Jon Fore - Black Water

“I don’t have anything under these…” Ethan began.

“Take them off now or I am leaving!” she threatened.

“Alright, relax. Here.” He unzipped the front and let them drop to his hips. “See? Nothing!”

“Drop them all the way!”

“I don’t… Fine.” He dropped them to the floor and shrugged his shoulders at her.

“Turn around.”

Ethan did as he was told, if not a bit quickly. “Okay?”

“Yeah, fine. You can get dressed. Nice birth mark by the way.”

“Yeah, thanks,” he replied dryly as he zipped the front of his coveralls. “Did you bring food?”

Shannon let the gun drop to her side. “No, and you’ll be glad I didn’t when we get out of here.”

“Oh, why? Never mind, let’s just go. Are you alone?”

“Yeah. Come on,” Shannon started back down the passage.

Ethan rushed to catch up with her, and suddenly saw the nightmare around him. “Oh my God…”

“It gets a lot worse,” Shannon quipped back as she continued.

“Why are we going so fast?” Ethan asked, still a bit sore from his trek to the Brighton house and the nightmare below.

“There are things in here I don’t want to meet again.”

“Like what?” Ethan enquired as they entered the stairwell.

“When we are outside, we can talk. We have to get out of here.”

“Yeah, alright.”

Ethan followed her over the empty elevator shaft, through the hallway, and into the reception area. Here he cursed under his breath wetly then dry heaved nothing onto the floor. Shannon took his arm forcibly and led him over the remains of the nurse and into the cold grayness of the outside. Ethan heaved again, this time bringing up some liquid from his empty stomach, which he spat to the ground.

“How do we get out of this town?” Shannon asked while keeping her eyes locked on the now aged hospital.

“I thought you would know,” Ethan replied around a mouth too full of spit.

“Don’t you live here?”

“No, I don’t, actually. I thought you did.”

“I might,” Shannon said under her breath.

“You don’t know?”

“I can’t remember much of anything, past last night.”

“Great. Now what do we do?” Ethan sounded exasperated.

“Find a map, a car, and get the fuck out of here.”

“So you don’t even know if you live in this town? How do you know your name?”

“I found my wallet.”

“Oh.”

“Can we go now?”

“Are you hurt? There is blood in your hair and on your face. What happened?” He sounded genuinely concerned for her.

Shannon turned on him angrily. “They tried to rape me to death, alright? I don’t remember a fucking thing before that!”

“Are you hurt?” Ethan asked again, trying not to show shock at what this girl had just shouted at him.

“No, just sore.”

“Let’s get to a drug store and get you cleaned up. I need some shoes, also.”

“So you started all this?”

Ethan looked up and down the street, looking for some sign of a grocery or drugstore. “I’m not sure. We can talk about it over a Twinkie; I’m starved.”

Without another word, Shannon started down the street with Ethan in tow.

In a cave at the base of the Black Water Mountain, a large pool of water stirred and then eased a thin tendril of itself from the confines of its shore, gently out of the cave’s opening, infesting the forest with its wicked nature. For the first time in centuries, Black Water Mountain began to run with black water, like blood from some ancient wound.

The pair walked slowly, watchfully down the street lined with ruined and burnt shops and offices. To Ethan, most of the town was like a large strip mall that stuttered. There were no high-rise buildings, at least none taller than the four-story courthouse, and all of the shops were one or two floors, some with apartments and others with offices. It was more like a concentration of suburbia in the middle of wilderness and farms than a real town.

Shannon had no particular opinion about Black Water; it was a town like many others. Because she seemed instinctively to know how to get around the place, she must have lived here at one point…and for some time. She was not the type of person to go searching every street and road near her home, but discovered them as needed and when time allowed. Shannon reasoned she must have lived here for at least a couple of years.

The road curved a bit and then sloped downward and into the parking lot of some small store. Before it stood a large neon sign slowing rotating, which read ‘Sir Speedy Convenience, the store with hours you keep…’ on both sides. The obligatory Bud and Bud Light ads were stuck to the inside windows surrounded by the fleeting, failing hopes of just about every cigarette manufacturer’s advertising budget. The rest of the building remained hidden by the structures on the side of the street.

“That’s the local drug store?” Ethan asked, pointing down the hill from inside his jumper pockets.

“Yeah.”

“And you remembered it was here but not where you live?”

“Yeah.”

“That must bug you out.”

“Yeah.”

Shannon sounded as if she were becoming annoyed, so Ethan fell quiet.

They shuffled on in silence, watching the Sir Speedy Convenience blossom into a full-fledge grocery store from behind the buildings. It had a large but mostly empty parking lot. The vehicles that were there had suffered extensive vandalism, some were even turned over. The rest had not a single solid window or tire filled with air. They were hollowed metal behemoths who had lost a battle with their creators.

Shannon looked at the somewhat lanky asylum escapee next to her. He was attractive enough—honest looking in his face and eyes—but it was a hospital after all. “So…why where you in that hospital?” she asked gently.

Ethan looked at her a moment, “I saw some things that they didn’t believe, and they think I killed my girlfriend,” he said flatly.

A bolt of fear shot through Shannon before she reasoned herself to a fragile calm. She had just blasted a nerd in the streets, like in a movie but with much more gore. “Did you?” She wished immediately she could take that back, but Ethan answered quickly enough for her.

“No. It was a monster. I tried to kill the monster.”

“I see, and…what did this monster look like?”

“Which one? There were three that I counted…well then there was Madison, so four—but others were in that cave, also.”

“Cave?”

Ethan stopped at the very edge of the parking lot, his eyes locked on a number of heads hanging from the store’s façade. Driven into the mouth of each was some enormous nail, more like a railroad spike and all of them were upside down, their hair hanging limp and scabby. “This is insane, really…”

Shannon’s eye locked on one of the faces, one that she recognized even though it was hanging inverted. She could not remember who it was. She knew only that this woman was important to her, someone who had played a major role in her life, but someone she just could not remember. Nevertheless, the sight of her head hanging on a storefront filled Shannon with a smothering sorrow. “I know her…” she said softly as she pointed on the third heard from the left.

“Who is it?” Ethan asked before considering.

“I don’t know,” Shannon replied, as a tear broke free of her eye, “but I know she was important to me.”

“Let’s just get in there and get what we need, alright?”

“Yeah,” Shannon said in a sad voice.

They walked beneath the heads and into the store. The lights still worked in many isles, and the stock was for the most part still on the shelves. The problem that faced them now was that everything seemed to be aged by years. The strange aging that had been going on outside made him wonder if the food might no longer be edible.