User:Rebuttal/storm

Morning, now. Thunder pounded outside, and the wind howled. They had promising a storm for some time, now, but they had never hinted towards such ferocity. From somewhere in my apartment complex I heard a loud crash, and a scream; someone waking from a nightmare, I assumed, and I didn’t blame them. My alarm clock erupted into life and I looked at it with tired, bloodshot eyes, silently ordering it to explode.

“- biggest, baddest storm we’ve seen in years.” The voice faded into a static chuckle, and there was momentarily silence. Finally, there was a loud crackle and the man’s voice returned, “- shaking in my boots, Joe, after hearing some of these news reports. These critters are spook -”

Irritated, exhausted, and desperate for an immense dosage of caffeine, I yanked the radio clock from the wall and threw it on my bed with a slew of profanity. Five o’clock already, and not a wink of sleep all night. I gathered a protective cocoon of blankets around myself and ventured into the drafty wasteland that was my apartment. I had lived there for around a year, at that time, and I still had not adjusted to the abnormally cool temperature. It was an old building, full of cold and creaks and cracks, but it was all that my limited income would allow. It hadn’t taken long to discover that deciding on an art major had been a poor choice, and the only job I could find since my graduation had been at the local dive, Ramsey’s. Grumbling about the cold, and cursing my inherent left-brained state of mind, I shuffled into the kitchen and set about making a pot of coffee, flipping the tiny television I kept on my counter-top on as I walked by. The news was on, and an irksome woman with thick make-up and a Barbie doll smile was rattling off a report of strange sightings of some sort or another in a chirping voice that reminded me of a truck in reverse. Her blank stare made me feel uncomfortable, and I’m not one for the news anyway, so I flipped through the channels (manually, I had lost the remote in my clutter long ago), finally settling on morning-time children’s programming. Sure, it was grating, but certainly not as grating as that news woman’s voice had been.

It wasn’t before long that I was armed with an old mug full of coffee - black, as always- and dragging my cloak of bedspreads out of my kitchen. My curtains were thrown open and the graying sky of a stormy dawn cast an eerie glow over me. It dawned on me that nothing had ever looked more inviting than my over stuffed tweed couch did at that precise moment, so I flopped onto it as gracefully as one can flop. Miraculously not a drop of my coffee had spilled and I scooted it onto a nearby table before passing out sprawled in a snarl of blankets and limbs, half on and half off of my couch.

I awoke to the city’s tornado sirens and a frantic knocking at my door. Startled, I rolled off of the couch and smacked my head on the table where my still-full mug of coffee sat. With a string of profanity I somehow managed to untangle myself from my blanket cocoon and got to my feet. “April? April open up, it’s Cassie. Are you there? You have to see this. April?” My neighbor’s daughter, an excitable fifteen year old girl, did this often. I angrily stomped to my door, rubbing my swelling head and preparing a tirade to avenge my throbbing skull.

“Cassie, it’s got to be like… six in the morning. What do you want? Go home.” I cracked the door open, glaring out with the most irate look I could muster. “This has got to be the seventh head injury you’ve given me in the past…” My voice trailed off when I saw my neighbor’s face. Her eyes were dilated and her nose was quite clearly broken, dried blood stained on her white tee-shirt. There was no smile plastered on her face, for once, and I couldn’t remember what I had been upset about a moment before. “Cassie, do you know your nose is broken?”

“April, it’s after noon. Haven’t you seen the news? There have been reports on all morning. Something’s weird.” She put her hand to my door and gave me an irritated look. “Let me in, April, you have no idea what’s going on.”

Dumbfounded, I opened the door and she pushed past me, scowling at the mess that was my apartment. She absently pawed at her nose, her face contorting as she spoke, “They’re odd. No one knows what they are, or where they came from, but they’re killing people. They thought they were harmless, at first, aliens or something, but then someone sent in footage of…” Her voice caught and she blinked back the first signs of hysteria she had shown until this point.

“Footage of what, Cassie? Do you need a glass of water? Cassie?” “Footage of them… Oh, I don’t know, April. I was sitting on my couch, getting ready for school, and the news was on. I was just blow-drying my hair and suddenly there was screaming coming from the television… and that never happens, you know?” She paused, picking at the dried blood that soaked her shirt, glancing nervously at my window before continuing. “So I looked and they were showing these things… I don’t know how to describe them. They don’t have arms, and they don’t have faces, and their legs look useless, kind of like mannequin torsos on stilts. There was a group of them, and a person, it must have been a friend of the person filming, and they were drunk, I think, both of them. The camera kept shaking and the person behind the camera kept laughing and laughing and laughing… Until the things… One of them opened its head. It had all of these teeth, and they were just sort of throbbing in its mouth, and a long tongue it… it kind of whipped out and grabbed the camera person’s friend and dragged him into its mouth. There was blood and it sounded like a blender. April, it sounded like a blender, and there was blood everywhere and the news channel just cut out. There was nothing but snow.” I stared at her for a moment, open-mouthed, waiting for her to burst into laughter so I could rough her up and send her home like I used to. Instead she burst into tears and at this I didn’t know what to do. Awkwardly, I sidled over to her, draped one of my blankets over her shoulders, and patted her head a couple of times. She calmed down quickly and looked at me with those wide eyes. That stare reminded me of the stories my dad used to tell me about war veterans, and a teeth-chattering chill ran down my spine. They called that look the ‘thousand mile stare’, my dad used to tell me. It was the look of a man who had seen people die. I hadn’t believed her until I thought of that, and at that moment I had felt like I couldn’t breathe.

I backed away from the frantic girl that sat in front of me, her chest heaving and her haunted eyes following my steps, into the kitchen. My television was still on and some silly cartoon characters jabbered away. I didn’t hear a word of it. Some distant part of my brain told me to change the channel, to turn on the news, and somehow my fingers found their way to the tiny buttons. The numbers on the screen crawled downwards. It seemed to take an eon, but I finally landed on the broadcast and for an instant I didn’t understand what she was saying. he same Barbie doll newscaster from that morning sat in her seat, but her eyes were glazed over and for a sick, terrifying second I thought she was dead. It took me a moment to comprehend what was happening. She was crying. Not the hysterical sobbing that Cassie had just got done with, but a hopeless, leaky way of lament that was somehow even more disconcerting. Someone spoke to her from behind the camera and she just shook. I heard the voice again, and the channel cut off. Nothing but snow. I slid down onto the floor and even I couldn’t keep myself from bawling.

Cassie composed herself before I did, and bustled into the kitchen, turning her eyes away from my tear-stained face. I slipped into some jeans and a baggy old sweatshirt while Cassie dug through my armoire for my pistol. We lived in a bad neighborhood, and my mother had suggested it as a ‘back-up plan’. I had whined and complained at her lack of trust in my independence, but, standing there in my apartment with the wail of tornado sirens and the bellow of thunder ringing in my ears, I thanked whatever God there may be for my mother’s paranoia. It wasn’t even fifteen minutes from Cassie’s initial arrival before we trundled out of my apartment building. I had my pistol clenched in my left hand and my small neighbor nervously shifted my dad’s old hunting knife from hand to hand, her swelling eyes darting from side to side. We moved quickly, deciding that the stairway would be the safer method of reaching the ground level. Luckily for us, I had gotten the third floor apartment rather than the one on the twelfth floor. Unfortunately for us, however, neither of us was ready for the scene that awaited us in the streets. A young woman sat in the middle of the road, unmoving, a bloody… something swaddled in her lap. Civilians darted down the road, many of them missing limbs, and practically all of them babbling with madness. A child walked down the sidewalk, struggling to drag a tattered blanket behind him. An old lady’s body was curled in the fetal position atop it, her glassy eyes staring out into nothingness.

Cassie’s breath began to hitch, audibly, and I put a hand on her shoulder. Part of me couldn’t believe I was about to say what I was about to say, and a feeling of self-loathing rose in my stomach. “We can’t wait around, Cass, or we’ll end up the same way.” She looked at me and I saw a glint in her eyes that broke my heart. She would have rather died than watch these people suffer, and she opened her mouth to say so. For a split second I was almost glad they decided to come at that moment, because her hatred almost scared me more than anything else did. My relief didn’t last for long, however. Cassie had done a fair job of describing them. Their skin was grey and translucent, their bodies essentially featureless and their legs feeble and wobbly. They made no noise as they approached, only the soft scrape of their footsteps along the wet concrete. The little boy dropped his blanket, kissed the old woman on her forehead, and dashed off into the fog. The woman in the middle of the road made a small choking noise and she started to scoot away revealing the fact that where her legs should have been there were only bloody stumps. Cassie turned, vomited, and the huddle of creatures reacted immediately. A few of them stopped, leaning forward in anticipation, but two of them performed the feat that my neighbor had attempted to describe earlier.

It’s nearly impossible to describe what happens, but it was like invisible hands were tearing the skin back from their faces, revealing a pit full of dirty, blood-stained needles. One of them extended a long, purple tongue-like appendage towards us and I grabbed Cassie’s arm, but I was too late. It wrapped around her neck and I heard the thick sizzling of her skin burning. She screamed and the rest of the monsters opened their mouths in unison, their tongues all shooting out at once. I shot wildly at the monsters, most of my shots flying off into the darkness. Only one hit its mark, and I almost cheered when I saw the bullet enter the first creature’s torso. It twitched and paused momentarily, and deep in my gut I knew that my bullet had done nothing, a thought that was confirmed when the thing wrenched Cassie forward into the waiting appendages of its companions. The knife fell out of her hand and she thrashed about wildly, looking at me with those war veteran eyes of hers. “Ape… April, stay with me.” I looked right into her eyes… and I ran. I ran like I never had before and I could feel the terror rising up my throat. I screamed as I ran, and at some point I stopped for a few minutes and vomited before I took off again. I passed the creatures, I counted them, and eventually the storm faded… The monsters, however, did not.

A week passed, and I only physically encountered one of the monsters. It got me while I was sleeping in a suburban ditch, and I woke up to a searing pain. It took me a moment to realize what was happening, but when my eyes adjusted I saw its tongue burrowed deep into my stomach, felt my skin burning. I shot it in its mouth and it fell down, screaming, and I felt an already distant pang of guilt about Cassie. Since then I’ve been holed up in an old parking garage on the far edge of the city. I’ve been praying constantly, but I can still hear the tornado sirens outside, and if I venture out far enough, the occasional scream.

So here I am. Starving, freezing, injured and dirty... But most of all alone. And I can hear them getting closer, their twisted legs dragging along the ground. I'm running out of time, and I'm running out of paper. I guess that's all that I can say. I’m not proud of this story, but in case the human race survives this, at least they’ll have some sort of account. No matter where these things came from, if they're aliens or biological warfare gone wrong, I think they're making it so that this is their territory now. I think they're making it so that we have to live in fear, hiding in shacks until they can slaughter us like cattle. So that, in the end, there is no end. No end to our suffering, no end to our terror, for as long as it may take. Forever and ever. Amen.