The Narrows(112)

He set the shotgun down then gripped the makeshift stake in both hands.

If I do this, I risk losing my sanity. I am on the cusp, on the verge. The world as I know it is crumbling down all around me.

But it didn’t matter. Not anymore.

He lifted the stake above his head and drove it down through the center of the creature’s body. He felt the flesh yield with surprising pliability as he sank the stake all the way through it to the ground. Something popped and air hissed from the carcass. More green ooze frothed out from the fresh wound. As Ben stared down at it, the creature continued to change its appearance before his eyes. Like flipping through pages of a book.

“Just in case,” Brandy said.

Then she dropped to her knees and cried.



13



Surrounded by a misting rain, they retreated back across the field toward the squad car. They did not speak to each other, opting for silence, as if they had just completed some religious ceremony. And perhaps they had.

Halfway back to the car, they paused to stare at the body of the hairless boy, dead in the mud. He was partially covered by debris from the collapsing of the silo. He was dead and projected all the morbidity and hideousness of a dead body…but he was also a boy once again, as if the stopping of his heart had instantly released him from whatever unimaginable horrors had kept him prisoner.

“Who was he?” Brandy asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you think…” she trailed off on her own. She didn’t need to ask the question. Ben knew what she was thinking, anyway.

She took off her rosary and laid it on the body. When she rejoined Ben, she was crying silently.





Chapter Nineteen


1


Ben awoke to a world that was already half a memory. The farmhouse was still dark, the mustiness of the place greeting him in its customary way. A soft rain fell against the roof. He listened to it for a time, and found the world otherwise silent. No power hummed through the walls of the farmhouse. No one drove cars up and down Sideling on their way to work. For a change, there wasn’t even the sound of generators off in the distance. Ben glanced at the clock on his nightstand and saw that it was just after seven in the morning, though there was still night pressed against the windows.

It was Friday, Halloween Day. The power was still out on the outskirts of town, including the Journell farm, but that didn’t bother Ben all that much. He stripped the bedsheets from his body and climbed out of bed. In the kitchen, he lit a few candles then drank two tall glasses of water from the tap. Rain sluiced against the windowpanes.

He turned on the gas stove and lit the burner with a match. He filled an old percolator with coffee and stood there in the semidarkness waiting for it to brew.

Ten minutes later he went out onto the covered back porch and sat in the coolness of the early morning listening to the storm and watching the craters in the untilled soil overflow with water. Due east, warm pastel light bled up the horizon, forming a sharp and jagged silhouette of the mountains.

He sipped his coffee and contemplated taking up smoking.



2



And he thought, Every small town has power. The people are aware of it in the way we’re aware of electricity humming through the walls of our homes or that our water is delivered through a network of pipes underground. We sense it like animals sense a tornado coming.

3



And he thought, Maybe the plague seeks out a town that is already on the verge of collapse—that is already very much near death—and it grabs hold and takes root and plants its virulent claws into the soil. Maybe when a town dies, it becomes this rotting, festering corpse that attracts the sorts of things that feed off corpses.

4

There were no reports filed and there were very few phone calls made. The death toll was never officially stated, though the number of lives lost came to just over two dozen. In a small, rural town the size of Stillwater, that was quite a lot of people.

At daybreak, Ben made the rounds in his squad car. Some of the water had retreated from the town square but there was still a lot of damage. Out on U.S. Route 40, the receding water left articles of clothing, discarded couch cushions, and pieces of antique furniture in the roadway like roadkill. Similarly, a number of cars at Jimmy Toops’s tow yard—including Tom Schuler’s beat-up old Maverick, which had been there for the better part of the week—were casualties of a mudslide that sent them tumbling down to the banks of the Potomac River. The stockpile of automobiles created a makeshift damn that caused the cold, black water of the Potomac to rise at an unusual rate, overtaking Beauchamp Avenue and flooding the root cellars of all the homes along Town Road 5. An avalanche uprooted trees and spilled their remains across Schoolhouse Road while the basement of the elementary school gradually filled with septic, black runoff. The school janitor, Odom Pulaski, would return to the building over a week later to a rancorous stench that would remind him of Vietnamese killing fields.

The water left bodies behind, too…although it was apparent these people did not suffer a death from drowning. Among the human detritus were the fetid and bloated corpses of Evan Quedentock and Tom Schuler, their faces sheared off and their skulls cracked right down the middle. (A black river snake might have been discovered curling up in the empty cranium of Mr. Quedentock.) Their mutilated corpses would be discovered by some thrill-seeking teenagers looking for valuables left behind in the wake of the flood. Bob Leary’s body would eventually be found too, his skull having been split open like an overripe melon, his legs still protruding from his fireplace. Floodwaters scooped Mike Keller’s body right off his front lawn and sailed him like a parade float down Schoolhouse Road. He would be found nearly a week later, snared in the Y of an oak tree, but by that time his face, fingers, and neck had been eaten away by wild animals. Judy Janus, his live-in girlfriend who drove the Chevy Blazer, would never be found. No one would ever know that it had actually been Officer Mike Keller who had shot and killed her that night following her tearful confession of infidelity. When Mike was attacked and killed on his front lawn by the Leary boy, he had been on his way into Garrett County to plant a bullet between the eyes of Judy’s lover.