That was it.
D-Mort was brought in. D-Mort, the Disaster Mortuary Response Team. A branch of the federal government, they were responsible for cataloging the dead following airplane crashes and mass disasters of any kind. They came in force with a team of pathologists and coroners, forensic anthropologists and undertakers. It was nearly impossible, under the circumstances, to identify the cadavers and parts thereof they found. But they did their job and it took months. D-Mort are notoriously close-mouthed about what they have seen and what it is they do, and they were no less secretive about Witcham. They gathered up the dead and placed them in huge makeshift morgues and began the gruesome business of setting things to right. Many were reburied, but many were not. And whatever they learned and whatever they decided was unfit for traditional burial and what it was they shoveled into the mouths of incinerators, they never spoke of.
Many who’d lived through the horror of Witcham and many who returned, denied the lurid tales that made the rounds. Just as the traditional press did. Of all those who had survived the death of the city, none of them wished to discuss more than what was reported in the press.
But what they said in private was a different matter.
Lou Darin returned to the city and spent his years denying that anything other than an ordinary flood had taken the town. He was not alone. Many refused to believe what they had seen and what they had lived through. It was simply beyond belief.
Some had no choice but to believe.
Chuck Bittner was one of these.
It took him weeks and weeks to track down the apartment building where Mrs. Crowley had lived. The building was empty, of course. It was marked for demolition and had been for months before the flooding. He had to sneak inside. He had to see that flat where the old witch had lived. He had to prove to himself that such a place existed.
It did.
What he found were empty, dusty rooms that had not been lived in for years. But the layout was familiar, too familiar. Maybe the furniture was gone. All the cozy accoutrements that had baited in he and the other kids that night they’d escaped from that clown were missing, but there was no doubt in Chuck’s mind that he stood in the house of the child-eating witch.
And that was proved positive when he saw something scratched into the wall there. Names. The names of the children:
Brian Summers.
Tara Boyle.
Mark Tobin.
And beneath that, in the same gouged and spidery hand:
September 27
On this date I did et three children and found them pleasing
Chuck ran out of there then. It was just too much. All of it came rushing back into his head and as he ran from the building, he thought he heard the shrill cackling of the old witch following behind him.
2
For Mitch and Tommy and Deke and Chrissy, there were a lot of long nights trying to pull their lives together. Nothing would be the same again. But they accepted that. Tommy had had no family but his sister Bonnie and she had been out of town when the disaster struck. Mitch had lost his wife and Chrissy had lost her mother and all of her closest friends. Deke had lost his parents. No one who survived the blackness Witcham had been plunged into came out of it without loss, without scars and wounds and suffering. It was the nature of the beast. But for all of it, there was a beauty and a serenity to surviving. To being able to see the sun and smell clean air again. And mostly, to be dry and know that the dead were once again, just the dead.
Deke moved in with his aunt who lived ten miles away.
Mitch and Chrissy moved in with Tommy out at his cabin on Pullman Lake, which was situated outside of the Black River Valley and suffered no damage. Mitch and Chrissy had a lot of good cries, did a lot of bonding. But they came through it. And Tommy was always there with a smart remark or to say the worst possible thing at the worst possible time.
But they went on.
They lived off of Mitch and Tommy’s savings, neither of them were quite ready to go back into the blue collar world even six weeks later. But that would come. In time.
One afternoon as Mitch laid on Tommy’s couch, he said, “You know, it’s just damn funny that there’s no mention of the walking dead, no mention of the shit that caused it: that goddamn army base and their experiments.”
“Perception management,” Tommy told him, pulling off a cigarette. “They got spin doctors at work out there, Mitch, that could make you believe you’re my maiden aunt.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
Chrissy who had been sitting there with them, threw back her long lustrous dark hair and just laughed. “Oh, there’s been mention of it, guys.”
They both looked at her.
On the coffee table were some of Tommy’s favorite periodicals, the kind that specialized in bigfoot rape stories and UFO abductions. There were three copies of the Weekly World Examiner sitting there, well-thumbed. On their covers were photos that might have been taken in Witcham or maybe on a soundstage for that matter. One showed a rain-swept, flooded street and blurry, out-of-focus people rising from the murk. Another showed a shadowy figure standing amongst some graves. And still another showed hands rising from the water. Hands that looked a little familiar for Mitch to simply shrug off. Too white, too bloated, too set with sores. WISCONSIN CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD, one headline proclaimed. THE WITCH-AM HORROR, said another. THE RISING DEAD OF WISCONSIN, said yet another. Inside, were more blurry photos. Some which had actually been taken in Witcham. The stories were lurid to the extreme and that was pretty fitting, because what had happened in Witcham was certainly lurid. And certainly extreme by all standards of normalcy.
Mitch just sighed, forcing memories from his head. “I guess…I guess it makes you wonder how much of that stuff is true, you know?”
Tommy and Chrissy looked at each other, laughed.
“Yeah, here’s one that’s got me thinking,” Tommy said. “’Face of Jesus seen on Mars.’ I mean, that’s food for thought.”
“How about this one,” Chrissy said. “’Rabid Grandmother feeds grandchildren to giant Rats.’ I don’t think I’ll sleep again.”
“All right, all right.” Mitch just shook his head. “And where are you off to?”
Chrissy shrugged. “Deke’s picking me up.”
“Well, tell him he better come in this time,” Tommy said. “No daughter of mine is dating some hoodlum who pulls up in the yard and revs his engine. I won’t have it. Me or your father.”
Chrissy ignored him, came over to Mitch and gave him a kiss. “Love you, dad.”
“Love you, kid. Be careful, will ya?”
“Always.”
Tommy put his hands on his hips. “Where’s mine? Didn’t I raise you better than that?”
Chrissy pecked him on the cheek.
Mitch watched her go to the door and wait. He found that he could spend hours just staring at her. She was her own person, tough and individualistic, but now and again, he could see Lily in her eyes or hear her in Chrissy’s staccato laugh.
“See you, boys,” she said when Deke pulled up.
“What should we do tonight, father?” Tommy said.
Mitch sighed. “Would you knock it off.”
