Gregory Norris - Down with the Fallen - A Post-Apocalyptic Horror Anthology

I fell roughly to the floor. I’m confident I left part of me atop the fence, but it mattered not.

My surroundings were mere outlines, I could make out the shapes of buildings and boats, but they were hazed. My focus was on the strange glow that I knew was Cassy. Her heart shone like a calling beacon ahead of me, and I could do nothing but surge toward it.

I didn’t want anything else except to reach that beacon.

I heard my feet stomping against the wooden dock but above that I could hear her breathing.

She did this to me.

She made me this monster, and I was certain to return the favor.

I found her cowering behind the hull of a bobbing boat. She let off a few rounds, and I think one even hit me. It was inconsequential, though, as I felt her clothes beneath my fingers at last.

My vision was filled with the glowing red of her beating heart.

Before I brought her into my new world, I took the time to savor the fear. The fear sent her red heart burning like the sun and finally as I sank my teeth into her, the light faded and she joined me.

Had she chosen a different path perhaps our fate would have been different.

At last, I released her and turned to look at the blazing moon in the sky high above.

In my fevered brain, I spoke while outwardly all I did was groan and grumble.

My world was no longer one of survival and life. Instead, it was now one of satisfying my insatiable need to feed.

Who was I to argue with this?

Not long ago, I had been one of the minority. One of those fighting against the inevitable end that faces us all. I realize that now. Why shy from what will always come to be?

In time, perhaps you will understand this, the fight for survival is insignificant when we will all, ultimately, face this fate.

In fact, as I watch you now through the window, see the glow of your beating heart, I know.

I know that very soon you will be with me, in this new world.

Nothing will taste or be the same again.

Knock… knock.

Before the media fell, the talking heads called it The Rip. It happened across multiple nations on Rip Day, a day now as infamous in US history as Columbine or 9/11. The Rip created chasms throughout the states, ragged doorways to another place, and the sound of them opening was like a wet envelope being torn asunder by failing geriatric teeth.

Men of science argued about The Rip on CNN and Fox News, trying in vain to explain the unexplainable. Various theories surfaced, but the most popular was that what we perceive as reality wore thin in certain areas. No one could agree if it was an inevitable accident or if it was intentional from the other side. But a large portion of the experts agreed that these chasms opened into an alternate dimension, an uncharted void both alien and incomprehensible to human beings.

The doorways appeared the same everywhere. They looked like some great hand took a crude knife and carved a slit into thin air at ground level. A translucent membrane covered each entrance, and there was nothing to be seen past the membrane but immense blackness and rain that seemed to pound everlasting. Each site quickly swarmed with military personnel, the government stretching themselves to the last man and woman in order to post quarantine compounds at all the known Rip slits.

It was human curiosity that damned them all. A single field biologist with a utility knife at a doorway in Pineworth, West Virginia. This man approached the membrane with the misguided idea of obtaining a biopsy, thinking the veil might be something akin to living tissue.

It sliced as smooth as paper, and as the membrane retracted, they came pouring through from the wet void. It started a domino effect across all corners of the continent. Membranes began to split on their own, and the swarm washed over those military camps with merciless antipathy.

Gun fighting, explosions, and all manner of human ingenuity sought to repel them . The resistance lasted a grand total of one week before civilization staggered to its knees due to what poured from The Rip slits.

The lights were blotted out, and electricity died with a gasping fizzle. Airplanes fell from the sky and subway trains smashed into each other in the depths of the earth. The population was culled in such a systematic ravaging that billions soon became mere hundreds. The world was prepared for global warming, nuclear war, and even widespread famine.

But the world was not ready for The Rip. Even in the wildest of imaginations, no one could fathom those wet and waiting things—things not built for our fleshy state of being. The corruption seeped from the slits like weeping wounds across Mother Nature’s mutilated face, and all was lost in the blink of disbelieving human eyes.

They tried one last time to close the doors. One massive last stand for the human race, a march to triumph or doom.

The hopes of an entire sentient species rested on the shoulders of those brave few that fought to the bitterest end. Hope died with them. All they found was doom. And in their final moments came the realization that doors that open into dripping black spaces can never be closed again.

Raymond holds the 12-gauge pump action shotgun in the crook of his elbow as he stomps through the dim confines of his derelict kingdom. The slot machines are just dead monoliths now, and all the former gambling worshipers have gone to little piles of mucus-covered dust. The casino is an eerie place without the lights and sounds to give it life, but it’s served him well as a fortress of solitude after the events of The Rip.

It’s been several months since Rip Day. He was lucky when the Rip slits opened. He’d been holed up in his hunting cabin on North Mountain sipping down shine and bagging a few wild turkeys out of season, but he was forced to flee when they came. They were after the wildlife, and it brought them sliding through the cities, the suburbs, and even the remote mountains. They have trouble breathing on our side, so they harvest the lungs of the living to compensate. Some sort of biological symbiosis that allows parts of them to blend with parts of us. They take faces, too, doesn’t matter what kind. Raymond has seen them utilize both the faces of humans and animals alike. They strip the flesh clean, make a mask of it, and then attach the lungs on either side of that dripping mask. The lungs expand, and the tattered mouth of the mask lets them expel a kind of black ichor after the oxygen is spent. They’re fiends for blood, too. They don’t drink it or digest it; they just smear it all over their bodies to keep themselves from drying out in our atmosphere. They like it wet and hot, sauna conditions, and they seem to luxuriate in a thick layer of warming plasma.

Raymond knows they’ve gotten inside. He just woke up from a pitiful slice of broken sleep. He was dreaming of the day that he came home to the doublewide trailer to find his wife’s face peeled clean and all of his children lying on the porch with their chests just open craters, the ribs bent back and snapped with their organs rotting in the sun. All that were taken were the lungs. That’s always the way of it.

He heard the slosh of them somewhere near what used to be a casino bar. It overlooks the entire establishment, a skybox view of all the dust-coated table games. He’s familiar with their watery movements. They sound like a mixture of a dripping faucet and something slithering through a mud hole. He smelled them, too, and the aroma helped to draw him back to the waking world. It’s a stench to make the nostrils twitch. It reminds him of the stink of snot splattering out of the nose of someone fighting through a bout with influenza.