The Cleansing Page 6

  Gary took one final look down and shuddered. As if a gun fired to start some invisible race, he crawled over to where the rope was tied to the post and attempted to loosen it. After a few attempts, he gave up and pulled out a pocketknife. Several stabs into the rope finally cut it loose and Mason’s body plummeted back to the bottom of the well.

  The entire stone wall below was now slithering upward. And the only sound was a single hiss of air from Mason that slowly faded to a gurgling sound, like someone was blowing bubbles in a pool of muck.

  I poured the gasoline.

  “Give me a match.”

  Gary fumbled in his pocket, slowly brought out a book of matches. I grabbed them, plucked one from the book and struck it. I lowered it to the mouth, then tossed it inside.

  There was a poof of flame that shot from the well. I glanced in as the flame settled back into the well. Mason was immersed in fire. He was still moving, clawing his way up the side of the well. The leeches around him looked as if they were melting.

  “Go,” I instructed, pointing to the opening in the skirting.

  Gary crawled away as I tossed the entire gas can into the well.

  I finally reached the outside edge when it exploded.

  Chapter 16

  We were blinded by the onslaught of hail. Down the gravel road, I lost sight of Gary at one point while we ran back to his trailer. One wrong turn and I knew I’d be hopelessly lost. Luckily I caught sight of him and kept up.

  We reached a clearing and Gary stopped dead in his tracks. I ran a few paces ahead of him, urging him forward. He shook his head, waved me on.

  “Fuck that,” I screamed into the wind, half-blinded by the torrent of hail assaulting us.

  Gary yelled something else, but the air around drowned the words. Not fifty yards from where we stood, a massive oak tree split, falling on top of a camper.

  “Find cover!” I yelled.

  “No, I got to get back to Audra!” Gary replied.

  The next sound I heard chilled me. I’ve never heard anything so frightening in my life. It was as if the sky had cracked open and death was riding in on a freight train.

  The wind gusted, blew into my ears. For a few moments I was blinded, the entire world disappeared to a dark place; my only sense was the sound of chaotic noise.

  My next vision was the sight of the tornado: a huge spiraling black entity that stretched the length of the entire campground. It was as if the land was being sucked into oblivion, taking with it cars, campers, and entire buildings.

  And it was headed directly for us.

  Gary and I looked at one another in disbelief. My entire body shook uncontrollably.

  Gary broke my stare by yanking my arm. He pointed to a building about fifty yards away. “Fucking run! he yelled.

  We reached a public bathroom and, routinely, I headed directly for the men’s door. Gary dragged me away, pushing me towards the women’s room. I hesitated and he said, “Windows are facing the storm in there, go in here!”

  The bathroom was one of the few establishments in the park with an actual concrete foundation. We quickly settled into a shower stall, where there were no windows.

  My body shook so hard my muscles were locking up.

  Gary’s face had totally lost its color. He shook his head, pacing the stall.

  “The finger of God, they call it and now I know why,” I said, my voice quivering.

  “Finger of God is right,” Gary replied. “And it’s the middle finger! He’s saying ‘fuck you’ and I think we’re fucked!”

  Being in an enclosed area finally allowed me to hear for the first time since the tornado materialized. But the twister was getting closer, as I could hear more debris hitting the roof. The eerie sound was getting louder, closer.

  “This is definitely God giving us the middle finger,” Gary said. “This is all happening for a reason.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is the wrath of God. There’s no doubt in my mind. We went to kill those things and, the minute we did, the storm comes. There were four of us that cheated God’s plan. We were like Adam and Eve, eating a fucking apple. We all knew it was unnatural. A person is made in the likeness of God, and I know that God is both good and evil. And, right now, you’re seeing the evil side.”

  “All I’m witnessing right now is nature,” I countered. “That’s all!”

  “Did you see what those things did to Mason?”

  I nodded my head as the roof began to creak and groan. We both glanced upward. I took a deep breath. Gary glanced, shaking away what looked to be tears forming.

  “Audra will be okay,” I said, trying to comfort him.

  He nodded his head in confirmation, but not convincingly.

  “I never told you this, but all four us who were cleansed were camping together two summers ago. This was before any of us had any signs of cancer. We were drinking well into the morning and all of us had grown quiet. Each one of us just stared at the campfire. Then your dad breaks the silence and says, ‘I had a terrible dream a few nights ago.’ I swear to God that every one of us looked up immediately. All eyes were suddenly on your dad. He went on to tell us about the dream that he had: He was sitting alone in a dark church with candles lit around him. The stained glass windows of the church were broken out and all you could see outside were fires. All you could hear was screaming. Your father told us that he sensed a presence around him. He couldn’t see it, but felt it: a malign presence smothering him, urging him to open the Bible in the pew. He opened it to the Book of Revelation. When he returned the Bible, a gun appeared next to him.”

  Gary sat back against the wall. Outside, the fury intensified. We braced our bodies in each corner of the small shower stall and I closed my eyes as Gary continued.

  “I looked around the fire as your father was describing this dream and I saw Mason shiver. Each man there cowered; each face looked white as a corpse. Your father never looked up as he told the story of that dream. He just stared into the fire, never even blinked. He was recalling that dream like it was the most defining moment of his life, one that he couldn’t forget no matter how hard he tried. Your father said, ‘Then I grabbed the gun, put it in my mouth and pulled the trigger.’ Each man around the fire could’ve finished the story of that dream, because we all had the same dream a few nights earlier. Mason got up out of his lawn chair and paced around the darkness, out of the fire’s light. From the darkness, we heard his voice: ‘And when you shot yourself, the presence left you and soared out the church’s windows. You opened your eyes and the darkness lifted. There were no more screams. But on the giant crucifix above the church’s altar wasn’t Jesus any longer, but some thing, like the devil with horns.’ No one said a word after that. In a matter of minutes from when your dad started telling us about that awful dream, he became spooked, cursed. Our entire lives changed, we all four grew apart, couldn’t face each other...hell, we were scared of each other, of what we had done, of what we should do.”

  The roof creaked again. Glass exploded from the windows. The terrible sound was bearing down on us. Gary’s story had spooked me even further, as I pictured some entity, shrouded in the black swirling wind outside, looking in at us and smiling.

  “What are you saying?” I asked. “You think you were meant to kill yourself?”

  Gary looked at me, gritting his teeth, preparing himself for the impact of the twister. “I think so. Patrick McClure did, too. He didn’t die from brain cancer in April. He died from a self-inflicted gun shot to the head.”

  The roof ripped away from the building. Splintered wood rained down on us. My ears rang as the sound was unbearable. Dirt pelted my face, clotted my eyes. Something stabbed its way into my back; I felt its sharpness imbed deeply into my flesh. I glanced around to see what it was when I glimpsed a tree branch falling towards me.

  Then darkness took me away.

  Chapter 17

  “Look at the trees,” I said, my voice that of a small child again.
>
  The trees were swaying, the wind was picking up.

  “Eye of the storm,” my father said.

  “The storm has eyes?”

  My father smiled, looked down at me and playfully messed up my hair. “Yes it does. How do you think it gets around so fast?”

  “But what does a storm look for?”

  My father shrugged his broad shoulders. “I don’t really know. I guess I’d have to be the storm before I knew the answer to that question. Maybe it’s just looking around and making sure we’re safe and that it rained on all the right places.”

  “Maybe it’s looking to get us!” I said and growled, monster-like. My father laughed.

  With my father’s arms wrapped around my shoulders, sitting outside on the porch, the suggestion was merely comical, as I felt no real fear.

  “The storm has a job, just like everything else.”

  “What’s its job?” I asked.

  “It depends on what kind of storm it is,” he explained. “Some storms are in charge of feeding crops with rain. Some storms might bring wind that blows down trees. Which you might think is bad, but it might be getting rid of the old weak trees to make room for new, stronger trees.”

  “But some storms kill people,” I said, now concerned.

  My father looked surprised by my suggestion. Then he nodded his head. “Yeah, I suppose some do that, too. But I don’t think they mean to. I think those storms are just too big and they don’t notice us, like when you walk outside on the sidewalk and step on ants. We don’t notice them, they’re so small.”

  Rain began to fall lightly.

  “Do they feel bad when they kill someone?”

  My father smiled, “You ask too many questions, kiddo.”

  I shrugged, but still waited for an answer.

  My father realized he wasn’t off the hook, then said, “Maybe they do, I don’t know. They have a job to do and if that job is to destroy things, then that’s just how it’s supposed to be. I’m sure a long, long time ago, right on this very spot, a big storm came and blew down all the trees. And do you know why it did that?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “So eventually many, many years later our house could be built here and so we could live in it.”

  “That’s nice,” I commented.

  “Yes it was, but you don’t worry about storms or anything, okay? I promise that as long as I’m around, no storm will ever come after you. Okay?”

  “All right,” I said. “You promise?”

  “Yep,” my father said and pulled me closer.

  Lightning flashed, outlining a lighter cloud with a darker mass in the center. The mass disappeared as the lightning faded.

  “Daddy, I seen the eye!” I said, “I think it just blinked.”

  My father laughed again. “It did, huh? Or maybe it just winked at you.”

  “Maybe!”

  “Well, we better go inside. Maybe it knows something we don’t.”

  After that night, I never looked at a storm the same way. And I always found myself looking up to the sky when a storm came, trying to find that same eye that had blinked at me when I was young.

  Chapter 18

  Nothing registered in my mind as I awoke. The dream of the storm and my father surfaced, and everything else seemed unreal. My head throbbed and my vision was blurry. I could only make out a fuzzy outline of Gary above me, his face was bloody from a gash across the bridge of his nose, his glasses missing.

  “Help me, I can’t see,” he said, his voice scratchy and weak-sounding.

  Blood dripped from his chin onto my shoes.

  I looked around and almost everything around us was gone. The entire building had been swept away. Only the concrete foundation and a few walls remained. I found Gary’s glasses against the wall; the wire-rims were twisted and the left eyepiece was shattered.

  I stood to retrieve it and Gary lurched forward and clung desperately to my arm. His breathing was heavy, almost frantic.

  I helped him to a sitting position and retrieved his glasses. My blurry vision was clearing as I tried to twist the frame of his glasses back into shape. I felt dizzy and lightheaded, but managed to reconstruct the glasses the best I could, though one lens was hopelessly beyond repair.

  As I lowered the glasses to Gary’s face, I gasped. I stumbled back a few steps and dropped the glasses back onto the ground.

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  At the sound of my voice, Gary looked up, but he saw nothing. My own vision had cleared enough for me to notice that the gash across the bridge of his nose didn’t end there. Both of his eyelids were also cut, the lower half of them dangling from a thin layer of flesh. Each time he blinked, tears of blood ran down his cheeks and part of an eyelid stuck in the cleft of a still-intact eyeball. It looked as if a knife had been scraped across the bridge of his nose and into both eye sockets. Both orbs were yellowing, darting around without focus. I knew that he had no vision in them.

  “Oh Jesus,” I mumbled again, and looked around what remained of the bathroom. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. My mind raced frantically as I tried to figure out what to do next.

  “Just stay there, Gary. I’m going to get us out of here,” I told him.

  “No, don’t leave me.”

  I peered upward to where the roof once was. Now a hint of blue skies shone down. I took a few steps out from the building’s rubble and noticed the black mass of clouds had disappeared. No signs of the storm remained. It seemed like I had only been unconscious for a few minutes, but now I knew it had been much longer.

  “Just stay here. I’ll find a way to get you to a hospital.”

  As I ventured out farther, the campground was no longer a maze of small roads between trailers. The entire community of campsites was leveled. It had now become an endless plain of destruction. Debris was strewn across the grounds from torn apart campers and sheds. Larger chunks of twisted metal lay scattered amongst the wreckage. I could see from one end of the campground to the other end. A few trees still stood, as well as a number of other rest areas, like the one we had used for shelter, and the gates around the sewage treatment facility.

  I trudged through the wreckage for some time until I came across an old pickup truck that was buried under a fallen TV antenna. I had never hot-wired a vehicle in my life, but it was my only shot. I was about to crack it open in search of the right wires, when my foot kicked the floor mat to reveal a key.

  What are the odds? I wondered, unable to believe the turn of events.

  I put the key in the ignition and, after a couple of turns, the truck fired.

  Several times on my way back to the facility I had to clear a path for the truck to travel through.

  As I pulled next to the restroom, I found someone else there.

  Mason.

  His body was charred almost beyond recognition and bloated to twice his original size. His beard was blood-caked, his clothing half-torn, half-burnt from his body. He was hovering above Gary. When I stopped, he turned and then proceeded to come after me.

  “Run, Gary!”

  Gary lay slumped in one corner, unmoving.

  My first thought was to run myself, but then I thought about Gary lying there helplessly. I had to do something.

  As Mason advanced, I spotted a broken metal pipe ten feet away. I retrieved it and found that the broken end was jagged and sharp.

  Mason closed in.

  I threw the pipe at him. The dull end hit him in the chest. The metal piece fell to the ground. Mason stopped. He looked down at the projectile calmly. Both his body language and blackened face revealed no signs of pain.

  I frantically searched the ground for another weapon, but couldn’t locate one.

  In the next instant, Mason was upon me, the pipe now in his hand. His laugh gurgled, as if phlegm-clogged. His dry, charred hands pushed me forward and I dropped to one knee.

  I scrambled away, but was stopped in my tracks by the sharp impact of the pipe piercing
the back of my leg just below the knee.

  For the first time in my life, I knew I was going to die.

  I tensed up, waiting for Mason to strike.

  And he did, but not the way I thought he would.

  He grabbed my hair and pulled me a few feet until he lost his grip and I went face-first into the ground. I grabbed at the pipe lodged in my leg, but couldn’t get a grip before he rolled me over on my side.

  He then straddled me, as I took in the monster that he had become. The stench of burnt flesh surrounded him like an aura. I could see something squirming inside his blackened nostrils. His eyes were dull, lifeless, yet still able to see as they rolled from side to side, focusing on my face.

  His mouth opened and a hiss of fetid air escaped. I knew instantly what was happening. He was trying to clear his throat of the parasites. He was targeting me as a new host.

  In one motion, I pulled my legs in, then kicked upward with both feet. A sickening pain shot through my leg, from the imbedded pipe. I connected with his crotch and he doubled over. Apparently the small portion of Mason that remained alive was still susceptible to that kind of pain.

  As he doubled over, he managed to pin my good leg beneath his knee. He lowered his head and I heard him retch.

  I grabbed for the pipe and began pulling as hard as I could.

  The thing that was Mason gagged again.

  I pulled at the cold metal, felt the flesh on my leg give, and dislodged the pipe.

  I lunged forward just as Mason vomited the black coiled mass onto my other leg. The oval black mass quickly spread across my pant leg. A string of drool still connected the mass to Mason’s mouth.

  “Get off me!” I grunted, then clubbed Mason in the head.

  The first shot stunned him. The next was a metallic backhand across his face that knocked him off me.

  I quickly stood and brought the metal pole down on his head three times until his skull cracked. His body erupted in seizure, spastically jerking in the pool of blood from my leg.