Blood and Rain (22 page)
About the Author
Glenn Rolfe is an author, singer, songwriter and all around fun-loving guy from the haunted woods of Maine. He has studied Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University, and continues his education in the world of horror by devouring the novels of Stephen King and Richard Laymon. He and his wife, Meghan, have three children, Ruby, Ramona, and Axl. He is grateful to be loved despite his weirdness.
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Boom Town
© 2015 Glenn Rolfe
In the summer of 1979, Eckert, Wisconsin, was the sight of the most unique UFO encounter in history. A young couple observed a saucer-like aircraft hovering over Hollers Hill. A blue beam blasted down from the center of the craft into the hill and caused the ground to rumble for miles.
Now, thirty years later, Eckert is experiencing nightly rumbles that stir up wild rumors and garner outside attention. The earthly tremors are being blamed on everything from earthquakes to underground earth dwellers. Two pre-teens discover a pipe out behind Packard's Flea Market uprooted by the “booms” and come into contact with the powerful ooze bubbling from within. What begins as curiosity will end in an afternoon of unbridled terror for the entire town.
Enjoy the following excerpt for
Boom Town:
Brady Carmichael finished his hot dogs and set his plate down at the end of his bed. He stared at the closed door across the hall from his room.
Bryce's room
. It'd been two years since his dad and his brother had died. Brady had been home with the flu when they went on their snowmobile trip. It had been unusually warm that January, and the ice on the lake wasn't frozen solid. The snowmobile broke through and took them with it. Rod Cameron and his son Jesse were there, but they couldn't save them. Rod tried and came away with a bad case of hypothermia.
Bryce's room was empty, but his mom still kept the door shut. She said the bare room was harder to look at than it had been when all of his things were still sitting in there, waiting for him to come home. Brady had been ten when the accident happened. Time seemed to have numbed him to the loss. He still had his sad moments, like now, staring across the hall, but most days he chose to look ahead, not back.
He broke his trance-like state and finished the glass of Coke he'd taken with supper. His mother would be calling up any minute for his dishes, but he had to take a leak first. He slid off the bed and moved down the hall. His mother's mini-library of mystery thrillers stacked on the bookshelf by the bathroom made him think of Kim. He wondered if she'd started reading the Stephen King book he'd brought her. He remembered how she'd looked at him in her bedroom. Her green eyes staring into his, he'd wanted to kiss her. He'd brought the book (a grown-up book) to her after reading it himself. It was a scary book about vampires in a small town in Maine, but there was also a love story in there. He'd been in Kim's room a zillion times before. They'd been friends since first grade, but things were different.
They
were different. He was going to be thirteen in June. She would be too, in August. His dad used to listen to a song that asked,
“Why must I be-ee a teenager in love?”
Brady wondered the same thing.
Alan Packard watched an old VHS tape of
WrestleMania III
, from back when the WWE was still called the WWF. He polished off what was left of his thirty rack of Budweiser and waited for the Huey kid to bring him his pizza. On the television, Hulk Hogan body slammed Andre the Giant when, for the first time, Alan thought he felt the actual impact. When the walls and floor continued to shake, Alan realized it wasn't Hulkamania rumbling the earth; it was another ground boom. His living room shook, rattled and rolled. Decorations fell like people from the Titanic: his framed photo of Cindy Crawford from the wall behind his Zenith floor-model television; a neon OPEN sign that had stopped working six years ago dropped to his RCA dual cassette-deck stereo below; his collection of pint glasses stolen over the years from dive bars up and down WisconsinâSchlitz, Coors and Pabst Blue Ribbon glassesâtap-danced to the edge of their four-foot shelf before committing hari kari. He'd felt the previous booms, but this was the first to hit his side of town.
Alan had read about the city's other booms in the paper, and had seen Suri Baker report about them on the local CBS affiliate. From eavesdropping on conversations between shoppers in his flea market, he picked up all kinds of wild theories (like Gus and Nat's Hollers Hill alien story). He'd overheard Mrs. Bunker's underground dwellers theory, and Denny Carlson's take about it being a malfunction in the government's secret oil line (built after 9/11 to stash black gold in case the sand niggers in the Middle East decided to try and fuck us royally). None of it made any sense to him. He figured they were less to do with alien entities and Al-Qaeda and more from the global warming thing that Al Gore and the liberals were always raving about.
The shake and tumble continued. Alan clutched his ratty recliner like a kid during a horror flick. He heard things falling down, banging and clanging to the ground in the store below. He lived above his flea market. The building was old. The wooden floors were land-mined with soft spots. The inventory consisted of numerous pieces of ancient garbage amassed from closed discount stores and liquidation centers around the state. He hated the flea market business, but it was what his father had handed down to him, and all he'd ever known. “You give what you get,” his father had always said.
The final reverberation caused its last windowpane to shudder and took the electricity with it. Alan rose to assess the damage as best he could in the dark, and fumbled his way to the bathroom to relieve his strained bladder. He flushed the toilet, but nothing happened. The water pipes had been compromised as well. He resigned himself to finishing off the night with his last three beers in the gloom, and passed out in his recliner.
The next morning, it was as though nothing had happened.
The power was back on, as was the water, although the water now held a slight bluish hue and an odd mildew smell. He wasn't about to drink it, but at least he didn't have to call Rick Fischer to come out and fix his pipes. The flea market made him enough cash to keep him fed and make his light and water payments, which was about it. He lived day-to-day, praying that his thirty-year-old Ford pickup stayed healthy, and that his house maintained its poor but stable condition.
Alan gobbled down a couple pieces of peanut butter toast and a leftover Miller Light that had survived in the back of his fridge. Then he noticed the wet spot on his recliner. He'd pissed himself in his sleep. He'd slept through to the afternoon. Hell, he was still a little buzzed.
He made his way back to the tiny bathroom, started the shower, and dropped his soiled pants and underwear. He caught a hint of the mildew scent again and noticed a little bit of blue slime had already begun to gather around the shower drain.
He climbed in anyway.
His skin felt slicker than normal as he got out and dried off using the closest towel from the floor. Finished, he dropped the towel back to the cracked linoleum and moved down the hall to throw on something that would pass as clean. He stopped two steps down the slim corridor. A wet suction noise caught his ear. He turned back to the bathroom and stared at the blue slime that clung to the wet towel. It was moving.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B
Cincinnati OH 45249
Blood and Rain
Copyright © 2015 by Glenn Rolfe
ISBN: 978-1-61922-909-9
Edited by Don D'Auria
Cover by Scott Carpenter
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
electronic publication: October 2015
