Sandy figured this was how the mound of limbs in the Johnson bedroom had started. She wondered how long it had taken the mound to reach that stage. A day or two at the most. This mass was bigger, with maybe twenty or thirty people jammed together under the long table.
She got closer. She didn’t want to touch anyone, but she had to know. Had to know if her son was under there. She kept the flashlight moving, searching for any sign, one of his shoes, a wrinkled twist of his shirt, a glimpse of his hair. Shit. She’d been so preoccupied this morning she couldn’t even remember what color shirt he’d been wearing. She wondered if she would recognize his hand, his fingers.
Someone gasped behind her and she dropped the flashlight and whirled around and almost fired the shotgun into Charlie’s chest.
“The fuck is that?” he wanted to know.
Sandy let her breath out in one long shaky whistle. She picked up the flashlight and backed away. “It’s the spores. It’s what they do.”
Charlie squinted behind the bug-like goggle eyes of his mask. “Fuck me sideways.”
“In a day or two, this will somehow produce more spores, I think.”
“I think we oughta burn ’em.”
Sandy didn’t have anything to say to that. The thought of trying to save these people was laughable, only it was the kind of laughing that once you started, you couldn’t stop until you were whooping and sucking in great gusts of air and somewhere along the way, the laughter skidded into a series of wavering screams.
She spent another few minutes trying to see if she could spot any sign of Kevin in the mass. Every time she moved the light and then brought it back, the tendrils had grown. She got close to the wall and knew there were at least fifteen bodies under the table that she couldn’t see. She flicked the light back at Charlie. “Help me slide the table out. Just a little.”
He pulled the table away from the wall, sliding it out slow about seven or eight inches. The metal studs on the center feet screeched as it was dragged across the cement.
She bent over the bodies. A man in his late forties who had been jammed right up under the bottom of the table blinked and opened his eyes. He blinked, but that was all; he didn’t move another muscle other than those around his eyes. Sandy suddenly recognized him as Randy, Elliot’s father. If he was down here, then… She refused to follow that line of thought any further.
Randy’s eyes rolled back and fluttered as if he was having a seizure.
A fat seven- or eight-year-old girl, her head stuck sideways in his armpit, also blinked and opened her one visible eye. More eyes, sunk into faces under the man and girl, began to blink.
Sandy looked back up at Randy and found that his eyes were staring right at her.
She stood up.
His eyes followed.
All of the eyes focused on her and the flashlight. Sandy found she was unable to move the light away. Their eyes weren’t blank, unfocused. They seemed horribly, horribly aware.
Sandy jumped back to stand next to Charlie. Her voice shook. “I think, I think they know. I think they are all awake, they can feel what is happening, but they can’t move.”
Charlie regarded the table for a moment. Nodded. “That… sucks.”
They found two more clusters of people as they moved deeper into the basement. They weren’t quite as big, and Sandy could see that Kevin was not a part of them. Still, she found people she knew, people she had seen in town, not only folks that she’d had to visit late night to calm down a fight or bust for pot, but people she’d seen in the Stop ’n Save, parents and children she’d met at Kevin’s school. It left her feeling raw, like her insides had been scraped and left in a steaming pile on the floor.
She didn’t want to leave them, but knew she had no choice. If she tried to say, “I’m going for help,” she knew it was a lie. Her only path was locating her son. She would find Kevin or die. If she found him, she would take him far, far away, and leave all this to someone else. If he had been infected, she would make that decision only when she found him.
When they climbed back out of the broken window, the sun was creeping toward the horizon. The shadows were getting longer; much like the fungal tendrils in the basement, you couldn’t see them moving, but they were getting bigger and longer, no question.
After Sandy and Charlie told Purcell what they had seen, he said, “That can’t be all of them. Look at all them chairs. A few of ’em went down there, but not everybody.”
“Yeah. And that’s not the only thing that’s bothering me,” Sandy said.
“It gets better?” Purcell asked.
“For a couple days now, we’ve been getting calls. Missing persons. Folks weren’t coming home after work out in the fields. People weren’t showing up for work. Lot of cranky wives thinking their husbands were out spending the rent on strippers.”
“They were probably right.”
“That’s what we thought. Hell, that’s what everybody thought. But what if they ended up like those people? And that was two days ago.”
“Maybe so. Either way, nothing we can do about it now. We need to figure out where everybody went so we can find your boy and get the fuck out of town. Getting tired of wearing this mask.”
Sandy walked up the street, past the stage, into the intersection of Main Street and Fifth Street. The pavement was littered with trumpets, saxophones, a few trombones, clarinets, and a single bass drum. Beyond that was another flatbed truck. The engine was still idling. A large, papier-mâché statue of a bird of prey with a huge, scowling head had been set up on the back as the falcon mascot for the high school.
Hundreds of people, gone.
They were infected and couldn’t have gone far. They sure as hell didn’t get into their cars and drive off. She didn’t think they were capable of getting farther than they could walk in five minutes, tops. They would look for sanctuary, for someplace to nest, someplace to gather, someplace dark.
She kicked one of the flutes in disgust. It went spinning away under the School Spirit flatbed, where it hit something and produced a cheerful ding. It didn’t sound like it had hit a wheel. Sandy bent over and saw that the flute had banged into a short crowbar. Just beyond that was a manhole cover.
The cover was off. The sewer was open.
Sandy straightened and looked down at the street beneath her feet. “I know where they are,” she called, and when Purcell and Charlie looked over, she pointed at the pavement. Charlie didn’t get it, but Purcell did. He started looking for another manhole cover, found it half a block down, on the other side of the Future Farmers of America truck. It was open as well.
Purcell sent Charlie back to the truck to collect his brothers and some flashlights.
While they waited, Sandy got into the School Spirit truck and pulled it forward, exposing the open manhole. She turned off the engine, climbed out, and joined Purcell in the center of the intersection. They looked down into the darkness.
Purcell said, “We find him down there, you know it’ll be too late to save him, right?”
Sandy didn’t say anything. If she said no, they both knew she would be wrong. And if she agreed, then she would be admitting that her son was probably dead.
Purcell said, gentle, “If you want, I can take care of him. Make sure he doesn’t suffer.”