Steve Tem - Excavation

The man in front of him, arm outstretched and face straining, eyes popping, screamed. The wall of flood touched the last man in the struggling group, then another, another, sucking them in one at a time. Then it was as if the man in front of Charlie leaped backward, so quickly all Charlie could register was the frantic, kicking legs being pulled back into the churning liquid surface.

Another staring face joined the others inside the moving wall.

Charlie scrambled back up the loose gravel slope, weeping, digging his hands into the sharp stones and trying to focus on the pain.

Ben stalked the loose boards of his front porch nervously, looking up at the clouds every few minutes, then at the tall waves of fog that had actually entered the town. And which looked so similar to the clouds—dark and angry—unlike any fog he could remember.

Shadows moved inside the fog, and at first Ben thought it was some of his neighbors, or people who had come down from the hollows for supplies, but the town had been virtually abandoned all day. He could make out the silhouettes of heads and arms, legs, but the faces were obscured. They moved in slow motion, with what seemed impossible grace, as if they were swimming. Or drowning. Their bodies filling with water…

“Who is it?” he shouted, and found himself shouldering his rifle, aiming it into the fog.

He had one of the dark shapes in his sights, but he couldn’t pull the trigger. After all, it could be anyone. He had to stay calm, get a grip on himself.

Someone was crying out in the fog.

A strangely faint, echoing cry, like that of a very small child locked up in a room. A boiling wave of mist passed in front of the house, about twenty-yards away, obscuring the lot behind his store.

He could hear the child’s cry, trapped inside it. The voice raised briefly as the traveling mist neared him, then faded away as it swirled past.

But it left shadows behind, an almost tangible, tasteable darkness in the air, and suddenly Ben could see much less of the town than before.

The fog wasn’t going to break. For several minutes Audra had been unable to see any of the old Taylor house at all. The fog had grown thicker, massing together, filling up all the spaces, taking up all the air. She could hardly breathe. She had to force herself to suck in mouthfuls of the thick soup, trusting her body to filter out any available air.

She was crying. She thought maybe she had been crying for some time.

Audra sensed a still spot in the whiteness behind her, a place where all noise had been held, denied escape. There was a will behind it, an anger. She could feel the charge of it in the particles of fog. The blonde hairs on her arms stood rigid. Her skin ached. She had never felt so cold.

She began to move in the direction in which she thought the Taylor place must be, but soon realized she had completely lost her bearings. It could be anywhere. It didn’t matter. She knew where she had to go. Away from the presence waiting behind her.

Waiting for her.

She couldn’t run, but she found she could ignore the tears and scratches the sharp-edged forest made as she pushed her way through it. Barbs reached out of the mist to snag her. Sharp branches stabbed at her; leaves and fronds slashed.

She sprawled over a downed tree so packed over with layers of the strange fog it had been impossible to see. Her slacks tore and she felt the sudden shock of blood exposed to frigid air.

This brought a sudden thrill of terror to her arms and legs and she found herself running, banging herself badly against tree trunks and large hidden outcroppings of rock. She couldn’t see, and suddenly she wasn’t sure where the intruder was.

She might be running straight into his arms. Reed’s arms.

A soft, animal hiss in the air. She ran faster, rammed her shoulder into a hidden tree, and exploded off it, screaming.

But the presence seemed so powerful, not like the pale, sickly looking Reed Taylor at all.

There was strength in the still air. An enormous charge contained within that hidden shadow. She could feel it.

She could sense the jagged, stone-hard teeth poised… somewhere, somewhere in the fog surrounding her. The jaws working hungrily as he watched her.

The flood had filled the site of the Nole strip mine rim to rim. Charlie sat on the ledge only a few feet above the surface of the heaving darkness, watching the waves, cataloging the debris, unable to move. For the time being, he thought, the flood waters seemed satisfied with the ground they’d gained.

After all, they’d taken the mine away from the Nole Company. In a way, Big Andy had gotten his land back.

Once, years ago—Charlie figured he had been about twenty years old at the time; he had done his tour in the Navy and was halfheartedly trying to decide if he should live away from Kentucky or let the Big Andy draw him back with its hard-to-ignore pull—he’d visited Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. He’d enjoyed it, he’d loved those northern woods, but the landscape there had made him uneasy as well. With its volcanic pools and restless geysers and periodic tremors, Charlie’d worried that the land might explode right under his feet. They had a thing up there called the mud volcano—jet black mud boiling up and burping furiously into the sky with a nasty-sulfur smell. It had looked just like these waters did now. Like they’d stolen the night and had it trapped in their waves and surf.

An old door floated by, a greenish blue mold trapped in the ornate carving. A rat scurried to the edge and chittered like an enraged sea captain.

A tumbling of plow blades and barbed-wire balls and shattered wagon wheels and slate-colored barn walls in the waves.

Ripped apart and smashed further into smaller and smaller pieces. The flood was a great grinder, gnawing every lost thing from the valley into images too tiny to remember.

He could just make out the vague outlines of human forms in the waters, but they appeared to be holding back, keeping hidden. Or waiting.

Occasionally Charlie would see wreckage he thought he recognized; something about the shape of a piece of wood or the color of some metal would remind him of objects, landmarks in his own past, artifacts long lost that he knew could not be here, in this place or in this time. But the shapes and colors still nagged at him, and he strained his eyes in the gloom to identify them. The yellow wagon he had as a boy. The old Ford his father owned, had to save years to get, and then wrecked after only a week on one of those narrow winding roads in the mountains above the Hinckey place, trying to make a delivery to somebody who probably couldn’t pay him anyway. Charlie’d recognize that radiator and those headlights anywhere.

It was as if Big Andy had been hiding that stuff all these years, deep inside him, and now was coughing it up like an old man with a diseased gut. You can’t get away from your past… his daddy had always said that. He should have listened to his daddy more. You might ignore your past for a long time, for years, but something would always happen to scrape the scab off, dig away at the ignorance you’d piled over it, and shove that mother lode of guilt and pain right up in your face.

Something light brown, twisted, patterned like a cobweb, was drifting Charlie’s way. Her mother had made that bridal veil for her… the whole family had been so proud…

“Mattie…” he choked, and turned. He wasn’t about to see what floated up after it.

Flames were dancing out of the trees, racing toward the edge of the flooded mine. Charlie stood still, entranced by their terrible beauty. Dancing. Dancing… as they grew closer, he knew it was a woman, her head on fire. Her feet weren’t even touching the ground, and she moved so swiftly she was soon only a few yards in front of him, increasing speed as she neared the dark floodwaters, and rising ever so slightly in the air.