Kealan Burke: Concrete Gods

Catherine began to weep. She jammed her knuckles into her mouth. She stepped forward and then back and then forward again, uncertain what to do but dreading the thought of watching him fall to his death before her eyes. "Oh God, Jack, what can I do?"

"N-nothing. Stay where you are. I'm going to try to make a jump for the steps."

The seven wooden steps leading to the basement door were only a few feet away, yet circumstance had made it seem an incredible distance.

Jack stood stock still, not breathing. He was little more than a silhouette framed by the lazy amber light drifting down to them from the bathroom beside the basement door. The floor had become a pane of ice, liable to break at the slightest move. Catherine's eyes were fixed on Jack's feet, willing them to float above the danger.

"Please be careful."

She thought he might have nodded but couldn't be sure.

"I'm going to go on the count of…"

The floor cracked again and this time a sliver of stone shot into the air and spanged! against the steaming boiler. Catherine ducked and wrapped her arms around her head. Jack yelped and tried to keep his balance.

"Oh shit… oh shit! "

"What can I do?" Catherine wailed; she was still dancing over and back, indecision tormenting her soul. "Please Jack, I have to do something."

"No!" he yelled back. "Just stay there. If I can make the stairs, you'll be able to jump across and I can help you from there. But for now, just stay still."

The room seemed to draw away from her; the doorway and the trembling outline of her husband pulling back. Now it was nothing more than a scene from some terrible dream. Catherine heard a cry in the distance. No, not a cry. Sirens! Police?

A spark of hope ignited in her chest. She began to whisper another prayer, hoping it would be heard and that they would live through this madness.

Jack edged toward the stairs. Another crack. Another step.

"Oh, no." A long breath.

And the floor caved in beneath him.

A startled cry, his body falling, here and then gone. Catherine rushing forward screaming, her caution forgotten. The floor rattled and jerked away from her. She slipped, wailing. The angry ground rose to collide with her face, shattering her nose and scissoring open her lips. Looking up from where she lay, she whimpered, confused, numb to the pain; tasting blood and dust. She saw her husband's face, and time slowed with malicious glee.

She watched a pit of deeper darkness yawn wide beneath him; saw Jack reaching to grab onto the sides of the hole but slipping, slipping, then salvation wrenched away from him. She saw his eyes widen, mouth moving, struggling to form a scream as the edge of the hole leapt upward to meet him, his face twisted into that horrifying awareness that accompanies impending death after horrible agony; and then the ragged edge, joining flesh in a fixed battle for dominance. The bricks and stone shearing away the skin of his handsome face, her loving husband's beautiful face, grinding through bone and shattering the very map upon which his beauty was drawn.

And finally the flutter of his hair as he sank below the edge, leaving a crimson signature on the concrete behind. A sobbing gurgle and nothing more. The ensuing silence was ephemeral; it lasted only long enough for realization to dawn on the bloodied, shocked woman lying on the floor, her fingertips inches away from the hole, that she was next.

The quiet, mere seconds, hurt her already pounding head. She deigned to break it with a scream of anguish that echoed off the still-quivering walls. They breathed a chuckle of dust in response.

"Why? Why is this happening?" she cried, weakening. She dropped into shock, her blood turning to smeared paste in the dirt.

The city answered in the only way it knew how.

Upstairs beneath the kitchen sink, Perry cowered and shook, deafened by the screams of an outraged deity.

The house swallowed itself.

"Walt, are you seeing this?"

Inside the police cruiser, forced into stopping with the front wheels mounted on the curb, the real wheels garroted by broken glass, Brad Haines stared out the windscreen at the miasma Lake View Estates had become.

Beside him, his partner, Walt Greenwood, nodded silently. "I am, but I'm hoping any minute now you're going to tell me I'm asleep."

Lake View Estates: Stanchion of the wealthy, complete with private pool, was now nothing more than a mass of rubble and bodies. The two policemen had been forced to sit stunned as a buttress the size of an Oldsmobile toppled and crushed to death Senator Mayfield and his wife and daughter. What little water remained in the swimming pool was now crimson and host to innumerable floating corpses. The half-mile long semi-circle of three and four story houses now looked like a war zone, blood and smoke drifting into the breeze to summon flies.

The palaces of the rich were tumbling.

"What do we do?" Haines asked. His face was pale, mouth agape. His gaze was still glued to the apocalyptic scene beyond the windshield.

Greenwood had to struggle to keep his voice calm. "It doesn't look like there's much we can do, but getting our asses out of here sounds like a reasonable course of action at this point, wouldn't you say?"

He moved his hand to the door handle but Haines stopped him. "Wait, what in God's name is that ?"

Haines was pointing up at the sky, over to their left where the horizon was reddened by fire and seething. Greenwood looked and his eyes went wide. The blood drained from his face, leaving nothing but the broken capillaries visible on his drinker's nose.

"What the hell?" he gasped. "Is that a fucking octopus, or something?"

Off in the distance, above the fires and toppled citadels of Delaware, enormous white tendrils reached far into the sky; writhing and snapping, forcing the smoke to shift to accommodate their very real presence. Chunks of stone and glass tumbled from one as it erupted to ricochet away as another appeared; each rose up as if greedily sniffing the filthy air.

Greenwood's panicked mind managed to register that there were eight of them but then his partner's fumbling hand on his shoulder, beckoning him to look in the opposite direction, immediately proved him wrong.

From the ruins of Lake View, three more of the creatures sprouted, sending debris flying in all directions, rising into the air and twitching…

"Oh my God, Walt. What are those things?"

Of course Greenwood had no idea, either. He doubted any sane person on the planet did. Up close, the things looked like oddly slimy, bleached redwoods without limbs; they were swaying liquidly to and fro, like something from a snake charmer's darkest nightmare.

"Jesus, Walt. We have to get out of here."

After a quick look in the rearview mirror confirmed his worst fears, Greenwood sighed and barked a nervous laugh. "Sure, but to where? The damn things are popping up all over the place. Where can we go?"

Eyes brimming with panic, Haines spun around and looked out the back window of the cruiser. More monstrously tall shadows were swaying at the end of the street.

"Oh, fuck me ."

"Somebody damned sure has."

Greenwood stared at the shattered street in front of them and unclipped his holster. Haines' frenetic flinching ceased for a moment as he watched his partner withdraw his gun.

"What are you doing?"

Greenwood shook his head, eyes watery, and nodded at Haines. "There's no way out, buddy."

As if on cue, the hollow in the road ahead of them, the road that had once led to a beautiful row of houses coughed smoke. The tip of something red-gray and slimy began to wriggle free of the debris. The ground rumbled, the police car squeaked and groaned. Greenwood shoved the barrel of the gun into his mouth.