Like everyone else on the block, the Keelers went outside in the middle of the night to watch the weather phenomenon. They’d never seen anything like it and may never again. The clouds above were a stormy ocean. Tidal waves of red vapor cresting and collapsing, flapping like a bedsheet drying in the wind. It didn’t feel right without sound. There should’ve been an ear-shattering roar at the force of it, the majesty of it. But it was silent.
Instead, they heard the whispered chatter of their neighbors. What the hell is this? Is it safe? We should go inside.
One person stood out, not a neighbor, no one Doug had seen before. He would’ve remembered his black jumpsuit, his long, salt and pepper beard. His hands were in the air, celebrating.
Doug told Jane this must be one of those events that made ancient civilizations think their God above was angry.
Jane told Doug she doesn’t believe in God, but she does believe something’s angry.
They could’ve watched it all night, but their ten-year old, Elsie, got scared, verging on tears, too young to appreciate the spectacle.
Elsie slept in her parents’ bed for the first time in months. Doug and Jane turned on the news to see if the phenomenon had become a story. On the local station, live footage of the night sky with the chyron reading: RED UNDULATING CLOUDS SEEN IN WEBSTER COUNTY.
They turned to cable news, wondering if this story was national. Sure enough, a meteorologist, with a tremor in his voice: “I can say that, yes, they are undulating clouds. I cannot say why they are red. And I cannot say why they are being reported on all seven continents.”
Doug looked at his wife, grateful they could tacitly communicate they were on the same page: Whatever this is, I can’t deal with it right now.
Doug turned the TV off.
***
The Keeler family woke up to body spasms and screams. Their own. Doug whipped the blankets off, saw his, Jane’s and Elsie’s toes curled into furious fists. Cramps. All three of them. Doug sprang out of bed. Walking it off brought instant relief. He didn’t need to tell Jane and Elsie to do the same. They were only a millisecond behind him.
“Why did my feet hurt?” asked Elsie.
Pacing around the room, Doug explained to Elsie what a cramp was and they just needed to drink some water.
In the kitchen, Doug opened the fridge and winced. The pain in his feet stung harder, his muscles pulling tighter. He had no choice. He started walking again and sighed at the ecstasy.
“Ow!” Jane yelled in the other room.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I just sat down for a second, then my feet-”
“Have you experienced cramps like this?”
“Never.”
“Is something wrong, dad?” Elsie said, walking in circles around the dining room table.
“Just a weird coincidence, Elle-Bell. Probably because we stayed up past your bedtime.” He paused a second and added, “Don’t stop walking.”
Doug felt like an absolute, goddamn moron as he walked in tiny circles in front of his fridge, each pass getting him a tiny bit closer to pulling a water bottle out. On his ninth pass, he succeeded and handed the bottle to Elsie with the instruction to drink it, all of it, and fast.
Which she did. But it didn’t matter.
Jane furrowed her brows. What do we do?
Doug shook his head. I have no fucking clue.
The sounds of grief and fury coming from outside gave them some direction.
In their front lawn, they saw the chaos.
Across the street, the Freeman couple walked in circles on their front lawn, crying, buck naked.
Hector Valdez ran to his car, sat inside, and jumped out. He needed to walk, unable to take the pain long enough to start the car.
The Cobb boy, the one in the wheelchair, was overturned on the street, trying to military crawl away on dead legs. He flipped over onto his back, panic in his eyes, as he watched, first, his toes curl inward, bones snapping, breaking. Then his ankles, then his knees until his legs formed a spiral against his stomach. An artery must’ve burst because a lot of blood rushed out where his bones broke through the skin.
It was like Doug saw that and didn’t see that at the same time. His mind wasn’t reacting, but his body was. How can a heartbeat drown out every sound?
Doug looked away from the madness, up at the sky. What he expected to see wasn’t there. The sky was blue, empty.
“Doug, do you know anything?” Gayle. The next door neighbor. In her seventies. Two bad knees but walking in circles like everyone else.
Before he could answer, everyone on the street spasmed, turning with jerky motions as if an invisible man were behind them, hands on their shoulders, manipulating their bodies as he willed.
They walked.
Everyone.
In the same direction.
Jane and Elsie each grabbed one of Doug’s hands as they joined a growing throng, turning away from the cul-de-sac and onto Highland, the main street running through the heart of the city.
Doug felt his wife’s pulse quicken in his hand when they saw the cars. Some parked intentionally in the middle of the street with the doors open. Others stopped unintentionally by colliding into buildings, telephone poles and other cars. Some hit people, but one, two or even seven people aren’t enough to stop a car determined to keep going (apparently).
“Close your eyes, Elsie,” Jane said. There was a lot of blood.
More and more people exited the suburbs and apartment complexes, draining out onto Highland like flood water. Thousands of people marching down the middle of the street. Pushing and shoving. A young man took an upper cut to the jaw and collapsed on the concrete. Snap! Snap! Snap! His leg bones breaking, spiraling. The world’s most extreme cramp.
Elsie’s hand gripped Doug’s tighter. Her eyes were open now. Couldn’t afford to close them.
“Why aren’t you walking?!” a hysterical woman screamed. Doug tried to peer over the horde walking in front of him. Between some heads, he saw a man sitting at the bus stop, watching everyone walk as if this were a planned marathon.
More people, increasingly crazed, shouted at the man. Tell us what to do! Help us! Fuck you, old man! I’ll fucking kill you!
It wasn’t the same homeless man from last night. But he was dressed in the same black jumpsuit. He didn’t say a word. But he did find a more relaxing position, propping his un-pained feet on the bench. A handmade sign next to him read “Sementa Sustarces-”
A gunshot, a scream. Twenty yards up, one head dropped down in the crowd, followed by a large group of heads-the people behind tripping over the body. The next batch had time to think, counter and step over the corpses. The same fluid mechanics of watching a pebble dropped into a pond. Down and up.
As soon as the thought hit, he remembered why he thought of that term fluid mechanics. It was because that’s what crowds act like when they’re tightly confined, a fluid. There was another term, he remembered, but he couldn’t come up with it in the couple minutes before that term was upon him.
Doug’s chest constricted, squeezed between the surrounding bodies. He couldn’t breathe. He didn’t get the worst of it. Other people’s rib’s cracked and they dropped. Others passed out, dropped and got trampled. Elsie disappeared in a sea of clothes and hands. Doug squeezed Elsie’s hand with everything he had and pulled, bringing Elsie back to him against all odds through the mass.
More and more people dropped. A tapestry of humanity packed so tightly it moved like the ocean, like waves.
Ahead, Doug saw more and more pebbles splashing into the pond.
“Mom!”
A panicked group tackled into Jane. Fortunate to stay on her feet. Unfortunate to have her hand ripped from Doug’s.
Jane and Doug, another tacit communication exchanged, this one all in the eyes, simple and immediate: I’m going to die. I love you.
And then Jane was gone.
***
If someone asked Doug how many people would die if one day, for no known reason, everyone just decided to walk down Highland at the same time, Doug would’ve guessed maybe a dozen.
Doug would’ve been very wrong.
His arm was broken.
Elsie took an elbow to the forehead.
It was a miracle he and Elsie escaped the city alive.
Here and there, on the paved country road, Doug felt the phantom sensation of stepping on soft human abdomens. Looking into his daughter’s eyes, he saw those people’s expressions as he used them like a rung in a ladder.
“Dad?” Elsie said.
Doug only managed a grumble. It was past midnight. They’d been walking for fourteen straight hours.
“I don’t feel-”
Elsie stumbled, fainted and dropped.
Then she spiraled.
***
Doug trailed blood from his bare feet having lost his shoes in mud during a stretch when his tears blurred out the ground beneath him. Surviving was no triumph. Everyone still walking was now spread out. Spread out and alone.
At least Doug finally knew where they were being compelled to walk. He tasted the salt in the breeze. Soon, he’d be in the ocean. Soon, he’d be panicking, unable to breathe, wanting to die, but wanting to survive even more. Barely. He promised himself he wouldn’t be a screamer.
The unknown compelling force that jerked him into motion to start this death march yanked on Doug one more time. His new trajectory lead away from the road and into the woods.
The bramble and the rocks scraped off more of the little remaining skin under Doug’s feet. Dutifully, hardly even sure why anymore, he kept walking.
As the smell of salt intensified so did the screams. So many screams. Just loud enough to be heard over the waves.
Doug broke through a thicket, out of the woods and onto a grassy platform before a sheer cliff overlooking the ocean. A gust of cold wind slapped his cheeks. A shock to the system. A whole new climate.
He was not alone. Collapsed and weary but alive, there were other survivors that made it this far.
The survivors were all doing one of two things: laughing hysterically or screaming in terror.
But at least none of them were walking.
Or spiraling.
At the edge of the cliff, more of those men, and now women and children, in the black jumpsuits stood, unmoving, guardians of the cliff.
Their eyes focused on Doug. Only on Doug.
They beckoned him closer with a gesture of their hands, off-putting in its playfulness, as if to say, C’mere Douggy-boy, we just want you to have a teentsy little looksy-doodle.
Doug peered over the edge of the cliff to see an ocean completely devoid of water.
The undulating red clouds were in the ocean’s place. Tidal waves of red vapor cresting and collapsing. Just like the night before. The same exact thing, except for the part where they weren’t in the sky anymore and had, instead, replaced the ocean.
That part was new.
Did you enjoy your looksy-doodle?
“Doug,” one of the black jumpsuits said.
Doug jumped, hearing his name.
“Sementa Sustarces Kymerak.” The man gave him a congratulatory hug. For what? Doug had no idea.
The man’s eyes look upward, an order for Doug to heed.
Doug did as he was told and saw where the ocean went, the one he remembered. The ocean with water in it and foamy waves and hundreds of thousands of dead bodies bobbing up and down.
Actually, maybe it wasn’t quite the exact same ocean he remembered after all.
But I guess the sky was red now and the ocean was the sky and the sky was the ocean. Did the finer details really matter at this point?
No big deal, right, Douggy-boy?
Like the other survivors, Doug couldn’t decide between hysterical laughter or terrified screaming so he just went for both. He’d make his final decision later.
Something moved in the red ocean beneath the cliff. Something large. Something powerful. And triumphant.
The black jumpsuits dropped to their knees in a posture of worship.
“Semanta Sustarces Kymerak,” they chanted.
The creature, the entity, the whatever-it-was responded with a growl, one that shook the earth beneath Doug’s bloody feet.
“Semanta Sustarces Kymerak,” they chanted again.
This time, Doug joined them.
Comments