Down with the Fallen: A Post-Apocalyptic Horror Anthology

Vortex ^{Gregory L. Norris}

The mother—she could have been their biological mother, though in recent days, it was impossible to be sure who belonged to the real family units and which people had simply bonded together in the chaos following the invasion—clutched the youngest girl protectively against her. She and the two older girls held hands in a chain and walked in formation along the side of the highway. With so many people crowding together onto the fresh two-lane flattop, the last shiny trace of government stimulus funds, it grew increasingly more difficult to breathe. They’d walked for days, which added to the burden, and it had rained; a cloying, hot May rain that clung unpleasantly to the skin.

The family exited the shadow of an overpass that sat in pieces on the other side of the highway, the metal there showing burn marks around the places where it had liquefied to slag. The mother, holding the youngest girl’s weight on her hip and head on her shoulder, turned away from the flyblown remains visible at the edges of the rubble. The view on their side of the highway wasn’t much better. The rain had run into an area of deadfall precipitously close to the pavement. People bathed in that stagnant pool. Some, she noted, wrapping her free arm around the nearest of the two girls marching in step beside her and calling the other close, floated face down.

This was what life had become after the first vortexes formed over major cities, she thought, and the brief war was unofficially lost to a merciless enemy who’d claimed victory without so much as showing its face to the conquered.

The two girls. One was sixteen. The other wasn’t quite a teenager yet, trapped in that awkward physical state when the body has experienced a growth spurt but the face hasn’t quite caught up. The older gripped the younger by the sleeve of her brightly colored T-shirt. The youngest, cradled against the mother, slipped free and down to her feet, the mother no longer able to shoulder her weight. That girl’s face was scrunched into worry lines that might never straighten out, even if given an entire lifetime.

They marched together, one holding onto another in a line, like elephants in a circus parade.

“There’s the next exit,” somebody, a woman, said. A woman, because most of the refugees were women, the men and boys above a certain age drafted into service for a war that had, by all measures that mattered, already ended.

The highway sign pulled free of the horizon and hovered in a shade of green brighter than the lime-colored new leaves undulating at the sides of the pavement. The Bedford exit didn’t offer much in terms of hope; it wasn’t the germs that killed the sinister Martians inside their tripods or the computer virus that deactivated the shields so the jet fighters could take down the colossal alien motherships in those other, fictional invasions. Had it been days or weeks since they’d seen a jet in the sky? And that one was disintegrating high overhead, in pieces at the tip of a sonic boom.

But the Bedford exit offered a break from the walk. A place to relax and rest and, most importantly, learn the latest information from what remained of the world’s governments. At last report, the Canadians were coordinating the global response. How far down the line had things fallen so that the military in Montreal was making the key strategic decisions, the mother absently wondered.

Parched and sore in a way she’d never known, every joint feeling exposed and swollen, she cycled through the information for the umpteenth time, no longer sure what was real or the result of her frazzled imagination. Purple-black vortexes, over three hundred of them in the sky, and then… silence, darkness, on the heels of a terrible, destructive thunderclap.

Another sound, one equally terrible, jolted her out of the fog and back to the moment.

“Do not attempt to exit—keep moving! Bedford is sealed to all non-residents at this time per order of the mayor’s office and the board of selectmen. I repeat—”

The baritone bullhorn voice boomed the same announcement, this time louder. Not really louder, the mother realized. Closer. They passed underneath the green traffic sign. A cacophony of angry shouts and expletives laced the air.

“What do you mean, closed?” somebody shrieked, swears lobbed with the question at whoever held the bullhorn.

In another time, another life, the mother’s instinct would have been to shield ears with hands, to spare the young ones the vulgarities launched at the voice—and, among the colorful insults, the voice’s parents.

“They’ve paid off the military,” said the woman plodding at the family’s left.

The mother recognized the woman. She was younger, in her twenties if the mother had to hazard a guess, though recent time had aged her considerably.

Paid off the military? With what, she could only imagine. Not money. People were using hundred dollar bills to wipe themselves behind trees at the roadside. Money wasn’t an effective incentive any longer. Food, shelter… flesh, perhaps.

“What do you mean, go back?” another voice shouted. “Back to what? Concord isn’t there anymore, and they’ll be swarming all over the suburbs by now!”

The procession briefly logjammed and the mother felt a rush of lightheadedness after being on the move for so long. A swarm of imaginary black flies buzzed around her head. Sweat, bitter and powerful, filled her next desperate breath.

“Per order of Mayor Stanislaus Sherwood, you will not be allowed access to the town of Bedford, so move along!”

The mother caught sight of the exit through breaks in the crowd. Military vehicles lined the curve, blocking the ramp at a diagonal angle. Men dressed in sand camouflage lurked behind the vehicles, with guns aimed at the highway. The mother imagined snipers in the trees, their scopes trained on the mostly women and children, focused on their fellow humans during the worst time in the world’s history. Rage ignited in her blood.

But it quickly cooled in the madness of a deafening thunderclap and the panic the pop of the bullet unleashed. Another followed, and the head of the young woman made old beside her blew apart, there one instant, gone from her shoulders the next. The mother screamed, as did her small brood, though the cacophony of cries that rose up into the unsympathetic heavens swallowed their voices.

Bullets raced at them. The mother felt the displaced air molecules and a rush of heat as one ripped to within inches of her face. They couldn’t go forward, because the war mongers at the Bedford exit were now firing at anything that moved. They certainly couldn’t risk going back.

She grabbed the youngest girl in one hand, the oldest in her other, and hoped the oldest’s grip on the middle child was firm enough to keep them all together. And then she turned toward the other side of the highway and ran. Military troops and police vehicles guarded the on-ramp there, and they, too, had opened fire on the refugees.

The family unit, which would be down by one by the time the shooting stopped, had barely reacted to one horror when another unfolded. The first came at them from two sides of the road; the newest opened up directly overhead.

The shrieks of frightened women and children vanished into the personified roar above. Fresh terror rippled over the mother’s skin, laying icy scales on top of her sweat. She glanced up to see the same monstrous image all had come to know in recent weeks. Only this one was being born right before her eyes, eyes that refused to blink and started to sting even worse than her throat, now screamed raw.

The sky churned and a bruise formed in its fabric, purple-black at the edges with crimson woven throughout. The wound expanded; as it grew, the nearest clouds fell into its pull. A funnel tip clawed its way out of the vortex. Running blindly, aware that the men at the roadblocks were still firing—still, in the face of yet another unholy visitation by the enemy—she dared look up, into the whirls. And, for an instant, she swore she saw something beyond that bruised patch of sky; a hint of a reflection, a glimpse into the alien world where their mysterious opponents originated.

She only saw the vista briefly; saw that it was a surprisingly light and soft-looking view of snow-capped hills sitting beneath not one sun or even two, but three dim, distant lights. And then she saw a hateful face staring back, and all illusions of softness and light being representative of that alien realm glimpsed through a hole in the Earth’s sky evaporated.

A terrified voice reached above the chaos. “Over there!”

The mother hurried toward the voice, where her surviving section of the crowd had diverted. She ran blindly, going only on hope. The giant twister unfolded out of the sky. She felt its pull on her spine, its dragging influence and hunger in the rising wind. And there was a smell she hadn’t noticed before but was now acutely aware of, synthetic, not quite like cleaning fluid but in that vicinity. Caustic and industrial, whipped into a fury by the cyclone.

“Quickly, up here!”

The other lane appeared beneath their feet, and then they were crossing gravel, climbing over sedge and litter at the opposite side of the highway, and scrambling toward the tree line. Here was the cement shell of a dilapidated building scarred with graffiti. The structure wouldn’t offer much protection if the cyclone came down near it, the voice in her thoughts declared. But it was their only option, their only chance.

The oblong cement shelter, probably used for storing road salt or sand, sat open to the elements, its windows and doors long gone. They hurried in, pushing the people in front of them, pushed by the people behind them. Had any more refugees escaped the savage dragging force of the cyclone when it touched down on the highway, they likely would have been trampled or smothered. As it was, the crowd cut out less than a dozen behind them as the vortex swept past, close enough to grab the last two figures at the door and one trying to enter through a window into its deadly caress.

The mother pulled the older daughter close, unaware that the middle child was no longer with them, and together they shielded the youngest girl between their bodies. The vortex tugged at their backs, pulled at their hair. The mother smelled the synthetic compound on the youngest girl, strong enough to make the soft lining of her nostrils burn.

The cyclone passed by, turning the woods at the side of the highway into ragged nubs. When it was gone from sight, they saw that it had taken the rest of the crowd with it. So, too, the men with their guns, their vehicles and, presumably, the Town of Bedford, Population: 0.

They continued forward, the three that had once been four, surrounded by a sparse collection of stragglers that had once been a crowd. Smoke stained the horizon at their backs; ahead of them, at the roadside, they reached a campfire. A hunter who had killed, butchered, and roasted a deer offered to share as far as the meat would go. It was their first solid meal in days.

Following the cyclone, the youngest girl had difficulty walking, and the chemical smell she exuded intensified. For the next day, a day that ran together into all the other ones before it in the mother’s mind, the child complained of terrible stomach pains. At first, the mother blamed it on the venison and the polluted water they were forced to drink from puddles as the weather grew stifling with humidity.

Until the following day, when the little girl twice vomited viscous blue, and the mother caught her staring at them with malice in her eyes. The girl didn’t speak after that, and with the chemical stink came another, underlying smell, a putrid odor of rot.

Rabid, that’s how the little girl looked.

The mother, who really wasn’t the girl’s mother, and the other daughter, stopped in place, paralyzed by the image that greeted them: the youngest girl, staggering away from them, blue liquid running from her mouth, ears, and the splits in the flesh at her throat. The girl’s chest swelled and contracted, as though the child’s lungs had doubled in size. Tripled. Only…

Somewhere in the thinned-out crowd, a woman screamed, “Dear God, don’t you get it? That’s how they plan to send their soldiers through!”

“Mommy,” the oldest girl said, mentally devolving to an age younger than the youngest.

“Don’t you see?” the same woman shrieked, and the mother did, pulling her oldest daughter closer. “They softened us up from space… now, they’re readying for the ground invasion. They’ve seeded their soldiers inside our children!”

The child’s body contorted at an awkward stance, not quite standing, tilting under the effort of those greedy, swooping breaths. Each repetition stretched skin and clothing to their limits. A sound like celery stalks being snapped in half tore through the terrible, sudden silence.

And then, as they watched, unable to blink or scream, the transformation was completed, and the thing emerged, grub-like, from the husk that had once been human.