The Hell Season by Ray Wallace Page B

very least, escaping further exposure to them.
    There were only two courses of action that he could think of at the present time. The first involved leaving town. Yes, he’d tried it once and had been turned back. But maybe the force field or whatever the hell it was that had prevented his departure did not surround the entirety of the town’s perimeter. Maybe there was a way out. The second course would be to visit the hole at the center of town that Ron and Tanya had told him about. They were of the opinion that it was from there that the terrors of recent days had originated. If what they said was true, then maybe there was a way to fill in or collapse the hole to prevent any further incidences. A long shot, sure, but a long shot was better than no shot at all. He needed to take action. This sitting around was getting him nowhere quickly, might get him killed sooner than later. He wasn’t ready to die, not just yet. Eventually, if all other options were exhausted, if he discovered no other way to be reunited with his family, if the only way he might be able to reach them and leave this place behind once and for all was through dying… Well, maybe then. But as long as he had options, no matter how farfetched they might be, he felt compelled to explore them. He was already taking one course of action, right that minute, he realized. He had chosen sanity over in sanity, reality over un reality. He had decided that what was happening was real and that he must choose a course of action to alter that reality. And now that he thought about it, the idea that all of this was a figment of his imagination seemed somewhat ridiculous. As a teenager he’d wanted desperately to be a writer of the types of “weird tales” that he’d enjoyed reading at that point in his life. It had come as no small disappointment to discover that he just didn’t have a creative enough of an imagination to get the job done. The surreal concepts and scenarios wouldn’t come to him. His mind, it seemed, just didn’t work that way. Even the stories that he told his children on occasion were mostly plagiarized things, conjured from the memories of the tales he had read in his youth. If he hadn’t been able to invent such fantasies at any other point in his life then what made him think he could do so now? It didn’t make sense.
    Finishing his lunch—or, more accurately, breakfast, as it was the first meal he’d eaten that day—he stood and, out of habit, brought the remains of his meal into the kitchen. It was warm inside the house, nearly uncomfortably so. The garbage was starting to smell a bit ripe. If he was going to continue living here he should dispose of it soon. He should also do something about the broken windows, about reinforcing the house in other ways to help protect him against whatever else might decide to attack his home. Or should he find someplace else to live? It wasn’t safe here, obviously. But what if Julia and the kids came back? How would they find him? Shouldn’t he stay in case they did? He figured he could always leave a note explaining where he could be found. The reality of the situation was that there were much more defensible places to hole up for a while. And he needed to find other people. Undoubtedly, his chances of survival were higher if he was part of a group rather than as a lone wolf. The idea grabbed hold of him. Other people … Surely there were those who had their own ideas about what was going on. Maybe a few had even figured out a way to escape this nightmare already. Where would he find those people though? He thought about Dana and Ron and Tanya. Where were they now? If he’d survived his transformation into a serpent then he assumed Ron and Tanya had also. They had military training. Surely he was better off with them than without them.
    This sudden desire to be around others filled him with a sense of excitement he hadn’t known since before his family had disappeared. It filled him with a