Tim Curran - Resurrection

They stood there for maybe ten minutes and finally Mitch said. “You don’t get it, do you?”

And all Tommy could do was shake his head.

Mitch lit a cigarette and he was shaking so badly he had to use two hands to get it to his lips. “Lily…she’s been in a bad way ever since Marlene killed herself. And somehow, some way, she talked herself into thinking Marlene was down below in the rainwater sewers or some secret lake, who the hell knows. Down there somewhere, waiting for her.”

He didn’t need to go into anymore detail.

Tommy understood…at least, as much as you could understand the mechanics of a delusional mind. The death of her sister had torn her mind and probably her soul wide open. All the good stuff had drained from that jagged rent and what had filled up the void was dark and spooky and demented. Yes, she thought her sister was calling to her. Missed her so much, that even the idea of a ghost or something like a ghost coming for her was just fine and dandy. Jesus, it was a tragedy. A real ugly tragedy. And especially if you’d known Lily before that.

But there were other things that Mitch had not said and did not need to. Things Tommy didn’t dare say out loud. The dead were rising in Witcham, issuing up from flooded graves and walking the streets. In a sane, ordinary world with sane, ordinary physical laws and logic, what they were both thinking would have been ludicrous. The sort of madness that could have gotten you committed. But…what if Marlene had returned? Because such a thing was now certainly possible, wasn’t it?

Mitch had to live with the possibility.

And if, say, Marlene had dragged Lily below into the darkness and dank seas of rainwater and sewage…would she come back, too? Tonight or tomorrow night or a week from now, would she come knocking at the door in the dead of night? Bleached white and waterlogged like the others, nothing but a foul blackness inside of her?

It was the sort of thing that made you want to laugh until you cried and cry until you began laughing hysterically. But it was certainly a possibility, now wasn’t it?

“Are you up to this, Mitch?” Tommy said as he came to Coogan Avenue, the shattered barrier there, which certainly looked like something as big as a bus had smashed through those sawhorses.

“Yeah,” Mitch said, not believing it himself. “I’m up to it.”

They stepped out into the wet darkness, clicking on their flashlights. Tommy had his four-ten and Mitch had his twenty-gauge Remington autoloader. Neither of them believed that the guns would do them much good, but they were something. And both men had filled the waterproof pockets of their raincoats with salt. It was crazy, maybe, but they’d seen what salt could do to the newly-risen.

The Zirblanksi twins were with Mrs. Sepperley now. She was old and more than a little frail, but she knew things and Mitch was pretty sure the dead would not mess with her.

“This is better,” Mitch said. “It’s chilly and raining, but it clears my head. That van…it smells like Lily.”

Tommy understood.

They’d taken Lily’s van so they had enough room to pack the kids. It was all-wheel drive, rode up high, and handled the water pretty good.

Flashlight beams panning the murky night around them, Mitch and Tommy started down the hill towards the rising water. Near the bottom, the lake that had drowned Bethany was black and leaf-covered. Some crates and cardboard boxes bobbed in it, stray branches and a couple bald tires, some other things obscured by the leaves. You could smell the stink of the river, the backed-up sewers and the ever-present smell of rot which was even more pronounced down there.

“After you,” Mitch said.

Tommy wiped a sheen of rain from his face and stepped into the mire. Mitch followed him. He wished they’d had time to bring waders, because the water was chilly and slimy-feeling, filled with submerged things that bumped into his legs. Things he just didn’t want to know about. He could just imagine the diseases simmering in that noxious organic stew of standing water and putrescence. It felt thick and muddy, full of suspended sediment. A mist steamed from its surface.

“I’m thinking I ain’t gonna like this,” Tommy said.

And Mitch was pretty much thinking that neither of them would. There were guys, he knew, that got paid to wallow in festering muck like that, but Tommy and he weren’t those kind of guys. He just wondered what sort of germs and contamination he was breathing in.

Bethany was an old place any day or night. Filled with old houses and old, rotting buildings, some restored, but many just decaying like Witcham’s industrial past. The streets here were narrow and winding, cut by snaking alleys and countless archaic cul-de-sacs. But on a night like this…with the flooding and the rain and the lack of electric lights, well, it was simply black and haunted and menacing. The buildings and high houses around them were netted in shadow, leaning out over the streets like they wanted to fall. The flashlights only cut ten, maybe fifteen feet tops into the stagnant brew coming off the water. Droplets of rain lit in the beams like tiny insects, falling and streaking. Things rustled in the shadows, splashed and squished. You could hear water running from rainspouts, things creaking and rattling in the wind.

They moved on slowly, panning their lights about, hearing sounds but never seeing what made them. The weave of darkness was claustrophobic and crushing. They stepped down carefully, never knowing what lay beneath that soup or if they might step into an open manhole or if the street beneath them might have given away to subsidence.

Tommy said, “Remember when I told you how bad that mortuary I worked at was?”

Mitch nodded. “Yeah.”

“Well, this is worse.”

Mitch believed him. Because he didn’t think anything could be worse than this. Worse than the smell and the dark and the way it made him feel inside. For as impossible as it may have sounded, everything seemed miles away now. Not just people and life, but everything he had been through and even the dire knowledge that he would never see Lily again. All that had been swept away by the stark immensity of this particular, awful moment. It felt like the city was closing in around them, pressing down with a ghastly weight, rising up like a great hand that wanted to crush them. He could feel something like a thousand eyes watching him, studying him, making him feel his own impending death which would not be quick and silent, but brutal and dirty.

“What the hell’s that?” Tommy said, his voice sounding like it was coming from somewhere south of his throat.

Mitch put his light on an irregular series of humps covered in leaves. But not covered enough, because he soon made out a white arm and then an ashen face, a single leaf clinging to its forehead and accentuating its pallor. The eyes were sunken, the lips shriveled like an old lady without her teeth in. A beetle crawled out of the nostril and then crawled back in. The entire body was blown up with gas, immensely round and barrel-like.

They moved around it nervously, just waiting for it to move.

“I guess…I guess I can handle corpses now,” Tommy said. “Long as they don’t move.”

They passed another bobbing body floating facedown in the classic dead man’s float. Its back had been laid open right to the spinal vertebrae. Something had been at it. Something with teeth. The water went from around their waists to up above their bellies as they moved through a dip and then it sank back down a few inches.

If Mitch had closed his eyes, he would have thought he was crawling through a subterranean pipe. The falling rain, the steam, the echo of dripping water. God, he’d never felt so completely unclean like he’d been wading in a septic tank. He had a nasty desire to scratch his skin off.