The day had melted away. It was civil twilight, that time when light first starts to fade. In the east, there were dark black and grey clouds saturated with water and energy, rumbling and stomping across the horizon. In the west, was a fading halo of orange light moving with the disappearing sun. The wind picked up ferociously, bending the young maple tree my dad had just planted a year ago to the ground. I stepped outside on the porch to witness the melee of leaves unfettered from their branches, twirling in the ever-maddening wind. Hail began to fall, icy meteors as big as golf balls beating the hell out of everything we owned, pushing aside my previous tranquility of the young evening. Then the rain came, falling heavy and fast, a moving wall of water. I could still see the light in the west. There was an odd unseen barrier between light and dark.
I lived at the bottom of a hill. During winter, when it had snowed, we were susceptible to cars losing traction and running into our yard, and on one occasion a truck had crashed into our front porch. I knew the driver, Corey. We went to high school together. He was driving to the convenient store with his younger brother in the passenger seat. He lost control in the snow, plowed through our front yard, and into the porch. His brother suffered severe injuries on impact. I remember going outside with my dad to check on the kid. The boy was still alive, but he was choking. My dad tilted his head forward, blood and a lump of tongue fell out of his mouth and into his lap. He had bitten half his tongue off, and with the force of the dashboard, his neck had been snapped back against the rear window. He was looking up at the roof, unconscious and choking on his own tongue. He died later that night at the hospital. We tried to get the city to put up a road barrier, but they refused. I was thinking about that for some reason, as it started to rain even harder. Maybe it was an instinct to expect the worse in this kind of weather when you lived at the bottom of a steep hill.
The water was accumulating on the side of the road, flowing like a fast river, with violent rapids, swelling and swirling into the street drain in front of our house. I was always fascinated by the roadside streams that would form during the worst of storms. Suddenly I felt the hair on my forearms stand on end and an overall strange tingling sensation over my whole body. There was a flash of light and immediately thereafter I felt the boom of thunder, as loud as the day when that truck had collided into our house. I thought I better get inside but then I noticed that the roadside river had a tinge of pink, and as time passed it flowed a deep red. I didn’t want to get wet or struck by lightning, but I was concerned that there might have been another wreck, and someone was hurt and in need of assistance.
I went back inside and put on my jacket. I grabbed an umbrella and my cell phone. I walked up the steep hill, avoiding the bloody stream. My feet were already soak and wet and the rain was not subsiding. The amount of blood that was flowing had thickened and increased. In my mind I thought that this was irrational. There was far too much blood for one person, or even two people. This looked like a war zone, a battlefield being washed clean by a divine judge. I got halfway up the hill when I noticed that the blood was flowing from a dryer vent on the side of a two-story home. The front door was wide open. There was a light from inside flickering off and on. I tried to call the police, but I had no reception. I heard a scream. Out of the dryer vent still flowed a waterfall of crimson, coursing its way down the driveway, into the neighbor’s yard, and into the street, making its way down to the bottom of the hill.
I went to the neighbor’s house and knocked on their door. No one answered. I walked past the blood house and to the house on the other side. Knocked on that door. Still, no answer. I went across the street and knocked on that door. No answer. From across the street, I heard the scream again. The flickering light seemed brighter. The storm had enveloped the entire evening sky, bringing on a premature nightfall. I could no longer see the blood flowing in the street. I walked across the street. I could hear the flow and the water moving. I stopped and gauged where I thought the blood was and leapt into the yard. I twisted my ankle and fell face first into the muddy sod, bending the rod of my umbrella beyond repair. Mud was in my eyes and before I could wipe them clean, something grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me through the yard, up the front porch steps, and into the house. I heard the front door shut. I felt like a doll. The ease and speed with which I was conveyed into the house worried me. This felt supernatural. My shirt was torn on one side from being dragged up the front doorsteps. My skin there was scraped clean of skin, and I had a sharp pain in my ribs. I was having trouble breathing.
The flickering light was from a table lamp. It was covered in blood. For that matter, so was the table it was sitting on. The bulb finally popped, and I was in total darkness. There was no sound other than the storm outside. I was listening for the perpetrator that had, against my will, brought me into the house. Then I felt a slight tug, a pause, and then I was being dragged again, faster than before and with much more savagery. I tried to grab whatever was holding my wrist, but felt nothing, even though I could feel the entity’s frigid grasp. The circulation in my wrist was cut off and my arm felt numb. I was pulled downstairs into the basement and slung up against the wall. I heard rapid footsteps climb back up the steps and the door slam shut.
I was beat up pretty bad, my legs, back, and ribs throbbing with pain. The back of my head felt like someone had hit me with a hammer. Every muscle in my body was sore. I could barely lift my arm, but I was determined to reach into my jacket pocket and get my phone. I hardly had the strength to pull my phone out of my pocket, but with a lot of effort I got the phone out and turned on the light. There in the basement hung up on wooden racks in a circle were four bodies, their bellies cut open and blood flowing out profusely, an unstoppable flow of misery. I looked into their faces, and they were cognizant, they were aware, they were wide-eyed awake, in pain but unable to scream or speak, their lips being sewn shut. I felt a deep lonely despair, and a feeling that I was trapped and doomed to the same fate. I grew hysterical and started to try and get up, but I stumbled and fell into one of the bodies. I looked up and it was Corey’s brother. His mouth was not sewn shut. He started to speak. At first, I didn’t understand him because it was a low moaning whisper. He got louder and louder, saying the same thing over and over, “Thank God, blood flows downhill.”
I woke up in a hospital bed, my mother reading a novel and my dad asleep in a chair. I had tubes in my nose and in my hand. I could feel a bandage on my head. I felt weak. I went to wipe my head. My mother noticed. She rushed to get the doctor. I couldn’t feel my legs. My dad explained what had happened. I had walked up the street, halfway up the hill and got caught in the storm. A car had lost control and hit me, throwing me into the air and against the wall of a house under the dryer vent. My head had been split wide open. The driver was unconscious. Most of the neighbors were away at the basketball game. My dad had come outside wondering where I had gone when he noticed a little stream of blood running from uphill and into the sewer drain. He walked up the hill and found me bleeding out in several places like a lacerated piece of chum. The doctor explained that I was lucky to be alive. He related that four people had died on that road, that he had been the attending surgeon for every one of them. He was relieved that I wasn’t the fifth.