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

There are only a few entrances to the casino, but he thought for sure he boarded them all up and smeared his special repellent along the thresholds. There’s only that emergency exit with the faulty lock, but he chained that up good, didn’t he?

Raymond hopes so in the deepest part of himself.

They’re so damn fast. That’s the weirdest part. They shouldn’t be fast. You see the physiology of them and you think of the only living organism on earth that they’re comparable to, and you imagine they’d be slow. They’re not. They must have evolved differently in the place they come from. That dark boiling landscape where the rain never stops.

Raymond hasn’t seen or heard another person since Rip Day. For all he knows, he could be the last. Nothing but a bearded old man holed up in cavernous casino and waiting to die. He’s considered going out by his own hand. That’s the merciful way. It’s much better than having them suck off the face and pull out the lungs, but he has a certain amount of pride left in him, and taking his own life is not something he’s willing to do just yet.

He’s been holding to a desperate wish that the world as a whole can still come back from this. Maybe there’s a way to seal up the slits. Perhaps they’ll just close on their own just as naturally as they opened, and the moist hell that waits on the other side will become nothing but a traumatic memory.

He wishes for this, but he also knows in his heart that the horde that came through won’t just vanish into thin air. They’re too numerous, too curious, and too intent on exploring what America has to offer. He thinks maybe they orchestrated The Rip in order to have more space to inhabit. Humans numbered in the billions before all this, but the things that came through seem to exist in the trillions. There are big ones, small ones, and breeders that never leave their chosen hives. Raymond thinks overpopulation drove them to seek out new realms of existence.

If that was their plan, they succeeded. They found a way through. They never tried to communicate with the human race. It seems they speak only the language of subjugation and destruction. Their own biological survival is the imperative, and colonization is the endgame.

Raymond rounds a bend and looks downward, but he sees no sign of their presence. He hears them, though. They’re watching him. Curdled slurping sounds, breathy expulsions of moisture, and that lightning quick noise of multiple bulbous bodies sliding across the floor.

Their defining trails are crisscrossed all around the tiles. Raymond leans down and runs an index finger through the stringy clear ooze with a look of distaste dominating his features. They got in somehow. They see him, they know of him, and the ambush is probably seconds away from happening.

Raymond knows he’s dead already. He sighs, resigning himself to slaughter as many of them as possible before he goes down. He checks the shotgun, and he finds that he has quite a few shells left. All the lead has been dumped out, and that’s par for the course. Lead smashes through them, but it does no lasting damage.

Only the rock salt seems to put them down. He’s seen it happen a few times when he was racing through the streets to get here. A few courageous souls saw what the things resembled, and they fought with nothing but cans of sodium and fists full of white particles. It’s nasty business. They writhe, twist, and contort inward when the salt hits them just right. It’s acid for things like them. It corrodes and eats them up, and Raymond isn’t opposed to offering up a little misery to the bastards that razed the only world he’s ever known.

They’re coming now. They make no attempt to hide because they know he’s cornered and there’s no place left to run. They slide with incredible agility across the floor, these great gastropods, blazers of slime trails and masters of the mucus that coats them. Their man-masks hang from featureless faces, just droopy and decaying visages with stalk eyes protruding up past the ragged crater holes of their masks. Sensory tentacles curve outward in anticipation, and the human lungs that they’ve bound to themselves expand faster and faster as they converge on the lone survivor.

The shotgun fires again and again. Rock salt splatters the horde, and many of them fall, seizing and tormented, to the floor. The salt dissolves them, their mucus membranes bursting with agonizing blisters, but still they come, sliding and slithering over their dead with single-minded purpose.

Multiple soft and sticky bodies smash into Raymond at the same time from all angles, and he loses his grip on the shotgun. Probing sensory tentacles manipulate his flesh, and he finds his chest caving inward as they strike for the lungs, the most pivotal part of a man. It’s what they need. It is the singular resource to allow this colonization to be a complete success.

Raymond’s last thought is a fragmented memory from his boyhood. He recalls a vision of himself giggling in the dirt and tipping a canister of Morton salt on a few slugs that were out and about in his mother’s garden.

They boiled and they writhed, and their suffering brought him a form of tingling pleasure. He didn’t think of it as anything more than a fun way to spend a rainy afternoon.

They’re slurping out his eyes now. They’re drowning him in a cocoon of mucus. Their sharp stalks find him, and they stab and they stab, ragged punctures taking shape all over his torso. His anguish seems to last forever.

Deep in the abyss of what remains of his mind, he thinks that this must be how it feels when a slug is salted. Desolate pain. Endless excruciation. Hurt, helpless, and at the mercy of the merciless…

His lungs explode outward in a spray of viscera.

No more breath. No more life. No more humans.

He regrets what he did to those slugs.

The straps of the backpack had rubbed Haley’s flesh raw and were now gnawing at it, biting ever deeper, to the bone. The backpack weighed a ton, or maybe it was just a couple of pounds but she’d been carrying it for what felt like months. Or was it months? Right now, Haley couldn’t care less which it was. She tried to adjust the right strap a bit, wincing with pain and then relief washed over her, for about a second, until the strap slipped back into its old place, gnawing at her flesh with every step she took.

“Look, smoke!” Juli yelled and Haley almost jumped out of her skin. She swayed but kept her balance. Her daughter grabbed her hand and pointed forward. “Look!”

“Juli…” She didn’t have the energy to tell the girl it’s not a good idea to yell. She didn’t have the energy to tell her to be quiet, as she had done so many times in the early days after the world got what it deserved in her decidedly non-humble opinion. She only had enough energy to look up from the road, where she had been gazing for the last few hours, or days, or months. There was a town about half a mile from them, the town they had set out to reach, and there was indeed a plume of smoke rising from the chimney of a house at the near end of the place.

“Come on, Mom!” The girl pulled on her hand and Haley lurched forward, almost falling over again. Her hair, wispy brown streaked with white now that she couldn’t maintain the lovely auburn shade that came in bottles, fell into her eyes. She tossed it back.

“Juli, give me a second and stop pulling,” she finally managed to say. She swallowed spit—spit that had suddenly filled her mouth at the sight of the smoke rising from that chimney of the nice-looking house half a mile away. Smoke meant people, sane people, and people meant food. But not necessarily, Haley thought. Not always. Her daughter let go of her hand and looked away, biting her lower lip.