Declan walked down the street looking at houses he was casing for the night. Ah, small towns. He caught a family getting out of their car and heading towards their house. A mother, followed by her two children. D never broke his stride, barely raising his head, playing his role as the poor little white boy, as he looked at the difference between mother and daughter, who could not have been more than fifteen.
The mom’s tits were huge. Her oversized shirt was barely containing them and the belly that she had going on. The daughter, on the other hand, was petite. Damned near waif thin, not that D would know what a waif was. He just knew that he and his associates would have some fun turning her out, after he had brained the son. Kid was only about eight. He had no interest in the boy. The daughter, though, he’d pop one in her while he made the mother watch, then he’d probably pop her as well before he turned her lights out.
It wouldn’t be him alone, of course. He was just scouting right now. Steve and Byron, who they all called Stomp because he was big as fuck and hated his real name. Blamed his dad for it, which is probably why he beat him to death when he was fourteen. Nobody wanted to feel what it felt like to get hit for real by Byron with those ham fists, so Stomp it was.
He looked at the house and car as well. The house was one of the bigger ones on the street, easily worth five hundred thousand, if not more. The car was a Mercedes GT. He was positive that they would make huge bank off that ride when they got it to St. Louis. His brother, Barney, worked a good one that paid good money. Then it’ll take no time to get the girl cooked and hooked on some meth, if she wasn’t already that is, and have her working those fierce streets and making them that fierce cash. Barney and Declan, D thought. Maybe we should have killed our dad, too. Wasn’t worth the shit he drowned himself in everyday anyway.
The daughter looked up at him as if she could sense him looking at her ass and smiled as they walked into the house. He smirked back at her as he continued down the road, wondering if she’d keep that smile while he and his buddies were filling every one of her holes tonight. It’d be fun to find out. He wondered if there was a husband, but he didn’t wonder that much on the notion. It didn’t matter; he was just an extra bullet or two, and D had clips of those.
So, he thought, we have a place for the night and holes to fuck. Part one was over and done with. Now all he had to do was get the boys and be back after nightfall and—
Something landed in front of him on the street, something large and brown. He stifled a startled cry as he looked down and saw that it was a naked black man’s body. Well, the skin that wasn’t ripped when the body hit the ground and exploded was that color. D looked down to see that he was covered in blood and pieces of human debris that, in his shock, he did not feel or even notice. What the fuck? He looked up into the sky for a plane and his brain froze in his skull while his lungs froze in his chest. He forgot to breathe or even how to in the panicking world of nonsense he was witnessing.
The sky was filled with bodies. Falling and naked. Their arms were flailing at their sides. He had thought that he had heard wind a moment ago, but that wasn’t wind, it was their screams. Hundreds, thousands of people, just screaming and falling. He watched as another hit the ground not too far from him, exploding on impact as well. The first body had been silent. This one had not been. She had been screaming until impact, sounding like a person wailing out of the window of a car as they passed. Her curly lemon blonde hair was still recognizable, though the skull it had been attached to was not. The woman’s body looked more like a Little Debbie’s shortcake roll that had been squeezed to bursting. Another screaming body, a fat and balding white man smashed into, then through a mailbox. The metallic box disappeared under his belly as he was run through like a needle through the skin of a balloon.
There were two planes in the sky, falling somewhere in the distance. The engines of one on fire while the other one was just falling. Thud, thud, crash! One of the bodies went through the roof of one of the poorer houses, while more bodies, some close, and some not, careened downward, screaming and breaking open like bloody eggs.
He looked back as a body smashed and bounced off the roof of the family’s house, then screamed as a body he hadn’t noticed crashed down a few yards from him. He looked at the bloody splatter-patch the body that hit the roof had left in its wake.
I have to get out of this flesh rain.
Checking his hoodie to make sure his gun was in the pocket, he looked at the front window of the house. The mother and daughter were looking at the falling bodies. Mom was crying, while her daughter was screaming. The little boy was nowhere to be seen, his mother probably keeping him away from the horror show that was taking place in front of them.
Looks like tonight is getting moved up. He made a break for the house and the door, hoping to whoever the hell might have been listening that he was not gonna get smacked by one of the bodies as he raced across the street, past the grass, and up the steps to the covered porch. He threw open the storm door and slammed his palm on the door. “Hey, in there. Let me in,” he yelled. He heard screaming in return from inside, along with the maddening thuds of falling bodies on the roof of the patio and the house itself.
He wondered if the patio was going to be able to handle the onslaught, and was answered by a crack of one of the support beams as a body hit the corner and the beam broke, causing it to sag.
D slammed his hand again on the door a few more times. “Hey in there, let me in. Please,” he screamed again and tried the door. It was locked and very solid. I’ll have to shoot the locks to open it.
The thuds and the screams were coming quicker now. The air was filled with the scent of blood, and a copper taste was in his mouth. He wasn’t sure if he tasted the blood in the air, or if he’d bitten his tongue. He felt numb, but he also felt like he was in some kind of delusion. That none of this was actually happening.
He turned to look at the world beyond the patio. Blood was streaming onto the bricks of the steps. A hand lay exposed, dangling from the roof of the patio as he looked beyond. The fleshy rain had gotten infinitely worse, and he was thankful that he hadn’t made a run for his apartment, which was halfway across town. Surely, he would be under one of those screaming meat puddles by now.
He didn’t understand what was going on, and that scared him more than the death. He had seen death all his adult life; he had taken life, and watched it being taken, sometimes in the worst ways that he and his associates could devise, but nothing seemed as horrible as this.
The world smelled of shit and blood. The street and yard were almost completely covered now, and the bodies were stacking on top of each other like meaty snow. He didn’t know when the door had opened behind him, but he felt the hand touch his shoulder, and the look of surprise and abject horror in the mother’s face as he whipped around, his Colt pointed at her forehead.
“Get in the fucking house, bitch,” he roared, barely hearing his own voice over the cacophony coming from screaming bodies slamming into screaming bodies.
“Please no—”
D pushed the gun to her forehead. “I said get in the fucking house or I will blow your fucking head off!” he bellowed, and half pushed her.
She backed into her doorway and D followed close behind, closing the door without looking. No one was coming. No one could drive in this, and to walk in it was certain death.
When the son and the daughter saw the gun, they started screaming over their tears.
“Shut up,” he said as he pushed the mother to the ground, then pointed the gun at the boy. “Either you all shut the fuck up or he gets it. Get it?”
They went silent immediately, but D didn’t feel like they really got it. He lowered the point of his gun and fired one shot. The bullet slammed into the little boy’s skull and sent him reeling backwards. The child fell to the floor as his mom stared for a moment.
“Tony! My Baby!” she wailed.
He pulled the gun away from the child and pointed it at the other one.
The daughter’s legs gave out, and she dropped to the floor, staring from the gun to her brother to her mom. “Please no,” she sobbed, drool and snot running down her face. “Please.”
“Don’t shoot my girl, please. I’ll do whatever you want, just please don’t hurt Stacy.”
“I’m gonna hurt both of you, it depends on you how bad this gets. If you fuck with me, I will drop your precious little Stacy, cut off your legs and fuck you on top of both of their corpses. Do you understand me?” he asked.
“I—”
“I said, do you understand me, cunt?” he demanded in a firm, steady voice. He could already feel himself getting hard at the idea. Maybe he’d kick start a fascination with shit he found online; Necrophilia would look good on these two. He smiled at the thought.
The mother nodded her head.
“Good,” he said. “Both of you get on the couch and turn on that fucking TV.” He pointed at the sixty-five inch that sat next to the big open window, glancing at the bodies as they zipped past to smash down on the other smears already there. It looked more like a fleshy hailstorm than a screaming hell of falling bodies.
The mother pushed herself off of the ground and went to sit on the couch. Her daughter sat next to her and pressed her crying face into her shoulder as the mom pulled the remote off the coffee table and pointed it at the TV. She pressed a button and the emergency broadcast system flashed onto the screen. Little words appeared in a scroll ticker underneath and at the top of the picture, saying something about the dead do not die.
That’s insane. He looked over to where sweet little Tony was lying, or rather, had been lying. Tony was no longer where D had dropped him. Impossible. He looked at the blood where the little boy’s head had been. He had seen the back of Tony’s head explode. There was no way that little fuck was still alive. It’s impossible, but then the screams from outside invaded his senses again. It was strange how that felt, like he had not been hearing them, even though they were almost deafening.
He saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned towards it, but he was too slow. Tony was on him, biting into him, his mouth stuck on D’s neck like he was biting into a piece of steak. He could feel the sharp little teeth grinding into the flesh, trying to clamp down. He swung and flailed around, but Tony kept a death grip on him and his neck. Soon, the burning and the tearing gave way, and the stinging pain of nerves exposed to air passed through him as Tony ripped out a sizeable chunk of his neck. D finally threw him off and to the floor. He saw the ragdoll of the boy’s body as it fell, his arm snapping backwards when he landed wrong. Anyone else would have been lying on the floor dead, or holding onto their broken arm screaming, but Tony got up as if he had just fallen off the couch, not seeming to notice his broken arm sticking out in a bizarre, unnatural way.
The back of his head was still gone. A rivulet of blood was running out of the entry hole in his forehead.
D pointed his gun at Tony, holding his other hand up to the wound to stop the bleeding from his neck, and wondered if this wound was a death sentence for him. Tony laughed at him, and the confusion in his mind almost overtook the pain.
Just then, a news reporter popped onto the TV. “This is Mark Wainwright with ABC Twelve with new developments. The bodies falling from the sky do not seem to be the only thing going on right now. People all around the world are reporting that the dead are not dying, and they are bringing a message from death with them. It has been reported that people have been told by their recently dead and reanimated loved ones that humans have fallen out of God’s grace. The gates of the entrance are barred and locked. Humans are being cast back to earth to die a second time. We have a quote from one of those that has come back to life that says, ‘From the bodies of the second dead, demons shall arise to claim the world and this folly of mankind.’ Welcome to hell on earth,” Mark said.
“We at Channel Twelve cannot validate if what has been said is true or not, but with the tens of billions of bodies that have fallen to earth with no indication of slowing or stopping any time soon, we can only guess at the validity of this statement. We ask all of our viewers to please find shelter in a sturdy structure as the weight of the bodies are collapsing rooftops with their sheer weight.
“Overpasses and parking garages are perfect, but a basement should work, and we advise everyone to shelter in place once you get somewhere safe. A body falling at the rate of speed that these are falling would surely destroy any human or other animal that they might chance to fall upon.” There were tears running from Mark’s eyes. “If this is true, if god has forsaken us, then god have mercy on our souls, each and every one of us, and god damn God for doing this to us.” Then Mark was gone, and the screen was filled with the emergency response picture again.
The mother turned off the TV, and the world was instantly filled with the screams of the falling bodies outside once again.
Tony had stopped laughing and was staring at D now.
D noticed his neck was no longer hurting. He felt different as well, and he was no longer bleeding. It slowly dawned on him what had happened. Tony had bitten through his jugular vein. D was dead. He had died on his feet with his gun in his hand and never even knew. “Shit,” he said and started to laugh himself.
“What’s going on? Tony? Why?” the mother asked. Stacey was still looking at the TV, completely silent. Everything that had happened seemed to have taken its toll on her, and she sat, comatose and unmoving. Her mom didn’t seem to notice.
D looked at her and smiled. “We’re fucked,” he said and dropped the gun. He didn’t need it anymore. What was the point? He could not threaten death upon any of them, and he had no interest in fucking anymore. He had always had the feeling his life would end in a very fucked up way, but not like this. And he never expected the rest of the world would be coming along for the ride. The gun hit the ground, and he just laughed. What a miserable fucking existence.
The rain of bodies ended just before sundown. He looked at the waves of human death that stretched before him in the destruction of what had once been one of the nicest streets in town. He stood on the porch, no longer fearing his death, as if death for himself had canceled out that fear for him. Tony stood next to him.
“When will it begin?” D asked Tony. He seemed to have aged considerably in the time that he had been dead to when he had been reanimated.
“Soon,” he said. “They told me soon.”
“Was it beautiful? Heaven?” D asked.
“Don’t know. I didn’t actually get there. I got turned back by some freaky alien looking things that I think were angels.
“Too bad,” D said as he looked and saw the silhouette of the first of the demons as its squat horned and disgusting form rose above the crests of bodies. It looked over and saw him standing there. There was no point in running. He looked out over the meaty wasteland and saw more creatures burrowing themselves out of the bodies. Hundreds, maybe more. There were many different versions of hideous mewing and roaring their births, so the entire world could hear them and know that they had arrived.
D made eye contact with the first demon he saw and smiled.
Its toothy maw grinned back.
