I rocked back on my knees and howled at the dark sky. A deep, heartrending hurt unfurled from somewhere in my chest and spread throughout my body like cancer. I kept howling, screaming, shrieking at the black, rain-filled clouds. Grandma was dead and I was ready to die too. To lie down, rest my face against the wet, cold wood, and drift off with Grandma, slip away to a quiet, numb place. A sound, like someone gasping for air, stopped me. I stared down at Grandma, hoping, praying that she was alive, fighting to draw air into her lungs. But Grandma hadn’t moved. Her eyes were still. The sound came again. I glanced over my shoulder.
Pearl was climbing out of the Dumpster.
Tiny worms hung from nearly every inch of exposed skin, as if she’d suddenly grown thick, squirming hair all over her face and shoulders. She flopped forward on her chest, wriggling her hips and kicking her legs, sliding onto the loading dock. I couldn’t move. With a grunt, she pushed herself to her feet, then looked at me. Actually, I wasn’t sure if she was looking at me or not because several fat worms hung out of her right eye socket. Still, she must have seen something, because she raised her good arm and pointed at me.
“Ooooooh,” she croaked. I realized that she was trying to say “You,” but when she opened her mouth, blood washed out over her bottom lip and her knife-edged chin. It looked like a dozen or so worms were eating her tongue. Part of her outstretched arm fell off. The muscle between the elbow and the back of the shoulder just fell free with a wet ripping sound and landed limp on the wood, hundreds of worms squirming through the fibrous meat.
Without a muscle to hold it up, her arm flopped back to her side.
She took a step forward.
More flesh started falling off, hitting the wood with soft plops. A couple of fingers. Part of her scalp. She took another step forward, and the jolt of her foot landing made more parts fall onto the dock. A giant chunk of her thigh. Her nose. Something that might have been part of an intestine slid out from under her dress and down the inside of her leg. The gold and diamond studded buckle fell from between what was left of her thighs. And all of her, everything down to the thin layer of skin covering the cartilage of her nose, was alive with worms, infested with them.
She shuffled a few more feet until I couldn’t take watching her anymore and simply placed my gloved hand in what was left of the exposed rib cage and pushed. It felt like shoving a stack of empty aluminum beer cans over. Pearl opened her mouth and four or five teeth tumbled out of gums that looked like Swiss cheese. Gurgling something, she fell back into the Dumpster. Her outstretched arm hit the opposite side and simply broke off, falling out into the floodwater, flinging clots of worms and meat into the air. Water filled her open mouth.
The last thing I saw of Pearl was her chin. The jawbone lazily separated from the rest of the skull, floating at the surface for a moment as worms swarmed eagerly over it, then vanished into darkness, swallowed by the black water.
Smoke curled out of the open doorway and rolled across the loading dock. I couldn’t see anything but bright, strong flames through theback door. The restaurant was finished; the building was burning out like a doomed ship on the open sea. But at least the sailors on burning ships could try and fight drowning or sharks. Those deaths would take time. They didn’t have to worry about the worms, the worms that would squirt through your open, flailing fingers and dig into your soft flesh, chewing, squirming, forcing themselves into your orifices.
Misty coughed, fighting the smoke that drifted across her body. Her right hand held the bottom of her shirt to her mouth as a kind of air filter. Shit, with Grandma, I’d forgotten. All it took was one little cough, and I realized that I didn’t want to die anymore. Not as long as Misty was still alive. Out at the quarry, on the blanket, I’d vowed to protect her. And I still meant it.
I tried to think of something, some way we could escape. We couldn’t go through the back door into the kitchen; the flames were too big, too strong. We couldn’t exactly jump in the water, either. We needed time, I decided. Maybe somebody had seen the smoke. Maybe help was on the way.
“Okay, okay. Now, you hang on.” I grabbed her shoulders, gave a little shake. “Just stay here, keep your feet. I’m gonna fix it so we can get on the roof, okay?” I said, looking into her battered face. I think she nodded back.
The wood beneath my feet suddenly shifted and dropped. Cold fingers clutched at my stomach and I felt that same kind of nauseating vertigo from my dream. The whole building was starting to collapse. Floodwater seeped across the loading dock, washing parts of Pearl around. Worms were everywhere.
I pulled the plank off of the Dumpster, dropped the bottom on the pile of rotting pallets, then slammed the top edge against the wall, as a kind of ramp. The top was at least two feet under the overhanging plastic gutter. It didn’t matter. It would have to work. We’d just have to stretch a little, that’s all. Already, four or five worms were clustered around my boots, probing and biting, inching up the leather. “Yougoddamn little shits,” I whispered down at them through gritted teeth and pulled Misty close. She took a good look at the plank, tucked her broken hand in close to her stomach, and started climbing.
The entire building shuddered and shifted. More water splashed across the loading dock, rocking Grandma’s body. I didn’t want to leave her there, but I knew I didn’t have the time to carry her up to the roof. I grabbed hold of the wood, pulled myself out of the water, and blinked the tears out of my eyes.
Above me Misty slowly dragged herself onto the sloping roof with her good hand. I followed as fast as I could, scrambling onto the slippery shingles and up the angled roof to the crest. Misty rested on her knees, coughing a little, trying to clear her throat.
I stood up and saw that the flood had swept through the flat valley, washing over the highway, across the ditch, through the fields, leaving nothing but an ocean of filthy water littered with garbage and cornstalks. I couldn’t see anything other than an empty horizon and knew that no help was coming.
Down to my left was the crumpled back end of Fat Ernst’s Cadillac, wedged between the front wall and the Sawyer brothers’ truck. Ray’s cruiser was twenty or thirty feet farther. Slim’s truck sat out by the highway, water halfway up its doors. And over to my right was Misty’s bright red Dodge, sitting by itself, maybe fifteen, twenty feet from the edge of the roof. The water only came up to the bottom of the frame, so I figured the engine was still dry.
“Do you have your keys?” I asked Misty.
She nodded and dug into her jeans pocket with her right hand, gingerly holding her mangled left hand up and out of the way. She dropped four keys and a dangling bottle opener into my open, gloved palm and asked “How are you gonna get there?”
I shrugged and stuffed the key ring into my pocket. I slid carefully down the front half of the roof and squatted at the edge, trying to estimate the jump from the roof to the pickup. I’d never make it. I’d end up fighting my way through the water while the worms got a free lunch. Even if I made it to the pickup, I’d bleed out before I could move the pickup closer to the building for Misty.
As if reading my mind, Misty called down to me, “I wouldn’t. Those things’ll get you before you get five feet.” The roof shivered, and the west edge dropped half a foot. I heard something over the rain and the flames, a low, strumming sound.
The telephone wires. A lone, thin wire stretched from the upper corner of the roof off to my right out to a telephone pole at the edge of the cornfield, halfway between the restaurant and the highway. If that wire could hold my weight, then I could swing hand over hand to the pole, where it joined several other heavier telephone wires. Those wires crossed right over Misty’s truck. It was a hell of a drop to the pickup.
“There,” I said, pointing at the wires.
“Do you think they’ll hold?” Misty asked.
“Shit, I hope so,” I said, more to myself than anybody else, as I scurried along the top of the smoking roof to the west end and tested the wire. I couldn’t see how it was attached to the building; it simply ran in through a little hole under the eave and disappeared. I stuck my foot over the edge and pushed down as hard as I could. The wire held, so I grabbed hold with both hands and swung out over the water. The wire bounced with a jerk but didn’t break.
I twisted around, locked my ankles over the wire, and worked my way over to the telephone pole like a skinny tree sloth on meth. It got a little tougher when I had to climb up the last ten feet going at a forty-five degree angle. When I got to the top, I reached out and grabbed one of the protruding steel bars that serves as rungs on wooden telephone poles.
I rested a moment and looked back to Misty. She held her wounded hand and watched me. Flames were now peeking out through blackened spots in the roof.
I edged out to the wires at the top of the telephone pole. Thoughtsof getting electrocuted by grabbing the wrong wire crossed my mind—and wouldn’t that have been a goddamned dumb way to die—but I didn’t worry about it, I just reached out and grabbed the nearest wire and moved out, hand over hand, feet dangling this time, until I was directly over Misty’s pickup, or as best as I could tell. It was hard to try and look directly down with my arms straight up. By then, my arms were screaming and my hands were threatening to let go whether I was in position above the pickup or not.
So I let go.
And almost landed in the pickup bed.
Instead, I hit the water next to the truck. The water was four, four and a half feet deep; it still felt like I was landing on concrete, boots hitting the water in a muddy splash, then falling forward, arms flailing, anything to keep my face out of the water. It didn’t work, and I hit the surface with an impact that drove the breath out of my lungs. My knees buckled as the rest of my weight came crashing down, and I slipped under the water. I jerked my head out and scrabbled up the side of the pickup and fell heavily into the plastic tray lining the bed.
After a couple of panicked seconds checking myself for worms, I stood and looked back to the restaurant. Flames licked at the roof overhang and thick black smoke rolled urgently out of the front windows. More smoke seeped out from under the shingles, and I hoped it wasn’t getting too hot up there. Misty crouched at the crest, half obscured by the swirling smoke.
I ripped the gloves and duct tape off, pulled Misty’s keys out of my pocket and leaned over the side, trying to fit them into the driver’s door. I didn’t want to get back into the water again unless I had to. I had just slipped the key into the slot when I looked up to check on Misty and saw Junior crouched in the back of his truck, watching me.
I flinched. The keys slipped out of the lock and disappeared into the water.