Jon Fore - Black Water

He turned to his portable shortwave radio and began tuning through different frequencies. He hit on a number of different conversations and paused at each. The happenings here in Black Water appeared to be only happening in Black Water. None of the ham radio operators talked about it and the topics they did discuss where mundane and nerdy at best. This had to be a localized situation, but Stan reasoned that Black Water could be ground zero for a global event. It would be best if he just holed up here, protected himself, and waited it out. The shooting down there had to stop at some point.

The police and fire scanner had gone quiet some time ago. The last thing he heard was dispatch screaming to a patrol officer about Bill going crazy or something. It did not surprise Stan. Everyone knew Billy was a bit off kilter; not quit right in the head. It was bound to happen. Stan was surprised they even let him drive the big snowplow; the guy was so utterly stupid. However, in this crazy world, everyone seemed to have a place, even the borderline retarded. Stan was certain someone somewhere was benefiting from the dullard’s labor, probably that rotund mother of his. Someone had to feed that thing.

A sound came from the woods beyond the open door. Something large had entered the forest or come down from the mountain. It was most likely a white tailed buck looking for love, or even a bear seeking out the happenings below. Stan gripped the mounted AK-47 and trained it towards the mantrap. If it, whatever it was, happened in, it would not get far. As he readied himself, his scanner began to crackle softly, distantly, as if his squelch was set wrong and the volume was much too low.

The scanner eventually gave up on the signal and moved forward through the channels again. It paused for a second on dead air, and Stan picked it up to read the dial. It was the police band. Someone had opened their microphone and was saying nothing. Stan began to feel a dread pour over him, perhaps someone was playing with the radio of a dead cop, maybe a child.

“Is anyone there?” a voice whispered over the radio. It was strained and whispered but clearly masculine. Then the voice snickered lightly, “Anyone? Can anyone hear me?”

Movement sounded just near the door, and Stan put the radio down to return to his vigilance on the rifle. Something was about to enter the mantrap, and he needed to be ready.

“Stan!” the radio barked, and he almost squeezed off a round. He looked down at the radio in disbelief; it had stopped on Channel 000000.

“That’s impossible,” he said softly as something entered the mantrap. Stan leaned into the rifle and took aim on the shape before he realized what it was he was looking at. Before him stood Mildred Pierce, owner and sole employee of the Dainty Dots Day Care Center. She was nude but for a number of tiny corpses, hung from tiny hangmen’s nooses tied around her own throat. Her face had become bloated and purple, her tongue protruding, black in the low light. Her body violated many times by bullets, which shattered some of the tiny corpses as well. With all of the wounds, no blood spilled from the holes; she looked to have completely bled out.

The creature shambled forward, navigating the mantrap in a stilted clumsy manor, her child-corpse clothing swaying around her like strands of beads. Stan, prepared for people to destroy themselves, most likely in a very violent way, was not ready for Mrs. Pierce’s entrance. She loved children dearly and usually bored people with her stories and impromptu lectures on child rearing. To have even thought of her with a dead child was near blasphemous. She turned the first corner of the mantrap.

“Hi, Stan…” the voice hissed over the radio. “We have come to collect you…” This last part was in the voices of many children, distant and sad but gravely determined.

Stan suddenly wondered if he had gone crazy, and if so, would the courts forgive him the killing of Mrs. Pierce? He fired the rifle.

The bullet entered Mrs. Pierce in the chest and performed its acrobatic tumble before exiting in an explosion of bloodless flesh. Mrs. Pierce stumbled a bit but soon continued, so he fired again. This time he struck her in the belly, where the bullet pulverized her spine and jutted fragments of the white structure through the air. Mrs. Pierce stopped as the weight of the tiny corpses hung from her neck eased the top part of her body sickeningly backwards, allowing the tiny bodies to strike the floor. Now Mrs. Pierce was looking behind her, and her legs bent in determination to reach him. She started walking again, dragging the meat tied around her neck, her pasty gray legs trembling with the strain.

“You mother-hating bastard!” the children’s voices screeched over the radio in a hellish chorus.

Stan fired again, the bile in his throat reaching his mouth, the urge to vomit almost too much to aim. The round struck Mrs. Pierce in the hip, shattering that bone and collapsing the legs together. It stopped again and wobbled before falling to the ground.

“You killed us! You shit fucker!” the children screamed. “Now we have to go… Captain Black gets to takes us…” The voices began to sob and scream over the impossible channel locked on by the scanner.

Stan switched the radio off quickly and began to gag. Some twenty bodies now littered his porch, one of them still jerking and digging with its heels. This is not how he pictured it—men with guns trying to force him to give up or mindless, drug-crazed thieves shooting everyone and taking whatever they liked—not a nurturing mother-figure adorned in the hung corpses of her students coming to “collect” him.

Sounds came from the outside again, the sound of many things moving in many different directions. The gunfire was becoming louder and more distinct. Stan could almost guess the caliber of each weapon used, if it was a rifle or a handgun, and knew the battle lines were drawing closer. He shoved all of his small portable radios and his laptop in a ditty bag and lowered that down the hatch and into his shelter. He then staffed the AK-47 again, this time slipping the illegally installed switch to the full auto position that was not even marked on the side of the rifle.

People, one after another, sometimes in pairs, began rushing through the mantrap, all of them armed, some even shooting widely at him in a stark, guttural rage. Stan fired back, mowing them down best as he could, dropping some ten or fifteen before they began to bunch up at the doorway. There, they began to kill each other, clubbing or shooting in their rampage to get into the house.

What bothered Stan the most was that these were not some form of walking dead, these were living people driven to some madness or rage they could not control. They bled and died on his porch, people he knew, people he had seen before, some he had never met in his lonely job and life style. When he could take the carnage no more, he went through his mental supplies list then dropped himself through the hatch and locked it with the rebar locking arm.

He sat in the darkness next to his bag and listened to the combat above. Eventually, one of them made it to the AK and began spending the remaining rounds in the clip. Others were trying to open the hatch, pounding on it with rocks, clubs, or whatever in an attempt to reach him. Stan had come to know fear, fear of people instead of his normal hatred of them. They were mad and self destructive, but why so bent on killing him he could not say.

He dragged the bag into his makeshift datacenter and hooked the laptop up to the telescope cables. He began panning around the town, looking for some sign of hope or end to whatever was happening. What he saw was dilapidated buildings, some just burnt out shells, others weathered and aged in the glow of the streetlights. It was as if the town stood abandoned for many years and was now the place of ghosts and legends. All along the streets drifted a mist of deep gray; heavy smoke from the fires he was sure.