Jeff Jacobson - Growth

He pulled the table away from the wall, sliding it out slow about seven or eight inches. The metal studs on the center feet screeched as it was dragged across the cement.

She bent over the bodies. A man in his late forties who had been jammed right up under the bottom of the table blinked and opened his eyes. He blinked, but that was all; he didn’t move another muscle other than those around his eyes. Sandy suddenly recognized him as Randy, Elliot’s father. If he was down here, then… She refused to follow that line of thought any further.

Randy’s eyes rolled back and fluttered as if he was having a seizure.

A fat seven- or eight-year-old girl, her head stuck sideways in his armpit, also blinked and opened her one visible eye. More eyes, sunk into faces under the man and girl, began to blink.

Sandy looked back up at Randy and found that his eyes were staring right at her.

She stood up.

His eyes followed.

All of the eyes focused on her and the flashlight. Sandy found she was unable to move the light away. Their eyes weren’t blank, unfocused. They seemed horribly, horribly aware .

Sandy jumped back to stand next to Charlie. Her voice shook. “I think, I think they know. I think they are all awake, they can feel what is happening, but they can’t move.”

Charlie regarded the table for a moment. Nodded. “That… sucks.”

They found two more clusters of people as they moved deeper into the basement. They weren’t quite as big, and Sandy could see that Kevin was not a part of them. Still, she found people she knew, people she had seen in town, not only folks that she’d had to visit late night to calm down a fight or bust for pot, but people she’d seen in the Stop ’n Save, parents and children she’d met at Kevin’s school. It left her feeling raw, like her insides had been scraped and left in a steaming pile on the floor.

She didn’t want to leave them, but knew she had no choice. If she tried to say, “I’m going for help,” she knew it was a lie. Her only path was locating her son. She would find Kevin or die. If she found him, she would take him far, far away, and leave all this to someone else. If he had been infected, she would make that decision only when she found him.

When they climbed back out of the broken window, the sun was creeping toward the horizon. The shadows were getting longer; much like the fungal tendrils in the basement, you couldn’t see them moving, but they were getting bigger and longer, no question.

After Sandy and Charlie told Purcell what they had seen, he said, “That can’t be all of them. Look at all them chairs. A few of ’em went down there, but not everybody.”

“Yeah. And that’s not the only thing that’s bothering me,” Sandy said.

“It gets better?” Purcell asked.

“For a couple days now, we’ve been getting calls. Missing persons. Folks weren’t coming home after work out in the fields. People weren’t showing up for work. Lot of cranky wives thinking their husbands were out spending the rent on strippers.”

“They were probably right.”

“That’s what we thought. Hell, that’s what everybody thought. But what if they ended up like those people? And that was two days ago.”

“Maybe so. Either way, nothing we can do about it now. We need to figure out where everybody went so we can find your boy and get the fuck out of town. Getting tired of wearing this mask.”

Sandy walked up the street, past the stage, into the intersection of Main Street and Fifth Street. The pavement was littered with trumpets, saxophones, a few trombones, clarinets, and a single bass drum. Beyond that was another flatbed truck. The engine was still idling. A large, papier-mâché statue of a bird of prey with a huge, scowling head had been set up on the back as the falcon mascot for the high school.

Hundreds of people, gone.

They were infected and couldn’t have gone far. They sure as hell didn’t get into their cars and drive off. She didn’t think they were capable of getting farther than they could walk in five minutes, tops. They would look for sanctuary, for someplace to nest, someplace to gather, someplace dark.

She kicked one of the flutes in disgust. It went spinning away under the School Spirit flatbed, where it hit something and produced a cheerful ding. It didn’t sound like it had hit a wheel. Sandy bent over and saw that the flute had banged into a short crowbar. Just beyond that was a manhole cover.

The cover was off. The sewer was open.

Sandy straightened and looked down at the street beneath her feet. “I know where they are,” she called, and when Purcell and Charlie looked over, she pointed at the pavement. Charlie didn’t get it, but Purcell did. He started looking for another manhole cover, found it half a block down, on the other side of the Future Farmers of America truck. It was open as well.

Purcell sent Charlie back to the truck to collect his brothers and some flashlights.

While they waited, Sandy got into the School Spirit truck and pulled it forward, exposing the open manhole. She turned off the engine, climbed out, and joined Purcell in the center of the intersection. They looked down into the darkness.

Purcell said, “We find him down there, you know it’ll be too late to save him, right?”

Sandy didn’t say anything. If she said no, they both knew she would be wrong. And if she agreed, then she would be admitting that her son was probably dead.

Purcell said, gentle, “If you want, I can take care of him. Make sure he doesn’t suffer.”

Sandy met his eyes. “You touch my son and I will kill you.”

Purcell nodded. “Your call. I’m old enough to know that you never mess with a mama bear.”

Sandy didn’t bother waiting, and started down; she had her own flashlight and firearm and didn’t see the point. She carried the shotgun in her left hand and used her right on the cool iron rungs. The temperature dropped at least fifteen degrees as she descended beneath the surface of the street and even before she reached the bottom and saw anything, she knew in her heart that they had found everyone.

It still didn’t prepare her for the reality of actually seeing the twisted knots of bodies, stretching away as far as her flashlight could throw the beam. The brick sewer had been built in the shape of a tube, with curving walls and a trough running along the center of the bottom. She turned in a slow circle, flicking the flashlight beam over the small mountains of bodies, and saw with horror that she was in the middle of a junction, same as the intersection above. People were strewn throughout all four of the huge pipes. The sewer tunnels followed the streets, and Sandy realized that it would take her hours to search through the hundreds of bodies.

They weren’t all clustered together in one huge mass. Instead, ten or twelve people had curled tightly together, gathered in curious clumps, then four or five feet farther along, there was another mound of bodies. Sometimes a few of the heaps would be collected along the shallow trench that ran along the bottom, then several mounds would coalesce on one side before they drifted back to the other side. Sometimes it appeared that a few single bodies had laid down between the mounds, as if they were connecting one circle of bodies to the next. The whole tableau could almost be seen as a vine of some sort, growing along from one flower to another, culminating in a tight ring of clusters that encircled the sewer junction.

Sandy stood in the middle of this and felt despair crash over her shoulders like a tsunami. She would never find her son, not among all these bodies, down here in the dark. Her hands shook and she almost went to her knees.

Purcell climbed down, SPAS-15 strapped to his back, a Maglite duct-taped over the barrel. He splashed the light around and muttered, “Holy fuck,” under his breath. “Believe I’m gonna be writing a letter to the editor about this.”