The Hell Season (17 page)

“I’m sure his feelings served him well in the past. He was involved in a war, after all. Sometimes your feelings are all that save your ass, I would imagine.”

“Aren’t we in a war now?”

Gerald paused to consider this. “I guess we are at that even if we’re not sure exactly who—or what—the enemy is. I can assure you and your friend, however, that it isn’t me. It isn’t anyone here. We’re all in this together. Whatever
this
is. Working against one another accomplishes nothing. To survive, we all have to cooperate. I think everyone here understands that. At least I hope so.”

“I hope so too,” said Thomas with a sigh. “Because you’re right. We’ve got enough trouble without there being dissension in our ranks.”

“Our ranks, huh? Spoken like a true soldier.”

It was Thomas’s turn to smile. “I’m a quick learner, I guess.”

Gerald was about to say something else when a great roaring sound erupted from outside the building and the ground started to shake.

*

Growing up near Pittsburgh, the worst that Mother Nature ever threw at us was the occasional heat wave in the summer and the blizzard one could expect at least once every winter. As a child, neither of these occurrences ever seemed to have much of a negative impact on me. The latter, in fact, was a much celebrated event for it almost inevitably meant that there would be school closings and I—along with my friends—would get to enjoy an unanticipated little vacation. I can remember waking up on certain mornings, pulling back the curtains of my bedroom window and seeing the snow falling heavily, the ground already deep with it. Then I’d race out to the living room and turn on the radio, listening as the list of closings was read. There were few feelings of exhilaration to rival those that came when the name of the school I attended came issuing from those speakers. Within moments, I’d be on the phone calling my friends, planning the day’s sledding and various other winter related activities. My mom would have to remind me to eat breakfast and shower before said activities were undertaken, such was my level of excitement. Of course, not hearing one’s school announced among those that were closed for the day had an equivalent emotional attachment to it, although a much more somber one.

After I moved to Florida and started a family, I got to experience a hurricane for the first time. When word of its approach was announced, Julia and I did like most of our neighbors and used sheets of plywood to board up our windows. We stocked up on water and supplies just in case the storm turned out to be “the big one”—like hurricane Andrew which wreaked havoc throughout South Florida—and we were without power for days if not weeks. Well, as it turned out this particular storm was not “the big one.” It was a category three, did not hit us directly but still dumped plenty of rain on us and whipped up some nasty winds for more than a day. Locally, no major damage was suffered by the time it was all over but there were a few moments—like when I saw a small, uprooted tree and pieces of somebody’s lawn furniture blow across the front yard—that made me a little nervous. Since that first hurricane, I’ve experienced a few more, one that was a bit more powerful, none of which I would classify as a serious danger to either my family or myself.

The good thing about heat waves and blizzards and powerful storms, I’ve come to realize, is that they usually announce their approach. They have a certain predictability to them. One has only to turn on the news to be properly warned and to take the appropriate precautions. Not so with an earthquake. They can come on without a moment’s notice, destroy streets and buildings and lives in mere seconds. The very thought of the ground beneath one’s feet turning treacherous is an alarming one to be certain. There is nowhere to run or hide from such an occurrence. That’s why I’ve never had a great urge to live in or really to even visit certain places in California. As a teenager, I did my research, trust me. I read the horror stories about people swallowed by sudden fissures in the earth or trapped beneath the rubble of fallen buildings. No thanks. I’ll take my predictable catastrophes any day. Sure, there are always plenty of things to worry about no matter where you live. But the one thing you don’t have to think about while living in Florida is what to do in case an earthquake strikes.

That is until the day came when the world changed and just about anything became possible.

Anything at all
.

*

Thomas was lucky, he realized later, after the roaring and the rumbling and the shaking subsided. They all were. The building, constructed to meet hurricane code, certainly, but never with an earthquake in mind, survived the chaos relatively unscathed. Shelves were toppled. A few windows shattered. Ceiling tiles fell like leaves on a windy autumn day. Some lighting fixtures crashed to the ground. But the roof did not collapse and no one was seriously injured. A few bumps and bruises and minor lacerations. Nothing that Angie and her cadre of caregivers couldn’t handle. All in all, the quake lasted only about thirty seconds or so. At the time, however, it had certainly seemed much longer than that to Thomas.

After Gerald helped him to his feet, the two of them and at least a dozen others walked toward the front of the store and out through the exit doors to see if the generators or any of the surrounding buildings had suffered damage. Ron was already out there, arms folded across his chest, looking toward the road and the great hole in the earth from which so much trouble had recently issued.

Lying in the road, so large that it nearly blocked the entire view of the repair shop where Ron and Tanya had been staying, was a giant worm, its tail only a short distance from the great hole in the ground from which it had obviously only just emerged.

“Well, I guess we know the source of the quake,” said Gerald.

The worm had to have been a good hundred feet in length. Its skin was a pinkish color, like that of a common earthworm. Its girth was more or less constant along its length until it reached the identically rounded ends at head and tail, making it difficult to truly know if one end was, in fact, the head and the other the tail. Its flesh was wet and glistening, almost oily in appearance, and steam could be seen rising along the entire length of its body and dissipating into the air above.

After about ten minutes of observing the worm’s immobility, Ron said, “Aw, fuck this,” and started walking over toward the thing. Gerald and Thomas exchanged a look then followed a short distance behind. Thomas could hear others hesitantly following them.

Ron stopped about twenty feet from the worm somewhere near the middle of its length. Thomas and Gerald came up to stand on either side of him. From here they could discern a low gurgling sound emanating from the creature. Also, this close to the thing there was a noticeable stench one would associate with an open sewer.

After moving up next to it, he reached out and placed his hand on the creature’s hide, jerked it back in surprise. “Man, that’s hot.” He stood there for a few moments, not saying anything, just staring at the wall of glistening flesh before him. Then he waved Thomas and Gerald forward. “Come check this out.”

Thomas nodded as a heavy feeling of dread settled over him. He turned around and pushed his way back through the crowd that had gathered nearby, people asking him what was wrong. He couldn’t find the words to speak, to let them know what he had seen, or thought he’d seen, suspended within the presumably watery innards of the great slumbering monster. There were figures in there, human sized figures floating inside the worm, just visible through that slightly less than opaque skin. As he’d watched, Thomas had seen one of the figures spastically wave its arm. And where the face of the figure directly before him was located he could have sworn that he’d seen a mouth, stretched wide in a scream. There was only one assumption he could make, that these were the people, his fellow survivors, who had succumbed to the illness and had not been resurrected. Until now. The very thought of it sickened him to the core of his being. And he felt an even greater sense of gratitude for Angie and the others who had not let him die, who had allowed him to escape this latest torment.

*

Three days went by before he realized that he’d been wrong.

As each day passed, the worm’s flesh grew steadily more transparent and its stench grew ever more repellent. Maybe the heat had something to do with it, Thomas mused. By now the midday temperatures were hovering around a hundred and ten degrees with oppressive regularity. Or maybe it was exposure to the sun itself, the great creature not used to life—or whatever semblance of life it still held onto—above the surface of the Earth. Whatever the case, the humanoid figures within the worm became increasingly discernible as the days passed. It became ever more obvious that they were not, in fact, the bodies—dead or alive—of those who had been killed by the recent plague. No, the figures floating within the body of the worm could only be described as
demonic
in appearance. And they were growing at an alarming rate.

The figures were tall and thin with long heads, pointed chins, and the beginnings of what were obviously horns growing from the top of the skull. The skin appeared to be a dark red color. From the rear it could be seen that each of the creatures had a tail emerging from the small of the back. What looked like a very thick intestine wrapped around a bone like a human spine ran nearly the entire length of the worm. Smaller, fleshy tubes branched off from the intestine and were attached to every one of the creatures at the base of the neck. The unborn things flailed about on occasion, like human fetuses trapped within the womb.

“Good Lord,” said Gerald as he and Thomas and Ron stood near the worm in the sweltering heat. “They’ve grown at least a foot in only a few days. I wonder how much bigger they’ll get. And what will happen when they stop growing.”

Thomas shuddered, feeling a chill in spite of the cold. “I think we should get away from here. I mean all of us, move somewhere that might be a bit safer, at least until whatever is going to happen happens.”

Ron was nodding in agreement. “A great idea if I’ve ever heard one. There have to be a few other locations where we can lay low for a while. Care to accompany me on a little reconnaissance mission, take a look at our options?” He directed the question at Thomas, made it clear that Gerald was excluded from the invitation.

Gerald only shrugged when Thomas looked his way.

“Alright,” said Thomas. “Give me fifteen minutes and we’ll meet in the parking lot.”

Back inside the Wal-Mart, Thomas went to check on Dana. She was sitting on her bed, feet on the floor, dressed in a t-shirt, sweatpants and fuzzy slippers, sipping at a cup of soup.

“I’m going to take off with Ron for a while,” Thomas told her. “I’ll be back before dark, okay?”

She just stared at him for a moment then returned her concentration to the plastic cup in her hands. Thomas hadn’t really expected a response from her—she hadn’t, as of yet, uttered a single word since emerging from the coma—but he figured that trying to engage her in some form of conversation was worth a try. She couldn’t stay silent forever, could she?

“Alright, I’ll see you later,” Thomas offered as he walked over to his own sleeping area, found some shorts and a light shirt, a bottle of SPF 30 sunscreen, then went off to the bathroom to change out of his long pants and the shirt he’d been wearing which was already damp with perspiration. Five minutes later he was in the passenger seat of the SUV Ron was driving. They headed east past the worm then around the great hole in the ground and off toward where they knew a few other strip malls were located. Some of the businesses there, a certain grocery store in particular, had been looted in days past. Now it was time to see if any of these places would be suitable for housing close to a hundred people, a number of them still comatose from the terrible disease that had left them all but dead to the world around them.

“You still don’t trust him, do you?” asked Thomas as he turned on the radio and flipped through the channels on the off chance that somebody somewhere was broadcasting. All he got was static.