that had been turned upside down and shaken out. So they put guns in their mouths or drew knives across their wrists or swung from nooses before the sun rose. Better that than live in a world where all the dark things were given breath, where the dead could rise from their graves to torment the living.
Here are a few things of a more personal nature that were witnessed by no one but those who suffered through them:
Chuck Bittner, after his run-in with Mrs. Crowley and then the walking corpse of his own mother, spent the night in a dumpster of all things. Hearing things moving in the water around him, but simply afraid to look and see what they were. Selfish, arrogant, uppity little brat that he had been, Chuck was no more. He had aged a decade that night. And he did not doubt that he would never again be a kid. So he waited through the long night, curled up, wet and shaking, the rain falling and the rising water smelling of his mother and the wind sounding like her voice.
Dr. Charles Monroe, the county coroner, figured on a long night when he saw all the drowned bodies waiting in the morgue. Just after midnight, when they began to move, Monroe did nothing but sit and stare. He sat there while the cadaver of Jenny Compton, aged three, walked over to him, fixing him with black and soulless eyes. And it wasn’t until she sank her teeth into his throat that he managed a brittle, broken scream.
Douglas Perry of Perry Family Meats was woken rudely over in East Genessee when he heard movement in his shop below. He kept no money on the premises, but he did have some ten-thousand dollars worth of meat hanging in his refrigerator room and was hoping the power would come back on soon before he lost everything. When he went down there, flashlight in hand, he found the stainless steel door open. Inside, hanging from shanks of beef and carcasses of pork, were what he thought at first were babies. At least, at first glance they looked like babies…like fetuses really: bulbous-headed and round-eyed. But there the resemblance ended. For these babies?if babies they were?were malformed and grotesque, some with too many limbs and others joined together like Siamese twins. They paid him little mind, just continued to chew and suck at the hanging meat with the most obscene sounds. Perry left and promptly put a bullet through his left temple.
And Father Mackley of the Holy Covenant girl’s school not too far from Perry Family Meats, stepped out that night into the rain and wind, half out of his mind over the girls missing from his school. He looked up in the sky and the clouds parted. He saw the moon clearly enough. Except it looked like a bright orange skull grinning down at him. Mackley suffered a fatal heart attack on the spot.
And that was the night in Witcham.
When the sun finally rose, it revealed the devastation. Which was considerable. Nobody had to erect a gravestone to Witcham, the buildings and houses rising from the water were a cemetery all their own.
8
Dawn.
The sun came up, but little of it was seen or felt. It hid behind an angry film of gray and black clouds, hinting at its presence, but refusing to show itself completely, wearing its veils like a stripper and refusing to disrobe. That’s how morning came, with a seduction and a tease of daylight, but nothing more.
The city drooped under the rain that fell in buckets and then blew in fine mists, but never, ever stopped coming. It was a hard rain and a soft rain, a needle-fine rain and a downpour that drenched you to the skin. It stung your face and got in your eyes and soaked through your pants and boots and after awhile, it seemed that your soul was drowning, filling up like a bucket and everything inside your head and out was gray and wet and steaming. That was life in Witcham these days, an existence of abyssal depths and muddy ponds and pale green swamps. There was no chance to ever dry off, just the water dripping and dropping, that accursed dampness that made you want to scratch your skin off after a time.
So, the water continued to rise, the Black River continued to swell, and Witcham continued to sink and sink. A gray mist came off the slopping, eternal sea, obscuring everything and turning what daylight there was to a leaden gloom.
People came out of houses, wading through the black, oily water. In less-flooded areas, they used trucks. In submerged areas, they boated or clung to drifting refuse.
What you noticed first when you stepped out into the overcast, damp world of Witcham was the smell. No, smell didn’t cut it. This was definitely a stink. It was an ugly black odor, organic and meaty and warm. You could not only smell it, you could taste it on your tongue and feel it laying over your skin like a sour sweat. Maybe you could fool yourself for a time, as you tried to breathe that thick and rancid air, that what you were smelling was just that stagnant, polluted water backwashed with rotting garbage and dead animals and sewage, but you knew better. For this stench was simply too overpowering, too sweet and high and gagging. This stench was that of the unburied dead, of hundreds, if not thousands, of bloated, waterlogged corpses chewed by rats and veiled by flies and sweating maggots by the mitful. This was what maybe Bergen-Belsen or Treblinka smelled like after a good rain. Not exactly a country lane after a spring shower, but a sickening, steaming brew of decomposition, an odor so physical, so very palpable that you had all you could do not to drop to your knees and vomit at the first whiff.
And if Witcham had a perfume, a signature odor, this was it.
The streets were rivers of filth and garbage, excretia and carrion rushing towards some unseen and pestiferous dead sea. Things bobbed and things rolled. Some of those things were alive and some were dead and some were neither. Everywhere, there were corpses drifting about, in whole and in part. And that brought flies, storms and clouds and ravaging swarms of meatflies. And gulls and crows and buzzards and rats, thousands of rats.
Witcham was a bloated, sunwashed corpse breeding disease and vermin and horror. Over a third of the population had fled when the flooding began and of those remaining, nearly half were dead by dawn.
You could almost hear the clicking of a great death-watch beetle hanging over the town, the ticking of a clock, grains of sand sliding down the neck of an hourglass.
This wasn’t over yet.
Something was coming.
Something was about to happen.
And it wouldn’t be long in coming.
9
Mitch rolled out of bed at 12:30 the next afternoon. The sleep felt good, but he did not like the idea of all the daylight that had been wasted. Tommy and Harry came awake about the same time. Mitch sat up, working the sleep from his eyes with sleep-numb fingers. It was not like in a book or a movie where some character rolls out of bed and does not remember the awful plight he or she is in. No, there was no merciful moment of forgetfulness. Mitch came awake fully aware of what had happened in the past twenty-four hours. It laid inside him in a cold, inorganic mass that made him physically ill.
“We better get going,” he said.
Harry was fully awake the moment he opened his eyes. You got like that when you did time. Just like a soldier in a war, you came out of sleep tense and ready to fight.
Tommy, however, took a few more moments. “Morning, sunshine,” he said to Harry.
Harry smiled.
Out in the kitchen, Wanda Sepperly was looking bright and perky and almost youthful. And why not? It had been years and years since she’d had so many fine young faces gathered around her table. The Zirblanksi twins were there, dark of eye and hair, but vibrant and taking to Wanda like seedlings to spring rain and sunshine. Deke Ericksen was there, too, his eyes little more than bloodshot holes. Those eyes had seen things, Mitch knew, things they would never forget. Despite the grayness pushing up against the windows, inside Wanda’s kitchen things were bright and homey.
Wanda was old school.
