The Sinkhole

We meet the zombies.

All I was trying to do was go to work.  That’s it.  Finishing a few sales calls was supposed to be my biggest obstacle.  Well, aside from dealing with Patterson and all his crap.  But that was easy by now.  I was even wanting to take off a little early.

Looks like I got my wish.

Remembering was so hard now, but I remember the hole in the Earth.  The sinkhole.  It had sucked down into the street, like Mother Nature had suddenly developed an insatiable hunger for cars.  The ones right above the hole didn’t have a chance, and as it spread wider, the ones behind found their brakes increasingly useless.  Since I was so far back in traffic, I jumped out and waited a moment.

When the hole stopped spreading, and the rumble died down, I began my approach.  The scene was bedlam, like something out of a movie.  Car alarms, screams, shouts, rocks shifting, all punctuating this low, rumbling noise like a dog makes when it hears a noise outside.  The people on the street looked so confused, so shocked.  Some were running to help.  Most were running for their lives.  I made like the former and inched closed to the hole until I could see the bottom. 

All the cars were piled on top of each other; a beautiful graveyard of brand new automobiles.  A new Escalade, a year old Honda, and so many other brand new cars crumpled and destroyed, packed into the hole like a small child throws all his Matchbox cars into a bucket.  It looked like the cars were sinking even more, probably as a result of their weight, I guessed.  Around the edges, the grainy, gritty pieces of asphalt continued to plummet down into the pit.

With the physical situation briefly assessed, I began to scan for any survivors.  But all I could really see was a splash of blood on the Escalade’s windshield.  My mind revved.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmyg-

Calm down.  Deep breaths.  We’re in control.

I kept watching, hoping for any sign of movement.  And there it was�"one of the cars closest to me, standing on its nose.  I saw the car lurch to one side and heard the loud pop of a damaged door releasing.  It fell open and bent backward under its own weight.  From my angle, all I could see was the person’s arm and maybe a little bit of a foot.  But the hole had spread so wide after the initial opening that I couldn’t circle around; there was only a few inches of clearance between it and the row of buildings that now looked precariously perched on the edge.  So I craned my head and yelled, trying to get my voice into the hole over the background.

“Hey!  Are you okay?!”

I didn’t get an answer, but again, I couldn’t be sure that the person could even hear me.  The part of the foot disappeared, and then the hand.  A second later, a woman’s head and shoulders extended out of the opening.  She looked oblivious.  By this time, she was probably in shock.  Her hair was falling down, persuaded by gravity to let go of the barrette and sway crazily.  Sort of fit the mood, if you ask me�"I was probably going a little crazy at the time.  I called to her again, but I still didn’t get anything.  Just the same glaze in her eyes, hair falling like her finger was in a light socket, head pivoting out of sheer instinct alone.

It was honestly the worst thing I’ve ever seen.  My brain was beginning to shut down under the pressure.  I mean…sirens, screaming, crunching, rumbling, falling, scraping, whistling, hissing…it was too damn much.

So, almost to answer the noises, my eyes found the woman again.  Not 20 feet from me.  

I swear, this happened.

Her head and shoulders pulled slowly back into the car, like she was right side up on an elevator platform and someone had just hit the down button.  It would have been funny, but I don’t think she meant to do this.  Right before the car eclipsed her eyes, I swear I saw them look down and widen unnaturally.  And as she disappeared, she screamed.  I knew it was her because it was different.  It had to be her.  

She sounded like her flesh was being torn to shreds.  It was by far the worst of the amalgam of sounds that comprised the scene.

So it wasn’t that crazy, then, when I saw the hand.

Instinctively looking away from the woman in the car, I saw it on the asphalt.  The fingers were mangled and crushed.  I couldn’t see the fingertips, and I realized a second later why not�"the fingers were buried in the crumbling street, all the way up to the second knuckle.  As I continued my approach, I saw that the hand was attached to nothing in particular.  Everything until an inch or two from the elbow were there.  But at that joint, the arm was ripped and torn, with flaps of tattered skin where the rest of the arm should have been.  But out all this, the feature I remember the most about the hand was all the dirt.  The skin looked like it was possibly from a Caucasian.  But dirt, grime, slime, mud, you name it�"the hand looked like it had been swimming through pot soil.  

That’s when I started guessing the horrible things that could have happened to this hand’s (previous) owner.  Maybe it was someone crossing the street when the hole opened.  Maybe it was someone from one of the cars that couldn’t resist the fall�"they bailed, and the car dragged the rest of the body down into the hole.

Okay, we’ve seen enough.  We can’t help.

Wait.

I tenuously approached the hand, breathing heavily, pulse pounding (to this moment, right now, that same heartbeat hasn’t quit).  I was studying it, really, trying to break some sort of code.  But then, something else caught my eye.

There was a body moving toward me, pulling up out of the hole.

With one hand.

My everyday, smartass self didn’t have time for the obvious “Hey, did you lose something?”

I yelled to the person, same thing as with the woman in the car.  “Are you okay?”

The head spun up unnaturally, like it was pulled on a marionette’s string.  Drunkenly, abstractly.

The eyes were gone, and the nose was pulled up in a constant snarl.  The teeth, or what was left of them, hung drastically in the thing’s maw.  But again, the thing that popped out the most was the skin.  Dark, leathery, caked in dirt so that you couldn’t tell what it really looked like.  The body didn’t appear to be wearing any clothes, either, but those (I reasoned) might have been torn off in the fall.  And it still came, using that good arm like a hiker’s pickax, dragging itself ever closer.  That arm wasn’t the only thing it was missing, either.  One of the legs was completely gone, and the other was missing its foot at the ankle.  

I took another step forward and leaned down, trying to convey my desire to help.  

Thing was, I don’t think this person needed my help.  It was just a sixth sense, like I needed to get out.  And I didn’t realize it until I took that extra step and crouched.

Because it was then that it roared.  Loud.  Insanely loud.  So much so that everything else dulled and faded back, and that roar blocked regular thought processes.  Throaty, gravelly, death.

My eyes widened and hairs I didn’t know I had stood on end.  They didn’t jump out of my skin until the thing pulled itself toward me even faster, as if it had some dying secret to tell to someone.  It roared again.

GET OUT.

My feet paced backward and I ran.  And that’s what happened with the sinkhole.

Author's Note

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