He pushed the door.

Desks lay overturned, chairs scattered, filing cabinets pulled down.
He scanned the beam of his flashlight across the room. In places the
decayed carpet had been rucked up into folded piles to expose the
concrete beneath. Smears of black sludge scored the walls and coated
the windows, holding back the day.

In the center, one of the sleeping bags was hunched up, like an
inch-worm, as if the occupant were praying to Mecca. The surface,
black and glistening, reminded Alan of a chrysalis he’d dug up
as a child.

It’s going to move. The words sounded in his mind, cold and
certain.

It’s going to move.

Move? The chuckle from the Sanders basement echoed through him. Hell,
it’s going to eat you.

Alan took a step back. He took another. Was that motion? Did it just
shiver? His nerve snapped and he spun around to run.

“Going somewhere?” Fred stood in the corridor immediately
behind him. Close enough to touch. Not the kindly well-fed and
well-equipped Fred of the night before. Not the Fred that was right
with Jesus.

Alan screamed. He leapt away, back into the office. Nothing would
come from his mouth except an animal noise, half sob, half shout.

“Did you think we’d left, neighbor?” Fred asked. He
looked like one of those bodies hauled from peat bogs after seven
hundred years, the flesh stained and shrunken.

“Stay back.” Alan managed. A pleading without authority.

Fred advanced with slow steps, his hands wide. The nails on several
fingers were torn off or hanging on a hinge of skin.

“We’re driftwood, Alan. The next tide will draw us in.
This is the flood.” Fred’s voice bubbled from corrupt
lungs, full of mirth and malice.

“Back!” Alan raised his arms, and discovered the
flashlight. Fred, or whatever creature lived inside Fred’s
flesh, drew away as the light fell across him. His eyes narrowed to
crimson slits.

“Don’t fight it, Alan.” Fred smiled. A black tongue
passed over stained teeth. “This isn’t the first dark
tide. You’ve lived your entire life beneath dark waters. The
oldest world was as different from today as today is from tomorrow
when the dark tide swallows this town whole.”

Alan listened and the words almost mesmerized him. He almost didn’t
hear the tearing of rotten fabric behind him.

As Lucy rose from the remains of the sleeping bag, Alan lunged
forward. He clubbed Fred aside with the flashlight and ran from the
room. Her nails raked across his back, nearly snagging his shirt, but
he tore free and reached the stairwell door. When he pulled it closed
behind him, he caught a glimpse of her charging down the corridor.
Blonde hair still clung to her scalp in bushy tufts. He clung to the
door handle, hauling to keep the door closed.

“Jane! Jane!” he shouted as loud as he could. “Jane!”

“Alan?”

“Get the kids out. Do it now.”

The door shook with awful force. He knew he couldn’t hold it.

“Quickly!”

Jane and the children hurried past, clattering down the bare steps.

The door shuddered. It threw him back and opened a good twelve inches
before he slammed back into it, pushing it shut.

“Alan?” Jane looked back at him, horrified.

A splintering sound reached him through the fire door.

“Just go.” He gasped for breath. “Into the street.
Don’t stop.”

The noise of footsteps faded as Jane descended.

“Run, Alan.” Fred’s voice bubbled behind the door,
tender, almost seductive. It turned his stomach. “Run. We won’t
chase you. The dark wants you for itself. It’s a high tide
tonight.”

And Alan ran. With sick laughter echoing behind him, he ran, taking
the stairs four and five at a time, careless of injury.

Being trapped is bad. The slow discovery that you’re trapped is
worse. Having to march your young children through decay and ruin in
order to learn that you’re trapped is hell.

Without a car they had to walk. Alan knew that you could hot-wire a
car. But he didn’t know how to. So they walked.

The streets were empty, but where the dark had run during the night,
they were corrupt. They stank, the weight of decades had descended on
them in hours, and gruesome relics lay scattered amid the rusting
cars. A severed hand, handcuffed to a street light. A baby seat with
the straps torn away. Four parallel scratches across a doorstep, as
if someone had been dragged away.

Ben grew tired, and Alan carried him. Sarah grew tired, but she had
to walk.

Time and again they turned a corner and found the road dipping into
the liquid dark.

“What are we going to do?” Jane asked the question they
weren’t allowed to voice.

“I don’t know.”

Alan had seen the footage of Nazi’s herding Jews onto trains.
He had been too young when he saw it, and the images kept with him
all his life. He had seen a man with two little boys, holding their
hands, leading them on to the train. And later, the pits, with
skeletal bodies stacked like cord wood. Every new understanding in
his life had added a fresh layer of horror to the look on that
father’s face. And now it was him. Perhaps he really had lived
his whole life beneath dark waters.

“We’ll go back,” he said. “Try the west
route.”

“But that’s away from James Hill,” Jane said.

“I know.” And he beat down the fury that threatened to
burst out of him. “I know it is.” Because if it got out,
he would hurt the things he loved.

Another image reached him. Rats in a trap. Kittens in a sack as the
water seeped in. Animals, with nowhere to run, biting each other.

He glanced at his flashlight. The bulb held a dim glow in the fading
light. He’d forgotten to turn it off. The batteries almost run
out.

“Fuck!” His hope had run out with them.

And he threw it. Out across the rippled darkness. The flashlight
landed twenty yards away, where the dark sea lapped close to the top
of abandoned cars. No splash. The yellow box-like body of the thing
vanished beneath the surface immediately, but for a long moment the
mirrored lamp held there.

“What the hell are you doing, Alan?” Jane shouted at him
now, her own fear maturing into anger.

He watched the lamp. It held for another second and then slipped away
beneath the surface.

The weight of his misery crushed him. A man in dark times, throwing
away his light. Abandoning hope.

Hope floats.

“Quick. Follow me.” He grabbed Sarah’s hand and
started to run.

“What?” Jane stumbled after him. “Why?”

Alan couldn’t say. The idea flickered at the back of his mind.
If he named it, it might die, it might fade away like a waking dream.

Three blocks back and he stopped in front of the store they had
passed earlier. ‘Wild and Wet.’ He let go of Sarah’s
wrist and she collapsed. He had dragged her the last half block. One
of her patent leather shoes was gone, the other worn to a dirty
brown.

He cast about for something to break the window with. It took a
while. The dark tide hadn’t reached these streets and there’s
never a baseball bat around when you need one.

The hardware store he needed next lay just around the corner. In it
he found a portable generator, the kind folk buy so they can watch TV
after a storm and keep their freezer running. It seemed that the wind
just had to puff these days and the lines went down.

Alan loaded the generator onto a trolley and stacked a workman’s
tool-box on top. He added a length of plastic tubing, some gas cans,
and five rolls of duct tape for good measure. A man can never have
too much duct tape. Jim Sanders used to swear by it.

Looters will be shot on sight. The thought rose as he wheeled the
trolley out of the broken doors. He grimaced. If a cop turned up to
shoot him, or the National Guard came in by helicopter, he’d
weep for joy.

Jane and the kids waited for him in the street. She sat on the box
holding the inflatable raft from Wet ‘n Wild. Across her lap,
both the shotguns he’d taken from the sports shop.

The children watched him with exhausted eyes, too tired for
questions.

He came back pushing a second trolley, stacked with several
nine-by-four boards, a circular saw, steel brackets, screws, heavy
duty drill.

“I’m going to need help,” he said. “We need
this stuff on the roof.” He pointed to a nearby office block.
Seven stories.

Jane and the children set to lugging the equipment up piece by piece.
Alan stayed in the street with his gas cans, tubing, and a screw
driver. When he had siphoned enough cars to fill his cans he took
them up.

“What are we doing here, Alan?” Jane sounded weary but
calm. Sweat ran down her neck making streaks through the dirt. In the
streets below the shadows were lengthening.

“I’m … I have an idea. It may not work.”

It almost certainly won’t work.

Most of what he was doing was for the sake of doing something. It was
to occupy his mind, to distract the kids, to keep busy and not think
about the black sea rising from below.

Jane said nothing, and watched him.

“The flashlight floated for a moment or two,” he said.

Sarah and Ben stood to either side of their mother, silent and
watching.

“It must have weighed four pounds, maybe five, and the light
was weak, but it floated.”

Alan looked around at the equipment laid out on the flat roof. He had
brought up several panels of fluorescent tubes removed directly from
the office ceilings below their feet.

“We’ve got a generator and plenty of gas.” He spoke
fast now. He needed to get the words out, to spread it all out before
Jane could question him. “We inflate the rubber dingy. I make a
wooden frame and set it on a stand, and set the boat in the frame. I
attach these banks of lights to the underside of the frame. I wire
the generator to juice the lights. We use another panel with lights
for drive. If light can float us, it can push us forward too.”

He looked at Jane. “What do you think?”

She raised her hands. “You’re building an ark?”

“Sure. But we’ve gotta be careful sailing her. The
underside is going to be fluorescent tubes. Scrape them across
anything and we’re going down.”

“Can you do it?” she asked.

“I’ve got to.” He could hear her thinking it. He
was the man never further than a fuse switch away from calling out an
electrician. The man who had trouble getting shelves straight.
“Necessity is the mother-fu ... I’ll just have to.”

He built the stand first. Close to the edge of the roof so they could
sail out over the deeps.