The Upwelling, page 1
THE UPWELLING
Book I of The Hidden
By F. Paul Wilson
A Gordian Knot Production
Gordian Knot is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Crossroad Press digital edition 2024
Copyright © 2024 F. Paul Wilson
ISBN: ePub Digital Edition - 978-1-63789-032-5
ISBN: Trade Paperback - 978-1-63789-031-8
Cover designed by Getcovers
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
F. PAUL WILSON is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of eighty-plus books and nearly one hundred short stories spanning science fiction, horror, adventure, medical thrillers, and virtually everything between. The Tomb received the Porgie Award from The West Coast Review of Books; Wheels Within Wheels won the first Prometheus Award. His novella “Aftershock” won a Stoker Award. He was voted Grand Master by the World Horror Convention, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers of America, and the Thriller Lifetime Achievement Award from the editors of Romantic Times. He also received the prestigious Inkpot Award from San Diego ComiCon and is listed in the 50th anniversary edition of Who's Who in America.
In 1983 Paramount rendered his novel The Keep into a visually striking but otherwise incomprehensible movie with screenplay and direction by Michael Mann. The Tomb has spent 25 years in development hell at Beacon Films. Dario Argento adapted his story “Pelts” for Masters of Horror.
Over nine million copies of his books are in print in the US and his work has been translated into twenty-four languages. He also has written for the stage, screen, and interactive media.
DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS
Visit the Crossroad Press website for information about all available products and its authors
Check out our blog
For information about new releases, promotions, and to receive a free eBook, subscribe to our Newsletter at the bottom of any page on our website
Find and follow us on Facebook and Bluesky
We hope you enjoy this eBook and will seek out other books published by Crossroad Press. We strive to make our eBooks as free of errors as possible, but on occasion some make it into the final product. If you spot any problems, please contact us at crossroad@crossroadpress.com and notify us of what you found. We’ll make the necessary corrections and republish the book. We’ll also ensure you get the updated version of the eBook.
If you have a moment, the author would appreciate you taking the time to leave a review for this book at the retailer’s site where you purchased it.
Thank you for your assistance and your support of the authors published by Crossroad Press.
Table of Contents
* * *
MONDAY
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
TUESDAY
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
WEDNESDAY
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
THURSDAY
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
FRIDAY
1
2
3
4
5
LOST HOURS REDUX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
SATURDAY
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
SUNDAY
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
The Secret History of the World
MONDAY
1
Pamela Sirman walked into the Landry Funeral Home at the appointed hour and spotted the head man—Chester “Call-Me-Chet” Landry—as soon as she stepped inside the door.
“Oh, Mrs. Sirman,” he said. He looked troubled. “I was just about to call you.”
“Really? Wasn’t this the time you told me I could pick up Phil’s ashes?”
“Yes…about that.”
Now he really looked troubled.
“Is something wrong?”
“Yes. That’s why I was calling you. It appears we’ve had a problem with your loved one’s cremation.”
Loved one…that was a good one. She and Phil hadn’t been each other’s loved one for years, but…
“What sort of problem?”
“It’s your husband’s body.”
“What about it, damn it?”
He cleared his throat. “It won’t burn.”
It took a few seconds for Pam to make sense of those words, and then they made even less sense.
“What?”
“The attendant loaded him into the retort and turned on the flames, but when he looked through the observation port later to check on the progress, your husband’s body was completely unaffected.”
Pam stared at him, mouth agape. Finally she found her voice.
“There’s got to be some mistake.”
“Exactly what I thought when the attendant called me down to the crematorium and showed me an unblemished body amid the flames of the retort. The first thing I did was check the temperature gauge, but it read just shy of seventeen hundred degrees, exactly as it should have. The next thing was the timer which read sixty-seven minutes. The cremation process usually takes somewhere around two hours, but after more than an hour at that temperature, he should have been, well, halfway there.”
What was it with the fucking world? Everything was going to hell. No, check that: Everything had fucking gone to hell a long time ago. Couldn’t anybody do their job right? Ever? For the first twenty-five or so years of her life she’d sort of assumed competence in others—or at least in those most folks assumed were competent—but then reality had stepped in and totally kicked her ass. And in the seven years since that butt blow, the message had been brought home time and time again: Nobody knew what the fuck they were doing.
But this…this was fucking unbelievable.
“Can I pick ’em, or what?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Of all the funeral homes in Monmouth County, I pick a Mickey Mouse joint that doesn’t know what the fuck it’s doing!”
As a rule she kept Potty-mouth Pam in check when she was with strangers, but now the old girl was breaking loose. And with good fucking reason.
“Now, you listen here, Mrs. Sirman! We know exactly what we’re doing. Our attendants are highly trained, skilled professionals. And that crematorium is top of the line.”
“‘Skilled professionals’? What kind of skill does it take to stick a body in a toaster and turn up the heat?”
A thought struck her. Wait a minute…wait just one big fucking minute. Was good old Chet running a game on her?
Yesterday he’d tried to talk her out of the cremation bit and insisted on showing her his array of caskets. To make it worse, Chet felt he had to do all sorts of mansplaining about the difference between a coffin and a casket—as if she cared—but she’d feigned interest about how a coffin has six or eight sides compared to a four-sided rectangular casket.
She’d somehow managed to keep her eyes from glazing over during this riveting discourse as he rambled on and on about his deluxe bronze-and-copper model because it offered the most “protection.” Seriously? Thirty grand to protect Phil from what? The worms? The guy’s fucking dead and eventually the worms are going to get him no matter what kind of box he’s in. Why put them off? Worms gotta eat too.
Pam had called an abrupt halt to the pitch. Phil was going to be cremated and that was that. And all they needed for that was a cardboard coffin.
Chet had wanted to know about arranging for a viewing. Well, forget that. The truck that T-boned Phil’s car had pretty much flattened his head on one side, so who’d want to look at that? Pam had barely recognized him when she went to identify the body. The medical examiner had taken one look at him and saved Monmouth County a few bucks by declaring the cause of death obvious, no post-mortem necessary. Yeah, that bad. About all they did was some bloodwork to determine if he’d been impaired in any way. The guy who’d plowed into him had been totally fucking wasted on booze and oxy, but Phil proved clean.
And as for catering to mourners, there wouldn’t be any. Both her family and Phil’s were all dead, and the people they’d once called friends had given up on them long ago, so wh at was the point of a viewing, even with a closed casket? She’d told Chet she wanted to have Phil cremated the next day. Which was today. But now he was trying to convince her that wasn’t gonna happen.
This guy was running a game: Tell the dumb wife her husband’s body won’t burn so she’ll have to buy a coffin and bury him.
No way. No fucking way.
“Where’s the body?”
“Downstairs, in the cremation center.”
“I want to see it.”
“I don’t think—”
“I want to see it, Chet. I mean, how do I know you’re telling the truth? For all I know you really did cremate him and now you’re going to dump his ashes in one of your overpriced coffins and tell me you’re burying his uncremated body.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
She spoke through her teeth. “I. Want. To. See. Him.”
After a long pause, he said, “Very well. Come this way.”
He led her to an oversized elevator—freight model, she guessed, big enough to move coffins to and from the basement. When they arrived below, the crematorium lay only a few steps to the right. A squat, burly guy stood discreetly off to the side.
Chet said, “I had the attendant wait until the body had cooled enough, then slide it out of the retort.”
Pam stutter-stepped and froze at the sight Phil’s body, naked and supine.
“Where are his clothes?” she said, her voice hushed. “Did you just dump him in the casket naked?”
“They burned away. That ash you see around him is all that remains of his cremation casket. Everything burned away except… him.”
She continued to stare at the body. “How is this possible?”
“I would love to have the answer to that, Mrs. Sirman. My father started this funeral home, and as a boy I’d help him prepare the bodies. I learned at his feet, which means I’ve been involved in the undertaking profession for most of my life. What you see here today is… I want to say ‘impossible’ but obviously it’s very possible, so I’ll go with unprecedented.”
She edged forward and took hold of Phil’s wrist. He felt cold. She lifted his arm and then dropped it.
“He’s not stiff.”
“No, he wouldn’t be. He’s long past the rigor mortis stage.”
She leaned closer and looked him up and down. This was Phil… really Phil. She straightened and turned to Chet.
This couldn’t be real. She and Phil had met in college—what…fourteen years ago—and fucked each other’s brains out. And then they got married and kept on fucking each other’s brains out until… until they stopped. They did everything together… until they didn’t. They hadn’t been getting along for years now, but…
“I know this man,” she said. “He’s normal flesh and blood through and through. Why won’t he burn?”
“Normal flesh and blood burns, Mrs. Sirman.”
She noted the slight added emphasis on normal and felt her shoulder muscles bunch with anger.
“We’ve been together over fourteen years. Don’t try to tell me I’ve been married to some kind of fucking android!”
“All I’m saying is that human bodies burn. The temperature in the retort was almost seventeen hundred degrees this morning and your husband spent over an hour in there with no damage.”
“Is that hot enough?”
“Fifteen hundred is enough to cremate a human body, Mrs. Sirman.”
All fine and good, she thought, but this could all be staged.
“All right. Show me.”
“Pardon me?”
She waved the body toward the toaster. “Slide him back in there and light up your burners and let’s see what happens.”
“Oh, I don’t think—”
“I need to know the truth.”
“I am telling you the truth.”
She leaned toward him. “But I need to see for myself. You get that, don’t you, Chet. What you’re telling me doesn’t make any fucking sense, so I need to see for myself.”
His expression said he got that. He turned to the attendant and said, “Put him back in, Tony.”
Tony must have been listening because he was already stepping forward. She watched as he began to slide the body back into the chamber—what Chet called the “retort.”
“Maybe he’s a saint,” Tony muttered.
Chet shot him a glare but Pam said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, like, the bodies of saints are supposed to be incorrigible.”
“That’s ‘incorruptible,’” Chet said, looking like he wished he could gag Tony. “Now just—”
“Right. That’s what I meant. When they dig them up years and years after they’ve been buried their bodies are in perfect shape.”
Yeah, right, Pam thought.
“Tell that to Joan of Arc. Believe me: Phil was no Mother Teresa.”
Chet pointed to a chair in the corner and said, “What’s that magazine over there, Tony?”
Tony got an embarrassed look. “Um, Sports Illustrated. I read it while I’m waiting for—”
“Bring it here.” When Tony complied, Chet laid it on Phil’s chest.
“What—?” Pam began.
“Just in case there’s a skeptic among us, this will prove that it is really and truly hot in there.” He looked like he wanted to say fucking hot but held back.
After the retort was sealed, Chet positioned her before the tempered glass plate of the monitoring window. The nozzles spewed jets of natural-gas flame from above and all sides, and she watched the magazine blacken and dissolve into ash while Philip Sirman’s body remained totally unaffected.
2
Chan Liao stood on the high-rise balcony of his Margate apartment and stared northward at the spot where the hotels and casinos of Atlantic City had once lined the Boardwalk. Where he’d consulted on the online gaming at the Xìngyùn Casino. Where nothing stood now. The high rises in Ventnor and Marvin Gardens between him and the city had been knocked down and lay in piles of rubble, but Atlantic City itself had been scoured flat.
Two months since the disaster—the Atlantic City Upwelling seemed to be the preferred euphemism for the complete destruction of a city and the disappearance of 25,000 people along with it—and he still couldn’t believe it. He found himself out here every day, staring at the devastation. The whole city… gone.
Along with his job. The Chinese owners of the Xìngyùn had loved Chan, their wonder boy. US-born of Heilongjiang immigrant parents, he was Ivy League educated with a major in computer engineering, who spoke both English and Mandarin without an accent. Really, what was not to like?
They’d started him off developing bettor profiles for their high rollers and he was just getting a handle on the whole operation when the pandemic struck. Like all the AC casinos, the Xìngyùn had to close its physical doors in early 2020, but its virtual doors remained open. That was when Chan took the reins of the online betting and sports book that kept the casino afloat. Upon reopening later in the year, the grateful owners gave him free rein to streamline all their computer operations.
Oh, yes. Only twenty-six years old, but Chan Liao had been on his way up in the gaming world—way up, like with a jetpack strapped to his back. Not that he was happy. He’d never, ever been truly happy in life. It simply wasn’t in the cards for him. But these past few years in AC had brought him within sight of that elusive state.
And then, on June 22, disaster. Total destruction. Even the online betting was gone.
As natural disasters go, the Atlantic City Upwelling didn’t hold a candle to the historic floods in China which purportedly killed millions. But upward of 25,000 Atlantic City guests and locals were listed as missing. Not officially confirmed dead, but vanished without a trace.
He remembered how the morning-after reports blamed the devastation on a tsunami. But all sorts of experts in varying fields started calling that into question. A tsunami is the result of a sudden displacement of water from a seismic event or a massive collapse like a landslide, but nothing like that had been recorded in the Atlantic or anywhere else that day. Also, the ocean will recede from the shore as a tsunami nears, and that never happened at Atlantic City. Nor could the flooding be blamed on a storm surge because the violent storm didn’t make landfall until after the flooding had begun.
