The Melting Dead

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Book excerpt

Chapter One

     At the risk of being crude, Angela looked as if she'd been yanked through a knothole. Her eyes swam in pink puffs of flesh, tears streaked her cheeks, a smudge marred her jaw. Her hair was grimy and disheveled, her clothes filthy, torn, blood spattered, and even burned in spots. Yes, burned. And she was running like she'd never run before. Uphill through the woods, out of breath, aching in every muscle, she ran on her last ounce of strength. She hadn't a step left in her, yet, on she ran, gasping for breath, shooting terrified glances into the pitch black behind.

     It's difficult to describe a negative but, as she ran, there were none of the normal sounds of the night about her. No nocturnal animals scampering in the brush, no creatures slithering in the grass, nothing flitting past on nightwing. Not even crickets. Nothing but the night and the sounds of her own gasping breath and her running feet – and the horrifying sounds of the thing chasing her.

     It moved quickly through the brush behind. Leaves rustled and branches snapped to its uneven step as it pounded the dirt path. Its panting, occluded breath played like a chilling theme song, Suite for String Orchestra, Tubular Bells, Malcolm is Dead; music to scream by, music to die by. Then came the bridge, musically speaking, as the panting gave way to a guttural howl. The thing was right behind, hot on her heels and closing.

     Then the dawn arrived; burst over the trees, brilliantly pink, orange, white and gold. But it wasn't the pure and cleansing light of salvation. The cavalry had not arrived over the hill. It was the dawn of the dead, for it cast long shadows through the dense woods, and shown with blinding brightness on a clearing ahead of her and above as if it were a spotlight on a stage. Lights up on the final act in the theatre of blood. Angela left the trees, still running, entered and crossed the clearing in eight panicked strides, then pulled up – out of room to run.

     She caught her balance, panting for breath, at the brink of a sheer rock cliff. She gaped over the edge and swallowed hard at the sight of the drop, a hundred feet to a surging river below. She was trapped. She turned back to stare wide-eyed at the edge of the woods on the downhill side. She dropped her arms to her sides, flexed her fists. She fought to master her breathing. Was she afraid? Yes. YES. Still, if the end was coming – let it come. She'd meet it like she met everything in life, head on. The morning breeze chilled her, blowing through her hair and torn clothes, brushing her sweat covered skin, turning it to goose-flesh, sending a shudder through her small, athletic frame. Her breath came in gasps. She could hear the water surging below and, just beyond the edge of the timber, the snapping twigs and crunching leaves as her pursuer approached.

     The thing broke through the trees.

     Angela Roskowic screamed – and bolted upright in bed, like they always did in the horror movies she loved so much. Like she had for the last three nights, since the nightmare, the deadly dream, had first begun. She'd been a mess while in it and was worse now it had passed. She was drenched, her too-big flannel night shirt clinging to the sweat, her hair matted, her breath coming in pants, and a rivulet of saliva escaping the left side of her mouth. Ugh, pretty.

     She wiped her chin with her shirt-sleeve, groaned, and fell back to the damp pillow. Like most people of the theater, she was a night person, not much good in the day. She didn't need nightmares on top of that. She lay there, working to control her breathing, blanking her mind, willing her muscles to relax. She told herself, “Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.” She looked at the bedside clock and groaned again. Time to make the doughnuts. She had places to be, people to see. To heck with nightmares. If she didn't get going, the day was going to wind up one big trip through hell.

     Four  hours later, following a shower, toaster pastry with sprinkles, and the completion of some last minute chores at the theater (she'd procrastinated the day before), with a cup of coffee-house espresso driving away the remnants of her nightmare and her comfy-as-an-old-shoe Maverick driving away the last of the two hundred miles from The Windy City, Angela motored through Savanna, a sleepy northwest Illinois town on the east bank of the Mississippi. If she'd read the map right, she was nearing her final destination.

     One of the great thought-thinkers at the last meeting of their Chicagoland Directors' Guild, to the question of where their next convention ought be held, had boldly suggested a retreat into the wilds beyond the city and suburbia. A “get away and play” as he called it. Of course, with the exception of a film shoot in South Bend, he had never been more than five miles from the heart of the Loop. Someone else would have to arrange the venture and Angela as, one, the recording secretary and, two, the only committee member not at the meeting, was nominated. She had no experience with nature either, but that would teach her to miss meetings.

     That was four days ago. Four fruitless rehearsals, with a guest director that made Scrooge look open-minded and amiable, with a cast of young performers raised in the village of the damned, each followed by a night of rotten sleep and – the recurring nightmare. Four nights of being chased in a dream that made no sense. First off, what could be more hair-raising than the frightening world of the theater? Secondly, she was a horror film nut, gaga for gothic. Monsters didn't scare her, they were a blast. So why a nightmare? And why the woods? She wasn't afraid to go in the woods, she just didn't want to. She was a Chicago girl, born and bred, and didn't go anywhere without indoor plumbing. And why the night stalker, the dark thing, on her heels? Chi-town was full of things willing and eager to chase you. You didn't need a cabin in the woods for that. But what needled Angela most in the strange dream was her condition. The torn clothes were nonsense; she pitied the guy ever tried to lay a hand on her without the okey-dokey. And the exhaustion was patently ridiculous. When she wasn't staging a show or catching a fright flick, she kept herself fit training for and running marathons. She relished the personal challenges of the sport. She may have needed her tip-toes to peek over a five foot wall, but she could jump one with no trouble. It would take a heck of a run to wear her out so completely. The dream just made no sense.

     Anyway, it was behind her. As was the trip from the city. Now Angela had something new to think about; her mission to scout the sticks for a retreat venue. She may as well have been on a journey to the far side of the sun. Completely outside of her comfort zone, she cruised slowly through Savanna and found she'd entered the small town territory of Salem's Lot and Let's Scare Jessica to Death. The sidewalks at that early hour were virtually empty. The few gaunt figures she did see silently followed her progress down the street with the deliberate stares of the Stepford wives. She missed Chicago already, where a million people might pass you but none paid you any mind.

     Two traffic lights, from one end to the other, and Angela found herself leaving town headed north. She'd passed a sign reading Marina at the hard curve in the middle of town, between the Lutheran Church and the Fire Station; had been told specifically to pass the sign (and the marina) by an insistent and gabby park big shot, and to keep headed north. Gorgeous rock bluffs with sheer cliffs, not unlike the one in her dream, that her map called the palisades, imposed to the right of the highway while ahead on the left, thankfully, appeared the sign she had been directed to look for, Miller's Landing. She turned left onto (because nothing in life made sense) Marina Road. Straight ahead lay the great Mississippi River. She had arrived.

     In one way Angela discovered, the boonies, like the city, were governed by the maxim 'Hurry up and wait'. She'd forced herself from bed, nurse-maided the old Maverick across the state, only to find the door to the landing office locked. She looked out over the bobbing boats, the wooden piers, and beyond the steep concrete incline to the water (for the launching of boats, she imagined), wondering just what the heck she was supposed to do now. Someone named Arthur should have been waiting to give her a ride. There wasn't a living soul about. So, how to get to the island?

     Yes, an island retreat, that's what she was getting the Chicagoland directors into.

     Prior to that moment, the nearest Angela had been to the Mississippi was a four-week run of Show Boat in summer stock. Now she could actually see the river, a surging, gray-green highway of water, and see it coming to life. The birds were everywhere, big black and white ones that looked like pelicans, majestic ones that were certainly eagles (though she didn't know gold from bald), soaring overhead. On the rocks beside and beneath the dock the frogs croaked, the snakes could be heard to hisss, and all around the hidden things in nature leapt and slithered and made their presence known. She couldn't see the fat daddy cats and walleye hanging low and cold along the shoreline, but they were there. She could hear the big mouth bass break the surface with a splash and, though she knew only that they were fish, she wondered if they weren't giving the fin to the few anglers visible up and down the way. The current slapped the rip-rap, big white rocks, on both the Illinois and Iowa shores. (That was Iowa over there, wasn't it?) Barges, flat, rusting metal monsters asleep at anchor, waited for the day's work to begin. It was all quite amazing. But one look told her that, while the old man river might jes' keep rollin' along, he was too wide-awake, wide, long, fast, and cold for her to swim. Angela would just have to wait and hope Arthur and his boat put in an appearance.

     Resigned, committed, and with her mind now free, Angela heard music. From radios and receivers in boats and barges up and down the water, as the station identification of a local morning radio show danced on the Mississippi valley air. “W-O-M-R. Old man river ra-di-o!” She heard the sprightly jingle too from at least one of the cars, or trucks, or campers in the nearby parking lot. She'd probably been hearing the broadcast all along but had blocked it out. Who listens to commercials after all? Now she heard it plainly, the first signs of civilized life the city girl recognized that morning.

     As the song died, there boomed the gravelly voice of the female radio host. “Yes, it is, moms and dads, boys and girls...” Three packs a day, Angela guessed. “This is your charming and delightful, ol' Aunt Sal. And right over there, shoving another cinnamon bun in his pie hole, is my sidekick, little runny-nosed Eddie. Hi, Eddie!”

     “Hey, Aunt Sal,” came the laughing reply, over the air, from the depths of their studio.

     Sal Cartwright, Savanna's most famous radio dee jay, didn't just sound like a frog, she looked like one and had, sitting in her W-O-M-R radio seat, since the training wheels came off Caesar’s chariot. Eddie Lanfair, her co-host, his headphone cord stretched to its limit, his mouth jammed with pastry beside the snack wagon across the studio, had been with her for half that time.

     “On this beautiful morning,” Aunt Sal croaked, moving the flexed microphone arm above her desk closer to her mouth, “we need to start off with a warning.”

     Choking down a sticky bite, licking his fingers, Eddie raced back to his seat and told his mic, “Say, sounds serious, Sal.”

     “Whoa. Easy on the alliteration, Eddie, you'll hurt yourself. But, yes, a warning. We want to inform our faithful listeners that the south end of Mississippi pool thirteen will be closed today.”

     “What?!” Eddie asked in mock surprise.

     “That‘s right, Little Eddie,” Aunt Sal said, scanning the news release in her hand. She rattled the paper in front of her microphone for effect. “Says right here... No lock and dam traffic due to dredging below the Rock Island.”

     “The river never closes, Aunt Sal!”

     “It does today, you lying little rat. Pool thirteen is open for recreation, the Bellevue lock and dam is operating as usual, and the river is open for commerce to the north, but don’t travel south today because there’s nowhere to go past the island. And the Clinton lock and dam is closed to traffic.”

     Eddie grabbed his kazoo and blew a wheezy sigh.

     “Yes,” Sal agreed, picking up another sheet. “...it's sad. But here’s a story from the NP news wire to cheer you up.”

     “Oh, boy, what is it?”

     “Well, Eddie, it appears we get a meteor shower this morning.”

     “Hey, a fire in the sky, that’s cool!”

     “Oh, wait, wait. No, it isn't. Says here... we probably won‘t see it.”

     Eddie blew his kazoo again.

     “Yes, sad,” Sal agreed. “Meteors strike the earth all the time, the experts say, but their spectacular night time displays are apparently a dud in the daylight. What’s that?” Sal looked up and through the four-by-eight sound-proofed glass separating the two of them in the booth from the control room engineer on the other side. “I’m being corrected over my head phones. Erwin, the super genius MIT grad who's running the sound board in this broken down Savanna radio station, is correcting me. He says, they’re not meteors if they strike the earth. Just a second.” She laid a hand to the headset cupping her ear. Erwin's lips moved behind the glass. “Okay, great. You can go back to sleep, Erwin. All right, folks, here’s the facts.”

     “The 411?” Eddie chimed in.

     “Don’t be hip, Little Eddie. I'm giving the good listeners out there the scoop on meteors and you're making an asteroid of yourself.”

     “Sorry.”

     “Yeah, yeah.” Back to it. “If these flying space objects hit us, meaning planet earth...”

     “The big blue marble?”

     Sal glared poisoned daggers across the table. Eddie wilted and she continued. “If they hit us, they are meteorites. But that’s rare. Meteoroids, what they’re called in space, usually burn up in our atmosphere.”

     “My roids are always on fire.”

     “Can it, squirrel.”

     Eddie cut into his own laughter, suddenly confused. “Well, wait. Then, what's a meteor?”

     “A meteor is – shut up, Erwin, I got this. Their fiery trail is a meteor. It’s something to see at night but on a bright morning like today, not so much.”

     “Wow.” Eddie didn't sound impressed. “So, if we aren’t going to see it, why the hell are we talking about it?”

     “Oh, boy,” Sal said, feigning concern. “Put a quarter in the potty mouth jar, Little Eddie!”

     “What? Just for saying 'hell'?”

     “Yes, sirree, bob. Go ahead and hit her twice for repeating it, you blockhead!”