They Lurk

They Lurk

Death of St. Innocent. 1530.

Black Death. Artist Unknown.

 

Memento Mori.  Daniel Preisler. 1650

In the early morning hours when first shift wakes up  a PSA played on every radio and phone screen. Even the TV lost its sound, a green bar flashed across with code and abbreviated agencies. A tone beeped before the message began playing. A robot voice said,

THIS IS A PUBLIC SAFETY NOTICE

Reports of Unidentified Persons have increased throughout Hitchens County. Residents are advised to lock doors and windows. A Large Concentration of Unidentified Persons has broken up and are moving towards the following counties. Saunderlund County. Torchlight County. Wilkroot County. Residents are advised against approaching any person who appears injured, confused, or displaying unnatural behavior. Stay indoors or find shelter immediately until the Emergency is over. 

Coffee maker steamed. Fang sipped it, but it burned his lips and he spilled it over his shirt.  Work boots fell apart. Pin and needles in his spine, so he took a pill. Take a pill with a dirty glass of water. With kids sleeping before school, the TV is still on washing their pale faces with flashes of eye-catching color. Grocery list on the empty fridge, with baseball photos and drawings. He looked outside, waited for the womanto return, but she didn't. Things flow like a river, somethings stay after being washed up, somethings belong there, living or dead.

 “It’s been awhile.” Mr Fang said nursing the stitches. The wound still felt fresh and moist. It drained pus and blood every morning. He wondered how well he’d be able to handle the machines but if no one else showed up, he’d be the one to do it.

. He was the gravedigger and landskeeper for the cemetery on the hill by a town of 900 souls so removed and remote that Amazon can’t deliver packages there. The newest bridge went up over 100 years ago. The people are either so aged that they’ve forgotten about the rest of the world, or they are intentionally laying low, repelled by the forces of greater society that gave up on its mislaid ruins long ago. Yet it’s graveyard was immense, ornate, and perched in a neat trench overlooking the hill top. The strange folk of the village said that the burial grounds used to be an important spot to watch the river. That senators and even warlocks built homes here and were interred in the soil of the graveyard. Something about purifying the waters of evil spirits, Fang didn’t really believe stories like that. 

. He got up everyday just before first light just so he could watch the fog in the trees and the foxes in the grass. Sometimes he’d catch them resting on the stones. Maybe if he did it fast he could get back home before anyone one saw him out during emergency hours. He turned the TV off and ate his breakfast.  

“Guess we hunker down until the Patrol says it’s okay to come out.” 

He rolled his eyes. It still hurt where the doctor stitched his wound shut. The boy who did it, his old lady’s son, walled himself off from the cops and held out in his barricade until he passed out from dehydration. Now this. And it was probably over nothing. A couple of scared old women.  

 Out the window, long lawn, wet grass, open fields, no dangerous people lingering with blood dripping from their mouths. He had stones to mount and grass to mow. Bones to collect and store. Last time this happened was more than fifteen years ago. They stayed in the basement one sunny day, did nothing, nothing happened to them, and in three days the emergency was lifted. Two people were killed, most people still had to go to work, the few that witnessed them couldn’t even see what was attacking them but for a shadow stumbling in the mist. 

Just stick to the procedure, cops will search around, and it will be over. Soon. 

However his face fell into his hands. The other day he had left the backhoe and two loading buckets out on the cemetery grounds. He got tired and hungry, figured he could store it today, so he took the keys with him and went home. He tapped his toe and thought about it, checking the curtains. He saw no danger yet.. He could run down there, put the backhoe and loading buckets back, and make it home before sunrise. So he put on his coat and darted out into the early morning dark.

As he drove down the highway, around the brick streets, gravel roads, over the bridge, he saw one in the field. Then two in the mist, and three more appeared in the middle of  the road.. They staggered with short steps, falling over creases in the ground, carrying bones with the meat gnawled off.. 

“That’s Uncle Robert.” 

Fang remembered the day of the man’s funeral. He still wore the suit they buried him in.

Mr. Fang drove up the countryside as pale light broke through the dark clouds over the hills. The strangers wandered from their positions in the field. One now wandered along the road, picking at roadkill. The other two fell into the ditch and got stuck in the drainage pipe. He had to slow down behind a truck. They waited for a group of about 6 to cross the road. 

“It’s more than last time.” Mr. Fang told himself. 

A while back they had sightings of a few in a barn. That night a homeless man had fallen asleep under the bridge to the graveyard, and he missed the emergency broadcast. He slept into the night, and was dragged into the creek, where he was disrobed and murdered, then eaten until only his bones were left. 

More recently, a few had been sighted in the river. A man drove to the edge of the river. He rested his car at a sandbar, he rolled down the windows, swallowed a bottle of pills and fell asleep. They got into his car, and murdered him too. They did such a thorough job on his body, that cops only found the puddles of blood on the seats and floor, and one single finger embedded into the steering wheel. 

The Patrol just issued another PSA but didn’t close school. Businesses opened, people drove to work. It was just a few sightings, and they found the ones who had murdered the men within that day. Many questioned if it was even a real emergency. Maybe something else killed the men, and the Patrol is just covering something up. 

Everyone in town had a different story for what had happened, each one contrived before the emergency was declared. Who saw the men who were eaten was a conversation topic like whose husband was cheating. 

Both victims got buried in the graveyard on the hill. Fang couldn’t be certain as he never knew them too well, but he thought he saw them there in the group on the road. 

The music on the radio all had the same message. 

"Residents should avoid the deceased."

Fang drove around the lingering bodies. He drove through the village, to the top of the hill, and up to the old road. It was narrow, dripping wet, and quiet. He pulled up to the garage, unlocked the door to bring in the machines. 

From the hill top he could see for miles. He saw nothing from the summit. The ground below looked just as it usually did. He could see the river, he could see the homes waking up and traffic sparkle in sunlight as it appeared on the highway. 

“Did they say three groups?” Fang thought as he wheeled the machine back inside.

From the countryside to the river, he watched out for a sign of them.

Something dark moved in the river water. At first it looked like a heap of trash floating to the top of the current. But it moved AGAINST the flow. It sank, and rose. Hands reached from the murk and broke the foam. Fang  thought it was just a cloud or a patch of fog, but it moved, it squirmed, and bodies crawled up to the bank. He could hear moans blowing up in the wind. Hundreds of them. Mud coated bodies, bloated and swollen, bursting on the sandbars, tangled together. They drifted downstream, pale and contorted by the pressure of the whirlpools. Other had no skin, just gray bones wrapped in a rag. Their shredded clothing hung from their arms and necks and trailed behind them like weeds. 

The river carried them gently to the shore. A body hit the bank. He slapped and sank into the mud. When he emerged, his entire body was a cast of muck and backwash. Others followed him. They tangled together on the bank. Legs caught in ribcages, fists stuck in mouths. Dark smelly water leaked from their eye sockets. 

Fang watched them break free and wander up the hill. The winds carried their voices nearer to him. Whispers. Then moans. Then a hundred voices speaking at once, rising and falling with the river like some ancient death ritual. 

The ones he noticed lost their balance or their footing, and they slipped and fell back down to the water, where they let the water take them down to the bottom again. Then one appeared at the gate. Others walked behind the road. They crawled in silence leaving black trails behind them. The ones that could walk went towards the roofs under the early morning moon, its light glistening on their bodies. The river kept carrying the rest down and down and down. 

As if the dead belonged there all along.