Tim Curran - Resurrection

And Father Mackley of the Holy Covenant girl’s school not too far from Perry Family Meats, stepped out that night into the rain and wind, half out of his mind over the girls missing from his school. He looked up in the sky and the clouds parted. He saw the moon clearly enough. Except it looked like a bright orange skull grinning down at him. Mackley suffered a fatal heart attack on the spot.

And that was the night in Witcham.

When the sun finally rose, it revealed the devastation. Which was considerable. Nobody had to erect a gravestone to Witcham, the buildings and houses rising from the water were a cemetery all their own.

Dawn.

The sun came up, but little of it was seen or felt. It hid behind an angry film of gray and black clouds, hinting at its presence, but refusing to show itself completely, wearing its veils like a stripper and refusing to disrobe. That’s how morning came, with a seduction and a tease of daylight, but nothing more.

The city drooped under the rain that fell in buckets and then blew in fine mists, but never, ever stopped coming. It was a hard rain and a soft rain, a needle-fine rain and a downpour that drenched you to the skin. It stung your face and got in your eyes and soaked through your pants and boots and after awhile, it seemed that your soul was drowning, filling up like a bucket and everything inside your head and out was gray and wet and steaming. That was life in Witcham these days, an existence of abyssal depths and muddy ponds and pale green swamps. There was no chance to ever dry off, just the water dripping and dropping, that accursed dampness that made you want to scratch your skin off after a time.

So, the water continued to rise, the Black River continued to swell, and Witcham continued to sink and sink. A gray mist came off the slopping, eternal sea, obscuring everything and turning what daylight there was to a leaden gloom.

People came out of houses, wading through the black, oily water. In less-flooded areas, they used trucks. In submerged areas, they boated or clung to drifting refuse.

What you noticed first when you stepped out into the overcast, damp world of Witcham was the smell. No, smell didn’t cut it. This was definitely a stink. It was an ugly black odor, organic and meaty and warm. You could not only smell it, you could taste it on your tongue and feel it laying over your skin like a sour sweat. Maybe you could fool yourself for a time, as you tried to breathe that thick and rancid air, that what you were smelling was just that stagnant, polluted water backwashed with rotting garbage and dead animals and sewage, but you knew better. For this stench was simply too overpowering, too sweet and high and gagging. This stench was that of the unburied dead, of hundreds, if not thousands, of bloated, waterlogged corpses chewed by rats and veiled by flies and sweating maggots by the mitful. This was what maybe Bergen-Belsen or Treblinka smelled like after a good rain. Not exactly a country lane after a spring shower, but a sickening, steaming brew of decomposition, an odor so physical, so very palpable that you had all you could do not to drop to your knees and vomit at the first whiff.

And if Witcham had a perfume, a signature odor, this was it.

The streets were rivers of filth and garbage, excretia and carrion rushing towards some unseen and pestiferous dead sea. Things bobbed and things rolled. Some of those things were alive and some were dead and some were neither. Everywhere, there were corpses drifting about, in whole and in part. And that brought flies, storms and clouds and ravaging swarms of meatflies. And gulls and crows and buzzards and rats, thousands of rats.

Witcham was a bloated, sunwashed corpse breeding disease and vermin and horror. Over a third of the population had fled when the flooding began and of those remaining, nearly half were dead by dawn.

You could almost hear the clicking of a great death-watch beetle hanging over the town, the ticking of a clock, grains of sand sliding down the neck of an hourglass.

This wasn’t over yet.

Something was coming.

Something was about to happen.

And it wouldn’t be long in coming.

Mitch rolled out of bed at 12:30 the next afternoon. The sleep felt good, but he did not like the idea of all the daylight that had been wasted. Tommy and Harry came awake about the same time. Mitch sat up, working the sleep from his eyes with sleep-numb fingers. It was not like in a book or a movie where some character rolls out of bed and does not remember the awful plight he or she is in. No, there was no merciful moment of forgetfulness. Mitch came awake fully aware of what had happened in the past twenty-four hours. It laid inside him in a cold, inorganic mass that made him physically ill.

“We better get going,” he said.

Harry was fully awake the moment he opened his eyes. You got like that when you did time. Just like a soldier in a war, you came out of sleep tense and ready to fight.

Tommy, however, took a few more moments. “Morning, sunshine,” he said to Harry.

Harry smiled.

Out in the kitchen, Wanda Sepperly was looking bright and perky and almost youthful. And why not? It had been years and years since she’d had so many fine young faces gathered around her table. The Zirblanksi twins were there, dark of eye and hair, but vibrant and taking to Wanda like seedlings to spring rain and sunshine. Deke Ericksen was there, too, his eyes little more than bloodshot holes. Those eyes had seen things, Mitch knew, things they would never forget. Despite the grayness pushing up against the windows, inside Wanda’s kitchen things were bright and homey.

Wanda was old school.

Unlike most, she had little use or faith in electric stoves or gas ranges. She hadn’t taken many things from her old farm in Bayfield County, but one of them, her most prized possession in fact, was her cast-iron wood-burning cookstove. Power or no power, you could count on it. Wanda was in her glory putting out the eats for the young gathered at her table: pancakes with maple syrup? “and it ain’t no Log Cabin nor Aunt Jemima, Mitch Barron, this is pure and sweet squeezed straight from my own trees”?and scrambled eggs and slab bacon. Rita and Rhonda, who lived mostly out of boxes and cans as was the curse of our modern age, were loving it like this was a trip to granny’s farm. Deke was mostly picking at his food. But Wanda kept scolding him and despite himself, despite what he’d seen and knew, his teenage belly was hungry. Hungry as only a teenage boy could be.

Wanda winked a sparkling blue eye at her recent arrivals. “Sit down and fill yourself. For this day will be no better than the last.”

Harry was pretty excited at the idea. After five years of state food, he was ready for some real eats. His eyes were wide and there was drool on his mouth.

“Not right now, Wanda,” Mitch said. “We’re gonna take a turn around the neighborhood, see what’s going on first.”

Harry looked disappointed, but he fell in step behind Tommy.

“Stay,” Mitch told him.

“No, I better go with you guys. You might need me.”

“Stay and eat for chrissake,” Tommy said. “Fill your tank. Look like you need it.”

He fell into a chair and Wanda set a plate of cakes and bacon and eggs down before him. Right away, he launched into it, oooing and ahhing and telling Wanda, between mouthfuls, that she was surely the finest cook in the world.

“Are you going to check at our house?” Rhonda asked.

“Yeah, we’ll take a look,” Mitch told her. “Maybe your mom and dad are home, girls.”

They both nodded. They’d been through hell like everyone else, but they were handling it much better. Mitch decided it was because they were young. The young were much tougher than anyone ever gave them credit for. They could switch gears and burn rubber in the blink of an eye before your average adult even got the keys in the ignition. That was youth. The girls were like dandelions that you mowed down one day and the next, they grew right back, flowering bright and yellow. You could not keep them down.