Toxic Shadows Read online

  TOXIC SHADOWS

  By

  Tim Curran

  -THEY ONLY COME OUT AT NIGHT-

  “Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.”

  —Anonymous

  PREFACE

  What you hold in your hands is a dream and possibly a nightmare, but most certainly the first horror novel I ever had published.

  There was one other book before this, a crime novel called Street Rats. Though I had been publishing horror stories for some six or seven years, when I sat down to write what would be my first published novel, I decided on a hardcore, violent gangster novel which became Street Rats. In the bizarre world of writing, my third novel, Skull Moon, was actually written before either of these and originally called Wolf Moon. After Toxic Shadows, it was rewritten and retitled. And, to make matters more muddled, I had written six novels before any of these, all of which were rejected by publishers. There’s actually a seventh, too, but I threw it out long ago (imagine, if you can, Catcher in the Rye with a psychosexual predator as its protagonist and you’ll know why).

  Confused?

  Yeah, me, too.

  Let’s stay on topic before this gets too fucked up. Toxic Shadows. I wrote this in 2001 and it was published in 2003 to absolutely no fanfare. It made not so much as a ripple in the world of horror fiction. Part of that was the fact that even less people knew who I was than do now. Another part was that TS wasn’t exactly The Stand, if you catch my drift. And the biggest part was that it was put out by a certain apex shit publisher, bottom-of-the-barrel swill collective which shall remain nameless. If you don’t know who I’m referring to, consider yourself fortunate. If you do—and I can hear the moans of disgust even way up here in the Michigan woods—then you know who I’m talking about. Suffice to say, this unnamed organization was (and is) notorious for putting out any piece of shit sent to them. To prove this point, a group of science fiction writers once submitted a novel to them in which the first three chapters were the only chapters—they were repeated until the end of the book. They were promptly sent a contract.

  Enough said.

  Back to 2001. I decided I wanted to write a post-apocalyptic novel where my characters had to survive the night in a town full of germ-infected psychopathic monsters. Sounded fun, I thought. As inspiration, I kept Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies in the back of my mind, as well as Italian zombie movies and books like I am Legend, Earth Abides, and James Herbert’s The Fog most particularly. My mechanism of infection was to be a mutant strain of the rabies virus, one that had been weaponized during the Vietnam War and “accidentally” let loose in a small Michigan town of my creation, Cut River (the river exists, just not the town). The story would easily spring from that and it did.

  These days, of course, using a mutated rabies-type virus is hardly original. Dozens of zombie books and movies have used it ad nauseum…but, in my defense, it was pretty much wide-open territory in 2001 and not the shopworn cliché it has since become. I give myself credit for that anyway.

  One more interesting bit here. Back in 1985 when I first began my collection of rejection slips (I was told to piss-off by every mag from the Twilight Zone to The Horror Show, missing very few stops in-between), I wrote a story called “The Nature of the Enemy.” It concerned a guy in the Vietnam War who discovers that a biotoxin called Laughing Man is being sprayed on enemy and, accidentally, friendly troops, creating subhuman, yellow-eyed vampire/zombie monsters that begin to wipe out village after village. The story was pulled into Toxic Shadows and forms the basis of Johnny Davis’ nightmare recollections of the war and is pretty much the foundation of the book itself.

  When I sat down to read this, I was hesitant.

  I hadn’t actually even looked at it since it came out originally. Reading through it, editing out a few of its excesses, I was struck by the fact that the theme of Toxic Shadows is very much like that of The Devil Next Door, though the latter is a better book with a much more interesting explanation for regression and the monsters are really just people like you and I (hence the title). But here in the world of Cut River as imagined in Toxic Shadows, the monsters really are monsters. Regardless, when I read through TS, I discovered it wasn’t as bad as I remembered. Surely no worse than the reams of weak post-apocalyptic fiction flowing monthly down the old literary drainpipe. No, it wasn’t as good as it could have been, but not as bad as it might have been.

  So there you have it: most of what I remember about writing this one…at least that which I don’t mind confessing to. Understand, this is not a great novel. There are flaws in it, inconsistencies, you name it. The characterizations aren’t bad, but neither are they striking. The story itself holds up pretty well and there’s a whole hell of a lot of action, so the book manages to leapfrog its own weaknesses with great bursts of bloody energy. It has that going for it. Just keep in my mind I was pretty green when I wrote it and probably had a lot more ambition and confidence in my abilities than common sense or experience.

  With that, I leave it in your hands.

  Good or bad, it’s up to you now.

  Tim Curran

  January 25, 2014

  1

  Already the city was quiet.

  Already the smell of death twisted inexorably in the chill air.

  Tom Haynes could smell it, feel it. It was in him now, too, a black infection spreading cell by cell.

  In his blood.

  His bones.

  His brain.

  It felt cold. There was no other way to describe it—a frigid numbness that was sliding through him with pernicious fingers. This morning it had been different. There had been pain, convulsions, and that awful burning in his belly at the very spot where the dog had sunk its fangs. But thankfully, that was all gone.

  Now there was only the saliva that ran down his chin.

  The stomach cramps.

  His fingers hooked into claws.

  And in his head, that odd sense of unreality which told him all was not as he thought it to be. That he could not trust what he saw, what his brain was thinking.

  Drooling and delusional, he shambled through the streets.

  Trees were down, power lines dangling. Half the city was without power, telephones still out. The storm had been a biggie—eighty-mile-an-hour winds, lashing rains, lightning that split trees—yet it was little more than a minor inconvenience compared to the truly dark thing that had the town in its savage grip. But the storm had done its job, all right, severing the town from civilization long enough for it to go bad.

  Haynes looked at the sky but the sun was so bright it seemed to burn his eyes. It made his face feel tight and hot. Nearly sundown. He could trust his instincts on that.

  The shadows were long and the air had a nip to it. Night wasn’t far off.

  And when the sun went down, he knew, they would be in the streets.

  Men, women, and children.

  He stumbled along the sidewalks and fell against a parked El Dorado. It was a nice older one with jutting fins in the back. The upholstery was shit. The fender walls were more Bondo than steel, but still not too bad. In another life he had worked at an auto body shop. He could still vaguely picture that life in his mind. It was all gray and convoluted, peopled by shadows and a routine that was alien and somehow exotic now. But it was there.

  How long ago had that been?

  He told himself months or years, but as he concentrated, collapsed on the hood of the El Dorado, he knew it had only been two days ago.

  Two days.

  That meant it was only last night he was bitten.

  He wanted to be startled by this, shocked even. The tenuous strands of humanity in him demanded it, but he did not have the strength. For a split second there was a surge of pa
nic, but then it, too, was lost in the chill gray fog.

  An agonizing wave of muscular spasms swept through him. He writhed and contorted and finally slid off the car into the street. His lips were bearded with bloody foam, his eyes glazed and yellowish.

  Am I the last one?

  Are there no others left?

  Is that even possible?

  Yes, he knew it was.

  In two days, the town had been swept into the dustbin. It probably started a few days before that, he supposed, being that’s when he first heard about it. That rain—dark, bloody, bizarre. By the time anyone realized how bad it had gotten, it was too late to do anything about it. Flu bug. That’s what everyone said.

  Ha, ha. Flu bug, all right.

  Then when the storm passed, Cut River was a graveyard.

  Haynes made a choking, gargling sound in his throat that was supposed to be a laugh. But it was laughter like a scream is a whisper.

  His body grew very cold as his core temperature plummeted.

  Weakness moved through him in sluggish waves.

  His eyes focused one last time and he saw the Last Call Tavern. Northland A & P. The Drill Sergeant Army/Navy store. Cut River Cinema, formerly just the Rialto. It was good to see those things. He remembered them from when he was a kid. And memories, sentimental memories, were good to go to sleep on. They made him feel like maybe he was still a man, still a human being.

  As he slipped into a coma, he prayed he would hurt no one. Prayed that someone, somewhere would shoot him down like the animal he would soon be.

  These were Tom Haynes’ last rational thoughts.

  2

  Lou Frawley rounded the bluff just outside Cut River and saw the little town lying in the hollow below, pretty as a postcard and about as exciting as ten feet of fence. He piloted his Grand Am down the winding stretch of blacktop that fed into town. He slowed, passed over a bridge spanning a rushing, restless river. It must have been the Cut. The moon had just come up and its ghostly reflection rode the waters, rippling, shimmering, but never disappearing entirely.

  He slid a cigarette in his mouth and sped over the bridge.

  On the other side, in the yawning fields, he caught a momentary glimpse of…what? He wasn’t quite sure. Almost looked like scarecrows strung up on crossbars, dozens of them. And then he was past it.

  Some crazy rural custom, he thought without much interest.

  He exhaled a stream of smoke, stretched his back.

  He drove up a main thoroughfare which was probably called Main or Elm or something equally as bucolic and quaint. When you pushed plumbing supplies in several hundred small Midwestern towns on a yearly basis, you got to know all their secrets. He had once kept count. On his yearly travels through Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota etc. he jotted down in a travel book how many streets were named Main and how many named Elm. Elm beat out Main six to one.

  The main drag.

  About what he expected.

  Stores were squeezed together on either side—sporting goods, drug stores, video stores, clothes shops, party stores. All the essentials. He saw the spires of churches climbing in the distance, old homes, a sprawling park along the riverbank, and, separated by a stand of gnarled, leafless trees, a cemetery hugging a series of shadowy hills. He saw old hotels, coffee shops, sheet metal Quonset huts that housed garages, auto body joints. There was a huge building in the distance, lots of pillars and stone work, a big clock set in its face.

  A lot of the town was dark. There were trees down all over the place and telephone poles, too. Maybe not as bad as out on the highway, but bad enough.

  Lou was looking for the local Ace hardware, Shinneman’s Hardware.

  He’d tried to call them from Green Bay that morning, but the operator told him that service hadn’t been restored yet to Cut River and probably wouldn’t be for a few days. Even the cell towers were down. Entire place was cut off.

  Oh, well. Come bright and early tomorrow morning, he’d be hawking PVC pipe and flushing kits to some bored local zombie.

  Right now, however, he’d have been glad to see anyone.

  Because, thing was, he hadn’t seen a soul since arriving.

  Not a car, a truck, nothing.

  He thought: These places, Jesus, they sure roll up the sidewalks at seven sharp.

  It wasn’t a bad-looking little town, he decided. Much better than some. One thing he liked right off the bat was all the saloons. Every block seemed to have a few, PABST and BUDWEISER signs competing for attention. He pulled to a stop across from a place called the Town Tap. Just to be different they had a neon OLD STYLE sign glowing in the window. There were a few pick-up trucks and a couple cars crowded in front. Looked like the place to be.

  Lou got out, tossed his cigarette.

  The air was chill and damp, screaming late September at him. Waterlogged leaves were plastered in the gutters. His stomach wasn’t feeling too good about then; he’d had a couple burritos at a Taco Bell on the highway a few hours before in Wisconsin and now they were beginning their obligatory march to the sea. He decided he’d feel more at home in Cut River after a good, healthy shit.

  The door, an old weathered oak affair, gave a groan when he pulled it open.

  He was expecting muted laughter, Hank Williams Jr. on the juke, the Monday Night Football game on the tube, the overpowering, reassuring stink of stale beer and cigarette smoke.

  But what he got was absolutely nothing.

  The place was empty.

  He stood there in the doorway, feeling oddly like a stranger at the borderland of some ghost town.

  He stepped in.

  A bar ran along one side, booths along the other, a scattering of tables in-between. The light was on behind the bar—he could see all those bottles of liquor lined up like soldiers, like hookers offering him a hard, fast time—but everything else was dark.

  He licked his lips, went to the bar.

  He could smell a faint trace memory of old booze, old smoke, but vague, a ghost of what was, was no longer.

  “Hello?” he said, his voice echoing emptily like a whisper in a tomb.

  Nothing. Nobody.

  He turned, made his way out of there quickly, gooseflesh prickling his arms and the nape of his neck. He wasn’t an imaginative sort, but damn if there wasn’t something eerie about the silent vacancy. The breeze was slight, chill, peppered by tiny drops of rain. It felt good, cementing him back in reality.

  Don’t make sense, he thought. Door wide open…but the joint’s closed. Everybody head for the hills when the storm hit?

  He saw the lights on in a café a few doors down.

  He walked over there, noticing with an almost palpable sense of alarm how incredibly quiet the town was. No cars passing, close or in the distance. No far-off barks of dogs, shouts of children.

  Nothing.

  Just a heavy, almost brooding desolation…a sense of creeping expectancy, like something was about to happen any minute.

  A surprise party, is what he was thinking.

  The town, its residents, were holding their breath, waiting, just waiting to jump out, to throw open doors and start screaming.

  The image of that made his flesh crawl.

  He shook it off, lit another cigarette, moved up the sidewalk consciously making as much noise as he possibly could. At least, he wanted to, but in reality he moved very soundlessly, afraid, maybe, that someone would hear.

  Oh, for chrissake! he told his runaway imagination. Quit being so fucking ridiculous here. It’s a small town. Excitement here on a Monday night consists of doing the wash, trimming your toe nails, and getting a piece off the old lady while the kids are plugged into the tube.

  He started when he saw a shadowy form slip behind a parked truck.

  He kept staring, blinking his eyes, not sure if he’d seen anything at all.

  His hand on the door to the Chestnut Street Café (there was one for his notebook, a Midwestern anomaly for his memoirs—a Chestnut Street
), he could see the graveyard in the distance, a covetous expanse of heavy trees and marble.

  The Chestnut Street Café was just a little counter joint. Places like this, Lou knew, always had the best burgers, the best breakfasts. Nobody knew this better than he did…or the expanding sack of his belly. The café was all lit up…but empty.

  His heart started pounding then slowed when he saw a man in the corner, back to him, just standing by a huge coffee urn.

  “Hello, there,” Lou said, flicking his ash into a tray on the green Formica counter.

  There was a blackboard above the malt machine and deep fryers. In fluorescent chalk the specials were scrawled: FRESH PERCH FRY $3.99, HAM AND SCALLOP BLUE PLATE $4.99, HOT BEEF $4.50. Yeah, it all sounded good. Beat the living shit out of Taco Hell.

  The guy still hadn’t turned around.

  Lou was about to sit down on one of the red vinyl stools, but he didn’t. He stood there, cigarette smoldering in the corner of his drawn lips, a numb, empty feeling spreading out in his belly.

  “Excuse me…” he said, lacking the breath to finish whatever might have come next.

  The guy turned around.

  He wore a red plaid hunting shirt. It was open to the waist. His bare chest and face were the color of graveyard marble. One eye was missing from its socket, a crusty trail of blood smeared down his cheek. The other eye was wide, unblinking, and yellow as a cat’s pupil.

  Then the guy made his move.

  All Lou knew was that there was some crazy, one-eyed shit coming at him with a meat cleaver. He looked frantically around for a weapon, saw a broom leaning up against a booth. It was either make a stand with the broom handle or he was going to get sliced up like a Christmas ham.

  He went for the broom, knowing that a run for the door would have been suicidal at that point.

  The guy kept coming, his face tight and bloodless. He was making a low gurgling sound in his throat. A tangle of foamy drool hung from his lips, swayed back and forth as he shambled forward.

  Lou got his hand around the broom handle just as a small pale hand grabbed him by the ankle from under the booth. He yanked his foot and the hand pulled back.