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

In another time, another life, the mother’s instinct would have been to shield ears with hands, to spare the young ones the vulgarities launched at the voice—and, among the colorful insults, the voice’s parents.

“They’ve paid off the military,” said the woman plodding at the family’s left.

The mother recognized the woman. She was younger, in her twenties if the mother had to hazard a guess, though recent time had aged her considerably.

Paid off the military? With what, she could only imagine. Not money. People were using hundred dollar bills to wipe themselves behind trees at the roadside. Money wasn’t an effective incentive any longer. Food, shelter… flesh, perhaps.

“What do you mean, go back?” another voice shouted. “Back to what? Concord isn’t there anymore, and they’ll be swarming all over the suburbs by now!”

The procession briefly logjammed and the mother felt a rush of lightheadedness after being on the move for so long. A swarm of imaginary black flies buzzed around her head. Sweat, bitter and powerful, filled her next desperate breath.

“Per order of Mayor Stanislaus Sherwood, you will not be allowed access to the town of Bedford, so move along!”

The mother caught sight of the exit through breaks in the crowd. Military vehicles lined the curve, blocking the ramp at a diagonal angle. Men dressed in sand camouflage lurked behind the vehicles, with guns aimed at the highway. The mother imagined snipers in the trees, their scopes trained on the mostly women and children, focused on their fellow humans during the worst time in the world’s history. Rage ignited in her blood.

But it quickly cooled in the madness of a deafening thunderclap and the panic the pop of the bullet unleashed. Another followed, and the head of the young woman made old beside her blew apart, there one instant, gone from her shoulders the next. The mother screamed, as did her small brood, though the cacophony of cries that rose up into the unsympathetic heavens swallowed their voices.

Bullets raced at them. The mother felt the displaced air molecules and a rush of heat as one ripped to within inches of her face. They couldn’t go forward, because the war mongers at the Bedford exit were now firing at anything that moved. They certainly couldn’t risk going back.

She grabbed the youngest girl in one hand, the oldest in her other, and hoped the oldest’s grip on the middle child was firm enough to keep them all together. And then she turned toward the other side of the highway and ran. Military troops and police vehicles guarded the on-ramp there, and they, too, had opened fire on the refugees.

The family unit, which would be down by one by the time the shooting stopped, had barely reacted to one horror when another unfolded. The first came at them from two sides of the road; the newest opened up directly overhead.

The shrieks of frightened women and children vanished into the personified roar above. Fresh terror rippled over the mother’s skin, laying icy scales on top of her sweat. She glanced up to see the same monstrous image all had come to know in recent weeks. Only this one was being born right before her eyes, eyes that refused to blink and started to sting even worse than her throat, now screamed raw.

The sky churned and a bruise formed in its fabric, purple-black at the edges with crimson woven throughout. The wound expanded; as it grew, the nearest clouds fell into its pull. A funnel tip clawed its way out of the vortex. Running blindly, aware that the men at the roadblocks were still firing— still , in the face of yet another unholy visitation by the enemy—she dared look up, into the whirls. And, for an instant, she swore she saw something beyond that bruised patch of sky; a hint of a reflection, a glimpse into the alien world where their mysterious opponents originated.

She only saw the vista briefly; saw that it was a surprisingly light and soft-looking view of snow-capped hills sitting beneath not one sun or even two, but three dim, distant lights. And then she saw a hateful face staring back, and all illusions of softness and light being representative of that alien realm glimpsed through a hole in the Earth’s sky evaporated.

A terrified voice reached above the chaos. “Over there!”

The mother hurried toward the voice, where her surviving section of the crowd had diverted. She ran blindly, going only on hope. The giant twister unfolded out of the sky. She felt its pull on her spine, its dragging influence and hunger in the rising wind. And there was a smell she hadn’t noticed before but was now acutely aware of, synthetic, not quite like cleaning fluid but in that vicinity. Caustic and industrial, whipped into a fury by the cyclone.

“Quickly, up here!”

The other lane appeared beneath their feet, and then they were crossing gravel, climbing over sedge and litter at the opposite side of the highway, and scrambling toward the tree line. Here was the cement shell of a dilapidated building scarred with graffiti. The structure wouldn’t offer much protection if the cyclone came down near it, the voice in her thoughts declared. But it was their only option, their only chance.

The oblong cement shelter, probably used for storing road salt or sand, sat open to the elements, its windows and doors long gone. They hurried in, pushing the people in front of them, pushed by the people behind them. Had any more refugees escaped the savage dragging force of the cyclone when it touched down on the highway, they likely would have been trampled or smothered. As it was, the crowd cut out less than a dozen behind them as the vortex swept past, close enough to grab the last two figures at the door and one trying to enter through a window into its deadly caress.

The mother pulled the older daughter close, unaware that the middle child was no longer with them, and together they shielded the youngest girl between their bodies. The vortex tugged at their backs, pulled at their hair. The mother smelled the synthetic compound on the youngest girl, strong enough to make the soft lining of her nostrils burn.

The cyclone passed by, turning the woods at the side of the highway into ragged nubs. When it was gone from sight, they saw that it had taken the rest of the crowd with it. So, too, the men with their guns, their vehicles and, presumably, the Town of Bedford, Population: 0.

They continued forward, the three that had once been four, surrounded by a sparse collection of stragglers that had once been a crowd. Smoke stained the horizon at their backs; ahead of them, at the roadside, they reached a campfire. A hunter who had killed, butchered, and roasted a deer offered to share as far as the meat would go. It was their first solid meal in days.

Following the cyclone, the youngest girl had difficulty walking, and the chemical smell she exuded intensified. For the next day, a day that ran together into all the other ones before it in the mother’s mind, the child complained of terrible stomach pains. At first, the mother blamed it on the venison and the polluted water they were forced to drink from puddles as the weather grew stifling with humidity.

Until the following day, when the little girl twice vomited viscous blue, and the mother caught her staring at them with malice in her eyes. The girl didn’t speak after that, and with the chemical stink came another, underlying smell, a putrid odor of rot.

Rabid, that’s how the little girl looked.

The mother, who really wasn’t the girl’s mother, and the other daughter, stopped in place, paralyzed by the image that greeted them: the youngest girl, staggering away from them, blue liquid running from her mouth, ears, and the splits in the flesh at her throat. The girl’s chest swelled and contracted, as though the child’s lungs had doubled in size. Tripled. Only…