Extinct (21 page)

To Robby—an island boy—the flowing liquid was the tide coming in on gentle swells. Despite the volume of fluid coming in with each swell, the puddle didn’t seem to be growing. At least it wasn’t growing in diameter. If anything, instead of getting wider, the puddle was getting deeper. Robby backed up. His feet seemed to move on their own until his body was mostly hidden behind the van. Robby peered around the side to watch several more swells bring even more height to the center of the puddle. It sloped down towards the pavement on the edges, but in the center the puddle looked about knee-deep. Robby glanced around in all directions, looking for the best angle of retreat. When he didn’t see anything else dangerous-looking behind him, his curiosity returned his gaze back to the liquid.

The swells stopped coming from around the corner and the edges of the puddle pulled in a little tighter. The pavement around the puddle where the liquid retreated was still dark with moisture. Robby watched the swelling liquid change direction and head towards the back of the line of corpses.
 

Except for his winter jacket, the last guy in line would have looked perfectly at home on a beach. His big folding chair had cup-holders built into both armrests, and the man slouched deep into the seat. His head slumped over to one side, as if his last margarita finally caught up with him. The man’s gloved hands flopped over the armrests and dangled at his sides.

The fluid in the puddle seemed to slosh from front to back in slow motion. First, the trailing edge would rise up and the front edge of the puddle would pull back a little. Then, with the whoosh sound, the liquid flowed to the front, inching closer to the sunbathing corpse. Robby watched the slow sloshing fluid and remembered his grandmother’s living room. On one of the end tables she’d kept several knick-knacks. Robby’s favorite—the one he could stare at for an hour—was a little wave machine. It had a layer of clear oil and a layer of blue water and it sat on a fulcrum. Touching one side of the device would start it tipping back and forth so you could watch a wave travel from one end to the other and then back.
 

Robby stared transfixed at this real-life wave machine as it overtook the sunbathing corpse.
 

For a minute he forgot about the bike, about looking for a car, and about his missing parents. Robby simply remembered his grandmother’s living room and the wave machine as he watched the slow-motion liquid slosh over the sunbather corpse’s legs. It looked like the liquid would just move past the corpse, but then the chair started to sway. The sunbather’s arms swayed as the chair rocked from side to side. The shaking became even more violent and the corpse’s head flopped back and forth. When the sunglasses flew from the corpse’s face, Robby ducked a little lower. With each rock, the sunbather slumped lower. Robby thought it almost looked like the liquid was tugging at the sunbather’s legs. The chair stopped rocking when the sunbather corpse slipped all the way out of the chair and disappeared into the liquid.

Robby couldn’t see much of the next corpse. Only the feet poked out from behind a gray and red tent. The liquid barely even took two swells to envelop and then move past those feet. When the fluid moved up the line to the next corpse, the feet were gone. The original sunbathing corpse disappeared without a trace as well. Robby squinted over the distance at the sloshing fluid. It looked perfectly clear, but it absorbed two adult corpses.

Robby glanced in every direction, suddenly feeling exposed.
 

Movement on his right caught his eye and he retreated to the far corner of the car to hide from this new threat. At the front of the store, near the double-wide tent, another pool of sloshing liquid formed just inside the big glass doors of the Best Buy. Every time the liquid pulsed, it rose higher on the inside of the glass door. Robby didn’t see where the leak started, but soon the liquid gushed from the bottom of the door and started to pool on the sidewalk outside the store. This pool looked bigger than the other, and it was a lot closer to Robby. As soon as the puddle completely migrated to the sidewalk, it started sloshing towards the tent.
 

The pool at the head of the line moved faster than the other. It nearly rolled the big tent over with its first assault. The tent poles sprung free with the tent flipped up at a forty-five degree angle. They bent over into parabolas from the tent fabric, but when they tore loose from the corners, they pointed straight into the air. Without its poles, the tent collapsed and bunched up in the sloshing tide. The poles fell backwards, landing on either side of the wheelchair. They were quickly joined by the next wave, which swept over the base of the wheelchair.
 

Robby watched the liquid flow around the feet of the wheelchair man. When the fluid receded, Robby saw what was left of the wheelchair man’s useless legs. Instead of leaving behind wet shoes and cuffs, the fluid left behind nothing. The wheelchair man’s pants simply ended below the knee. Nothing, including the fabric of the wheelchair man’s pants, remained. Before he could blink, he saw the next wave slosh up to the wheelchair man’s waist. Robby couldn’t see the man’s lower body—the fluid sloshed but continued to obscure the wheelchair man’s lower body—but suspected it disappeared to wherever the legs went. He figured the legs were gone because the wheelchair corpse suddenly became unstable in his chair. As the liquid sloshed, the wheelchair corpse’s body wavered and then toppled over into the fluid.
 

One arm remained above the surface of the fluid for a second, and then the whole wheelchair corpse disappeared. The liquid pooled around the wheelchair still looked clear.

Robby had seen enough. He glanced back to the end of the line and discovered that the original puddle had overtaken about a third of the line of corpses. If they kept moving towards each other, within minutes the two puddles would run out of corpses to absorb and would collide somewhere in the middle.

Robby slid his bike back from the front of the van and backed away slowly from the Best Buy. He tried to keep the knot of parked cars between himself and both of the puddles, but that soon proved impossible. Even though they moved closer together, Robby couldn’t shield himself from both puddles. He made his choice and moved from behind a little Toyota.
 

If it had eyes, the puddle farthest away at the back of the line could have seen Robby as he snuck across the parking lot to get away from the carrion-feeding puddles. When Robby reached the sidewalk, he threw a leg over the bike and strained at the pedals to pick up speed.

At the next intersection, under the dead traffic lights, Robby saw a trail of dark, wet pavement running down the center of the road. He couldn’t see the puddle that left the wet trail, and couldn’t even guess where it was headed, but he still didn’t want to cross the trail. He imagined even touching the damp pavement might summon the swelling fluid.

Robby took a chance and steered his bike to the left. A few dozen yards down the new road, the wet trail veered off and intersected a storm drain. He slowed the bike and put his feet down to consider the trail. He would have to jump the curb to ride on the sidewalk unless he wanted to cross the trail. It seemed like a stupid chance to take.

Robby took off his gloves and tucked them under his armpits so he could blow on his cold hands. It wasn’t as chilly as Maine, but the wind cut right through the gloves and froze his fingers to the handlebars. The smallest whisper of a sound made him take his hood down so he could hear better. He tilted his head—the sound came from the curb. He took a couple of timid steps closer to the wet streak on the ground. The sound wasn’t the same swoosh-whoosh from the Best Buy. This sound reminded Robby of a squeaky hinge on a door in a haunted house.
 

“Hawn-ned howse,” his mother would have said. Halloween had been her favorite holiday by far. Their house always sported the most intricate Halloween displays—from spooky spider webs in every doorway, to the rounded gravestones in the side yard. Robby remembered the corny epitaphs his mom composed and then inscribed in chunks of styrofoam before she painted them to look like weather-worn rocks.
 

Robby’s dad liked the simple ones—“Here lies Fred. A rock fell on his head.”

But his mom enjoyed writing more abstract verse. "Herbie found a dime and ate it. It made him constipated. Then he died.” Robby remembered standing over her shoulder as she composed the verse, carving it into the foam with her paring knife.
 

“You’re going to run out of space,” Robby said. “How will you finish it?”

She didn’t answer—his mom just completed the thought with those last three words—“Then he died.” That cracked her up. She’d laughed for five minutes at the sudden change in tone of that particular epitaph.

The memory of decorating with his parents warmed up Robby from the inside. He wanted to sit down and remember their faces. He wanted to wrap himself in a blanket of memories. He thought about lowering himself to the ground so he could stare off at nothing and remember better times. The sound—weird screeching like a protesting metal hinge—was the only thing bothering him. He wondered why it didn’t stop. It just kept going.

The sound of the bike clattering to the pavement snapped Robby back to the present. His mouth hung open as he looked at the bike lying on its side. The back wheel spun, producing a slow tick, tick, tick. Its rhythm almost lulled him back into his trance. He shook his head and glob of spit flew from his lower lip.
 

The front tire of the bike was touching the wet streak on the pavement. But it wasn’t just a wet streak anymore; near the tire enough liquid stood to smooth out the surface of the asphalt. The fluid looked deepest right around the bike’s tire. The whole bike jerked and Robby heard a hissing sound from the front tire. The rim settled into the puddle as the tire deflated.

Robby reached for the back wheel so he could pull the bike away from the swelling puddle. When he gripped the metal rim of the tire, his fist closed hard around it. His hand clenched against his will, like his fingers were magnetized. One of the spokes dug into the webbing between his index and ring fingers. Despite the pain, Robby couldn’t relax his grip. His arm throbbed with the effort of his clasping hand. Numbness started to spread up Robby’s arm from his hand. Robby gave up on trying to let go of the rim and instead pushed back with his legs to pull his arm from the bike. His grip didn’t waiver, but he pushed his way to his feet.

The bike pulled away from the puddle until the front tire was just about to break contact with the water. At that point, the liquid seemed to exert some kind of force on the front tire. As Robby pulled and leaned away from the puddle, the bike held him from backing away. He lifted the back half of the bike off the ground with his pulling as the puddle held the front tire.

Robby grunted with effort. Where it gripped the rim his hand felt ice cold. The gloves he pinned under his armpits fell to the pavement as he raised his left hand to tug on the wrist of his right. The numbness in his right arm worked its way up to his shoulder.

Robby sprawled backwards when the puddle gave up its grip on the front tire of the bike. His hand immediately came free of the rear rim and he hit himself in the forehead with his cold right hand. Robby flew back a couple of feet and landed on his back on the asphalt. As soon as he hit, he scrambled backwards with his legs and left hand. He held his right arm to his chest. Pins and needles stabbed his right arm as the feeling rushed back into the limb.
 

The bike looked to be free of the puddle now, but Robby didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. He got to his feet and backed away without taking his eyes off the part of the puddle that ate the bike tire. The fluid was still collecting there; it grew deeper each second. Before he could get any farther away, he noticed the liquid ebbed and flowed, like back at the Best Buy.

Pain came with the return of feeling to his right hand.
 

Robby turned and ran from the liquid trail on the pavement. He crossed the sidewalk and kept going, running full-speed across a scrubby vacant lot bordering a gas station. The station had a little convenience store and Robby pressed himself flat against the side of the building while he tried to catch his breath. He rubbed his hands together. The feeling started to return to his cramped right hand.

The faint wet streak down the middle of the road was just barely visible from the store, but Robby kept his eyes locked on it as he backed around to the far corner of the building. The back wall of the store had two steel doors and a narrow alley between the store and a tall stockade fence. He jogged down the length of the building.

On the other side, he found a vacuum machine with a big “QUARTERS ONLY” sign and a corpse face-down in the parking lot. Just past the dead guy, Robby saw a beat-up truck. He sprinted the few steps to the corpse and gave him a big shove to roll him over. The exploded eyes still shocked Robby. He could barely take his eyes off the man’s face as he patted down the guy’s pockets, looking for keys. No keys. Robby rolled his eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. He tucked his hands in his own jacket pockets and looked around for another body to search.

Robby looked at his own right hand and flexed his fingers. His hand still felt a little numb, and his palm was red where he’d gripped the rim, but it looked okay. It felt like an electric current, but without the buzzing sensation. Robby had shocked himself experimenting with electricity, and this was almost the same feeling.

He glanced back at the corpse’s right hand. The man’s hand was closed around on something. Robby ignored the exploded eyes and went right for the fist. The corpse’s fingers gripped a set of keys. Robby smiled and pried them free from the cold fingers. The chain didn’t have a fob for unlocking the doors, but the truck was the only nearby vehicle, and the key said Ford just like the grill of the truck.

Robby found the truck unlocked. The key fit the ignition and the truck fired up.