The Water Brings the Bodies

Caen turned his eyes to the sky as thunder rolled across their valley like boulders falling from a cliff. He'd been so focused on the rusted engine before him that he hadn't noticed the midnight-colored clouds massing over the mountains. They were close enough that he could see their corrugated undersides.

"Shit."

He stood, wiping grease onto the stained cloth tucked into his belt and ignoring the stiffness in his shoulders and back. The tractor would have to wait another day, and the harvest would sit in the field until he had it up and running again. He cursed again, slammed the rusted engine cover down with a hollow metallic thump.

The sky flickered as fingers of lightning danced along the edge of the mountain range, sending more thunder down the mountains, and across the perfectly circular fields of golden wheat he'd planted at the start of spring. This year's crop had grown well, but a heavy storm now could destroy it where it grew.

Then he'd have to deal with what came after.

When it finally hit, the storm dumped so much rain on the farm that Caen couldn't see the tractor from his kitchen, even though it was only fifty paces from the kitchen door. Raindrops flew almost parallel to the ground, hail drummed on the shutters on the up-stairs windows, and Caen's old dog huddled under the kitchen table whimpering until and looking up at Caen with pleading eyes.

Caen lowered himself to the floor and scooted under the table.

"It's okay Sparky," he said. "It's just a storm."

He scratched absent-mindedly behind Sparky's floppy, black ears. It wasn't the storm they needed to be afraid of.

The storm passed, leaving the crisp tang of lightning in the air. Sparky stopped shivering once the thunder died down to background noise, and the old guy's tail thumped tentatively against a table leg.

"Time to inspect the damage," Caen said. Sparky answered him with a flurry of tail-thumps.

Caen took his old shotgun down from the shelf above the kitchen door. It was a Remmington 870, his father'd taught him to shoot it when he was 14 years old. The thing had nearly knocked him on his ass the first time he fired it, now it felt like an extension of his own body.

Sparky followed him out of the door and into the sharp-scented air. The tractor stood in the field, exactly as he'd left it. A quick circuit of the house told him that all the window covers were intact and in place. The hail and wind hadn't pulled any of them out of the walls this time.

After checking the house, Caen set off down the footpath to the river which ran through his land. The river had kept him alive, fed his crops, and provided fresh water since the shops in town went out of business. It also brought the bodies after heavy rains. He didn't know where they came from, up stream obviously but why were there always more? Was there a settlement up there? Or was it more like a graveyard, the rotting corpses waiting for a storm to wash them out of the hills and onto his land?

And with the bodies came the scavengers. It was the scavengers that necessitated the shotgun.