21

I took an experimental step into the darkness before me.  Into another puddle.  I sloshed at the water, moving my foot from side to side.  But the generator was dead now, so what was the danger?

Another step, closer to the hose, the pump, the generator, and the dark shape beyond it on the floor ahead.  The large body appeared to move as though sitting up, a phantom form barely discernible on the edge of a nebulous black hole that threatened to swallow both it and me.

On impulse I turned my head back toward the door in the distance behind me, wanting to coax more radiance from it.  But it was too small, too narrow, while the overhang above it on the outside blocked any direct light from the noonday sun.  Most of its light was blocked inside too, by the metal screen in front of it, and by the pens between it and me.  Inside of those pens, though, I could see silhouettes of jostling shapes in a frenetic motion so fast now that it startled me.

I turned back into the blackness, into the void in front of me, and waited for my eyes to readjust.  Then I took several more steps, willing myself forward.  I came at last to the hose, and stepped over it.  Then the generator, the pump, and a round drum that I realized was a five gallon can of gasoline.  Finally, I clearly saw the shoe, and the leg, and then the torso of the man who lay in a puddle that I sensed was not water, but blood.  And it was then that I realized that I had been walking in that blood.  As had something else . . . something which was not a shadow or pool of water as I’d imagined.

The grunt emitted from directly before me was almost a snarl.  A loud complaint, as when an animal on the Serengeti plains of Africa is disturbed while feasting.  The angular head that lifted from its corpse—its found meal—shrieked at me.  I stumbled backward in shock as it came forward in response, as though to defend its kill.  It was a large animal that had been lying beyond the dead man, gnawing at his facial bones.  I imagined the man’s eye sockets were only pool of blackness, now, his scalp already ripped clean.

I screamed as I tripped over the hose, and the thing attacked me.  I doubled over, arms crossed around my head as it struck me in the back, pitching me forward against the generator.  Then its snout found my cheek, its jaws widening in close peripheral vision as I jerked to the side and rolled away.

I tried to pull myself up as it went for my legs.  The bulk of it broadsided the nearest pen, against which other hogs clamored.  Then I was struck again, lifted as though by a bucking bull, and flipped to the side of the cart where the generator engine was bolted.  Jowls fanned the fetid air for me, and missed.

Hooking the gas can with one hand, I propelled it heavily forward into the animal’s questing snout, dodging its near-sightless lunge.  Its massive weight slid past me, its skin like coarse sandpaper, as its heavy flank-steak hindquarters bumped me aside.  I struggled to my feet.

Aware that I was being followed, I ran with the half full can sloshing in my arms.  Blindly turning corners whenever I smashed into a fence of sectioned steel pipe, I realized that in my panic I’d run in the wrong direction, and soon I couldn’t distinguish between the insane virus-induced rage of the animal hunting me from the other excited shrieks and grunts coming from those still imprisoned in this maze of dark pens.  Were there other hogs that large on the loose as well? I wondered.  An entire accidentally freed pen full of heavy-hoofed ham out for revenge?

Welcome to the Fun House, I could almost hear Darryl summing up.  But it was a bit more nutty than having eight kids in a crowded, starving world controlled by taxes and terrorism.  It was more like being in a horror movie as the star victim, and on a set with no director, no script, and no lighting supervisor other than the Prince of Darkness.  Because somewhere over there, the only door to the outside world suddenly swung shut.  Its light winked out like the sliver of the sun’s corona the instant before total eclipse.  The wind?  Impossible.  There was no wind, only hot air out there, moving as slowly as Satan’s contented breath.  Someone from the house?  Possibly, but then where was Julie?  Trapped in here, I couldn’t help her or myself.  And, as in hell, the darkness was complete—already a fading memory on my retina.  Only the noise remained, loud and disturbing, as though the cries of the damned had morphed into animal voices, merging into a singular choir of demented desire beyond all possibility of hope.

With a snout attuned to many scents, the berserk hog would find me, I had no doubt of it.  Amid this labyrinth of pens it trundled—a massive, strange, and intelligent creature whose species we farmed for organs, and whose flesh we ate.  It was a scavenger that ate many things itself, now including its tormentors.

I lifted the gas can, quickly screwing off its lid.  Well over a gallon inside.  Maybe two.  I sniffed at the volatile fumes.  Would it cover my scent to the door?

I dribbled the fuel behind me, brushing the rail to my left to keep to the side as I moved, hoping not to run into my nemesis should we intersect.  I felt other questing snouts poking against my hip as I passed blindly and tried to gauge my position against the vague and incomplete grid I conjured in my mind.  Twice I heard an overlong sloshing and grunting nearby that could not have been made by a hog trapped in a short pen.  Had the gasoline confused it, like perfume sprinkled about an area where a pig hunts truffles?

The remaining gasoline was half gone when my foot struck something blocking my path.  I reached out and felt a metallic cube with a spongy bottom, attached to a larger convex metal casing.

It was the air filter to the carburetor, and the engine of the generator.

But in which direction was the door?

Feeling for the generator’s gas tank, I twisted open the cap, and poured at least a pint of gasoline into it.  Then I climbed atop the cart that suspended the engine above the wet floor.  Balancing myself and careful not to touch any metal, I found and pulled at the crank.  Once, twice, jerking at the nylon cord as it rasped and reeled.

The engine fired, coughing once, and died again.

I frantically felt for the carb, pulled out the choke, then cleared myself.  I was preparing to jerk at the cord again when I heard, not far away, a sloshing motion.  Like hooves approaching.

There was no way to brace myself for an attack.  I could only wait for it, bending forward, one hand grasping the starter grip, my other hand curled around the handle of the gasoline can.  Turning my ear toward the darkness in front of me, I tried to ignore the noisy tumult in the pens on all sides, to hear at last what I had not escaped in time.  Smarter than I thought, the thing had made the connection somehow, and followed the gasoline scent back to me.  Now it closed in for the kill, snorting its way to me in gloating anticipation.

Sure that it was wading in the puddle nearest me now, I planted my feet again on either side of the wooden cart that supported the engine, and jerked at the starter cord.

This time the engine sputtered to vibrating life, along with a new sound that met its steady rumble with what seemed almost a roar.  A spark, like the sustained flaring of a sulfur match, blossomed from beneath the cowling of the attached pump.  In that instant I glimpsed the blood streaked face of the animal which now shrieked as it sensed an electric current like a hard pinch felt everywhere at once.  It saw me too, and came at me, only enraged by the pain I had induced.  So I turned the gas can in my hands to let the remaining fuel splash down over the faulty pump below.

And gas found spark.

A geyser of flame rose between my arms.

I hurled the engulfed can at the hog’s head.  It struck one of the animal’s dirty egg eyes, flinging fire in a whistling cascade across its back.

Dazed by the bull’s eye blow, the thing turned in a tight circle as though in a frantic effort to rid its forehead of the tiny flame that danced there like some holy spell of judgment.

I did not wait to see what might happen next.  The generator engine flamed as I leapt from my perch, and the pain from my leg wound felt worse at impact than the feeble current which had penetrated my shoes before I stamped out of the puddle behind me.  With grim resolution I limped toward the distant door that was illuminated by a flickering and dying light.  And by the time that light faded back into nightmare behind me I’d already targeted my escape, and soon blindly—but gratefully—groped for the doorknob . . .

Only to find that it was locked.