Survivors

I’m deaf. His eardrums had burst. That’s why he couldn’t hear anything…only a silence so loud, it was a shrill cicada-like trilling in his ears. No, inside his brain.

Raising a bigger question.

Why am I still alive?

He lifted hand…tried to lift a hand.

Something pinned it to the ground. He had to struggle to throw off the weight. Rocks? Feeling the sting of grit as he slung dirt aside. Have I been buried? Had Jen and Anna somehow retrieved their bodies and put them in the family cemetery? Without checking to see if they were actually dead?

Scenes from zombie movies flashed…hands thrusting through layers of grave dirt…shambling creatures sending clods of earth flying as they extracted themselves…limbs crumbling and falling away…a sudden desire to devour brains…

So now I’m a zombie? Good God!

     Wait a minute. Would a zombie call on God?

     His other hand freed itself. More soil and rubble scattered.

There was a ripple of air so faint he might believe he’d imagined it. Not that high-pitched treble bouncing around inside his head but more low and feeble, like a slow, agonizingly expelled breath. He wanted to open his eyes, look around, find the source but—hey, I’m not being unreasonable here—he was afraid, afraid of what he’d see. Besides, he couldn’t open his eyes. Something heavy lay across them.

     Is this how a vampire feels the first time it leaves its grave?

He lay still a few moments more, listening to nothing. Even the cicadas were silent. Like the way the whippoorwills went quiet, just before they seized your soul…

A moan or groan or whatever the sound was came again and he reached out, vaguely aware of cloth tatters flapping around his wrists as he swiped his hands across his eyes, scraping away the dirt and something soft and gelatinous and gaggingly squishy, as he opened his eyes...

…and saw nothing. He was surrounded by a haze of dust. He inhaled…and immediately coughed it back up, spewing a visible funnel of clag, scattering the cloud for a momentary glimpse of sky.

At least, he thought it was sky.

A frantic swat battered the dust into nothingness…amid a swirling mixture of sulfurous red with narrow, sinuous threads of bloody-black crimsons and muddy oranges, melding into a swirling, churning, vaporous maelstrom. Sky? Couldn’t be. It was the wrong color, as if someone filled a balloon with paint, then stabbed it with a handful of pins and squeezed.

     Are those supposed to be clouds? Shit, it looks like the surface of Jupiter. Where the hell am I?  

Had the blast catapulted them from Earth onto another planet?

Will this nightmare ever end?

The moan came again. Another memory burst forth.

Josh, hands gripping the sledgehammer. Himself, helping him bring it down on the ancient box of explosives...

“Josh…” he croaked through a throat filled with grit and that thought sent him into a frenzy of movement, kicking at the encasing rubble, knocking his way free. He scrambled out of the hole, scattering rocks and pebbles as he scrabbled blindly up and over, sliding through more dust to the ground, tripping and falling forward, landing on his knees. He winced as sharp, rocky edges stabbed through his jeans, sinking into, if not completely piercing his kin, as he staggered up again.

“Josh? Josh!” He couldn’t see anything but that awful, spinning sky and an infinity of rocks and high jagged cliffs—the spires from the ocean at Land’s End transported to this alien landscape—with boulders strewn as if a volcano had spat contents immediately hardening, trapping their molten color inside.

“Josh?”

“H-here…” The answer came from behind him, at the edge of another pile of rocks.

A hand protruded, splayed fingers twitching feebly, skin redly reflecting the lurid sky.

Immediately, Rob was running, stumbling, falling to his knees beside the stones. Unmindful of the damage to his own hands—hell, they were already skinned and bloodily abraded—he scooped up handfuls, throwing them away, uncovering Josh’s dust-covered face, splashed with a single crimson star of broken skin on his forehead, bloody trickles seeping from it to outline the furrows between his eyes and around the bridge of his nose.

Josh opened his eyes, their color gleaming like peridots in the midst of all that red and gray.

Rob caught his hand, hauling him upright, sending debris flying.

“Are we dead?” Josh wheezed, expelling a cloud of dust worse than the one Rob had inhaled. His cough came from somewhere around the vicinity of his toes, deep and tearing.

     Same question. Great minds did truly think alike.

“No…at least, I don’t think so.”

      Could he be any more indefinite? Rob felt an overwhelming urge to laugh, then immediately switched off the thought. Put aside the hysteria for later.

“Then why are we in Hell?”

“We’re not.” Rob clamped down his laughter, answering seriously. It was the only way to keep from indulging in that desire for insane laughter now. Are we in Hell? Define Hell? “At least, I don’t think so.”

“Could’ve fooled me.” Josh looked around, head turning slowly, as if it hurt to move even that small angle. Rob thought he could hear bones creaking against each other, a raw, grinding chafe to set teeth on edge. “Sure looks like it.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Rob conceded. “Who knows where this dimension begins or ends? Maybe the explosion knocked out a wall and blew us straight into Hell.”

“Liking that idea less and less,” Josh coughed again, glancing up at the sky. “One thing for sure. This certainly isn’t heaven. Look at that sky.”

He waved a hand.

Rob looked up, seeing something Josh obviously hadn’t.

A small speck, coming closer and closer…a shapeless mass in yet another shade of red—how could there be so many variations of a single color?—mingling into an uneasy brindle of black and scarlet-tinged green and too many colors to name, as if its ropy, muscular body had been dipped in a bucket of tar, then rolled in a bowl of rainbow sprinkles that promptly melted.

The shape separated, becoming a flock, at least a dozen or more.

All were winged, with three pairs of bat-curved appendages, simultaneously sweeping the air, sending the harlequined masses swirling, as they came closer, the apex of those elongated coils, roundly suggesting heads but with no eyes, nose, or mouth. The protrusions twisted slightly like gunner’s turrets.

Somehow—and he didn’t know why, because he’d certainly never seen something like that before—Rob thought the things looked familiar. He felt an uneasy recognition but where or when…? He didn’t have time to wonder, however, for, without warning, the leader glanced down, changed direction and swooped.

“Down, quick!” Rob pushed Josh back onto the rocks, throwing his body over his brother’s, his arms over his own head, at the same time wondering what good that would do and how the thing knew they were there.

It didn’t have eyes, didn’t even have a head. Could it simply sense them?

Huddling as close into the rocks as he could, he pressed Josh into the dirt. He was aware of the fear-filled tension in his brother’s body, short, quick pants of frightened breath echoing his own, trying to stifle that frightening breathing and instead sending up minute puffs of dust betraying where they were…how they both struggled to lie still when every instinct was to jump up and run as fast as they could…to where?

The creature circled, immediately the others followed, a long spiral diving close to the ground. The air created by the quick, short flaps of those multi-wings pelted their bodies, hard as the buffet of a storm-wind a la a movie-maker wind machine, sending rocks bouncing and rolling. The rock heap from which he’d extracted himself donated several good-sized ones, finding their mark, striking Rob’s shoulder, the side of his head. He bit his lip, stifling pained grunts.

The vortex rose, circled twice more, then flapped away, wings make a frantic flip-flip-flip as they receded into the distance, without making any other sound.

A final rock chip dislodged, bounced and struck, making a farewell parting strike, sharp, sudden, and painful.

Rob didn’t move, barely breathed until the lazy, flap-flap of those wings died away and everything was still again.

He became aware of a struggle going on beneath him, something pushing at his chest, his ribs. He rolled over, resting on his back, suspended by bent elbows.

“What the hell, Rob? All that for a sandstorm?” Blowing out a frantic breath, Josh sat up also, sweat shining through the streaks of dirt and blood on his face, making miniature crimson mudslides. “These rocks aren’t soft.”

Ungrateful. I just saved our life. Rob didn’t say that, instead pushed himself to his feet, Josh held out a hand. Rob helped him stand. He was shaky, holding onto Rob’s forearm until his legs steadied, then released him to look around.

“This certainly isn’t a place I’d like to visit, much less live in. How the hell are we still alive?”

Instead of replying to that, Rob asked, “Do you remember anything?”

“Not much,” His forehead wrinkled in thought. “You told me to leave. I did, then came back.”

“Yeah,” Rob put in. “You take orders so well.”

“I wasn’t going to let you do this alone. That’s what brothers are for.” It came out defensively. “We picked up the box of dynamite, and jumped…” He caught Rob’s arm, squeezing so tightly, it took all Rob’s strength not to cry out. “Rob. Why…aren’t…we…dead?”

“You’re beginning to sound like an echo. Been asking myself that same question and the only answer I’m getting is…I don’t know.” Rob gasped, his answer part exasperation, part fear, because he had no idea how anyone could survive a dynamite charge exploding less than a foot away. “Damn it, Josh, let go. You’re about to break my arm.”

“Huh?” Josh glanced at his blood-smeared hand, fingers digging into Rob’s skin through the tatters of his sleeve. “Oh.” His hand dropped. He stared at something on the back of his hand, a jelly-like substance transferred from Rob’s arm to his fingers. “Sorry.”

“All I can say for sure is…we proved an explosion can kill some of these things.” He pointed at the ground, littered with rocks, dust, and globs of greenish congealing splotches and semi-solid splatters, then at the stuff on Josh’s fingers.

Josh looked from his pointing forefinger to his hand and the sticky smear, realized what it was, and gagged.

Now, it was Rob’s hand clasping his arm tightly as Josh fell against him, bent over.

“Don’t get sick,” he ordered, giving him a sharp shake and pulling him upright. “We don’t have time. We need to find somewhere safe, so we can figure this out.”

“Where?” Josh went to wipe his mouth, remembers the clots on his hand and held it away from his body, fingers stiff.

Bending, he shook both hands violently, slinging away the smears, then scrubbed them against the ground. Scooping up dirt and rubbing it over the backs of each hand, he checked his fingers, then scrubbed even harder.

“Hey, ease up,” Rob cautioned, shaking his arm. “You won’t be much good if you rub all the skin off your bones.”

Josh straightened. His hands were now dirt-caked but free of the creature’s remains as well as the dried blood. Looking around, he wiped his hands on the seat of his jeans for good measure and checked his hands for the result. His skin was now jelly-free but a deep red as if acutely sunburned.

“Some place safe?” He repeated what Rob had said. “Where? I don’t see anything, except sky, a very unfriendly-looking ocean, and rocks, rocks, and more rocks.”

“Right,” Rob agreed. “Rocks, forming cliffs, and where there are cliffs, there have to be caves.”

“…and where there are cliffs, we can hide,” Josh finished. “Sounds good to me. Let’s go.” He started forward, staggering slightly, only to stop as Rob again caught his arm.

“Wait.” He looked down, pointing to something lying on the ground, the sledgehammer they’d used to explode the dynamite. It was also remarkedly undamaged. “We may need that.”

He stooped and with some difficulty picked it up. The thing was heavy. With Josh’s help, he hoisted it to his shoulder. He actually staggered under its weight.

“You okay to walk?”
It was a ridiculous question, in view of the fact that he was the one with knees shaking from the hammer’s weight. At least that’s what he told him was causing that incipient weakness in his leg muscles. Not shock. Not dismay at their current predicament. Just plain old inability to bear such a heavy burden.

“I’ll make myself be okay to get out of here,” Josh promised.