Chaos Cloud Takes Virginia

By Jennifer Spellman

At first, everyone thought it was just a thunderhead. 

Well, maybe not everyone – the hill folk grumbled about the end times, but we fine gentlemen and ladies of Richmond knew better than to listen by now. Our grammies and grampas had been muttering about Revelations great and small ever since they’d been grammies and grampas. No one paid attention anymore. It looked too rural.

Instead, we listened to the weathermen speaking sagely of freak cold fronts and supercells. We all got out our umbrella and slickers, canceled golfing plans, and let the dogs in the house for the day. None of which did any good, of course, except maybe putting the dogs in.

My first clue that something was weird was when Jenkins popped by my cubicle just before my 10 o’clock smoke break, leaning over my desk. “You gonna go grab a smoke?”

“Of course,” I grunted, not looking up from the Butler-Smythe account I’d been mired in all morning.

“Well, you might want to reconsider that,” he said in a funny kind of voice.

I looked up, puzzled, and noticed he wasn’t looking too good. Kinda pale and cheesy. Damp, too. “Why? That ol’ thunderstorm broke? I hadn’t heard any booming.”

He laughed, but it wasn’t his deep chuckle; it almost sounded like he was choking on it. “You might rightly say that, yes, you could.” He cleared his throat. I figured he must be getting sick, so I leaned away from him, not wanting to bring home another goddam cold to Mary and the kids. “Maybe you oughta just go on and see for yourself.”

He was kinda ticking me off, so I got up and grabbed my slicker. “I’ll do that. A little wet ain’t gonna stop me from having my morning smoke.”

Jenkins hacked out that queer strangled chuckle again, then wandered off toward his cubicle. Not rightly sure what became of him – I didn’t see him again after. I just hope he ain’t still on our floor.

Anyway, the elevator was crowded, worse than usual. Everybody was hen-gabbling about the weather, each with their own set of rumors picked up from somewhere. Tornadoes had touched down outside of Tuckahoe, or maybe Midlothian, or both at once. Somebody’d heard about hail the size of goose eggs. Two of the girls from marketing were trying to outdo each other with colors of lightning their sister, or their mama, or their boyfriend, or some-damn-body had texted them about. Blue lightning, green lightning, purple, black. After three floors, I got sick of all the tall tales and plugged in my iPod. Jimi started crooning about the joker and the thief’s ride, and I closed my eyes, almost able to taste that first drag on my Winston.

That’s probably why I didn’t notice the screaming right away.

There was a – a thing lying on the navy-blue lobby carpet. It had once been a man – I thought – but now it was a mass of writhing flesh. It looked shiny, like a hot dog after you’ve nuked it long enough for the grease to sweat out. It was bubbling like that, too; bulging out, threatening to split its skin, all red and gray and yellow. And when the screaming died down a bit – since people had fainted or were too busy throwing up – I could hear it moaning, real thick and low, even though it didn’t have a mouth no more. It reminded me of back on the farm, when Pa had to put down a calf that had gotten into jimson weed real bad; it had lowed in that same dumb, pained, helpless way. I’m not sure if it was the memory of Pa bringing the sledge down on the calf’s head or the abomination in front of me or just everybody else puking, but breakfast came right up out of me, right onto the wingtips Mary bought me last Christmas.

Dimly, I heard a hysterical warble – one of the marketing girls, Sharon I think – sobbing, “What’s happening? Where’s Harry? What is that? I wanna go home!”

“That’s Harry right there,” some guy I didn’t know in a brown suit said, pointing at the writhing hunk of meat with an ink-stained finger. Sure enough, once I’d recovered my stomach enough to look, I could see that the – thing – was rolling around on the remnants of a blue security uniform.

“He’s gone,” continued Brown-Suit matter-of-factly, then giggled sharply.

“What – how can you laugh at a time like this?” Sharon said, flushing under her heavy layer of foundation pancake.

Brown-Suit didn’t seem to hear her, or care if he had heard. “Harry got caught in the rain, what a pain, washing down the plain, tapping at the windowpanes…” He giggled again, then broke out into a little shuffling dance, accompanied by his tuneless singsong.

“What the fuck – “ is wrong with you was how I meant to finish that sentence until he looked at me head-on for the first time. Whatever was on his fingers – it looked like blue ink, but ink doesn’t spread like mold on bread under one of those fancy time-lapse cameras – was on his face, too. And it was growing.

Before I bolted for the stairwell, I realized he was dripping wet.

~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~

We – those of us that were left – huddled around our only lifeline, an old battery-powered radio. The electricity had gone out two hours ago, the Internet an hour before that. None of our cell phones worked – they’d dial out, but all we could hear was horrible squealing sounds and bursts of static like machine-gun fire from old action movies. The radio wasn’t much better, but we could hear enough to make us real scared – more scared, I guess. Reports from all over the state, of people changing like poor Harry and Brown-Suit, or worse. Building collapsing, or growing tropical flowers, or floating away like balloons filled with screaming people. Trees coming to life and walking around, or turning to ash within seconds, or sprouting thorns and crying babies’ heads. The governor got it early, we guessed, because it was the lieutenant governor who was telling us all to stay calm, to stay in and lock our doors. Then she started ranting about the Democrats causing all of this to escalate the war on coal, but we weren’t real sure if she’d got hit by the rain or if that was business as usual.

The radio cut out for awhile; the next time we could make anything out through the static, some big-shot science guy was talking about “the Chaos Cloud.” It was like, he said, some kind of biological super-mutation accelerant that had gotten in the atmosphere: maybe from a chemical spill, or something from a meteor shower. We could tell he didn’t really have any idea, no more then he knew why dead stuff and stuff that had never been alive was changing too. He mumbled something about fragments of nucleotides and molecular uncertainties before the batteries died in the radio.

We’ve been sitting here in the dark ever since, waiting. There’s no way in hell we can go downstairs; when Richard tried, he came back bleeding where something – or someone – had clawed him. Me and Jed managed to stop up the thigh wound with a tie tourniquet and a pressure bandage from Marsha’s emergency box of pads – turns out Jed was an Army medic before he went to business school – but Rich died anyway. We carried him into the janitor’s closet and locked it, just in case.

I know it’s no good hoping for the cops or the Guard to come rescue us like in the movies. It’s still raining, you see. We watched it fall for awhile, hoping for some break in the thick black clouds, but ever since some kinda bat with green wings and way too many teeth bashed into the window five or six times before bursting into a bloody mist, we’ve kept the curtains drawn. So now we’re just sitting, the four of us that are left, hoping the hissing sound of the downpour stops before we run out of our junk-food stashes, or before we get too thirsty. It’s in the drinking water now – that’s how we lost Marsha. At least it was quick in killing her, thank God.

Maybe the hill folk were right.

If I don’t make it, please tell Mary and th

[The rest of the memo pad is too water-damaged to decipher]

About the Author

Jennifer Spellman is a long-time Athens County resident. About to graduate from Ohio University with a Bachelors in English, she enjoys reading and writing speculative fiction as well as poetry. Even as a child, she was a huge fan of fantasy, science fiction, and horror; the first “grown-up” novel she read was Dean Koontz’s Watchers at eight years old. As an adult, she reads Stephen King, Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey, Dennis L. McKiernan, and a plethora of poets, contemporary and otherwise. She appreciates Raven’s Light’s use of Huginn and Munin as a source of inspiration, since she also studies the pre-Christian Scandinavian lore that these famous ravens come from. She lives in Nelsonville with her husband and three unruly cats.