Atomic horrors, p.1
Atomic Horrors, page 1
Weird House Press eBook Edition © 2023
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Text © 2023 by Tim Curran
THE SHAPE (originally appeared in Dark Animus 10/11, 2007)
Cover and interior artwork © 2023, by K. L. Turner
Interior and cover design by Cyrusfiction Productions
Copy edited by F. J. Bergmann
Editor and Publisher, Joe Morey
Weird House Press
Central Point, OR 97502
www.weirdhousepress.com
CONTENTS
Furnace
Ground Zero
King Of Flies
Rat Trap
Doll Parts
Black Widow
Worm Cast
Fallout
Coffin Birth
Brain Death
Crabmeat
Bride of the Termites
Conjoined
Little Monsters
The Shape
Atomic Horrors Afterword
About The Author
About The Artist
ILLUSTRATIONS
Atomic Horrors
Ground Zero
King Of Flies
Rat Trap
Doll Parts
Black Widow
Worm Cast
Fallout
Coffin Birth
Brain Death
Crabmeat
Bride of the Termites
Conjoined
Little Monsters
The Shape
FURNACE
Just before the world ends, the woman, the chosen one, awakens screaming with a froth of white foam at her lips. She shakes in the darkness, the pains in her belly excruciating like hot knife blades being jabbed into her guts. Lathered with oily sweat, she grips the mound of her belly with straining, white-knuckled fingers, loving what’s inside her and hating it at the same time. As the old hags mutter ancient words, their faces cadaverous in the guttering candlelight, they try to hold her still.
“It’s … it’s biting me,” the woman says in a hissing voice. “It’s tearing me apart.…”
The old man looks on, the flaking leather book in his hands trembling.
“Tell us,” he says. “Tell us what you see.”
The woman jerks with clonic spasms, blood leaking from her nose and staining her face like red wine. Her voice is garbled, but they hear what she says, what she sees in the narrowing perception of her mind. The prophet, she tells them, the dark one, the holy one, the abomination before the Christian god. It stands in the broken ruins of the cities of men and calls out its plan for humankind. Multitudes gather at his feet … burnt, puckered with gaping sores, eyeless and deranged, they howl like animals and lick his fingers like dogs. As the abomination speaks the forbidden words that make the world tremble and the blackened masts of trees sway, the sun goes black as a charcoal briquette in the sky and the earth splits open with great, seething fissures. The writhing vermin of hell crawl free with leggy, slinking profusion to rise up and walk the gutted landscape. The stars are different now. They laugh in the sky as the land grows cold and ashes blow on the moaning winds in a great, screeching dust storm.
“It is the prophecy as we understand it,” says the old man. “Let the world become a graveyard, let the cities be tombs, and let the jackals gnaw at the bones of the fallen god and his followers.…”
The woman contorts and squeals, her belly shuddering as what’s inside her stretches its limbs.
The child is coming.
And the world is about to die.
In the first seconds, there are two suns in the sky.
One is yellow and ancient, the other a brilliant burning red exploding with impure light. The sky is no longer blue, no longer scudded with puffy white clouds. It becomes a yellow-orange tangerine and then an odd shimmering rose—the color of burgundy held up to firelight. The atmosphere is a flickering, iridescent blue-green with pockets of phosphorescent crimson.
This is followed by an instantaneous, blinding white flash that sears the world, scalding faces and burning out retinas. For a moment. The world is X-rayed in white brilliance … and then death comes, on a scale that is literally unimaginable, with a resounding, rumbling sonic boom.
Close now, so damn close.
The agony the woman feels ratchets up from zero to a hundred in bare seconds. It feels like she’s being peeled raw inside by razors, dull surgical blades, and rusty crosscut saws. She screams and thrashes. The old hags, the midwives, nod their heads and call out forgotten words that were ancient when the world was young. They anoint the woman with salves and balms and liniments made from the fat of boiled infants.
“Make ready,” one of them says.
The old man prepares the sacred cloth. He unfolds it with shaking fingers. It is scarlet with yellow piping. He has waited for this moment his entire life, but now that it is happening, he is not sure how he feels. Scared. Excited. Hopeless. Overjoyed.
One of the hags with a face like a yellow, shriveled skull places her ear against the moist, warm belly of the woman and nods her head. Inside, she hears something like the low bubbling of a cauldron and a scratching sound like a dog outside a door.
“Make way for the Lord,” she says.
The other hags listen now with cupped ears. They grin with toothless maws, for they hear the sound of the child … like the guttural lowing of an alligator in a swamp.
The woman is out of her mind by this point.
She is a husk of breathing meat that sweats oil and blood and slimy excretions. Her mind is filled with grotesque shapes that dance with ritual movements. The hags crowd around her, touching her with fingers sticky as rotting peaches. They exude a foul perfume, a sweet and gassy smell of dead squirrels trapped in the walls of old houses. Their formaldehyde breath is sickening to the extreme. They wear black, musty shawls that rustle and flap like the wings of crows. Though they are living, inside they are rotten like the hearts of old stumps.
One of them, her face dark as coffin wood, says, “He comes now … you must surrender your flesh, for it is his nest, his food and drink and spawning grounds.…”
The woman no longer understands words. Thought and reasoning are alien to her. She is an animal now, a pink and fly-specked sow about to farrow. There will be nothing beautiful about the birth; it will be brutal, organic, and unpleasant, a blood sport like a cow calving in the straw of a stable.
The hags hold her tighter now, fighting against her manic muscular contractions. The flesh of her swollen belly has become membranous and sheer. They can see the nightmare fetus within her turning and turning, a larva preparing to break free of an egg sac.
The gushing, spinning fireball rises above the city, becoming a vast crimson, mushrooming shape of clear, evil delineation. It looks like a skull, a demon, a laughing face—all depending on who sees it. There is no doubt what it is to those who dare look upon it. The Devil of man’s construction has come to earth. Its explosion creates an initial, devastating shockwave that lays neighborhoods flat, grinding concrete and brick to dust, reducing the city center into a gutted, scarred landscape of rubble, jagged girders, and mountains of steaming slag. Hurricane winds follow immediately, destroying buildings still standing and reducing houses to kindling, all of which gets sucked up into the raging, funneling dust storm of the fireball and then dropped to earth in a deadly, blazing barrage.
Huge, bloated blood-red clouds seem to dip down over the skyline, rupturing like brilliant scarlet tapestries, lightning arcing earthward in dancing chains that play along the rooftops, blasting free chunks of concrete and roofing tiles, starting fires and splitting trees. The resulting heatwave turns streets into rivers of molten tar. Sidewalks split and heave, water pipes bursting with eruptions of boiling steam. Rubble flies through the air, static electricity crackling and popping, exploding with acrid bursts of blinding light.
The firestorm comes next.
The superheated city center erupts with great licking fireballs that spew greasy black smoke in roiling, churning clouds above the ruins that flash with veins of brilliant red. Fed by broken natural gas mains, ruptured propane tanks, and gasoline wells, the firestorm rolls on and on, propelled by hot, dry windstorms. The flames leap up several hundred feet and then cascade down like napalm, incinerating everything in their path.
The city has become a huge crematory, as an incinerating blanket of heat turns the world to ash.
In birth, there is death.
In spawning, biological obliteration.
The woman’s body is pulled taut as a bedspring, a coiled and elastic thing that stretches with the sound of an overinflated balloon. A sharp, septic smell like necrotic wounds rises from her. Her lactating breasts ooze a pink foam, fluid splashing from between her legs in a uterine flood that inundates the bed and splashes to the floor like the cold guts of a fish.
The hags can barely hold her in the grasping claws of their hands. She writhes and fights, twisting and jumping as if she’s thrumming with high voltage. If there wa
As the old man shouts the words from his book, the woman undergoes contractions that tear her skin open with pinpoint, blood-bubbling fissures. The pain is white-hot and unbearable. It tears her mind out by its pink, shivering roots.
And then, from anus to vagina, she splits wide open in an expulsion of gore, tissue, and afterbirth. What emerges is a worm-like mass that pulsates and quivers, splitting open the birth-sac with black talons, a scaly, monstrous fetus with corrugated flesh the color of blood. It squeals and mewls, a suckering gray mouth pulling in air with a wet, gulping sound and exhaling a fetid mist of corruption.
It squirms between the macerated, shorn pubis of its mother, flapping like a freshly-landed carp, an undulant, mutating, embryonic horror that is smoldering with the stench of roasted flesh and burnt hair. It cries with a cacophonous, shrill noise like millions of buzzing insects and whining buzz saws.
Its mother is dead, collapsed into herself like a melted candle. She bleeds ropes of tallow. It crawls from her anatomical wreckage, unfurling itself from a web of sticky excretions like a fetal wasp, staring out at its wailing worshippers with pink, blood-seeping eyes like skinned toads.
As the world outside is ground beneath the heel of nuclear annihilation, the Devil has been born. Its congregation is wiped out as the blast flattens the house and their bodies burn like candle wicks.
The gigantic mushroom cloud towers above in the sky, purple and red and hot as a smelting oven. It was born at the very exact moment as the child.
In the flaming wreckage, the abomination crawls forth, crying out for its mother, its true mother. And from the smoke and debris and fuming sparks of the furnace, a tall, gaunt woman steps forward. She has the green, slit eyes of a cobra. She holds out her hands.
“My child,” she says. “At last. Now, let us remake the world in our image.…”
GROUND ZERO
THE DEMON
When the bomb detonated above the city, there was an instantaneous release of kinetic energy equivalent to 100 kilotons of dynamite. A blinding white flash burned brighter than a thousand suns as nuclear fission released a deadly saturation of neutron and gamma rays. The sky went a brilliant, bruised purple, then the blazing fire-red of a supernova. A shockwave of greater than 500 miles per hour lashed out with devastating force, convection currents sucking dust, smoke, and debris 30,000 feet into the atmosphere, creating a boiling mushroom cloud millions of degrees Fahrenheit.
And it was only the beginning.
SURVIVOR
Penn came out of his underground shelter outfitted in an olive-drab military-grade NBC suit. Through the goggles of his hood, he saw the wasteland that had once been the city: an endless maze of heaped rubble, overturned cars, bodies rotting in the gutters. What a pretty picture it made. Dust storms were still blowing off and on, all of them cooking hot with fallout. He knew he had to be careful. The suit would protect him only if he was careful. And smart.
And I’m both, he thought. Hell, yes.
And he was. While everyone else pretended in their naïveté that the Cold War as such was over, Penn knew better. He prepared. He built the shelter under his basement. He stockpiled it with food, water, medical supplies, weapons … all the goodies needed to survive a worldwide pandemic or, in this case, a full-out attack by the Russians. It had taken years and thousands and thousands of dollars, but he’d done it. He didn’t give a damn what his family said or what those headshrinkers at the VA told him—he was not paranoid; he was prepared.
There was a difference.
As he stepped out into the hell zone of the new world, he moved carefully, stealthily, like a stalking animal. He’d been waiting for this. He hadn’t wanted it any more than anyone else (at least, he liked to tell himself that), but he was a survivor with a survivor mentality. He was going to live through it.
Humanity, what was left of it, was in shambles now. Society had collapsed. But, of course, it was only a matter of time. He’d known that for years. As Captain Kane had told him in the war, the peaceniks and liberals were to blame. Love and peace, racial equality and gender neutrality. It makes me sick, troop. It all makes me sick. We’re over here fighting for their freedoms while they run the country into the ground. And Kane was right; Kane was always right. The only equality in this world was who had the gun in their hand and how willing they were to pull the trigger. Survival of the fittest.
If we’d have nuked the Ruskies years ago, this wouldn’t have happened.
“Damn right, Captain,” Penn whispered.
Goddamn Putin. He was to blame. Penn had counted on Trump to put an end to that sonofabitch; instead, he’d climbed into bed with him. Which only proved that all politicians were corrupt little maggots.
Wait.
Something was moving over there behind the bus. He’d seen it skitter away. It could have been a victim, even a dog, but Penn trusted his instincts. The goddamn Russians didn’t bomb the shit out of the USA for no reason. They were probably already here in numbers. It was something he and the other patriots had debated at length out on the message boards: the likelihood of a full-out Russian invasion once the United States was crippled sufficiently by thermonuclear weapons and neutron bombs.
Oh, they’re here, all right.
As Penn moved closer to the burnt hulk of the bus, he saw that all the windows were gone and inside were dozens of blackened corpses still sitting upright. They had not even fallen over. Probably welded to their seats by the intense heat of the initial blast. They grinned at him like melted rubber fright masks, lips burned away so all he could see were teeth and gums. In the distance, he heard screams and then gunfire.
Slowly, controlling his breathing, Penn brought up his M4 carbine, his finger glued to the trigger. Through the earpieces of the suit, he listened. He heard something move. Someone was trying to be quiet; he knew that. He could sense that. Suddenly, they burst into a fit of coughing.
Penn moved fast.
Maybe it was a trap.
Easy, troop. Real easy.
He ducked around the bus. He saw a woman crouched there. She was dressed in burnt rags. There were gaping sores on her face. She looked at him with one bleary eye.
“Water,” she said, holding out a dirty hand to him. “Water.”
Just a victim. That’s all. She was no threat, just a pathetic thing that would probably be dead from radiation poisoning within twenty-four hours. He stepped closer to her … then stopped.
A bead of sweat rolled down his face.
A chill went up his spine.
Something clicked in his head and he saw that there was a knife in her hand. Sure. He’d read about that. The Russians had developed a special adaptive camouflage that could make their soldiers look like ordinary men, women, and children. That’s how they were planning on infiltrating American cities after the bombings. You’d see them and think they were no threat, then the camo screen would go down and you’d be looking down the barrel of an AK-47.
Now you’re thinking like a soldier, troop.
Penn kept his gun on the woman. He licked his lips. “Nice try,” he said. “You make one move and you’re dead.”
“I need water.”
“Don’t fuck with me, bitch. Where’s the rest of your unit? What’s your strength?”
“Please.”
“Tell me the name of your commanding officer. You got about five seconds, Svetlana.”
“Please, oh dear God … please help me.”
Penn wasn’t fooled. Oh, they’d tried to fool him at the VA hospital, too, when he’d been shipped back from Iraq, telling him all kinds of crazy shit about how he’d had a breakdown over there and had wasted some women and children. Ripe bullshit was all it was.
“Last chance,” he told her.
“I just need … water,” she muttered and he had to hand it to her: she was good, real good. Her camo was perfect. She definitely looked like an old lady and she acted the part convincingly, but she was no doubt part of an advanced recon unit.
