Robert R. McCammon - Doom City.pdf

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DOOM CITY
by
Robert R. McCammon
He awakened with the memory of thunder in his bones.
The house was quiet. The alarm clock hadn’t gone off. Late for work! he
realised, struck by a bolt of desperate terror. But no, no ... wait a minute;
he blinked the fog from his eyes and his mind gradually cleared too. He
could still taste the onions in last night’s meatloaf. Friday night was
meatloaf night. Today was Saturday. No office work today, thank God. Ah,
he thought, settle down ... settle down ...
Lord, what a nightmare he’d had! It was fading now, all jumbled up and
incoherent but leaving its weird essence behind like a snakeskin. There’d
been a thunderstorm last night – Brad was sure of that, because he’d
awakened to see the garish white flash of it and to hear the gut-wrenching
growl of a real boomer pounding at the bedroom wall. But whatever the
nightmare had been, he couldn’t recall it now; he felt dizzy and
disorientated, like he’d just stepped off a carnival ride gone crazy. He did
recall that he’d sat up and seen that lightning, so bright it had made his
eyes buzz blue in the dark. And he remembered Sarah saying something
too, but now he didn’t know what it was ...
Damn, he thought as he stared across the bedroom at the window that
looked down on Baylor Street. Damn, that light looks strange. Not like
June at all. More like a white, winter light. Ghostly. Kind of made his eyes
hurt a little.
Brad got out of bed and walked across the room. He pushed aside the
white curtain and peered out, squinting.
What appeared to be a grey, faintly luminous fog hung in the trees and
over the roofs of the houses on Baylor Street. It looked like the colour had
been sucked out of everything, and the fog lay motionless for as far as he
could see up and down the street. He looked up, trying to find the sun. It
 
was up there somewhere, burning like a dim bulb behind dirty cotton.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and Brad Forbes said, “Sarah? Honey?
Take a look at this.”
She didn’t reply, nor did she stir. He glanced at her, saw the wave of her
brown hair above the sheet that was pulled up over her like a shroud.
“Sarah?” he said again, and took a step towards the bed.
And suddenly Brad remembered what she’d said last night, when he’d
sat up in a sleepy daze to watch the lightning crackle.
I’m cold, I’m cold.
He grasped the edge of the sheet and pulled it back.
A skeleton with tendrils of brittle brown hair attached to its skull lay
where his wife had been sleeping last night.
The skeleton was wearing Sarah’s pale blue night-gown, and what
looked like dried-up pieces of tree bark – skin, he realised, yes ... her ...
skin – lay all around, on and between the white bones. The teeth grinned,
and from the bed there was the bittersweet odour of a damp graveyard.
“Oh ...” he whispered, and he stood staring down at what was left of his
wife as his eyes began to bulge from their sockets and a pressure like his
brain was about to explode grew in his head and blood trickled down from
his lower lip where his teeth had pierced.
I’m cold , she’d said, in a voice that had sounded like a whimper of pain.
I’m cold .
And then Brad heard himself moan, and he let go of the sheet and
staggered back across the room, tripped over a pair of his tennis shoes
and went down hard on the floor. The sheet settled back over the skeleton
like a sigh.
Thunder rumbled outside, muffled by the fog. Brad stared at one
skeletal foot that protruded from the lower end of the sheet, and he saw
flakes of dried, dead flesh float down from it to the Sears deep-pile
aqua-blue carpet.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, just staring. He thought he might
have giggled, or sobbed, or made some combination of both. He almost
threw up, and he wanted to curl up into a ball and go back to sleep again;
he did close his eyes for a few seconds, but when he opened them again the
skeleton of his wife was still lying in the bed and the sound of thunder was
nearer.
And he might have sat there until Doomsday if the telephone beside the
 
bed hadn’t started ringing.
Somehow, he was up and had the receiver in his hand. Tried not to look
down at the brown-haired skull, and remember how beautiful his wife – a
just twenty-eight years old, for God’s sake! – had been.
“Hello,” he said, in a dead voice.
There was no reply. Brad could hear circuits clicking and humming,
deep in the wires.
“Hello?”
No answer. Except now there might have been – might have been – a
soft, silken breathing.
“ Hello? ” Brad shrieked into the phone. “Say something, damn you!”
Another series of clicks; then a tinny, disembodied voice: “We’re sorry,
but we cannot place your call at this time. All lines are busy. Please hang
up and try again later. Thank you. This is a recording ...”
He slammed the receiver back into its cradle, and the motion of the air
made flakes of skin fly up from the skull’s cheekbones.
Brad ran out of the bedroom, barefoot and in only his pyjama bottoms;
he ran to the stairs, went down them screaming. “Help! Help me!
Somebody!” He missed a step, slammed against the wall and caught the
banister before he broke his neck. Still screaming for help, he burst
through he front door and out into the yard where his feet crunched on
dead leaves.
He stopped. The sound of his voice went echoing down Baylor Street.
The air was still and wet, thick and stifling. He stared down at all the dead
leaves around him, covering brown grass that had been green the day
before. And then the wind suddenly moved, and more dead leaves swirled
around him; he looked up, and saw bare grey branches where living oak
trees had stood before he’d closed his eyes to sleep last night.
“HELP ME!” he screamed. “SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME!”
But there was no answer; not from the house where the Pates lived, not
from the Walkers’ house, not from the Crawfords’ nor the Lehmans’.
Nothing human moved on Baylor Street, and as he stood amid the falling
leaves on the seventh day of June he felt something fall into his hair. He
reached up, plucked it out and looked at what he held in his hand.
The skeleton of a bird, with a few colourless feathers sticking to the
bones.
He shook it from his hand and frantically wiped his palm on his
 
pyjamas – and then he heard the telephone ringing again in his house.
He ran to the downstairs phone, back in the kitchen, picked up the
receiver and said, “Help me! Please ... I’m on Baylor Street! Please help –”
He stopped babbling, because he heard the clicking circuits and a
sound like searching wind, and down deep inside the wires there might
have been a silken breathing.
He was silent too, and the silence stretched. Finally he could stand it no
longer. “Who is this?” he asked, in a strained whisper. “Who’s on this
phone?”
Click. Buzzzzzz ...
Brad punched the O. Almost at once that same terrible voice came on
the line : “We’re sorry, but we cannot place your call at –” He smashed his
fist down on the phone’s two prongs, dialled 911. “We’re sorry, but we
cannot –” His fist went down again; he dialled the number of the Pates
next door, screwed up and stared twice more. “We’re sorry, but –” His
fingers went down on about five numbers at once. “We’re sorry –”
He screamed and wrenched the telephone from the wall, threw it across
the kitchen and it broke the window over the sink. Dead leaves began to
drift in, and through the glass panes of the back door Brad saw something
lying out in the fenced-in backyard. He went out there, his heart pounding
and cold sweat beading on his face and chest.
Lying amid dead leaves, very close to its doghouse, was the skeleton of
their collie, Socks. The dog looked as if it might have been stripped to the
bone in mid-stride, and hunks of hair lay about the bones like snow.
In the roaring silence, Brad heard the upstairs phone begin to ring.
He ran.
Away from the house this time. Out through the backyard gate, up onto
the Pates’ front porch. He hammered at the door, hollering for help until
his voice was about to give out. Then he smashed a glass pane of the door
with his fist and, heedless of the pain and blood, reached in and
unsnapped the lock.
With his first step into the house, he smelled the graveyard reek. Like
something had died a long time ago, and been mummified.
He found the skeletons in the master bedroom upstairs; they were
clinging to each other. A third skeleton – Davy Pate, once a tow-headed
twelve-year-old boy – lay in the bed in the room with posters of Prince and
Quiet Riot tacked to the walls. In a fishtank on the far side of the room
 
there were little bones lying in the red gravel on the bottom.
It was clear to him then. Yes, very clear. He knew what had happened,
and he almost sank to his knees in Davy Pate’s mausoleum.
Death had come in the night. And stripped bare everyone and
everything but him.
But if that were so ... then who – or what – had dialled the telephone?
What had been listening on the other end? What ... oh dear God, what?
He didn’t know, but he suddenly realised that he’d told whatever it was
that he was still on Baylor Street. And maybe Death had missed him last
night; maybe its scythe had cleaved everyone else and missed him, and
now ... and now it knew he was still on Baylor Street, and it would be
coming after him.
Brad fled the house, ran through the dead leaves that clogged the
gutters of Baylor Street, and headed east towards the centre of town. The
wind moved again, sluggishly and heavily; the wet fog shifted, and Brad
could see that the sky had turned the colour of blood. Thunder boomed
behind him like approaching footsteps, and tears of terror streamed down
Brad’s cheeks.
I’m cold , Sarah had whispered. I’m cold . And that was when the finger
of Death had touched her, had missed Brad and gone roaming through the
night. I’m cold , she’d said, and there would never be any warming her
again.
He came to two cars smashed together in the street. Skeletons in clothes
lay behind the steering wheels. Further on, the bones of a large dog were
almost covered by leaves. Above him, the trees creaked and moaned as the
wind picked up, ripping holes in the fog and showing the bloody sky
through them.
It’s the end of the world, he thought. Judgement Day. All the sinners
and saints alike turned to bones overnight. Just me left alive. Just me, and
Death knows I’m on Baylor Street.
“ Mommy! ”
The sobbing voice of a child pierced him, and he stopped in his tracks,
skidding on leaves.
“Mommy!” the voice repeated, echoing and warped by the low-lying fog.
“Daddy! Somebody ... help me!”
It was the voice of a little girl, crying somewhere nearby. Brad listened,
trying to peg its direction. First he thought it was to the left, then to the
 

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