Tim Curran - Resurrection

In a way, he thought lights might bring in people that needed shelter and the more, the merrier tonight. But there was also the possibility that the lights might draw in those other…people out there. For surely, like it or not, they were out in the streets now. Mitch had been thinking about them a lot and not coming up with any good explanations for any of it. All the doors and windows were locked. They had Tommy’s four-ten and Mitch’s twenty-gauge Remington auto-loader that he used for hunting partridge in the fall, to go “a-grousing” as his old man had called it. Though it had been a few years since he’d been out bird hunting, he still had a full box of shells. So they had weapons, if it came down to it.

But would any of that be enough?

“I don’t know,” Mitch finally said, “but I figure we have to take a chance. It might be worse sitting in the dark with those kids.”

They had pulled Lily’s big conversion van out of the garage now and pulled in Tommy’s truck. He had a police scanner in there and that, at least, connected them with the world. The garage was attached, so they didn’t have to go outside.

While Tommy sat in the cab listening to the police chatter which was pretty hairy stuff?lost people and bodies, looting and shootings, accidents and people trapped in flooded buildings?he sat by the workbench and smoked, staring out the single rain-spattered window at the night beyond. He didn’t really know what any of this was about. He figured most didn’t, but there were a few out there who did. After seeing that living dead woman that the cops pulled from the drainage ditch, seeing that she wore the remains of military fatigues, Mitch had pretty much made up his mind that the explosion out at the Fort Providence base was all connected up with this. He didn’t know what they did out there, nobody really did, but they were involved. All this shit had come down after that explosion and although Mitch didn’t believe half the crazy stories circulating about that, there must have been a germ of truth in there somewhere.

The Army was saying it was fuel tank that exploded.

But Mitch was no longer buying that.

They had been working on something weird out there, must have been. The idea that the dead would start walking around on their own just didn’t wash. The Army were up to something fantastic out there and whatever that had been, it was out of control now. Maybe something in the rain. Mitch had spent four years in the Navy. That wasn’t exactly a career, but it was enough experience so that he knew the military were not exactly up front about their activities. And when they fucked-up, they rarely admitted such. No, Mitch was not much into conspiracies. He didn’t really think the military had captured flying saucers or anything, but they were no doubt involved in things equally as frightening.

This scenario pretty much proved that.

Mitch didn’t trust his own government any farther than he could throw them and he sure as hell did not trust the military. You put people in power and they invariably abused it. But even with that in mind, he doubted that any of this was meant to happen. No, it was an accident. Something went wrong, something got out of control.

But what exactly? What had they been doing at that base?

Tommy came over. “Mitch…it’s getting pretty wild out there.”

“No shit?”

“I’m serious here. There’s been some kind of riot out at Slayhoke, prisoners running wild. The National Guard are up there putting it down.”

“Jesus, just what we need right now.”

“And something else…there’s a bus load of kids missing,” Tommy said. “They were coming from a soccer match and now nobody can find that bus. But they figure it’s in town.”

“One tragedy after another.”

Tommy lit a cigarette. “You know what I was thinking?”

Mitch looked up at him.

“I was thinking about that witch, that old lady you took me to see.”

“Wanda Sepperly?”

Tommy nodded. “I don’t believe in any of that crap, but you got to admit that lady’s got something going on. She knows things. I bet she might know where that bus is and I bet she might know where Chrissy is.”

Mitch nodded, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it. “Maybe…maybe we should take a walk over there.”

“Maybe we should.”

Mitch nodded. “For a minute there, I thought you were going to tell me about some cousin of yours that was a witch.”

“What kind of family do you think we are?”

Next door to the Barron’s, as the idea of making ice cream was being tossed around, Arland Mattson came awake to the sound of invasion. He’d been snoozing in his recliner, feet atop a stool heaped with newspapers. He came awake slowly, dreaming about the sores on his chest and the pains he got down in his bowels sometimes. He opened his eyes, thinking he’d maybe heard a car backfire, but then right away he heard only the sound of the falling rain, the wind skirting the eaves.

Nothing more.

Right away, he became suspicious.

Arland had not necessarily been of sound mind since his wife Camille had been taken by cancer ten years previously. What had been a somewhat alarming trend towards suspicion and distrust while she was alive, had bloomed into a fully developed persecution complex by the time of the flooding of Witcham. Arland was extremely paranoid, was certain that the government were watching him and had planted listening devices in the walls of his house. He also believed that the pancreatic tumor that had killed his wife was not merely a matter of heredity or chance, but the result of something slipped into her food that was intended for him. And he knew that there were parasites living inside him, tiny insectlike creatures that were eating away his stomach, even if the doctor told him that such a thing was impossible. Neighbors like Mitch Barron had gotten used to the threats of frivolous lawsuits and the rampant conspiracies that Arland saw in everything from sudden changes in the weather to the questions asked by census takers, but they only saw small bite-sized portions of his dementia.

Had they seen more, they would have had him committed.

So when Arland came awake, he knew that his house had been invaded. Possibly by the things the rain had brought and possibly by government agents that had come to steal his water samples that he had taken from the rain.

Arland sat there in his chair, listening, knowing something had come into his house and right about then he began to smell it. Whatever it was, it stank dirty and flyblown.

Houses are very personal things.

They are the webs of our daily lives just as we are the spiders that inhabit them. And, like spiders, when something settles into our webs, we can feel the minute tugging of strands, the vibrations, the weight and physical impression intruders make. And this is what Arland was feeling. Though he was past eighty, terribly thin, and his vision was not so good, he could feel that sense of invasion just fine. The minute threads of his web had been touched, broken, torn asunder. Some weighty bluebottle fly or yellowjacket had landed and become ensnared in those fine filaments and he could feel the oscillations of their distress…or perhaps it was his own.

Lightly, he got to his feet and grabbed a butcher knife off the coffee table. His battery lantern was still glowing and he took this, too.

Arland was afraid, but he had suspected this for some time. It was only a matter of time before they came to silence him; he knew too much. They had no doubt hoped to kill him in his sleep, but he had thwarted their plans, had he not?

He walked out of the living room and into the hall.

The front door was open a few inches and this more than anything made something solidify in his belly. He always kept the door locked. But now it was open and what could that mean? Well, yes, they had picked the lock, of course. They knew how to do things like that. There was a hidden key outside, secreted beneath a loose brick on the porch, but even they would not have known that.