Storm Warning
An R-rated supernatural thriller set in North Carolina
STORM WARNING
JM Hauser
T he Doppler Radar showed a mass of supercumulus thunderheads gathering over Orange County, North Carolina. The weather report, as of 4am, just an hour ago, had predicted a clear and sunny day with a high of fifty-two. For Alex Bachman, after eight years of meteorology at Channel 9 News in Raleigh, this was an unprecedented screw up.
“What the hell?” He leaned over the terminal, a mug of coffee in hand. The screen blipped every three seconds as the radar spun. The wind had picked up too, from a calm five knots to a blustery twenty. “This doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered.
“Were you drunk when you gave that forecast?” joked Rose. She dabbed on lipstick behind the news counter and smacked her full lips. “Or just an honest mistake?” She pinned him with a half-cocked smile that both aroused and annoyed him.
“This shouldn’t be happening,” he told her, focusing on the monitor. “We had a completely stable high pressure system squatting over our heads with zip for humidity, no rain, no clouds, nothing. And now this. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Cameron Niles twiddled his fingers mysteriously. “Ooh…creepy! Just in time for Halloween. Say, why don’t you work it into the holiday, Al? Just tell the kids that the Great Pumpkin did it.” He winked at Rose and jabbed an elbow. She busied herself with shuffling papers and didn’t respond, although a faint smile creased her face.
That amused her? thought Alex. Ridiculous.
“We’re on in twenty seconds!” shouted a camera operator.
Alex rubbed his jaw. He could handle the discrepancy. Oddball weather patterns popped up all the time, like the sleet storm last year that had buried the Triangle viewing area under two inches of ice and shut down roads and power for at least a week straight. He and his wife Barbara – now divorced-wife Barbara – were fortunate to get their power back on early, and their home had served as waystation for a dozen friends and their pets otherwise ousted with no heat. But this…this autumn storm bubbling up…Alex suppressed a chill and chugged lukewarm coffee.
“Ok, on in 5…4…3…” The director Don mouthed two and one and displayed his fingers. The red camera lights blinked on.
Rose flashed an ultra-white smile. “Good morning, everyone. I’m Rose McKinney, here with Cameron Niles. It’s 5:01 on October 31st, and while we’re at it, we’ll start with our Weather on the Ones update with Meteorologist Alex Bachman and our conditions outside. Alex?” She raised a thin eyebrow.
Alex swallowed and put on his game-face. “Thank you, Rose. Well everyone, we’ve had an unexpected development overnight. I know I said that we would have a bright and crisp Monday morning, but it looks like that changed. If you’ll look at the Doppler Radar…” The light on his camera flicked off and Alex knew they had superimposed the weather map on-screen. “…you will see a large mass of clouds accumulating over the central part of the state, all the way west from Forsyth County to Alamance County in the east. Furthermore, you might notice the…uh…odd circular wind patterns that look vaguely like a hurricane. Fear not folks, it is not a hurricane, but there might be some strong storms associated with this front. We'll keep you updated as the storm develops, but I would definitely be taking your umbrella to work this morning. You might need it.”
The Unit 2 camera shut off and Unit 1 flicked back to Rose and Cameron. “Thank you Al,” said Cameron dryly. “In other related _heavenly_ news,” and Cameron grinned his trademarked grin, “astrologers at the Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii have recently confirmed a new comet in our solar system, named Shuborne-6. This comes on the heels of today’s loose planetary alignments, which includes Earth, Venus, Mars…”
Alex zoned him out. That’s how he handled Cameron. It didn’t matter what he was talking about, whether what his wife made for dinner or fluctuations in the stock market or an impending nuclear strike, Alex preferred to zone him out. Cameron was an asshole. A handsome asshole, Alex admitted, but with a wretched sense of humor. And maybe Alex hated Cameron too because they shared a similar weakness for the feminine gender.
Rose though…that Rose McKinney…
He risked a glance at her. Straight-backed. Professional blue suit and flared collar with a slightly dipping neckline. Blond hair pulled back in a bob. Angular face with high cheekbones. She almost looks like a runway model, he thought. That was the first thought that occurred to him six months ago when she'd started. That was the thought still occurring in the year since his wife had divorced him for owning a wandering penis.
Ah, Alex…and the pangs of guilt shall never die…
“In local news,” began Rose, “Duke University has a new program for graduate students that—”
He pulled his attention away and concentrated on HIS problem. The storm. He tapped a pen on the screen. The circular motion of the clouds blipped rhythmically, and in the hour since he had first noticed the anomaly they had tripled in intensity, as if literally boiling out of thin air. He rapped his temple, thinking, How is this happening?
Don, their balding news director, suddenly hunkered down beside him. “What we got here, Al? A weather Trick-or-Treat? And I didn’t bring my umbrella!” Square black glasses made Donny look like an insect, but he was a good guy. Alex liked him and thought they worked well together.
“I can’t say it on TV, Don, but this is some weird shit.” Alex shrugged. “I mean…this storm is developing faster than any I’ve ever seen. According to what I know about weather, anyway.”
Don peered closer at the monitor. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I don’t know what kind of pattern is going to emerge out of—”
One of the PA’s, a slim girl whose name Alex didn’t recall, was waving her arms frantically from the call-center, trying to get his attention. She pointed to the receiver in her hand and jabbed it toward Alex and Don.
“Hang on, Don,” he said. “I think I need to take this call.” He motioned for the PA to transfer over to him. Don patted his arm and Alex answered the trilling phone on the desk and put it on speakerphone.
“Hello? Alex Bachman here.” Static crackled on the other end, then a voice broke through.
“Al! It’s Mark! Look, man, I’m out here at…(crackle)…oint Mall and I-40 and there are some crazy clouds forming. I thought you said—”
“Yeah, yeah, Mark, I know what I said. How’s the live feed look?” Mark was part of their StormChaser’s Team, but he also did early morning Traffic Alert.
“Not good, we’re having a helluva lot of feedback and transmission problems.”
Don cleared his throat. “Mark, Don here. Sorry for any confusion, but Al is on top of things. We have a surprise front moving in from…?” He looked to Alex.
“Prevailing winds is easterly at 20 knots,” said Alex.
They heard more static and the thump of wind on a microphone. In the background, thunder rumbled. “Well, that may be true where…(crackle)…about to knock my goddamn truck over.” Several phones began ringing at once and Alex looked up, but the PA’s answered them.
“So we’ll hold off going to Traffic Alert,” said Don. “No problem. Mark, can you broadcast to us on the private channel? I want to run a visual test.”
“A-OK, Big Guy.” Alex and Don moved to a different station where video feeds piped in to small displays. Within twenty seconds the screen flickered with grainy blue haze and Mark appeared, shivering and holding a microphone. Rain pattered down, and although he wore a jacket against the autumn chill, he obviously wasn’t prepared enough. Don leaned in to the mic.
“Ok, we got a poor picture,” said Don. “Yeah, looks rough. Sure it’s not the cables or the camera?”
There was a slight delay, and then Mark shook his head. “Hell, I don’t know. What worries me is THAT.” He pointed behind him and the unseen camera operator tilted up. It was hard for Alex and Don to discern the details on the small screen and pre-dawn dark, but they could still see a roiling knot of black clouds punctuated by lightning.
Don frowned. “Al, I’m no expert, but that looks bad. Do you think a—”
“Mini-hurricane?” finished Alex. That had occurred to him to, but he didn’t want to say it. The conditions were wrong, the pattern too sudden, everything about the whole situation reeked of WRONGNESS. “It would be a first in the annals of history, Don. Like I said, this shit is weird.”
Mark nodded on the screen and stuck the mic to his mouth. “You’re telling me! The wind is nuts out here!” Even as the two men watched they saw Mark struggling to keep his balance. The camera swayed, and they knew the operator probably had even more trouble.
“That’s it,” muttered Don. “I’m grounding the Eye in the Sky. No one’s flying up in this crap until it calms down. I’ll be back.” Don stalked off, cursing under his breath.
“Traffic is light,” continued Mark. “Far as I can — (crackle) (crackle)—hell?” The picture fuzzed completely out of focus, and then flickered back intermittently. Alex turned up the volume. “Mark. I lost audio and visual. Can you hear me? Can you hear me?”
The screen momentarily returned, slashed with horizontal jaggies, and then a burst of static squawked over the open channel: “Shit! It hurts!(crackle)” Alex covered his mouth. He said it hurts. What hurts? Did he get hit by lightning? Alex spun in his chair, looking for Don, but Don had retreated to the control room and was using a handheld walkie-talkie. An aura of dread hung over him, and glancing around, Alex saw it mirrored elsewhere. The switchboard was lighting up, too many calls for the assistants to answer all at once. The PA who had first transferred the call listened at the handset, her face ashen.
At the news desk, Rose was finishing her report and seemed unaware of anything else. Cameron, off camera, allowed a smug gaze to cross the room and fall on Alex, as if his being in close proximity to Rose made him somehow special. But she won’t screw you, thought Alex. You’re not a married man with a life to ruin, so what’s the point?
The microphone warbled again with a shriek, and a brief burst of live video feed. Alex saw the camera at a weird angle, obviously on the ground. Fat raindrops were falling, and he saw the rear tires of a truck, probably the StormTracker news van, and that was it. The image only stayed up for another two or three seconds then returned to snowy static.
“—and a Sports Update when we come back,” finished Rose, and the station switched to commercial. She leaned back and stretched.
“Brilliant as ever,” Cameron told her, grinning.
“You’re just jealous, Cam,” she said. She looked toward Alex, but he dropped eye contact almost at once. Almost.
Alex fiddled with the controls instead. He couldn’t get the image back up. The transmitter must have gone down. He heard thunder outside. He went back to the Viper Radar and inspected it. The tendrils of the storm had definitely changed, swirling more and more like the concentric pattern of a tropical depression, right over the middle of the goddamn Triad on Halloween morning.
Don returned and clapped a hand to his shoulder. “Ok, buddy, the heli-pilot is waiting for further notice. He says the winds are bad and he wasn’t going up anyway.”
“Come with me, Don,” said Alex, and both men grabbed their jackets and exited through the backdoor of the station, huddling beneath the protective overhang. It was raining, the normal gray haze of dawn replaced by an ominous dark. To the east, actinic lightning highlighted black clouds.
“It looks like a low-pressure system is developing on top of our heads,” said Alex. “It’s not possible, but that’s what the instruments say, and that’s what I’m seeing out here.”
“Well,” said Don, “I guess everyone is entitled to mistakes.” He smiled, but Alex couldn’t find the humor.
“It’s not a mistake. It’s like the goddamn Seventh Sign of Armageddon, or something. I’m calling the other stations, see what happening there.”
Don’s smile disappeared. “Don’t you think that’s a little exaggerated, Al?”
“I hope so,” Alex said. “Otherwise, I don’t know what—” He stopped mid-sentence. The mass of clouds flickered with lightning again, but this time green. Green lightning. Alex stared at Don, both their faces lime-colored in the sickly light.
“Do you pray, Don?”
“Sure I do,” he murmured, staring up. “I might even start going to church again after—oh shit. I think I left my windows down. Crap! Alright, I’ll be right back.”
Don sprinted off into the gloom, and Alex returned inside. The newsroom was abuzz. He could feel a tension in the air greater than he’d ever known here. The PA ran up to him, the one from before. Christy, he thought was her name, but wasn’t sure. All these young interns blurred together.
“Mr. Bachman!” she whispered excitedly, her pretty blue eyes wide. She grabbed his arm. “Someone just called from Alamance County with a report of it raining blood! I know. I know. It sounds nuts, but she was hysterical, she was saying it burned her skin. She said the farm animals were going crazy and her husband went out to tend them, trying to get them inside the barn and he hasn’t come back yet and…and…” Tears welled in her eyes. “I’m really scared, Mr. Bachman! My parents live in Guildford county, and that’s really close!”
“Shh. Shh. It’s okay. Just stay inside, keep answering calls, and if it sounds like an emergency try to transfer them to 911. We’re a news station, not a hospital.” Not yet.
He glanced at the news desk. Cameron and Rose were back on camera, more or less oblivious to the commotion outside. It was almost time for a weather update. What would he say? Unconfirmed reports of blood? Emerald lightening? Yes folks, stay inside until Judgment Day has passed. Clear and Hell-free in the forecast, coming up right after this break. He pounded his head with his palm. This was getting out of hand.
A few other people began running out the door, grabbing umbrellas, coats, scarves. Not essential personnel, but Alex wondered how long it would take for word to get around. Thunder rumbled outside, but it resonated much differently for Alex this time, strumming right down to his toes and curling the hairs on his neck with an indescribable terror.
He’d seen enough storms and performed enough forecasts over the years to know a bad one. He’d seen the aftermath of the Oklahoma twister that churned a path of carnage three and half miles and straight through a trailer park. He’d been here when Hugo boiled up from the Gulf of Mexico and laid waste to Florida and drowned the eastern seaboard of North Carolina. Forecasting the weather was his bread and butter. He went to school for it, graduated second in his class with Honors, and the whims of weather and its predilections flowed in his veins like ancestral blood.
But this —this storm right now —this scared the shit out of him.
He huddled with the computer techs and helped them toss together an impromptu weather watch to scroll at the bottom of viewer’s screens. Rose approached him during the commercial break. “Alex…you don’t look so good. Is something wrong?” Thunder rumbled again, and the lights inside the news station flickered. She looked around, frowning slightly.
He licked his lips. Rose already knew about Barbara deserting him, so that wouldn’t be worth bringing up again. Not that Rose would care. As far as he was concerned, she was the Devil in disguise.
“Well, yeah, we have a slight problem. This storm pattern has become extremely aggressive. I mean, we’re putting up a warning for the entire viewing area. This thing is coming down on us like a tropical depression. I’ve got winds clocking out there at 55 mph. And—and—” Blood from the sky. It burns! “—and some other weird shit, Rose. Look, I got to go.” He started to walk past her but she put a hand on his arm.
“Alex,” she said softly, in that quiet, conversational tone that had swept him away the first time he'd met her. “I’m sorry about what happened. Maybe your wife will…will take you back.”
Alex couldn’t look her in the face. “Maybe,” he said, and then before he knew it, his turn was up and the cameras were on. He tried to wear his game face again, but it actually felt like a mask this time, a charade he feared would fall away and expose the pasty, unsure, unsound Alex Bachman cowering beneath.
The red light blinked on, the camera operators gave the signal, and the outside world beamed in.
“Morning folks,” his voice cracked. “Ah…as you may have noticed, we had a little hiccup in the forecast this morning. There is a bad storm moving through all the counties displayed below. You might want to take your umbrellas if you have to get to work, but, if you can go in late, that might be even better. We have winds out there up to 60 miles per hour, so this is going to officially enter the books as a tropical depression. Sorry for the mishaps folks.” He chuckled, the same warm chuckle that had carried him through fires and floods and even infidelity, only it didn’t feel so warm to him. It clogged his throat and stuck in his craw, and he wanted this morning to end more than any ever in his life. “We’re keeping a top of the situation.” He launched into another explanation of the Doppler Radar, secretly appalled by the spiraling red arms of a hurricane brewing right over his head, its tendrils sweeping across six counties. But to his experienced eye, even this storm did fit not the normal pattern. There was something else swirling inside that colorful mass that couldn’t quite register with his brain.
Maybe he didn’t want it to.
His segment ended, and he lurched off stage, foregoing the usual banter with other team members. He was immediately swamped by attendants and PA’s and heard the trilling of phones and the beeps of delicate machinery, but above all that, outside, he heard the low, monotonous drone of the wind like some slumbering beast that had awakened.
He realized he hadn’t seen Don since he ran off to close his car windows. Don should have been in the control room trying to keep a handle on this mess, and that wasn’t like him to shirk his duties. Alex's eyes shot to the EXIT sign. Several people were gathered there, tentatively leaning out to watch the hullabaloo outside. Sweeping rain driven by howling wind forced them back inside, although one brave soul kept the door cracked.
“Hey, is Don out there?” Alex asked.
The PA from before, Christy, turned to him, her eyes wide. “It’s hard to see outside, Mr. Bachman. I —I thought I saw someone in the parking lot, but not now. The lightning is really bad.”
“Shit.” Alex grabbed his coat and a spare umbrella and trotted to the back door. Outside, the sky roiled as if God had positioned a giant inverted blender up there and set it to frappe, every peal of thunder really just a mocking laugh. Ho! Ho! Foolish mortals! Green lightning filled the clouds again, although now hints of blood red color joined it, splashing ominously across the sky. Somewhere in the distance ambulance sirens blared, and then a three pronged streak of red lightning hit a power transformer and it exploded in a bloom of sparks. A chunk of downtown Raleigh went black.
Alex opened the umbrella, finding it nearly impossible to use in the wind, and he tried to supplement with the water-proof yellow slicker pulled over his head. He sloshing into the parking lot, trying to avoid the deeper puddles. “Don! Are you out here?” Don drove an old Nissan Sentra, and Alex looked for where Don usually parked. He saw the blue car and angled toward it—
– and he saw the body lying facedown in a puddle.
“Holy shit! Don! Don!” Alex dropped the umbrella and raced toward to Don. Even before he reached him, he smelled burned flesh, like a roast overcooked in the oven. The man’s shirt was scorched with fire marks, the thinning hair on his head singed off, the flesh puckered and reddish-black. Alex felt the vomit rise in his gorge. Don hadn’t even made it far enough to close both of his windows.
Alex fumbled for the cell phone in his pocket, but red lightning flashed dangerously close by, and the boom of thunder nearly knocked him off his feet. He yelped, pulled open the Hyundai’s door and flung himself inside. The car still smelled new. A Jesus fish dangled from the rearview mirror. He called 911 but was met with a busy signal. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” He tried to call inside the station but got another busy signal. The lines were jammed.
Weird arcs of electricity leapt from the rooftops; more transformers exploding. He saw a tree topple over, ripped up from sodden roots. He slammed a hand on the dash panel, not even trying to stop the tears burning his eyes like weak acid. Don you bastard! You can’t be dead!
Ruddy light flared all around, and the vehicle shook from another boom. Alex shut his eyes, knowing that this was too real, somehow too _crisp_ to be a dream. So with his eyes closed, he didn’t see exactly what grabbed his hair through the sliver of open window. Fingers curled around the roots, and then someone pulled him face-first into the glass. The window cracked and blood spilled down from his forehead. Screaming, he gripped his attacker and tried to pull back. The hand wouldn’t release, but Alex lurched away so hard that a handful of his brown hair actually ripped free.
To his imminent horror, Alex stared incredulously at his assailant: Don stood outside the window, one eyeball melting down a cheek with a jagged charred hole blown right through it. His left arm was stretched through the window and his hand spasmodically clenched for him, with Alex’s hair still sifting though the fingers.
Holy shit holy shit holy God what has happened?
Alex didn't think a man could survive that kind of damage. It looked like a mortar shell had hit him. He could even see Don's tongue curled through the ragged hole in his cheek, and the melted eye dripped gobbets of jelly ever time he moved. The window cracked even further, and Alex knew the thing would breach it within seconds. Then he noticed the rain subsiding as if a faucet had been turned off. The wind died down some, but that didn’t stop the Don-thing from slamming into window again, and Alex had the vague impression of a great white shark tearing into a diving cage.
Alex jerked open the driver side door and stumbled out into the misting rain. Don swiveled to follow him, lurching as if he had missing joints. Two people waited at the back door and Alex nearly bowled them over in his haste. “Close the fucking door! Close it!”
“Who’s out there?” someone asked. “Is that Don? What’s he—”
“Close it goddammit!” Alex shoved the man out of the way and pulled the bar. The door clanged shut. “Do not, I repeat – DO NOT – open this door for any reason! I don’t care what you hear out there!”
Alex dashed back to the control room, absorbing everything at a glance. Excited faces, dour looks, and a hum of nervous agitation far beyond the norm. He saw Rose, her expression not unlike a stupid deer caught in the headlights. He saw Cameron trying to update the public on recent advances in the war and foreign policy, seemingly ignorant of the madness crashing around him.
Alex lurched into the cubicle, threw himself into the swivel chair, his hand reaching for the phone when the image on the monitor froze his blood with the most terrifying thing he had ever seen.
The rotating pinwheels of the hurricane had morphed into something else - a face — a grinning death —mask face with two sagging black eyes, slit nostrils and gapped holes for teeth. It wore a shaggy hair and beard of tattered storm front, streaking Southwest to Northeast across the Triad. Raleigh was smack in the middle of the right eye, and the storm’s trajectory, at its curr30180ent speed, would haul the mouth-part of the storm over them in less than ten minutes.
Another PA stood beside him with a full cup of coffee but dropped it when he saw the skull-thing. “What in the FUCK is that?”
Christy streaked in beside them, tears cascading down her cheeks. “Oh my God! There are snakes falling in Chapel Hill! Thousands of snakes! Everywhere! Everyone in the streets is getting bitten! Oh God. Oh God. I have to go. I have to go. I can’t stay here. I can’t—”
“No!” yelled Alex. “No one goes outside!” Alex heard thumping at the backdoor, saw bewildered people thronging near, tossing blanks stares back at Alex. “Don’t open that fucking door!” he screamed, realizing a split second later than the microphones probably caught his voice and splashed it over half the state. It didn’t matter. Screaming “Don’t open the fucking door!” might be more effective than a monotonous siren. He grabbed Joe, another computer tech, a bald headed guy with wire rim glasses and a sheen of sweat so heavy it looked like condensation on a cantaloupe.
“Joe. Listen to me carefully. Post an emergency broadcast beacon. Tornado, hurricane fucking forest fire, I don’t care. All stations, all channels, just blitz everything and don’t let up and DO IT NOW.” Joe nodded furiously, looking as if were about to faint and started tapping the keyboard.
Alex fished out his cell phone again and staggered back to the radar. The face leered at him. He couldn’t even bear to look at while he called Barbara's work number. After four rings the answering machine answered. He cursed, hung up, dialed his home number, remembering that she didn’t go in on Monday’s. Oh please Christ in Heaven, be there Barb. Be there be there be there…
“Hello?” His wife answered, sounded husky and withdrawn, and a wave of emotion spilled through him. He hadn’t talked her in two weeks, and every nuance of the woman flashed through his brain, both the things he hated but mostly the ones he missed.
“Barbara! It’s me! Look, please, please listen to me. Don’t hang up.”
“Alex.” Her voice trembled, as if she had just seen something she didn’t quite know how to verbalize. “Are you…are you (crackle) station?” Alex heard a sound on the other end like a faint Splat!
“Yes! Now look, there is a bad, bad storm passing through. But this —this is not a normal storm. Do not go outside. Lock the doors, go to the basement, take blankets and water and grab the dog and—” Alex heard the sound again, a Splat! Splut! Splat! “Barbara, are you ok?”
“—(crackle) Alex…there are babies falling.” He could hear choked sobs. It was the same way she'd sounded when her father died, as if by trying to swallow the fact of the matter, if you forced it deep enough it might not really exist at all.
“What? What do you mean b—”
“Babies. From the sky. Fetuses. Falling fetuses. It’s raining babies outside. It’s (crackle) babies. (Crackle)…babies! BABIES!” Splat! Splat! Splunk! Splat!
Alex glanced at the radar, saw that their house thirty miles away in Durham was where the nose of the thing lurked. Blowing snot, trotted through his head. If the trajectory stayed the same the mouth would miss her, with luck. “Barbara! Do as I said! Get to the basement, take food and water and the dog and do it! Now!” He knew she probably only caught a few words of that through the increasing communication breakdown. He heard her voice crackling again.
“Come home, Alex! Please!”
“Soon! I will soon! When this passes I’m on my way! I promise! Barbara, I—” The phone dropped the call, all five bars shrinking to nothing. “—love you,” he finished. “Fuck!”
Outside, he heard warbling sirens of every make and model. He could only imagine the chaos, and he wondered how many poor bastards like Don had been struck by red lightning,and didn’t remember they were supposed to stay dead. He looked back at the EXIT door but only a few people were keeping guard there. Alex thought he heard dull slaps, as if flat palms slammed the exterior.
Rose and Cameron and a handful of others swarmed into the Doppler control room.
Rose, concern etched on her face, pressed right up to him. “What happened to your head, Alex?” His head? In all the confusion, Alex had forgotten about Don nearly ripping his head off through the Nissan’s window. He touched his brow where it still oozed down the side of his face.
Cameron raised his arms in an exaggerated demonstration of What the hell is happening? Then verbally followed with, “What the hell is happening?”
Alex pointed at the radar image. “That’s what is happening. This—this storm is dropping some of the craziest shit this side of a Stephen King novel. I—I—just saw Don outside, and—and—” Alex held a knuckle to his lips. “He's—he’s not doing so good. He’s dead.”
Gasps rippled through the group. Rose swooned, but Cameron shook his head. “What are you talking about? I saw the guy a few minutes ago! What do you mean he’s ‘dead’? Are you sure? Where? What happened?”
“Struck by lightning,” said Alex. He didn't want to say the next part, but he did. “Only…he’s…not quite dead.”
“Oh, good Lord,” cried Cameron. “Did you call an ambulance? Where the hell is he, man?”
“He’s out back, and I really don’t think an ambulance is going to help. Listen to me. We’re getting reports from all over the place. There’s blood and aborted fetuses falling out of the sky. I’ve seen green and red lightning. And THAT –” indicating the maw stretching toward them, “is not like anything they ever taught me at NCSU. God knows what’s going to happen next. I mean that. Literally.”
Rose’s hand clamped to her mouth, as though if to remove it her jaw might clatter to the floor.
Cameron rolled his eyes. “Well, one thing they taught me is that when a friend is injured, you do something about it!” He shoved through the crowd, muttering obscenities.
“Don’t go out that door, Cameron!” yelled Alex after him. “Don has gone insane. He tried to kill me!”
“I would too if you left my injured ass out in the rain!” Cameron retorted. He stalked toward the EXIT sign, but Alex followed after him.
“Don’t do it, Cam! I’m not joking around! It’s not our Don out there!” But Cameron Niles was a big guy, six foot four inches stacked on a body that had played college football, and Alex didn’t leap in front of him.
Cameron reached the bar, the few people there scattering out of the way, although one person did say, “There was someone banging on the door, Mr. Niles.”
Cameron glared at Alex, cracked his neck to the left and right as if preparing to lift a deadweight barbell, planted one polished loafer on the handle and kicked door open. The rain had started again, the wind had returned, and the elements gusted into the studio. Cameron narrowed his eyes, his clothes rippling around him. He stepped into the opening, shouting, “Don! Don are you out here? Don!”
“What happened to Don?” whispered Rose to Alex. She stood near, smelling like Obsession, the same heady scent she'd worn that night at the Ritz Carlton. At the time it had intoxicated him, along with two bottles of Chardonnay, but now it was sickening, just as much as Don’s blasted face or the thought of aborted fetuses peppering the ground or blood in the gutters and man-faced locusts in the sky—or Barbara’s broken trust when he had confessed to what he’d done.
“Something bad,” he told Rose in answer to her question.
Cameron stepped out of view. Alex trembled, resisting the urge to just slam the door behind their anchorman. He heard another, “Don!” over the roar of wind, and then Cameron returned to the door frame. “There’s no one out here. Where did you see, Alex? Maybe he was just in sh—”
Don collided into Cameron with freight-train speed. They both fell inside, surrounded by a room suddenly full of shrieking. The rain outside must have become acidic for Don’s skin was streaked and blackened, bubbling and sloughing away to reveal muscle and ligatures beneath. Don had latched onto Cameron’s ear with his teeth, even as someone tried to pull the station director off, and half of Cameron’s ear pulled free like stringy silly putty or mozzarella cheese. Blood gushed everywhere, his screams accentuating the mangled mess of his head.
Don wouldn’t let go though, not even when Alex grabbed his legs and tried to forcibly drag him back out the emergency exit. Cameron shoved the dead man away, but couldn’t quite escape scrabbling hands, and Don latched onto him again with surprising strength, biting Cameron’s signet ring off – along with the finger wearing it. Joe, the balding computer tech, surged up with a red fire extinguisher and bashed Don in the skull. The corpse-man rocked back but didn’t release its grip, chewing the finger as if munching a french fry. Joe hit him again, fracturing his skull so deep that brain matter seeped to the surface. Men and women were retching, but Alex kept pulling, pulling, and managed to drag Don halfway out the door, pulling Cameron too, but when he glanced behind him he saw in the glare of another crimson flash more charred corpses staggering toward their position.
“Shit!” he screamed. He let go of Don’s feet and picked up a heavy ash can with a faux-pebbled exterior. A woman with smoking red hair lurched unsteadily toward him, followed by a boy probably not ten years old, one arm completely incinerated and missing. Alex hurled the trashcan and caught the redheaded woman square in the nose. Her neck snapped backward, and she slumped to her knees, her head dangling to the side and patting the ground like a blind person looking for lost change.
The ground began to quake. Alex lost his balance and fell to one knee, the image of that face on the Doppler Radar racing through his mind, the mouth opening wider, wider, sucking them down a stormy gullet. We’re being swallowed by the Devil.
A sound he had never imagined filled the air, agitating the particles and atoms to the point where they heated. The air grew heavy, his movements sluggish as if pushed through invisible syrup.
Joe slammed the fire extinguisher down one last time and Don relinquished his grip on Cameron. Blood pooled around them both, so abundant now that Alex couldn’t tell whose was whose. The wailing in the air grew louder, and he remembered what a tornado sounded like, the approaching knell and keen of a train. The vibration strummed in his breastbone as a hell-red glare filled the sky and ashen clouds bathed everything in a shroud of looming destruction.
Treetops erupted into whooshing matchsticks. There was a sickening crash and rumble and fissures opened in the ground, sucking down cars, trucks, and sidewalks with equal glee. Across the street, Alex saw one corner of the Bank of America shrug, lean, and then collapse, devoured into a rift, followed by the entire front façade of the building. Every light in the building flickered and then the instrument panels exploded. The big widescreen projection TV’s snapped from their fastenings and collapsed, boiling forth smoke and sparks.
Alex kept the door open though, determined to watch their demise no matter how much it hurt. The little boy missing an arm stepped even closer, but his face was turned to the sky. Hissing streamers began to fall, punching holes in roofs and cars and pavement, a storm of meteorites. Hundreds plummeted down, from as small as golf balls to as large as a bowling ball. One struck the little boy and his head vaporized in a fiery bloom.
The buzzing thrum grew ever louder, piercing Alex’s eardrums until he had to clamp his hands over them to try and squelch the pain. His vision blurred. He saw Rose doing the same, and Cameron and Joe the tech guy and everyone else still left in the station who hadn’t already fled.
The roar continued, and the reek in the air grew ever more repugnant, the smell of contamination and rot and decay and other odors that defied description, all rolled together into the horrible promise of a hell to come.
Judgment Day hath cometh, thought Alex. I knew I should have been a church man. However, as he watched St. Mary’s Cathedral across the street disintegrate under a flaming rock the size of a trailer bed, he doubted religion would have helped.
Meteors pierced the News station too, sinking through the roof as if it were tissue paper. Cameron Niles tried to crawl away, holding a hand to the side of his face half torn apart. Alex saw Rose shrieking, but even though her mouth worked, the sound blended with the stellar whine in the air, and even when a chunk of frozen space dust punched through the ceiling and then punched through her torso, that mouth of hers kept working. Just kept on working and working and working and working…
Alex swooned, the floor rising up to meet him, and he slumped unconscious, the dead woman’s gaping “O” painted lips the last thing he saw.
***
Explanation for the storm ranged across the spectrum. Religious zealots saw it as a taste of the Apocalypse, a promise of things to come for sinful Mankind. That point of view had ample supporters. A brief planetary alignment of six heavenly bodies was also blamed for the ordeal, and the fact that it coincided with the relative proximity of Shuberg-6, a comet from the Orion constellation that reached a distance of sixty thousand miles from earth, a mere hair in terms of interstellar measurement.
It took a full month to restore full power to Raleigh, which had been hit the hardest of anywhere in the state. As far west as Statesville and as far east as Rocky Mount had felt its touch in some way though. Confusing, often contradictory reports filtered in over the next few days and weeks while emergency relief teams swarmed in from all over the country. It was a disaster zone, but not the only one.
Denver, Colorado experienced a similar storm that brewed out of nowhere. Among other surprises, that one dropped carnivorous frogs that had a predilection for eating human genitals.
Montreal, Canada experienced a sleet storm of epic proportions. By the end of the 43-minute blizzard, it had dumped seven inches of ice over the city and surrounding area. That, and an army of icy white cockroaches that consumed the dead.
Sydney, Australia was covered by a dust storm that scoured the flesh from bone of anyone caught outside. That lasted approximately 23 minutes.
Two small towns in South Africa experienced extremely caustic acid rain over a 12 minute period. It killed roughly 2500 people who melted to unidentifiable goop.
Worldwide, the death toll was estimated at around 300,000 people, although many bodies were never found. Individuals who died during a storm, and then decided to stand up again, all collapsed once the storms dissipated, which they all did roughly the same time. The black adders that had slithered through Chapel Hill also died when the storm ended, drying to scaly husks like earthworms baking in the sun. Everything that appeared during the devastation did its damage, and then vanished or crumbled away, leaving only the physical evidence of the day’s nightmare.
Alex Bachman wished it were only a nightmare. No, the actual bad dreams continued every night for a long time after emergency workers found him in the shattered hull of the WRAL News Center. Cameron Niles survived his attack, only he needed extensive plastic surgery, prosthetic ear and skin grafts to restore him to even to partially the handsome man he used to be.
Alex moved from Raleigh to Asheville after that, getting a job as a meteorologist at a small news station. He got addicted to heavy sleeping medication that kept him blissfully dreamless. He started drinking too, often chasing the pills with a tall glass of vodka. Sometimes it helped him to forget what he had seen. Sometimes not.
His ex-wife Barbara survived the incident too, for which he was glad. She was a good woman who deserved better than an unfaithful bastard such as himself. Alex thought about Rose McKinney too, and the sizzling hole in her torso, and the cooked organs that slid out of her, and the way she had looked at him, mouth open, her eyes begging for help.
But he couldn’t have helped her. Getting involved with Rose McKinney was the last thing he should have ever done. She was a button-cute succubus dressed up like a gal that would suck your soul dry if you gave her the chance.
And the way Alex Bachman figured it, there were plenty of things in the universe that wanted to suck your soul out and crush your sanity. So from then on, he figured he would be more careful and pay closer attention to threats in the sky.
After all, that was his area of expertise. For what it was worth.
THE END
Author's Note: Thank you for reading the story above! If you enjoyed it, check out some of my other work below! And please don't forget to hit the ❤ button below and subscribe
About the Creator
Jason Hauser
I am a writer, artist and poet from North Carolina. I recently self published a children's/YA book called Harold and the Dreadful Dreams. You can learn more about it at my blog https://jmhauser.com, as well as other projects.
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