The Hell Season (11 page)

Thomas winced at the recounting, still shocked that he was capable of such brutality, drugged or not.

“There was an indeterminable length of nothing but darkness after that which slowly began to clear. I realized that I was moving,
climbing
, to put it more accurately. I was pulling myself up and over a rocky surface. My arms and legs felt strong, so much stronger than I could remember them feeling in a long time. It was still rather dark where I was but there was a light shining down on me. I looked up and saw a circle of white and blue illumination directly above. As I placed each bare hand and foot—I was quite naked, you see—into whatever tiny crevasse I found, I started to laugh at this newfound strength flowing throughout my body. I’m telling you, it was the most wonderful feeling! After what had to be at least an hour of climbing, I was able to pull myself into that blue and white circle which turned out to be the beautiful summer sky above. I had been climbing up the wall of the hole out there.” He nodded toward the front of the store. “Somehow, I had been resurrected down in the depths of that lightless chasm and I emerged from it like a babe from the womb newly born. A womb of earth, it seemed.”

Thomas cringed a bit at the man’s flowery language, although he had to admit that dying and coming back to life might render him poetic about his own experiences.

A few other people had gathered around during Gerald’s story and an older woman brought her hands together and declared, “A miracle! A genuine miracle in this world of horrors. God’s love does still exist!”

Gerald seemed to consider this for a moment before saying, “Well, that’s good. The idea of it still being around is rather unsettling.”

Thomas could understand that.

“It’s all God’s will,” the older woman was saying. Thomas thought that he had been told that her name was Patricia the night before. “All of it. Our loved ones being taken from us. Those of us who were left behind. The terrible things that have happened since then. It’s the End Times. The Great Battle is coming. We have been chosen to fight in the coming conflict. Why us? Why now? Well, who can say? God works in mysterious ways, after all. It is not for us mere mortals to question such things.”

“Bullshit,” said a middle-aged man with a thick red beard and curly hair sticking out from beneath a John Deere baseball cap. “It’s a God damn government conspiracy. Some sort of experiment. We’re all just a bunch of guinea pigs. A test to see how humans react under extreme psychological situations. Hell, I’m not sure any of this is really happening. It’s all just like in that movie,
The Matrix
. It’s all happening up here.” He tapped the side of his head with the tip of his index finger. “A computer simulation is what it is. Some sort of advanced virtual reality or something like that. You know they have to have that sort of technology by now. And it looks like they finally thought of the right situation in which to use it. Easiest thing in the world for them to kidnap some people, drug them, plug their brains into some crazy simulation and see how they handle it. Bastards have been experimenting on their own citizens for generations. Anyone ever heard of Project MKULTRA?”

“No, no, it’s not that at all.” Now it was a young woman chiming in. Tall, sharp features, with long blonde hair. Her eyes were wide, brimming with the knowledge she possessed and was obviously quite desperate to impart. “It’s the aliens. Proxima Centaurians, to be exact. They’ve been among us for a long time now, possibly even centuries. I know because I was abducted once as a child. They implanted me right here…” She rolled up one of the sleeves of the sweater she wore, pointed to a spot on her forearm. “Some sort of tracking device. None of the doctors I was sent to were able to find it. Invisible to X-Rays, apparently. All of you probably have them too. It makes too much sense. And now here we are, participants in some strange project of theirs.”

“Ridiculous!” shouted an older man in brown slacks and a white collared shirt. “Proxima Centaurians? You can’t be serious!”

The young woman looked crestfallen.

“Any creature native to our universe, no matter how advanced, is subject to its laws. One such law is that nothing can travel faster than light. And the distances, even from Proxima Centauri… Young lady, I don’t think you understand just how big outer space is. The odds of some advanced civilization discovering that we’re here are staggeringly low. To randomly come across the little speck of space dust that we call Earth… Nearly unthinkable. No, if we have been visited by alien beings, and if they are responsible for what we’ve been recently going through, then it’s quite obvious that they must come from a parallel universe. Or maybe some higher dimension or plane of existence where the physical laws are quite different from our own…”

With that, Thomas had heard enough. It dawned on him just how hungry he was. So he wandered off across the store over to where the grocery section was located. Even with the people who’d been staying here the past few days looting the shelves, there were still plenty of canned goods—soups and vegetables and pastas for the most part—still available. He grabbed a couple cans of mini raviolis—not his first choice for breakfast but it would do—and a gallon of bottled water then wandered around until he found a cooking pot, a package of napkins, some plastic forks and bowls and cups then made his way back to the common sleeping area. He could have gone into the sprawling warehouse area in the rear of the store, he knew, with its row upon row of shelving where the back stock was kept, looked through the massive walk-in cooler located back there and the stacks of refrigerated meats and vegetables, milk and other perishable goods. Two of the survivors staying at the Wal-Mart were electricians and Thomas had been informed the night before that they had rigged the store’s permanent, massive generators to feed power only to the areas that needed it most: namely the walk-in cooler and the lights in the employees’ bathrooms. That way, the reserve power would not be wasted running things like fans and lights and the TV in the sleeping area, things that could easily be powered by scavenged portable generators. He decided against paying a visit to the cooler for two reasons: he wanted something quick and easy to satisfy his hunger, and he really wasn’t much of a cook.

Someone had moved a few stoves over near the beds and plugged them in to extension cables running back to the portable generators in front of the store. He turned on one of the burners, set down the pot, opened the cans of ravioli and poured them in. Dana and Gerald kept him company while he cooked then joined him in a bowl of pasta a few minutes later when it was good and hot.

“Not overly impressed with the explanations some of our fellow survivors have come up with?” asked Gerald, nodding his head toward the group of people still arguing about God and aliens and government conspiracies. He raised his bowl, scooped up a forkful of pasta.

“Just never saw the point in arguing about things that have no answers.” He blew on some of his ravioli to cool it down before tasting it.

Gerald gave him a look but didn’t say anything. They ate their meal in silence.

*

The time had come for Thomas to go see the hole. He didn’t want to. The very idea filled him with a palpable sense of dread. But he’d always heard that the best way to conquer one’s fears was to confront them. Besides, he figured it would be a good idea to check out the place where all the recent horrors had originated.

After breakfast and a quick bit of freshening up with a washcloth and some soap and water, Thomas walked out through the front doors of that sprawling superstore, Dana and Gerald accompanying him. They made their way across the mostly deserted parking lot, over to the sidewalk that ran along the wide thoroughfare that fronted the store, and down the couple of blocks to the hole. The floodlights were off, the generators silent. Some other people were already there—two men in whispered conversation, another man and a woman. Thomas wondered, not for the first time, about what had happened to Ron and Tanya. Were they in hiding somewhere? If so, he couldn’t blame them. Or were they unaware of the fact that a group of survivors was staying at the Wal-Mart? Whatever the case, he wished that they were here. His sense of dread was growing and he would have felt just a bit more comfortable knowing that Ron and Tanya’s military experience could be called upon.

As he looked around, took in the sight of the people there, he couldn’t help but wonder why no children had been left behind. No doubt that some of the conspirators he’d listened to earlier could offer up a theory or two. What about all the animals? He hadn’t heard a dog bark or a bird sing once during the past few days. He could only imagine the increasingly outlandish explanations awaiting him back inside the store.

All such musings were forgotten as he found himself standing at the edge of the hole. The first image that came to mind was one of a monstrous throat or some other such orifice. The sides of the opening were a reddish brown—some sort of clay, here, in Florida?—and gouged as if by randomly wielded shovels and picks or by many years of scattered erosion. Like he’d been told, the damned thing was a good fifty feet across. Its far edge was less than twenty feet in front of the entrance to the McDonald’s there. Some of the business’s parking area had been devoured by the opening. And the smell... It reminded him of the hallucination he’d been subjected to by the insect corpses, of his descent into Hell. There was a strong odor of sulfur and decay carried upon the wisps of steam drifting upward. He found himself breathing through his shirt which he lifted up to cover his mouth and nose. The sun was making its way up the cloudless sky and the morning air was already heating up but it was even warmer here near the opening, so much so that Thomas noticed that he was starting to sweat rather profusely.

“You climbed out of that?!” he asked Gerald, his voice slightly muffled by his shirt, the very thought of it causing him to shudder.

“I sure did.”

“Wow.” It was all he could come up with for the moment. He was having no trouble imagining the bloodstorm and the bugs and the snakes all pouring forth from this very place. In fact, standing this close to it, it made all the sense in the world.

Feeling a moment’s inspiration, he bent down and grabbed a fist-sized piece of rubble near his foot, inched his feet right up to the edge and gave the rock a nice little underhanded toss into the hole. After it disappeared into the darkness below he listened intently for what must have been a full minute and never heard the stone hit bottom.

“All the way to Hell,” said Gerald. Thomas didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, but he’d been thinking the same thing.

The other people who’d been standing nearby came walking over. One of the men, a balding fellow wearing glasses who looked to Thomas like he would have been right at home working in a law office, said, “You should be careful. No telling what you might stir up down there by doing that.”

And, yes, that’s exactly what it sounded like, somebody moaning, whether in pain or pleasure or hunger it was hard to tell. The sound echoed as it was expelled from the hole, giving it a strange, multi-layered quality as if it came from multiple sources.

“We should probably get out of here,” Thomas heard someone say, one of the people who had been there when he arrived. It may have been one of the most intelligent ideas he had ever heard. He started to back away from the hole, keeping his eyes on the opening, not sure he wanted to let it out of sight lest whatever was down there reached the surface without his knowing and took him down from behind.

After moving back about ten steps he detected movement at the edge of the hole right where he’d been standing. A hand reached up and grabbed at the blacktop of the road that ended there. The fingers scrambled about for purchase then another hand came up followed by the head of a woman then her shoulders, torso, hips, legs and feet. She lay there for a moment as if gathering her strength then got up slowly like she was ill or exhausted. The most obvious detail about her was that she was naked. She was young, thin, her skin dirty and bruised in places, her long hair hanging limp and haggard down over her shoulders and breasts. The woman moaned and something else moaned from the pit behind her.

Other hands reached up from the hole. Other arms appeared, other heads and other naked bodies. It wasn’t long before a crowd of people had appeared. Ten of them. Twenty. Thirty. All of them bruised and battered to various degrees. All of them moaning.

“Margaret?” Thomas heard someone say. As he continued to back away from these newcomers, a man walked by him toward a gray haired woman who had just climbed up to the surface.

He took the woman in his arms and Thomas could hear the sound of weeping. The woman, Margaret, did nothing to console him. She just stood there, moaning. Then she opened her mouth wide and bit into the man’s neck. He screamed and tried to pull away but the woman wrapped her arms around him in a firm embrace. The man’s cries became louder and higher pitched as the woman pulled her face away, now bloodied around the mouth, a sizable chunk of meat held in her grinning maw.

“Lucius?” Thomas heard someone say behind him. Then someone else: “Elizabeth?” He turned and saw that a dozen or so people who’d spent the night at the Wal-Mart with him had gathered to witness the spectacle. They too had spotted loved ones among those who had emerged from the pit. Even after seeing what the old woman had done they still came forward, driven by an overriding desire to be reunited with those they had lost.