Tim Curran - Resurrection

1

Sometimes it was the rain and sometimes it was the wind and sometimes it was just the night closing in on them. All Chuck Bittner knew for sure was that maybe, just maybe, he had made a mistake here. Maybe they all had. Maybe they should have waited with the others in the bus for rescue. Because, yeah, it had seemed like a good idea at the time, just up and walk out of there, but now he just wasn’t so sure.

He wasn’t so sure about a lot of things.

Because with the power out, things were very dark, pitch black almost. You could see the shapes of buildings and houses looming around you, but that’s all they were, just shapes. Even the flashlight did them little good with the rain pouring down and the night rising up and that wind howling through the empty places, because…well, because sometimes it almost sounded like human voices out there.

They’d been slogging through the waist-deep water for what seemed hours now, Cal and Kyle Woltrip in the lead, seeming to get a kick out of the whole thing. Tara Boyle was with them and Brian Summers, Jacob Key and Mark Tobin. That was their posse, the ones that had made the heroic breakout from the schoolbus. They had been turned around and turned around again and God only knew where they were now.

Chuck was numb from the waist down. He very much wanted to be out of this. Because he was starting to feel the need to do something he had not done publicly in years: cry.

From the moment they’d left the bus he’d felt oddly exhilarated, excited that they were doing the sensible thing and just helping themselves. Taking charge and not waiting in that damn bus like a bunch of old ladies. But no more than twenty minutes into it, following behind the Woltrip brothers who managed to get them more and more lost with each turn, he began to feel something more primal, something that cut from the inside: fear.

There was no denying it.

And it wasn’t just him.

For not only were they wet and shivering, they were all scared.

At times, the rain came down in a fall of needles, fierce and blinding, and there was nothing to do but cover your head and wait it out. At other times, it was more of a cold drizzle than anything else.

But it all sucked.

It all completely sucked.

They were paused at what might have been an intersection once. Overhead, in the beam of Cal’s flashlight, they could see the swinging mass of a dead traffic light. It swung on its wires, impossibly large and impossibly clumsy looking. If it fell, it would surely crush one of them. Cal put the light on the street signs. Westhaven and 15^th Avenue.

That didn’t tell Chuck much.

He was from Elmwood Hills like the rest of the kids. He didn’t know Bethany and this was Bethany. Maybe he didn’t know much about directions outside of Elmwood, but he did know that Westhaven Street was over in Bethany. Chuck agreed with his dad that River Town and Bethany were just a lot of ugly old properties that should have been razed for new development. Chuck’s dad sold real estate and Chuck figured he would one day, too. And when he did, he’d have Bethany bulldozed to the ground.

Tara Boyle, slumping under the rain, said, “I thought you said we were in Crandon. Westhaven isn’t in Crandon.”

“It is too,” Cal Woltrip said, but you could detect a note of uncertainty under his words.

“It is not! My dad’s going to put a Burger King in Bethany! He told me so! He said he was putting it on Westhaven Street!”

“Lah-tee-dah,” Kyle said. “Do we have to listen to this?”

“You’re both…jack-offs!” Tara told them. “All you’ve done is get us lost!”

“You could do better?” Cal asked her.

“Anybody could do better,” Chuck told him.

“Okay, smartass. Here’s the flashlight. Go ahead, take it. You lead. You get us out of here.”

Brian and Jacob and Mark just stood around forlornly, rain dripping off them.

Chuck swallowed, took the light. “Good, now we have a chance.”

“You don’t know your own ass from a hole in the ground,” Kyle told him. “Just a fag like your old man.”

Chuck turned on him quick, but Cal got in-between them.

“No, no, no,” Cal said. “Let the big man lead us out. Go ahead, Mr. Big Man. Do your stuff. But if you don’t get us out, then we’re all gonna kick your ass.”

Brian giggled.

Tara sighed. “Oh, spare me the drama.”

Chuck turned away from all of them.

They all stepped back, left him out front, all alone.

Well, it was just a matter of…well, he didn’t honestly know. But he wasn’t about to admit that. Westhaven was right ahead of them. If they followed it back the other way, to what he thought would be east, then they would have to come out in Crandon. Of course, if those dumbass Woltrips hadn’t been in charge, they could have followed the hill up out of Bethany to Broad Street.

Chuck, feeling very tense inside, took a step forward. Then another.

By God, it was a wasteland.

Bethany was a drowning wasteland.

Chuck Bittner saw it open up before him and it took his breath away. You simply couldn’t realize the extent of the devastation until you were hip-deep in it. Just like you couldn’t appreciate the cool dankness of the grave until you found yourself in one.

A bit of moonlight came through now and about all it did was make the streets look like a flooded cemetery with all those buildings and houses rising up, some leaning and others narrow and skeletal. The waters had claimed Bethany like some gargantuan oil spill, something black and rising and glistening. Nothing but floating leaves and garbage, pieces of houses and tree branches.

“C’mon,” Chuck said.

He moved down Westhaven in a direction that he was pretty certain would take them away from the river. And that was the important thing now. The water was thick and sludgy, lots of submerged things bumping into them. Occasional ripples brushed through it as if things were moving just under the surface. Everything echoed with a rolling, subterranean sound that was more than a little disconcerting.

Chuck was scared.

Oh, he’d never admit it to the others, but he was bad scared. Scared like he hadn’t been in years maybe. Back when he was little and his mom used to hold him when he had a bad dream. A long time ago. Mom was dead now, of course, and Chuck had trouble feeling anything about that. She’d moved out when he was like five and spent her time drinking and whoring (his father’s words). Chuck saw her quite a bit at first, but as the years passed and she tangled herself up with one man after the other, the visits became very infrequent. When she died, he hadn’t seen her in almost three years. But right then, he wished she was there. Not his dad, but her.

They moved on that way silently for maybe ten or fifteen minutes and then stopped.

“What was that?” Brian said.

“I don’t know,” Kyle told him.

They’d all heard it and it stopped them dead. Nobody was willing to identify what it was. Or maybe they were just afraid to. Chuck panned his light around. It gleamed off the water, sparkled with raindrops. A few stray leaves blew around before settling into the murky soup.

“It was nothing,” Chuck told them.

But, dear God, he did not honestly believe that for a minute. That sound had been clamorous and loud and sharp. He knew what it sounded like, but he wouldn’t dare put a name to it. Not out loud. But in his head, a voice was saying, You know darn well what you heard. It’s weird and freaky and it just doesn’t belong, but you know what it was…a noisemaker.

Sure, one of those silly contraptions you spun around on a stick on New Years Eve. They were kind of funny, kind of annoying maybe. But out here? Out in this flooded blackness? Such a sound was about as disturbing as anything Chuck could imagine. For those things didn’t make noise by themselves, somebody had to spin them, to wind them around on their sticks. And that could only mean that someone was out there, someone who thought this was all some kind of party. And what kind of person would think that?