A Village That Was Lost
A story by J. R. Kelly
Browse all of the stories produced at Guardian Summer School here
Sherriff Bradley was a coy man who meant business. His definition of business was one that involved fighting, arguing and handcuffing. A filthy man sat on a bench behind steel prison bars. His cell was opposite Bradley’s office. His yelling, vomiting and bar rattling had been distracting Bradley for the past hour.
‘Hey, Sherriff, oh Sherriff! When you going to come and let me out of here’?
‘Shut up you dirty street rat’!
The Sherriff rose to his feet and lifted a baton from his draw. He picked the prison cell key up from his desk and put it in his pocket. The man in the cell could see Bradley’s shadow, and he called out, mocking him:
‘Hey, what you going to do hard man’?
Bradley walked out of his office with the baton held behind his back.
‘Hey, cop, what you holding there buddy’?
Fear was in the man’s voice now. He chuckled nervously and stood up. One eye screwed up and the other opened more widely. Bradley pulled the key from his pocket and unlocked the door. It swung ajar. The man behind it stepped back quickly.
‘No! No! Please don’t. I didn’t mean any of it’.
The Sherriff stormed in, raised the baton from behind his back and brought it down upon the prisoner. His frantic screams echoed the lonely corridors and a cold wind carried them through open windows into the night.
A meteor had fallen upon the town of Summerdale, Florida in the year 1972. After a blackout and hundreds of desperate callers complaining to police officers about red lights in the sky and a strange sulphuric smell, the Centre for Disease Control dispatched four black vans, which were closely followed by about thirty police cars.
At 2:30 AM they arrived on the main road, a mile ahead of the city. Doors flung open, armed men leapt out in radioactive yellow suits, tools to measure for unusual geographic qualities were set up, and PH measurements of a nearby stream were instantly taken and tested. Nothing, as far as anyone could tell, was out of the ordinary.
Then vehicles started to come from the town, their approach being signalled by their twin white lights and screeching tyres. But when they came closer they ended up being stopped by newly erected roadblocks. And so drivers turned into pedestrians as they ran to the police in their masses.
‘What on earth is going on here’, exclaimed one elderly woman who stood hunched over in a pink spotted dressing gown. Her husband was shaking a calloused fist at another officer.
‘Sir, I’m going to need you to step back’.
Then Sherriff Bradley arrived at the scene and the panic calmed and order returned to the roads. The Sherriff spat a wad of gum onto the tar and crushed it with a black boot.
‘People, people, calm down, calm down.’ He looked at Dr Mills, a CDC pathologist who had been taking samples from the town, and tipped his hat.
‘What precisely, doctor Mills, is the problem here?’
‘Sherriff, we’ve taken a look about and we couldn’t find anything suspicious in this area, but townsfolk have been collecting this shit in bucket loads’.
He pulled out a test tube from one of his suit’s pockets. Inside was a green gloopy substance that slopped from side to side as it were alive and moving. The Sherriff didn’t need to be told that it was alive, he could see that.
‘Sherriff Bradley’, said Dr Mills, ‘It seems to be an organism of some kind. It’s alive and in all my years of seeing strange shit, I’ve never seen anything even remotely like this.’
‘Has the CDC issued a procedure?’
‘The standard, Sherriff.’
Bradley turned to his deputy, a plump man by the name of Wardell.
‘Lieutenant, Issue seven, you know the drill.’
The deputy whistled and called for order. Within moments large vans would appear and begin evacuating the people, but as they went out the police would have to go in and Bradley would have to spearhead the attack. In his twenty one year career he had done this three times before, but each time had been different. One case had been a minute scale power plant leak, the others had both been false alarms. Not one of them had happened in Florida, none had happened at night, and certainly none had involved any green gloop or flying comets.
Bradley looked back at the test tube which was still being held in mid-air by Dr Mills, almost as if it were a torch. The contents slopped and swirled and white lumps emerged which looked like the tiny Fordyce glands that can be found in the pink of one’s gum. To Bradley they looked like the sticky coconut rice that was handed out in bags on Saturday nights at the Thai place round the corner from his office. He watched as the doctor tapped his index against the side of the glass. The substance that was housed within did not take any notice. It was unintelligent, completely oblivious to its little prison.
‘Well then, I guess I need to be taking a look at this mess’.
‘I’ll let you get right to it, sir’.
The doctor put the tube into his pocket, turned, and left.
Since the area had been verified as safe, Sherriff Bradley and four other men went for the initial review of the scene. A barrier was put in the roadblock to allow them to travel up to Summerdale, Bradley in one vehicle with two men and the other two in a separate car. The barricade lifted and they drove into the darkness which encircled the car and clawed at the mechanical cage with black fingers, on held back by the front and rear lights.
One of the men set behind the Sherriff, a junior called Davidson. He pulled a lighter out of his jacket pocket and lit a cigarette.
‘Put it out’, said the Sherriff. Davidson paused resentfully, and then blew it out, deliberately directing a breath of smoke at Bradley. Bradley ignored it and carried on driving. The other man, Ramirez, looked down at his lap as if the tension that hung between the other two sat on him like a boulder.
‘Look’, he said, ‘Let’s not be shitty towards each other about this, ok? We don’t need this sort of bad will between us right now.’
‘Shut up dickhead, you’re not helping’, said Davidson. He made a sort of churning noise in his mouth and tapped his fingers on the window.
Bradley looked scornfully at him in the rear view mirror. Davidson didn’t look back.
He went on: ‘You know, arrogance and self-righteousness breed incompetence. An incompetent leader is responsible for breeding arrogance in his followers, and thus the cycle repeats itself.’
Ramirez remained silent, but Bradley’s hands tightened on the wheel and he turned the car around a corner a little too fast for Ramirez liking.
‘Please stop, just stop’, he begged.
The trees around them turned to blurs.
‘Stop it dumbass’, said Davidson.
‘I’m the Sherriff dipshits’.
Bradley was addressing them both now.
‘I’m tired of your whiny bullshit and your shitty attitudes and your disobedience. Think you know better than me? It doesn’t matter, I’m the Sherriff. You two are subordinates.’
He jerked the wheel just in time to send the car spinning around another corner and to miss flying off the road. Ramirez let out a little shriek, and this time, for once, it was Bradley who laughed at the man’s expense.
‘If you two fuck up spy wanabe supermen ever belittle me again then I will fire you. If you step a foot out of line tonight I’ll fire you. And if you get in my way’, he paused, allowing the sombre words to sink in, ‘I will kill you’.
He put two fingers together and pressed them against Ramirez’s temple, making the childish shooting gesture that is typically done by children playing cops and robbers.
He made a noise to go with it: ‘Bang bang’!
Then he aimed his finger pistol at Davidson’s weary reflection and did the same. He got no response. Silence fell over the whole car. Bradley could feel Davidson’s eyes stabbing at his back. The silence grew louder and the accumulation peak approached. The breaking point split. Then it exploded in little breaths. Ramirez was sobbing. No one poked a jibe at him. Even Davidson, who would in any other situation leap at the chance to humiliate another colleague, remained silent. The wind could be heard from outside the car as well.
The gravel ceased to crunch as the vehicle went from road to marble ground. Ramirez was wiping his wet eyes on his sleeve and Davidson gnashed and grinded his teeth so loudly that Bradley could almost imagine that a lion was in the car with them. He knew that the man’s rage was going to be redirected from him onto whatever was waiting in the town, and at that moment, although he would never admit it, he was slightly scared of him, glad that he wasn’t going to be on the receiving end of his wrath.
They opened the car doors, climbed out, and slammed them shut behind them. Dimly lit lights stood over them, flickering and sizzling. Then they saw the gloop. Beer barrels had been gathered in groups in the courtyard and they were overflowing and bubbling, the green monstrosity sliding its way down the rusty edges and onto the ground. Blobs of the stuff swept around, colliding and joining, getting bigger and bigger and then breaking on steps or bins or any object like waves on a beach. At best they were puddles on the ground, and at worst two metre jelly structures. The national flag hung from the arched roof of the town hall, green lines oozing down between its stars and building at the base before plummeting down to the floor below.
There was complete silence, other than the occasional slurping. Then Ramirez wailed and ran away.
‘Get your sorry ass back here Ramirez’, yelled Bradley.
It was too late. He had gone back down the path and into the darkness.
Davidson turned to his senior. The coal fires of fury had been extinguished by the same waters that had welled in Ramirez’s eyes; tears of fear. He gulped and stepped back a little.
‘Now what Sherriff’?
The second car came up behind them, and its occupants got out quickly.
‘We kill this shit’.
‘No, no please, it’s not, not like anything that I or, or, you’, he trailed off, turned on his heel and sprinted after Ramirez.
‘You’re dead bitch’.
Bradley fired a bullet after him. The morning darkness was briefly lit by the yellow flash.
Bang
It missed. Davidson shrieked in fear and began to run in zig-zags down the road. He cocked his gun and fired again.
Bang
This time it hit target, this time it killed. His eyes widened and he dropped his gun in disbelief at his own action. He felt numb and the flow of time seemed to slow down with a ghostly wind that whistled though the empty buildings and twisting trees.
‘What the hell did you do’, yelled one of the other officers.
Bradley snapped out of his spell and turned his attention to them. Snatching up his firearm he yelled:
‘Get back, Marcus. I’m in charge here. I always was. We’ve got bigger things to deal with than cowards.’
The other officers looked at each, white with fear and then turned back to Bradley. The barrels of their guns rose into the air and Bradley could easily have thought that he was staring into the two black eyes of some evil form.
‘What are you doing’, he shouted.
‘You’ve gone too far today Sherriff.’
The other officer’s walkie began to crackle and he whispered frantically into it. Bradley squinted at the body of Davidson, and a stream of sweat began to accumulate on his scalp as he realised the magnitude of his impulsive action.
Then there was a loud humming noise like a speeding train going through a subway tunnel and the sky lit up with a green streak. The three men instantly looked up at it as it soared below the stars from north to south; a murky cyclone of two parallel lines traveling over them. The gloop changed behaviour quickly and began to slop inwards; closing in on the town centre. The three men stood completely helpless and watched as the two lines crossed to form a spiral far above and then descended upon the town. The gloop was swirling around, now completely one body: a green tsunami on land. It began to twist and turn and then it shot up in a thin beam to meet the spiralling structure. And then there was a green flash of light; a bright beam that stretched to both horizons and then disappeared in an instant.
The three men stood staring up at the sky, shocked senseless. It wasn’t until the sun rose through the gaps between the branches of the oak and pine trees that the Sherriff realised how long they had been standing there. When Wardell and his men finally arrived on the scene after receiving no telecommunicated response from the initial expedition, they found no green goo or spaceships, only four men; two as good as catatonic, Sherriff Bradley with a gun in his hand, and one lying dead with a bullet wound in his head.
