Doomsdays Read online

  DOOMSDAYS

  Stories by Jeffrey Thomas

  ISBN: 978-1-937128-51-7

  This eBook edition published 2011 by Dark Regions Press as part of Dark Regions Digital.

  http://www.darkregions.com

  Dark Regions Press

  300 E. Hersey St. STE 10A

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.darkregions.com

  © Jeffrey Thomas 2011

  Cover Design by Robert Steven Connett

  Ebook Creation by Book Looks Design

  http://www.booklooksdesign.com

  Premium signed and limited print editions available at: http://www.darkregions.com/books/doomsdays-by-jeffrey-thomas

  Contents:

  Out of the Blue

  Blue Sphinxes

  Harsh Light

  Insides Out

  Ouroborus

  Post #153

  Apples and Oranges (with Scott Thomas)

  Praying That You Feel Better Soon

  The Arms of the Sun

  Twenty-five Cents

  A Naming of Puppets

  Gasp

  The Call of the Worms

  Working Stiffs

  The Friend of the Children

  The Tripod

  300,000 Moments of Pain

  The Fork

  The Green Spider

  Flesh Wound

  Elephants Weep

  The Schism

  Publication History:

  Out of the Blue is original to this collection

  Blue Sphinxes is original to this collection

  Harsh Light is original to this collection

  Insides Out is original to this collection

  Ouroborus first appeared in the limited edition of “Aaaiiieee!!!”, Delirium Books, 2004

  Post #153 first appeared in the anthology “Octoberland,” Flesh and Blood Press, 2002

  Apples and Oranges first appeared in the anthology “In Delirium,” Delirium Books, 2005

  Praying That You Feel Better Soon first appeared in the anthology “Frontiers of Terror,” Marietta Publishing, 2002

  The Arms of the Sun first appeared in the anthology “Dark Homage: Lovecraft,” Delirium Books, 2004

  Twenty-five Cents first appeared in the publication “Underworlds,” 2004

  A Naming of Puppets first appeared in the book “A Puppet Show For No One,” Delirium Books, 2004, in an edition of 26 tray-cased copies

  Gasp first appeared in the publication “Cemetery Dance,” 2003

  The Call of the Worms first appeared in the anthology “Sick,” Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2003

  Working Stiffs first appeared in the anthology “The Dead Inn,” Delirium Books, 2001

  The Friend of the Children first appeared in the publication “Bare Bone,” 2003

  The Tripod first appeared in the publication “Terror Tales,” numbers 2-3, 2004-2005

  300,000 Moments of Pain first appeared in the publication “Redsine,” 2002

  The Fork first appeared in the anthology “Leviathan Three,” Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2002

  The Green Spider first appeared in the anthology “Strangewood Tales,” Eraserhead Press, 2001

  Flesh Wound first appeared in an electronic edition of the publication “Redsine,” 2001

  Elephants Weep first appeared in the anthology “Whispers and Shadows,” Prime, 2001

  The Schism first appeared in the anthology “Warfear,” Marietta Publishing, 2002

  Out of the Blue

  In that week, no one had time to explain where it had come from, of what it was made. Even if they did know, lines of communication went down and this information could not readily be shared over TV and radio, e-mail and phone call. Mostly, people were too busy simply trying to breathe; even indoors, their lungs were coated with the stuff, the air of their homes and the buildings they took shelter in filled with a fine blue mist that filtered in just about anywhere. And outdoors – outdoors they were buried under great mounds and drifts of it, like fossilized figures from Pompeii under countless tons of volcanic ash. But this ash was a brilliant, laser-bright blue. The blue of toys. The blue of sky. It was as if the sky’s dome had crumbled away, its paint chips all fallen. It was like a snow made from the very color of the sky. A blizzard of candy blue flakes, but stickier than snow, adhering even to the sides of the buildings that had not been fully immersed. Like any storm, its effects varied, were inconsistent: in some cities, the ash was only a foot deep. In others, it engulfed all but the very tallest skyscrapers. It was a deluge, drowning cities all over the world, painting red deserts blue, a dry flood of blue like dehydrated water, heaps of the stuff clotting the surface of the world’s oceans, almost making a uniform crust upon them, vast bobbing scab islands. Some people, not too deeply buried, bravely managed to claw and dig their way up to the surface, but still suffocated from the sands that filled their lungs like hourglasses. Most remained submerged, buried alive, entombed.

  Over the days that followed the blizzard – when the blue flakes no longer fell out of the cloudless blue sky – the last of the bluish haze faded from those indoor places it had infiltrated, settling into a film upon the floors and coagulating there in a layer of crunchy pigment as blue as a cue stick’s chalk. Those who had sheltered indoors who had managed to protect themselves via gas masks or more improvised methods found that they could safely draw breath again, sometimes mere hours after the storm had come, sometimes after the bulk of the week had passed, again depending on the severity of the storm in their location. And during that time, the ash outside had dried – the sticky flakes all having coalesced and solidified. You could walk upon it now, even where it enveloped whole towns beneath its unbroken undulating blanket, without fear of slipping under its former quicksand surface. It had a rough texture, hard as coral. But it was still a laser-bright blue.

  Now, finally, survivors could expend the time to speculate. Maybe it was Nature’s doing: the debris of an exploded comet; cosmic dust; the last dregs of the ozone layer. Or maybe it was the work of people: fallout from some angry little country’s nuclear testing; pollution; the biological weapon of terrorists; the exterminating weapon of an alien race. Or perhaps it was a curse from God: a biblical apocalypse; Heaven – fallen. Whatever it was, its vibrant color as cheerful as plastic mocked the devastation it had brought, the snuffing death, the silent desolation, blue being the color of sky and sea and hence of the most potent of life-giving elements, the color of crayons and robin eggs and little girl eyes. Yet the Earth had been all but killed, in less than a week’s time, by the color blue.

  * * *

  There were eight bays, or lines as the workers called them, in the Aseptic Filling and Inspection department of Caduceus Pharmaceuticals, but only four of those lines typically ran every day. The filling itself took place on first and second shift, but the lines were prepared for the next day’s operation during the third shift – which was 11pm to 7am. That particular night, the bays being prepped were 1, 3, 4 and 8. Bay 1 was devoted to “Large Syringe,” the product typically being morphine sulfate. Bay 3 focused on a novocaine-type solution, occupying injectable dental cartridges. Bay 4 was called “Large Vial,” and the current solution would fill 50ml containers, amber-colored glass to protect the contents from light. Bay 8 was the only line that filled a topical anesthetic solution, called “jelly,” into either 5ml or 30ml plastic tubes.

  Inside the sterile core, where the product was actually filled, there had been six set-up technicians, one AET mechanic, and two cleaners, though the cleaners had been on break at the time and using the computers outside sterile core to surf dating sites on the internet despite their married status. Outside sterile core, the glass vials, syringes and cartridges were washed in scalding water then loaded by the thousands into t
unnels to be cooked in bacteria-killing heat before the containers entered into the core to be loaded with their respective potions. The set-up techs inside had been Maria, who was Polish and could out-swear a trucker with Tourette Syndrome, quiet Dennis from Costa Rica, smiling Albert from Lebanon, gruff Edward and towering Joseph, both from Ghana, soft-spoken Tanaka from Zimbabwe, and then there was the AET Josh – who often felt like the only Anglo-Saxon, American-born worker in all of Caduceus Pharmaceuticals.

  That was okay with him...just unusual at times. For one thing, he found himself befriending, and being attracted to, people he might never even have imagined meeting before. At present, he was more than a little attracted to Tanaka. He had never dated a black woman previously, but last week they had driven to Salem, Massachusetts together – her first time there, and he had been eager to show her around. They had told themselves that it was just two friends joining forces to fill an empty weekend (both were on the rebound from failed relationships), but Josh could tell his coworker was as drawn to him as he was to her. He was a few years older than her 30 – she being the youngest of the third shift set-up technicians. She was shortish, solidly curvy; her eyes on him and her voice in his ears imparting the golden sweetness of honey and the darkly suffusing warmth of coffee.

  That night, shortly before their 1:15 am break for lunch, there had been a...shudder. All of them in the sterile core had felt it, they would learn later when they compared notes. It was not exactly like an earthquake tremor. It had been both more subtle and more profound than that. It had been like the jolting impact of two different dimensions or planes of existence bumping together and briefly overlapping.

  In the sterile core they were required to wear pale blue hospital scrubs, tight-fitting, that Josh thought looked particularly becoming on the women, like voluptuous Tanaka. Over that they wore a white spacesuit-like uniform with a hood and mask, goggles over their eyes and gloves on their hands and booties over the pair of shoes that they were only allowed to wear inside the core. To those outside the core, seeing them through the windows that ran the length of the filling department, it was easy to confuse them with each other. They all looked fundamentally the same, made homogenous by their color.

  When the odd shiver came they looked at each other through their goggles, maybe a couple of them exchanged a few words, but none of them grew alarmed. Not until perhaps a half hour later, when Josh looked up and out through the window into the area of Bay 3, where two production operators in their blue uniforms and white lab smocks and hair nets had been sanitizing the washer with hot water before loading the tunnel with glass for the dental cartridges. Josh had narrowed his eyes somewhat in confusion, at first thinking the window had become fogged in some way. Then he realized it was hazy out there, as if a thin steam filled the air. He saw one of the production operators hunched over a steel work table, hacking, the other hovering over their shoulder in concern. Was it a fire? Was that haze from smoke? If so, why hadn’t the alarms gone off?

  As Josh watched, the person hunched over the desk slipped sideways and thumped soundlessly (from inside the controlled environment of the sterile core) to the floor, before the other operator could catch them. In a near panic, the other operator then dashed off, presumably to summon the supervisor or team leader. Several minutes later, however, the operator had not come back. That was when Josh moved to the phone (not too quickly, as they had been instructed to keep their motions within the sterile core slow so as not to stir contaminating particles from their clothing and body into the air) and phoned the department’s supervisor, Hassan. When Hassan did not pick up, he next tried the team leader, Patty. Again, no answer.

  Seeing his concern, Tanaka had come beside him, followed by Albert. Albert had pointed outside, then, but the others had spotted it already. A pair of blue-clad legs, jutting out from behind a pallet of glass modules. Someone else had apparently passed out on the floor.

  They moved from line to line, trying each bay’s phone, and seeing what they could out each bay’s window. When they saw another operator lying sprawled on the glossy floor, and then the two cleaners slumped motionless in their chairs, that was when Josh decided to call the security desk instead.

  It rang. And rang.

  Seeing his two Ghanian cleaner friends apparently unconscious in front of the computer station roused Joseph to action, and even his friend Edward could not deter him from leaving the sterile core, changing into his plant uniform swiftly, and going to investigate. The others hovered at the window expectantly. They saw Joseph enter Bay 6, where the computers had been set up, but by that time he himself was hunched over and wracked with coughing. They watched him try to shake one of the cleaners, Kwame, in his chair. Kwame dropped to the floor...and a moment later, so did Joseph.

  That was when the first of the attempts at interpretation began. An industrial accident – an unprecedented rupture of one of the immense solution tanks on the fourth floor (but what solution they mixed, filled and sold could engender these results?). A gas leak. Biological weapon. Radioactive fallout.

  Over the next several hours, because they couldn’t get an outside line, they tried every extension printed on the list posted beside each bay’s phone. Only once, four hours after Joseph had ventured out of the core, did someone pick up. It was the extension for the cafeteria. The person on the other end of the line rasped in a gargling, strangled sort of voice. Then the phone clunked loudly in Josh’s ear as it was obviously dropped, and he heard the voice fade as if the person were wandering away, muttering to his or herself.

  They waited several more hours, afraid now to leave the core. But after a while, they became less concerned about contaminating the product and more concerned with seeing to their personal needs. They allowed spray bottles filled with steaming hot water, for cleaning, to cool to the point where they could drink it, and lowered their face masks to do so. They even peed into a bucket but kept it covered when they weren’t using it.

  Albert, the oldest of them at 54, grew the most impatient. “Look,” Josh spun him by the shoulder and pointed. “Look, Albert. You see that blue fog or whatever? It’s poison. It’s still out there. You want to end up like them? They haven’t moved in six hours. They’re dead, Albert. They’ve gotta be dead!”

  “Do you wanna, what-do-you-call-it, stay in here forever?” Albert blurted in his Lebanese accent. “What are we supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re alright in here for now. Someone will come for us – they have to.”

  But three hours later, no one had come. There was a change, however. They noticed that the air outside had seemed to grow clearer. As the misty quality had subsided, the floor instead had taken on a bluish cast. This blue dust had even settled on the machines. Even on the prone bodies strewn throughout the bays.

  Then, Maria had shouted, “Fuck! Fuck! Look! It’s Joseph!”

  The others had leapt to her side, practically pressing their faces into the glass. Beyond, they had seen their friend Joseph shuffling drunkenly out of the computer area, headed in the direction of the supervisor’s office. They had then rushed into Bays 5 and 4, banging on the glass to get his attention. Joseph had finally stopped in his tracks, but did not turn to face them or continue on toward the office. He merely stood there, wavering slightly as if dazed.

  “I’m going to, what-do-you-call-it, go out there and see what’s going on. I’ve had enough of this,” Albert said, pushing through them.

  “Wait, Albert,” Josh said, whirling around. “We don’t know that it’s safe yet!”

  A body slammed into the window of Bay 4, causing Tanaka to let out a yelp. On the other side of the thick glass was Kwame, his eyes wide, his mouth smearing a frothy, vaguely blue-tinted saliva across the pane.

  “They’re waking up, see?” Albert said. “Don’t worry...I’ll leave my suit and mask on, okay?”

  “Albert!”

  “Let him go,” Maria said. “Somebody has to find out something, right?”

&nb
sp; And so they had turned back toward the window, rapping at Kwame, trying to get him to respond coherently to them, but he merely went on smudging his palms and his mouth across the glass, his bulging eyes unblinking. Until, finally, they saw Albert appear out there in the uniform they never would have dreamed of wearing outside the sterile core before this day. And they saw that Kwame heard Albert. Albert was perhaps saying his name. Approaching Kwame from behind.

  Kwame swung around, took hold of Albert, toppled his weight against him. Together, they crashed to the floor, the heavier black man pinning the graying-haired older man. Inside the core, the others couldn’t get a good look at what was happening at first, largely because of their own jostling struggle for a look. But then Maria screamed, and Dennis shouted something in Spanish, and Kwame shifted just enough for them to see the blood so vividly red on Albert’s white uniform. It looked to Josh, perversely, as if Kwame were performing analingus on his co-worker; his face was pressed hard into Albert’s posterior and moving from side to side. But when Kwame drew back, they saw the tear in the white spacesuit...and the blue scrubs beneath...and in the cleft of Albert’s flesh beneath that. They saw the gleaming train of viscera gripped in Kwame’s teeth, being pulled out of that ripped-wider opening, drawn out like a bird teasing a worm from its hole.

  Joseph was staggering toward the two men on the floor as if to intervene...but his arms were reaching, his eyes fogged, a bluish saliva foaming down his chin.

  The rest of them remained inside the core for two full days. And then, finally, when they had seen every one of their co-workers outside rise from their comas (except for Albert, whose swollen belly they tore open in order to get at the remainder of his offal, though they left his exterior otherwise untouched), Josh pointed out that the longer they remained inside, the more deranged co-workers would rise up throughout the plant and its adjacent office structure – assuming they hadn’t all of them already risen. One or two of them had to chance the outside air. And so, they turned off all the lights in the core to conceal their movements from their former friends, who had been avidly and hungrily ogling them through the glass.