EDITOR'S NOTE: Look for a new chapter from Lee Thomas's DAMAGE every Wednesday and Saturday. All previous chapters are archived for a limited time only.

31

Nature's onslaught of Pierce Valley, a blinding downpour of rain brought to electric life by frequent and fierce lightning flashes, continued through the morning, sending the river spilling over its banks, knocking out the power to two-thirds of the city's homes and covering the town in a shadow so dark that the street lamps came on at one-forty that afternoon. The entire western region of Washington State took nature's primal beating, and like all animals, the people cowered in awe at its power. They placated themselves with hot soups and passionate lovemaking, being driven to soothe their basest desires as an antidote to deeply entrenched fears.

These same fears afflicted the residents of Pierce Valley, but they were altered and amplified. Dread poured over the residents in a dark, emotional mimicry of the rain.

Bachman's Lake climbed up its banks like a spreading wound, toward the expensive homes on Lakeshore Drive and the condominiums where Frank McQueen owned a two-bedroom apartment.

A redwood, one of the oldest in the county, had fallen across Route Eleven soon after Doug fled the scene at his house. The tree, three times the age of the city itself, had been struck by lightning (according to notes in the official report) and had crushed a minivan, instantly killing its driver, Fiona Lawless, owner of Hamster Home Pet Shop. Ten cars in all had been involved in the accident, which in conjunction with the storm, had effectively closed Route Eleven until the injured could be tended, their cars towed and the tree removed.

At the river's edge, the work crews piled sand bags. One of the workers, a slender fire fighter named Kurt Vanderhoof, was taken from the dark banks of the river in an ambulance, trembling and crying while EMS workers struggled to get his heart rate under control. Though injected with enough sedatives to calm a racehorse, the fireman could not be calmed, and a weak vein in his frontal lobe, a congenital defect, burst under the pressure of the tide pumped through it by his frantic heart.

Kurt was at the front of the bag brigade, on stacking detail. The angry river roared, charged and spat only a few feet from his face. He took a break to get dry and use the bathroom at Bound for Glory, one of the shops the Fire Marshall had commandeered for this very purpose. After relieving his bladder, a noise - something between a woman's crying and the squealing of a pig - from behind the locked door of the storage room sent him fleeing back to his position on the stacking line. He hauled bags and chatted with Phil Clyde and found himself compelled to stare at the raging current. While doing so, he spotted a long white object, like a mannequin snatched from a shop window, drifting by his position and Kurt whispered, "Floater." Before he could add power to his voice, announcing his terrible discovery another of the pale shapes passed, borne on the frothing tide. Then another body and another raced through the gloomy water, until the river was thick with human remains. Choking back a cry, Kurt watched the floating dead, followed the corpses with his eyes to where they nearly vanished in the coal gray water.

The procession of the dead, though horrendous in its volume, was not responsible for Kurt's panic and ultimate death. Not exactly, at any rate. The killing image came when he gazed through the peppering rain, making a visor of his hand so he could see the bend of the river, over which the Apple Core Bridge spanned, down where the bodies seemed to bruise and blacken under the violent tide. He saw one of the gangly-limbed floaters pull itself from the foam at the river's edge, roll in the mud for a moment and begin climbing the hill toward the bridge. Another of the mortal flotsam pulled free of the raging river, crawling on his belly like a slug because his legs were severed mid-thigh. A third and fourth followed.

That was the moment Kurt's scream carried above the snare drum rapping of the storm, and the moment when his heart began a fierce rhythm that would not slow until it stopped completely.

Over the Apple Core Bridge and well out of town, through barren fields turned to swamp by the rain, and against the southernmost lip of the city charter, Donny Barber woke from his faint in Reed Thompson's home and crawled over the tiled floor away from the stairs and the slaughtered body of the home's owner suspended at their apex.

He didn't bother retrieving his umbrella, but instead stumbled into the storm and dropped into the seat of his car, clothes soaked through. The smell of the rain, the reek of misery like old tears, covered him. Starting the car, Donny's elbow screamed in pain and he yelped. He must have cracked the joint when he'd hit the tiles, and it hurt like a motherfucker.

The fact that Reed had been hurt far more severely and with infinite permanence came as an afterthought. Reed was well beyond the ministrations of medicine, and while Donny considered calling the police, he pushed the thought aside quickly. Hell, he'd thrown the man through a window less than a week ago; were the police going to believe he had nothing to do with filleting the guy like a trout and suspending him from the ceiling of the second floor? Not likely. Though innocent, he knew that he'd be in for a major hassle if nothing else.

Fortunately, Thompson lived a good ways from anyone. With the storm, no one would have noticed Donny and even if a few of the folks on the edge of town had seen his Beamer cruising into the South Forty, they couldn't prove he'd actually come here to Reed's place.

Until the police found his fingerprints on the doorknob.

"Shit," Donny hissed, striking the steering wheel and feeling white fire scream up his arm.

Back in the storm, he mentally retraced his steps, wondering where else his fingerprints might remain. On the walls? The floor tiles? Certainly, his wet shoes had left marks on the white ceramic.

At Reed's front door, a gust of wind tipped the screen of rain so dramatically that it ran parallel to the ground, showering Donny with icy cold droplets. He untucked his shirt, but before he began to wipe the knob, he followed a path of logic, cleared long ago by the edge of his well-honed paranoia. If he wiped off the knob, then the real killer's prints might be erased, leaving Donny a likely suspect. Additionally, if he mopped up the floor to hide his footprints, he would need to use a towel. What if he was caught discarding the towel, and they traced it back to Reed's house? One failing in his plan after another occurred to him, and Donny was left with the fact that his only real chance to avoid persecution and possibly prosecution, was to call the police and get them out here fast.

He stepped back into the foyer, uncomfortable with the atmosphere that he shared with a corpse. He kept close to the threshold as he freed his cell phone and attempted to dial emergency.

But the storm was playing havoc with his signal, and he couldn't even get a channel long enough to dial in the three numbers. He'd have to use Reed's phone, which meant getting nearer to the dead man than he wanted.

Each footfall into the house, closer to the opening of the stairway, tightened the anxious knot in his belly and made his nerves dance. The abused odor mingled with the perfume of rot, creating a noxious cologne. The rain marched at his back, sending chills along his neck and down to his ass before shooting back to his shoulders. For a moment, he imagined Reed alive, still butchered, still dangling from the ceiling like a meaty chandelier, but alive nonetheless and struggling against the cord that bound him to the ceiling. Donny shuddered and stepped back as he might if his foot had come down on something slick and cold.

He's dead, Donny told himself. Dead is dead.

Just don't look up those stairs. Keep walking and keep your eyes on the floor. The telephone is in the next room. Just don't look up those stairs.

And Donny would have taken that advice. He would have gone to the phone, called the police and waited in his car for them to arrive if he had not heard Reed's voice, low and dry, rolling down at him.

"You said you loved me," Reed said.

Donny shrieked, casting a cornered cat glance up at the remains hanging from the ceiling. "Didn't you?" Reed asked, lifting his head to reveal that his jaw had been torn away and his tongue hung loose against his throat like a pink tie.

Refusing another second of this dreadful vision and still screaming, Donny fled the house. In less than a minute he was speeding through the gloom along the road that cut the South Forty in half. As more minutes ticked by, his mind withdrew further from reality. The fields and road still played like a bad black and white movie, but now the sky and dirt were etched with screaming tortured faces.

Well within the grip of insanity, he took the corner through the stand of redwoods too quickly and his rear tires slid out. Donny righted the car with a painful thrust of his right arm. His elbow throbbed as if the joint were sprinkled with shards of glass. With the Apple Core Bridge finally in sight ahead of him, Donny checked the rearview mirror to make sure the nightmare was behind him.

As it turned out, it was.

In the mirror, he saw Reed's dead stare and the lifeless skin of his face. The skinned knobs of his spine rose up behind the head like the tail of a scorpion and Reed asked, "Don't you love me anymore?"

Donny lost his mind and his control of the car simultaneously. The absence of rational thought sent him into a black well of writhing nightmares where Donny was enveloped by an orgy of leaking bodies. Lacking a competent hand to steer, the car launched over the edge of the riverbank and collided with the side of the Apple Core Bridge. The impact sent the steering column through Donald Barber's ribcage and the chassis of the car broke through a support beam and dislodged the metal ramp at the center of the trestle.

The startled work crews at the river's edge put down their canvas bags of sand. They watched stricken as the BMW tore into the bridge and then tumbled backwards, landing upside down on the foaming river to be carried away by the hungry flood.

So soon after Kurt Vanderhoof's break down (they would find out later that he died in the ambulance), the crews fell into disarray, knowing they didn't stand a chance of beating nature in the race to control the river, and fearing that something, maybe something in the water supply, was starting to fuck up people's heads with lethal skill. Oliver Marshall rounded up a dozen of his police officers, and they began trudging through the storm to set up barricades to keep people from driving on the compromised bridge. The other men, the other cops and firefighters, formed tight squads next to the wall of sand bags, and amid the flurry of rainfall and the ankle deep mud, at least one member of every huddle asked, "What the fuck is happening?"


#

Lee Thomas's novel DAMAGE, originally published as a Limited Edition by Sarob Press, will be serialized in its entirety--and with the addition of 6,000 words--on Fear Zone. Please visit the author at http://www.leethomasauthor