5
I think it was our first night in South Bend that I began having the nightmares. I, like you, have had my share of night frights, but this was like nothing I’ve ever had before. To call them dreams is like calling a 500-megaton thermonuclear weapon just a bomb. And the real scary part here, you see, is that I’m not really sure they were dreams. The experience was too…corporeal, too organic, if that makes any sense.
All I can tell you is we were in the storeroom. Janie was sleeping at my side and Texas Slim and Carl were across the room. In the dream, I opened my eyes and what I saw was the shadowy storeroom. I sat there, blinking, looking around, filled with a terror that was positively nameless. I wanted to get out, to do anything…but I could not move. Or maybe I was afraid to. There was no window in the room, but the entire far wall suddenly lit up like it was washed by pale moonlight. More than moonlight. Luminous, flickering, energized. That’s when I saw that the light wasn’t just light but some whirling vortex of phosphorescent matter that was alive, expanding, engulfing the entire wall until there was no wall. It made a hissing, boiling sort of noise that put my nerves right on edge.
I was filled with revulsion and horror. I wanted to scream and maybe I did.
It kept expanding, swirling, a great worming mass like thousands and thousands of corpse-white snakes squirming and roping and tangling, being born from their own serpentine lengths, pushing out from a central mass that looked almost like a face…it had a contorted, leering slash for a mouth and something like eyes, evil, upturned eyes pulsating with the formless blackness of the void. The rest of it kept changing form, compressing, elongating, mutating. The face of Medusa. That’s what I thought in the dream: I was staring at the face of Medusa. Except this Medusa was absolutely alien, absolutely obscene, a corpuscular entity with a grotesque blur for a face made of thousands of those reaching white tendrils. Like the face itself, they were not a solid mass, but composed of millions of squirming threads and filaments who themselves were made of millions of roping fibers braided together down unto infinity. As I watched, the entire thing began to unwind until it looked the entire far side of the room was a nest of billions of writhing, smooth white cobras made of plaited, conjoined worms.
But the face wasn’t gone…not entirely.
It was eroding, flaking apart, unwinding into viscid living threads, but still those malefic eyes stared out at me. They watched me. As I cowered with bunched fists, a pounding heart, and a sour sweat running from my pores, it took a wicked delight in my terror. You can run, but you can’t hide, Nash. I’m coming just as you’ve always suspected, born in the microscopic ether and into the real. East to west, that’s my path. I leave nothing but graveyards and gleaming white bones in my wake. As you go westward, so do I. And you better hurry because I’m right behind you. Youngstown is a cemetery now. Those streets you played in as a child…filled with bloating white corpses and strewn with well-picked bones, nothing but flies and rats and buzzards, nothing more. Just the rising hot stench of decay and the silent blackness of tombs. I’m entering Cleveland now. Soon I’ll be coming for all that you have left. Will you scream when I take Janie, your sweet little cherry away from you? Or will you barter for your own miserable life as her flesh blackens with the pox, as she drowns in a yellow sea of her own infected waste and diseased blood bursts from her pores and she vomits out the black slime of her own liquefied intestines? What will you do, Nash? What will you offer to me?
It was bad, that thing getting inside my head and tormenting me, but what was worse was that it touched me. All those coiling, unraveling threads came at me, covering me, sliding into me like slivers of ice, impaling me and filling my body with their pestilence and contamination. The agony of infestation was unbelievable. My body shook and gyrated with waves of agony as I was absorbed, assimilated, remade in the form of that monstrous Medusan parasite, my blood gone to cold clotted venom, my internals dissolving to a marrowy sauce, my brain rendered to a gray slopping jelly. My cells were polluted one by one, distended with waste, each finally exploding in a drainage of diseased cytoplasm. I was literally a living corpse, drowning in my own filth, poisoned bile, and putrescent blood.
My mind was gone, pulled into some sucking black hole of insanity…but still I could hear a voice, my voice, wild and screeching: Nash, Nash, Nash! Can’t you see what it is and what it will do? Look behind you, look to the east, it’s nothing but a great bird-picked bone pile now! No more sunshine, no more light, no more anything! That thing destroys everything in its path and leaves a spreading ink-black swath of darkness in its wake! And it’s coming, getting closer day by day, for the love of God or Janie or yourself, you better run, you better run as fast as you fucking can-
I came out of the dream at that point, if dream it was. Drenched with hot-cold sweat, I stumbled to the door and got out of the storeroom. My guts were flipping over themselves, rolling with a greasy peristaltic motion. My legs were so weak I could barely stand. I stumbled into walls and tripped over my own feet. My muscles were sore and throbbing. My back kinked. My hands trembling. White bolts of pain were trying to split my skull in two. Tears rolled down my face and my teeth chattered. I was filled with a sense of loathing as if I had been embraced by a wormy corpse.
But what had embraced me was far worse.
Not the corpse, but The Maker of Corpses.
Outside the Army/Navy store, I fell to my knees in the cool night air. I didn’t care about dog packs or the Children or rats or any of it. That shit was pedestrian in comparison with what I’d just been through. I did not know if it was sheer nightmare or reality or some feverish, fucked up brew of both, all I knew was that I could smell the hot green odor of rotting corpses in the cities to the east and taste something in my mouth like hot-sweet bile. I threw up and kept throwing up until it was all purged from me. And even then the raw, fetid stench of it on the sidewalk-far unlike any vomit I’d ever known-made me shake with dry heaves.
Somewhere during the process, Janie came out. “Are you all right, Nash?”
I looked up at her, my face warm and waxy, my eyes bloodshot and tearing. I swallowed. Swallowed again. I could not speak. We went inside and I drank some water, smoked a cigarette, and all the while she was staring at me, wanting answers. “Nash? Nash? God, Nash, speak to me…” Oh, but I couldn’t. Because if I opened my mouth and powered up the old voice box what was going to come out in a gushing flood of pure unbridled terror was the scream to end all screams. I was afraid I would start and never, ever stop.
So I said nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I could see it in her eyes, the concern, yes, but also the fear as she wondered if I was shot through with the Fevers. But what I couldn’t say, what I dared not frame into worms, was that I was not sickened with Fevers but had been embraced by the Mother of Fevers.
And it was coming.
Getting closer day by awful day.
An unnamable horror that had come to exterminate what remained of the human race.
6
Texas Slim and Carl found a vehicle for us and it was really something. They came back with it about an hour before the sandstorm hit, noticing with some discomfort the uneasy silence that lay between Janie and I. They did not ask about it. They took us out to show us what they had found.
I started laughing when I saw it.
So did Janie.
Of all the dinosaurs in the automotive jungle they had somehow come across a VW microbus that had been new when the Vietnam War had still been raging. The bus was worn and dented, painted up with ancient flowers, peace signs, and other psychedelic hieroglyphics that had faded with age. It was an ugly vehicle for an ugly world.
“Where in the hell did you find this?”
“Some guy’s garage,” Carl said, scratching his thick black beard. “We were checking out this neighborhood, just looking in garages for anything we could get. We found this. Looks like shit, sure, but it moves and it can get us out of here. Maybe Michigan City or Gary, wherever.”
“It’s been serviced some, Nash,” Texas Slim added. “We found the fellow what owned it. He was on the floor, still had an oily rag in his hand.”
