Blue World (8 page)

At the intersection of Baylor and Ashley streets, a police car had smashed into an oak tree. The windshield was layered with leaves, but Brad saw the hunched-over bony thing in the police uniform sitting behind the wheel. And the most terrible thing was that its skeletal hands were still gripping that wheel, trying to guide the car. Whatever had happened--radiation, chemicals, or the devil striding through the streets of his town--had taken place in an instant. These people had been stripped to bones in the blink of a cold eye, and again Brad felt himself balanced precariously on the edge of madness.

“Ask the p’liceman to find Mommy and Daddy!” Kelly called from behind him.

“There’s a police station on Main Street,” he told her. “That’s where we’re going to go. Okay?”

She didn’t answer, and Brad set off.

They passed silent houses. Near the intersection of Baylor and Hilliard, where the traffic light was still obediently blinking yellow, a skeleton in jogging gear lay sprawled on the ground. Its Nike sneakers were too small for Brad’s feet, too large for Kelly’s. They kept going, and Kelly cried for a few minutes but then she hugged her doll tighter and stared straight ahead with eyes swollen almost shut.

And then Brad heard it, and his heart pounded with fear again.

Off in the fog somewhere.

The sound of a phone ringing.

Brad stopped. The phone kept on ringing, its sound thin and insistent.

“Somebody’s calling,” Kelly said, and Brad realized she was standing right beside him. “My tel’phone number is

-6949.“

He took a step forward. Another, and another. Through the fog ahead of him he could make out the shape of a pay phone there on the corner of Dayton Street.

The telephone kept on ringing, demanding an answer.

Slowly Brad approached the pay phone. He stared at the receiver as if it might be a cobra rearing back to strike. He did not want to answer it, but his arm lifted and his hand reached toward that receiver, and he knew that if he heard that silken breathing and the metallic recorded voice on the other end, he might start screaming and never be able to stop.

His hand closed around it. Started to lift it up.

“Hey, buddy!” someone said. “I wouldn’t answer that if I was you.”

Startled almost out of his skin, Brad whirled around.

A young man was sitting on the curb across the street, smoking a cigarette, his legs stretched out before him. “I wouldn’t,” he cautioned.

Brad was oddly shocked by the sight of a flesh-and-blood man, as if he’d already forgotten what one looked like. The young man was maybe in his early twenties, wearing scruffy jeans and a dark green shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had sandy-brown hair that hung to his shoulders, and he looked to have a couple of days’ growth of beard. He pulled on the cigarette and said, “Don’t pick it up, man. Doom City.”

“What?”

“I said… Doom City.” The young man stood up; he was about six feet, thin and lanky. His workboots crunched leaves as he crossed the street, and Brad saw that he had a patch on the breast pocket of his shirt that identified him as a Sanitation Department workman. As the young man got closer, Kelly pressed her body against Brad’s legs and tried to hide behind the Smurf doll. “Let it ring,” the young man said. His eyes were pale green, deep-set, and dazed. “If you were to pick that damned thing up… Doom City.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“Because it is what it is. Somebody’s tryin‘ to find all the strays. Tryin’ to run us all down and finish the job. Sweep us all into the gutter, man. Close the world over our heads. Doom City.” He blew a plume of smoke into the air that hung between them, unmoving.

“Who are you? Where’d you come from?”

“Name’s Neil Spencer. Folks call me Spence. I’m a…” He paused for a few seconds, staring along Baylor Street. “I

used to be a garbage man. Till today, that is. Till I got to work and found skeletons sitting in the garbage trucks. That was about three hours ago, I guess. I’ve been doin‘ a lot of walking. Lot of poking around.“ His gaze rested on the little girl, then back to Brad. The pay phone was still ringing, and Brad felt the scream kicking behind his teeth. ”You’re the first two I’ve seen with skin,“ Spence said. ”I’ve been sittin’ over there for the last twenty minutes or so. Just waitin‘ for the world to end, I guess.“

“What… happened?” Brad asked. Tears burned his eyes. “My God… my God… what happened?”

“Something tore,” Spence said tonelessly. “Ripped open. Something won the fight, and I don’t think it was who the preachers said was gonna win. I don’t know… maybe Death got tired of waitin‘. Same thing happened to the dinosaurs. Maybe it’s happenin’ to people now.”

“There’s got to be other people somewhere!” Brad shouted. “We can’t be the only ones!”

“I don’t know about that.” Spence drew on his cigarette one last time and flicked the butt into the street. “All I know is, somethin‘ came in the night and had a feast, and when it was done it licked the plate clean. Only it’s still hungry.” He nodded toward the ringing phone. “Wants to suck on a few more bones. Like I said, man… Doom City. Doom City here, there, and everywhere.”

The phone gave a final shrilling shriek and went silent.

Brad heard the child crying again, and he put his hand on her head, stroked her hair to calm her. He realized he was doing it with his bloody hand. “We’ve… we’ve got to go somewhere… got to do something…”

“Do what?” Spence asked laconically. “Go where? I’m open to suggestions, man.”

From the next block came the distant sound of a telephone ringing. Brad stood with his bloody hand on Kelly’s head, and he didn’t know what to say.

“I want to take you somewhere, my friend,” Spence told him. “Want to show you something real interestin‘. Okay?”

Brad nodded, and he and the little girl followed Neil Spencer north along Dayton Street, past more silent houses and buildings.

Spence led them about four blocks to a 7-Eleven store, where a skeleton in a yellow dress splotched with blue and purple flowers lolled behind the cash register with a

National Enquirer open on its jutting knees. “There you go,” Spence said softly. He plucked a pack of Luckies off the display of cigarettes and nodded toward the small TV set on the counter. “Take a look at that, and tell me what we ought to do.”

The TV set was on. It was a color set, and Brad realized after a long, silent moment that the channel was tuned to one of those twenty-four-hour news networks. The picture showed two skeletons--one in a gray suit and the other in a wine-red dress--leaning crookedly over a news desk at center camera; the woman had placed her hand on the man’s shoulder, and yellow sheets of the night’s news were scattered all over the desktop. Behind the two figures were three or four out-of-focus skeletons, frozen forever at their desks as well.

Spence lit another cigarette. An occasional spark of static shot across the unmoving TV picture. “Doom City,” Spence said. “Not only here, man. It’s everywhere. See?”

The telephone behind the counter suddenly started ringing, and Brad put his hands to his ears and screamed.

The phone’s ringing stopped.

Brad lowered his hands, his breathing as rough and hoarse as a trapped animal’s.

He looked down at Kelly Burch, and saw that she was smiling.

“It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to answer. I found you, didn’t I?”

Brad whispered, “Wha--”

The little girl giggled, and as she continued to giggle, the laugh changed, grew in intensity and darkness, grew in power and evil until it became a triumphant roar that shook the windows of the 7-Eleven store. “DOOM CITY!” the thing with pigtails shrieked, and as the mouth strained open, the eyes became silver, cold, and dead, and from that awful crater of a mouth shot a blinding bolt of blue-white lightning that hit Neil Spencer and seemed to spin him like a top, throwing him off his feet and headlong through the 7Eleven’s plate-glass window. He struck the pavement on his belly, and as he tried to get up again Brad Forbes saw that the flesh was dissolving from the young man’s bones, falling away in chunks like dried-up tree bark.

Spence made a garbled moaning sound, and Brad went through the store’s door with such force that he almost tore it from its hinges. His feet slivered with glass, Brad ran past Spence and saw the other man’s skull grinning up at him as the body writhed and twitched.

“Can’t get away!” the thing behind him shouted. “Can’t! Can’t! Can’t!”

Brad looked back over his shoulder, and that was when he saw the lightning burst from her gaping mouth and hurtle through the broken window at him. He flung himself to the pavement, tried to crawl under a parked car.

Something hit him, covered him over like an ocean wave, and he heard the monster shout in a voice like the peal of thunder. He was blinded and stunned for a few seconds, but there was no pain… just a needles-and-pins prickling settling deep into his bones.

Brad got up, started running again. And as he ran he saw the flesh falling from his hands, saw pieces drifting down from his face; fissures ran through his legs, and as the flesh fell away he saw his own bones underneath.

“DOOM CITY!” he heard the monster calling. “DOOM CITY!”

Brad stumbled; he was running on bones, and had left the flesh of his feet behind him on the pavement. He fell, began to tremble and contort.

“I’m cold,” he heard himself moan. “I’m cold…”

She awakened with the memory of thunder in her bones.

The house was quiet. The alarm clock hadn’t gone off. Saturday, she realized. No work today. A rest day. But Lord, what a nightmare she’d had! It was fading now, all jumbled up and incoherent. There’d been a thunderstorm last night --she remembered waking up and seeing lightning flash. But whatever the nightmare had been, she couldn’t recall now; she thought she remembered Brad saying something too, but now she didn’t know what it was…

That light… so strange. Not like June light. More like… yes, like winter light.

Sarah got out of bed and walked across the room. She pushed aside the white curtain and peered out, squinting.

A gray fog hung in the trees and over the roofs of the houses on Baylor Street. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and Sarah Forbes said, “Brad? Honey? Take a look at this.”

He didn’t reply, nor did he stir. She glanced at him, saw the wave of his dark hair above the sheet that was pulled up over him like a shroud. “Brad?” she said again, and took a step toward the bed.

And suddenly Sarah remembered what he’d said last night, when she’d sat up in a sleepy daze to watch the lightning crackle.

I’m cold, I’m cold.

She grasped the edge of the sheet and pulled it back.

Nightcrawlers

“Hard rain coming down,” Cheryl said, and I nodded in agreement.

Through the diner’s plate-glass windows, a dense curtain of rain flapped across the Gulf gas pumps and continued across the parking lot. It hit Big Bob’s with a force that made the glass rattle like uneasy bones. The red neon sign that said big bob’s! diesel fuel! eats! sat on top of a high steel pole above the diner so the truckers on the interstate could see it. Out in the night, the red-tinted rain thrashed in torrents across my old pickup truck and Cheryl’s baby-blue Volkswagen.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose that storm’ll either wash some folks in off the interstate or we can just about hang it up.” The curtain of rain parted for an instant, and I could see the treetops whipping back and forth in the woods on the other side of Highway 47. Wind whined around the front door like an animal trying to claw its way in. I glanced at the electric clock on the wall behind the counter. Twenty minutes before nine. We usually closed up at ten, but tonight--with tornado warnings in the weather forecast --I was tempted to turn the lock a little early. “Tell you what,” I said. “If we’re empty at nine, we skedaddle. ‘Kay?”

“No argument here,” she said. She watched the storm for a moment longer, then continued putting newly washed coffee cups, saucers, and plates away on the stainless-steel shelves.

Lightning flared from west to east like the strike of a burning bullwhip. The diner’s lights flickered, then came back to normal. A shudder of thunder seemed to come right up through my shoes. Late March is the beginning of tornado season in south Alabama, and we’ve had some whoppers spin past here in the last few years. I knew that Alma was at home, and she understood to get into the root cellar right quick if she spotted a twister, like that one we saw in ‘82 dancing through the woods about two miles from our farm.

“You got any love-ins planned this weekend, hippie?” I asked Cheryl, mostly to get my mind off the storm and to rib her too.

She was in her late thirties, but I swear that when she grinned she could’ve passed for a kid. “Wouldn’t you like to know, redneck?” she answered; she replied the same way to all my digs at her. Cheryl Lovesong--and I

know that couldn’t have been her real name--was a mighty able waitress, and she had hands that were no strangers to hard work. But I didn’t care that she wore her long silvery-blond hair in Indian braids with hippie headbands, or came to work in tie-dyed overalls. She was the best waitress who’d ever worked for me, and she got along with everybody just fine--even us rednecks. That’s what I am, and proud of it: I drink Rebel Yell whiskey straight, and my favorite songs are about good women gone bad and trains on the long track to nowhere. I keep my wife happy. I’ve raised my two boys to pray to God and to salute the flag, and if anybody don’t like it he can go a few rounds with Big Bob Clayton.

Cheryl would come right out and tell you she used to live in San Francisco in the late sixties, and that she went to love-ins and peace marches and all that stuff. When I reminded her it was 1984 and Ronnie Reagan was president, she’d look at me like I was walking cow-flop. I always figured she’d start thinking straight when all that hippiedust blew out of her head.

Alma said my tail was going to get burnt if I ever took a shine to Cheryl, but I’m a fifty-five-year-old redneck who stopped sowing his wild seed when he met the woman he married, more than thirty years ago.