Moonbane by Al Sarrantonio

Author:Al Sarrantonio
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Horror
Publisher: Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Published: 2010-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Elegy

We waited forever.

In our morgue, we breathed shallowly. My own lungs settled into a rhythm that, after a time, became my sole attention. My head grew light, but still I puffed in, puffed out, like an emphysemic.

At one point, I drifted into sleep, and dreamed. In the dream my son and wife beckoned me from the doorway of our house. I was walking up the steps, toward them, and behind them, in the house, I heard what sounded like the television on, very loud. It was Jimmy Rogers’s voice, shouting in his confident drawl, “We need Proctor and Baines real bad. Proctor and Baines.” I heard him spit, and then the television got very loud and then very soft, and I distinctly heard the click of it being shut off. My wife and son stopped smiling. I had nearly reached them. Their smiles returned, only they weren’t smiles anymore. Their mouths were filled with long teeth, and their faces became indistinct, pushed out, longer. As I reached to embrace them they took me and began to tear at my flesh with their teeth and hands…

The dream ended, and I became aware of my breathing again. In, out. In, out. Only now, the puffing was ineffective; I needed more air. I felt like a drowning man reaching for a receding surface.

Shallow breathing was turning to gasping around me. Pettis’s daughter labored for breath; Doc, whose lungs must have been filled with years of nicotine stains, was doing no better.

“What…time is it?” Doc gasped.

A round smudge of fluorescence glowed into life directly in front of me; in its light I made out Pettis’s features greenly. He let go of the button on his watch and the green light disappeared.

“Four-sixteen.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“Don’t talk,” Pettis ordered.

We gasped on. I began to hallucinate, dreaming awake. I saw wolf faces floating before me, mouths snapping like steel traps, howling, laughing…

Finally, at five o’clock, Pettis announced, “I’m…going to open the door for a minute.”

“Yes,” Doc begged.

Pettis shifted in the dark, grunting. A long vertical crack of light suddenly beamed into the room. Sound flooded in—something snarled in the distance.

Pettis grunted again; the crack doubled in width, doubled once more.

There was now a one-inch line of the bomb shelter visible. I saw nothing but bright light that hurt my eyes, something dark in the distance that looked like the top of a locker.

Cool air brushed my face.

I felt as if someone had given me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A luxurious breath of oxygen climbed down my throat; my lungs screamed Yes! Yes!, pushing sour carbon dioxide out.

“Oh, God!”Pettis’s daughter suddenly cried.

For a long time, in the coffin-like quarters we occupied, with the lack of fresh air, the nearness of human bodies, the cramping of my body, I had been unaware of the weight of Pettis’s wife on my lap. Her head had been cradled there, and she had not moved at all, except to cough once, soon after Pettis had sealed the door. I now put my hand to her face and felt coldness.

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