Down with the Fallen: A Post-Apocalyptic Horror Anthology

The Rip ^{Jeremy Megargee}

Before the media fell, the talking heads called it The Rip. It happened across multiple nations on Rip Day, a day now as infamous in US history as Columbine or 9/11. The Rip created chasms throughout the states, ragged doorways to another place, and the sound of them opening was like a wet envelope being torn asunder by failing geriatric teeth.

Men of science argued about The Rip on CNN and Fox News, trying in vain to explain the unexplainable. Various theories surfaced, but the most popular was that what we perceive as reality wore thin in certain areas. No one could agree if it was an inevitable accident or if it was intentional from the other side. But a large portion of the experts agreed that these chasms opened into an alternate dimension, an uncharted void both alien and incomprehensible to human beings.

The doorways appeared the same everywhere. They looked like some great hand took a crude knife and carved a slit into thin air at ground level. A translucent membrane covered each entrance, and there was nothing to be seen past the membrane but immense blackness and rain that seemed to pound everlasting. Each site quickly swarmed with military personnel, the government stretching themselves to the last man and woman in order to post quarantine compounds at all the known Rip slits.

It was human curiosity that damned them all. A single field biologist with a utility knife at a doorway in Pineworth, West Virginia. This man approached the membrane with the misguided idea of obtaining a biopsy, thinking the veil might be something akin to living tissue.

It sliced as smooth as paper, and as the membrane retracted, they came pouring through from the wet void. It started a domino effect across all corners of the continent. Membranes began to split on their own, and the swarm washed over those military camps with merciless antipathy.

Gun fighting, explosions, and all manner of human ingenuity sought to repel them. The resistance lasted a grand total of one week before civilization staggered to its knees due to what poured from The Rip slits.

The lights were blotted out, and electricity died with a gasping fizzle. Airplanes fell from the sky and subway trains smashed into each other in the depths of the earth. The population was culled in such a systematic ravaging that billions soon became mere hundreds. The world was prepared for global warming, nuclear war, and even widespread famine.

But the world was not ready for The Rip. Even in the wildest of imaginations, no one could fathom those wet and waiting things—things not built for our fleshy state of being. The corruption seeped from the slits like weeping wounds across Mother Nature’s mutilated face, and all was lost in the blink of disbelieving human eyes.

They tried one last time to close the doors. One massive last stand for the human race, a march to triumph or doom.

The hopes of an entire sentient species rested on the shoulders of those brave few that fought to the bitterest end. Hope died with them. All they found was doom. And in their final moments came the realization that doors that open into dripping black spaces can never be closed again.

Raymond holds the 12-gauge pump action shotgun in the crook of his elbow as he stomps through the dim confines of his derelict kingdom. The slot machines are just dead monoliths now, and all the former gambling worshipers have gone to little piles of mucus-covered dust. The casino is an eerie place without the lights and sounds to give it life, but it’s served him well as a fortress of solitude after the events of The Rip.

It’s been several months since Rip Day. He was lucky when the Rip slits opened. He’d been holed up in his hunting cabin on North Mountain sipping down shine and bagging a few wild turkeys out of season, but he was forced to flee when they came. They were after the wildlife, and it brought them sliding through the cities, the suburbs, and even the remote mountains. They have trouble breathing on our side, so they harvest the lungs of the living to compensate. Some sort of biological symbiosis that allows parts of them to blend with parts of us. They take faces, too, doesn’t matter what kind. Raymond has seen them utilize both the faces of humans and animals alike. They strip the flesh clean, make a mask of it, and then attach the lungs on either side of that dripping mask. The lungs expand, and the tattered mouth of the mask lets them expel a kind of black ichor after the oxygen is spent. They’re fiends for blood, too. They don’t drink it or digest it; they just smear it all over their bodies to keep themselves from drying out in our atmosphere. They like it wet and hot, sauna conditions, and they seem to luxuriate in a thick layer of warming plasma.

Raymond knows they’ve gotten inside. He just woke up from a pitiful slice of broken sleep. He was dreaming of the day that he came home to the doublewide trailer to find his wife’s face peeled clean and all of his children lying on the porch with their chests just open craters, the ribs bent back and snapped with their organs rotting in the sun. All that were taken were the lungs. That’s always the way of it.

He heard the slosh of them somewhere near what used to be a casino bar. It overlooks the entire establishment, a skybox view of all the dust-coated table games. He’s familiar with their watery movements. They sound like a mixture of a dripping faucet and something slithering through a mud hole. He smelled them, too, and the aroma helped to draw him back to the waking world. It’s a stench to make the nostrils twitch. It reminds him of the stink of snot splattering out of the nose of someone fighting through a bout with influenza.

There are only a few entrances to the casino, but he thought for sure he boarded them all up and smeared his special repellent along the thresholds. There’s only that emergency exit with the faulty lock, but he chained that up good, didn’t he?

Raymond hopes so in the deepest part of himself.

They’re so damn fast. That’s the weirdest part. They shouldn’t be fast. You see the physiology of them and you think of the only living organism on earth that they’re comparable to, and you imagine they’d be slow. They’re not. They must have evolved differently in the place they come from. That dark boiling landscape where the rain never stops.

Raymond hasn’t seen or heard another person since Rip Day. For all he knows, he could be the last. Nothing but a bearded old man holed up in cavernous casino and waiting to die. He’s considered going out by his own hand. That’s the merciful way. It’s much better than having them suck off the face and pull out the lungs, but he has a certain amount of pride left in him, and taking his own life is not something he’s willing to do just yet.

He’s been holding to a desperate wish that the world as a whole can still come back from this. Maybe there’s a way to seal up the slits. Perhaps they’ll just close on their own just as naturally as they opened, and the moist hell that waits on the other side will become nothing but a traumatic memory.

He wishes for this, but he also knows in his heart that the horde that came through won’t just vanish into thin air. They’re too numerous, too curious, and too intent on exploring what America has to offer. He thinks maybe they orchestrated The Rip in order to have more space to inhabit. Humans numbered in the billions before all this, but the things that came through seem to exist in the trillions. There are big ones, small ones, and breeders that never leave their chosen hives. Raymond thinks overpopulation drove them to seek out new realms of existence.

If that was their plan, they succeeded. They found a way through. They never tried to communicate with the human race. It seems they speak only the language of subjugation and destruction. Their own biological survival is the imperative, and colonization is the endgame.

Raymond rounds a bend and looks downward, but he sees no sign of their presence. He hears them, though. They’re watching him. Curdled slurping sounds, breathy expulsions of moisture, and that lightning quick noise of multiple bulbous bodies sliding across the floor.

Their defining trails are crisscrossed all around the tiles. Raymond leans down and runs an index finger through the stringy clear ooze with a look of distaste dominating his features. They got in somehow. They see him, they know of him, and the ambush is probably seconds away from happening.

Raymond knows he’s dead already. He sighs, resigning himself to slaughter as many of them as possible before he goes down. He checks the shotgun, and he finds that he has quite a few shells left. All the lead has been dumped out, and that’s par for the course. Lead smashes through them, but it does no lasting damage.

Only the rock salt seems to put them down. He’s seen it happen a few times when he was racing through the streets to get here. A few courageous souls saw what the things resembled, and they fought with nothing but cans of sodium and fists full of white particles. It’s nasty business. They writhe, twist, and contort inward when the salt hits them just right. It’s acid for things like them. It corrodes and eats them up, and Raymond isn’t opposed to offering up a little misery to the bastards that razed the only world he’s ever known.

They’re coming now. They make no attempt to hide because they know he’s cornered and there’s no place left to run. They slide with incredible agility across the floor, these great gastropods, blazers of slime trails and masters of the mucus that coats them. Their man-masks hang from featureless faces, just droopy and decaying visages with stalk eyes protruding up past the ragged crater holes of their masks. Sensory tentacles curve outward in anticipation, and the human lungs that they’ve bound to themselves expand faster and faster as they converge on the lone survivor.

The shotgun fires again and again. Rock salt splatters the horde, and many of them fall, seizing and tormented, to the floor. The salt dissolves them, their mucus membranes bursting with agonizing blisters, but still they come, sliding and slithering over their dead with single-minded purpose.

Multiple soft and sticky bodies smash into Raymond at the same time from all angles, and he loses his grip on the shotgun. Probing sensory tentacles manipulate his flesh, and he finds his chest caving inward as they strike for the lungs, the most pivotal part of a man. It’s what they need. It is the singular resource to allow this colonization to be a complete success.

Raymond’s last thought is a fragmented memory from his boyhood. He recalls a vision of himself giggling in the dirt and tipping a canister of Morton salt on a few slugs that were out and about in his mother’s garden.

They boiled and they writhed, and their suffering brought him a form of tingling pleasure. He didn’t think of it as anything more than a fun way to spend a rainy afternoon.

They’re slurping out his eyes now. They’re drowning him in a cocoon of mucus. Their sharp stalks find him, and they stab and they stab, ragged punctures taking shape all over his torso. His anguish seems to last forever.

Deep in the abyss of what remains of his mind, he thinks that this must be how it feels when a slug is salted. Desolate pain. Endless excruciation. Hurt, helpless, and at the mercy of the merciless…

His lungs explode outward in a spray of viscera.

No more breath. No more life. No more humans.

He regrets what he did to those slugs.