Black Lightning.

Down by the water again. The old pier... solid 1800’s stonework. Feels safer somehow. It’s not. Used to drink whiskey for the taste, expensive bottles of scotch. A goddamn connoisseur. Now it’s just for the burn and the fog in my head. Fuck, wait, this isn’t even whiskey. Don’t know what the hell this is. Stole it from the back of some guy’s truck. Could be gasoline for all I care. Last time I saw a human being and I stole his hooch. Fuck it. Dark reeds hug the shoreline. Swaying. The motion turns my stomach. Too quiet around here. Used to think the calls of the night-birds were creepy. Ha. When was the last time I heard a normal bird or animal, even in the daytime?  Guess they can’t survive on that shit out there, or they’ve migrated somewhere. People have migrated too, but there’s no-where to go.

Same stories on the news from everywhere, before the TV went out. First it was some black shit growing over grain crops. Some kind of mold epidemic brought on by record levels of heat and humidity they thought. Yeah. Farmers bankrupted, scientists baffled. Humanity fucking doomed. Soon it was growing on everything. On people. The things started to show up after that. Little ones first.  Like a kid’s mixed-up drawings of different animals. Like chickens crossed with jellyfish or crab-worms, octopus-lizards, mushroom-wasps. Whatever. All kinds. All flat black. Never make a sound. Everything backwards, inside-out, wrong.  Black plants, but not plants. Things in the water. Things floating in the air like balloons. Then the big ones. People said they were attracted by noise, or heat, electricity, whatever. They were attracted by fucking food.

Jeanie was only seven years old. Daddy’s little princess...she hated that. A bad-ass little tomboy more like. Always with a grazed knee and a pocketful of ‘treasures’ from the woods or the creek-bed. Guess it was only natural with her mom not around. She cried with joy when I gave her an antique, ivory-handled pocket knife for her birthday. Those eyes. Those big brown eyes.  I’m so sorry baby. I kept her inside when the black stuff started getting found everywhere. Tried to make her see that it was dangerous. But she was born curious. She had to know about everything, touch everything. That was her way. She was so damned brave. Just a fucking kid. My beautiful little Jeanie.

She was one of the first, around here anyway. The first to be bitten, or stung, whatever that fucking thing did to her. Infected her. Maybe she would have got a kick out of that, being first, a goddamn pioneer. We didn’t know anything. How could we? Nobody knew what this shit was, and it was everywhere. Of course she wanted to catch one of those things. Keep it in a jar like a lightning-bug. Black lightning. We didn’t know about the big ones yet. Hadn’t seen them. Everyone was freaked out  enough by the little ones. Everyone but Jeanie.

She screamed for days. Drugs did nothing. Alone. Terrified in a quarantine room. Then silence. That was worse. Silent, just like one of them. She stopped moving. She changed. My baby girl.  Her gorgeous, huge, brown eyes. Just like her mother’s. Black. Her fucking eyes went flat black. Doctors being what they are, they pretended they could do something. For my sake I suppose. Her skin, her messy brown hair that had never known a bobby-pin. She turned black, so black that the hospital lights barely touched her. They stopped pretending. She was gone, they told me. I watched through the window. She...she just collapsed under their hands. Collapsed into nothing, a puff of black dust. Never even got to put her in the ground. They incinerated what was left of her.

I...its hazy what happened after I lost Jeanie. The whiskey, obviously. Government guys in suits. Army guys. Priests. Fucking assholes. They forgot all about me when the big ones started showing up, eating people. Forgot about Jeanie.  Panic. State of Emergency. Martial law maybe? I don’t remember. Suddenly town was empty, the TV and radio went out. Things everywhere. Fuck them. Yeah, sure. I know what you’re thinking. Sure. I have a gun, found it in that guys truck. Loaded too. Guess he wanted out so bad he didn’t double check. Or didn’t give a fuck. There’s nothing for me here except monsters. But you don’t understand. I can’t. Ann, Jeanie’s mother. My girl, though we never got to an altar, my wife. She was so gentle. Timid even. Not like our daughter. After Jeanie was born, she got depressed. Postpartum or something. She was afraid all the time. Afraid of raising a kid I thought, of fucking it up. Look how that turned out. Oh god. That’s how I lost her, why I can’t do it myself. She...killed herself, while I was at work. Right there with Jeanie in the crib beside her. Neighbours heard the shot. There was a note: ‘I’m sorry Mark, tell my baby I’m so sorry. I can’t fight it. There’s just too much pain inside, too much blackness’