But everyone wasn’t dead.
Where the road had been, there was still a piece of it left with a van and half a dozen people standing around it. They were in the shadows of toadstools that rose up to three stories or more now. They were staring up at them in awe and wonder, tendrils of mist wrapping around them.
Hyder heard a squishing sound and a shape shambled out of the mist. It was a massive thing in the general shape of a man, but a man that had been bloated to obscene, impossible proportions, a man-like form that moved like a wave heading ashore. It was pulpy and distended and grotesque, a jellied mass of twitching, crawling things that hissed a yellow and venomous steam. A luminous shine came from it.
Hyder was not afraid.
He knew it was Kenney. He knew it was a friend.
He noticed then that every single cap was swelling now with nodules that were inflating like balloons until they must pop. Then they did like bubbles. But not exactly like bubbles. They exploded and cast vibrant clouds of yellow spores that spread out into a storm, a blizzard that was blown on the winds and settled back to the earth in a downy fall.
He stood up, raising his arms like a child greeting the first snowfall of winter and the spores settled over him, adhering to him. They were in his hair and covering his body. He tasted them on his tongue and breathed them in. Under their gentle caress, he settled back into the grass and dreamed beautiful, amazing things, his system overloaded with psychotropics that opened up febrile, impossible panoramas in every direction.
47
Later, he was still sitting there, content and happy, studying the spores that looked like pulsing blood blisters on the back of his hands. His body was swollen with their secretions, his legs now firmly rooted into the soil, strange tubular growths like ghost pipes rising up from him and spreading oval cups to take in the delicious moonlight.
He thought about Haymarket and Bellac Road, Kenney and the other cops, all slipping away fast now and being replaced by a communal joy that was the body of the mother organism. The world at large would soon know the rapture that was his.
Brushing webbed fingers over his spongy lips, he recalled the reality he had once known with its petty greed and jealousy and meaningless competition. And as it faded into the fog of his mind, he heard the voice of his youth say, “It’s all gone now. It was all just a bad trip.”
Then he lay back, his multiform tendrils and shoots digging deeper into the dark, rich Wisconsin soil of his birth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Curran lives in Michigan and is the author of numerous bestselling novels and novellas of horror and suspense.
Find him on the web at: www.corpseking.com.
OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR
Long Black Coffin
Sow
Worm
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Copyright
First Edition
Nightcrawlers © 2014 by Tim Curran
All Rights Reserved.
A DarkFuse Release
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.