Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. The Flood Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

THE FLOOD

A lightning bolt struck down Lea Redding’s mother. The scent of burnt flesh was not so different from bubbling campfire hotdogs. That smell came right through the window, into the trailer.

The brown mongrel of a dog named Lucky hid in the cabinet under the sink alongside the three-quarter empty bottles of off-brand cleaners and the tube of Drano crystals. The nails in the pine paneling squeaked as they moved in and out while the walls rocked in the storm. Outside, the sky was mold green and orange peels. There were bodies all over the ground.

Closest of all those smoking figures was Lea’s mother, August Redding. She lay flat, seemingly lifeless, though not truly lifeless. Her chest rose and fell as steady as the ocean tide, but small as a whimper.

Lea had screamed when her mother dropped onto the gravel path, as much for her mother as for herself. August left the safety of the trailer to help the neighbor two doors down. A bright rocket of lightning had toppled Scoot Pine in the moments preceding. The valley was alive with brilliant, hot white flashes that seemed to ignore the surrounding mountains and the ocean not a mile away.

It came as a certainty to the young Lea that the apocalypse was now upon them. The scene was not quite how Piper Amonte said it would be, though it did share the incredible, awing terror that he’d suggested. Lea watched the sky for horsemen.

The electricity danced upon the trailers, yurts, and tents. Bolt fingers jabbed victims and shelters as if squishing ants at a picnic. The clouds overhead swirled and swayed, never reaching a cyclone stage, but ominous all the same.

No horsemen here.

Not yet.

A bolt fired down and rocked the Redding trailer. Lucky yelped once before he half-rolled from under the sink. Eyes wide, jaws open, tongue dangling. The dog was neither aware nor unconscious. The static in the atmosphere tickled Lea’s bowl-cut into a wavy orbit over her skull. Knees tight to her chin, she leaned into the ratty old couch and closed her eyes. She did not see the bolt that shattered the window. But she heard it. The sound was incredible, and the impact was jarring. When it struck, that bolt melted the hairs on her head into nubs. She gave a partial blink before rolling from the couch to the floor.

—

Birdsong was the next sound Lea heard. Piper Amonte’s voice shouting about the sinners of the valley followed this. Before recognizing that lightning had struck her cold, or that the window of the trailer had disintegrated into dust, or that the dog was up and stumbling around the kitchen, she recognized that as a soul living in the valley, Piper’s sermon included her. Her mother as well. The others too, but they hardly mattered. Every single soul in the valley were sinners.

The door clanged against the coil spring. August rushed in. “Lea, baby girl!”

Lea recollected and reconciled. The girl clutched and pawed at her mother, began wet sobbing into the available shoulder. August consoled the child, rocking her on the threadbare carpet of their trailer.

Lucky laid a paw across the entwined thighs of his masters.

—

“The end is upon us. The Lord has sent His warning.” Piper stood at the pulpit at the front of the shed. The pulpit was an off-center rectangle of recycled wood recovered from the beach beyond the valley. The interior side featured two inches of spray foam insulation gone banana yellow with time. “The Lord has cut us off to save us, but we must accept Him and His designs with an open and ready heart. We must reject Satan!”

Lea rubbed her feet inside loose shoes. The itch was incredible. Around her, many others did likewise, some even took shoes off to scratch.

Doc Koehler suggested it was a symptom of the lightning strike. Despite the fact that the doc had no formal medical training, nobody disagreed with his summation. The itch was rampant. All had kissed a bolt of power.

“This morning, Thomas Brubaker travelled as far as the lip of the valley and he could go no further. The Lord has crumbled the path, has built a formidable obstacle, a test. We shall love Him and persevere!”

August scratched at her shin, unable to resist.

It wasn’t until later that night that Lea experienced an itchiness creeping higher in her legs.

—

“Beats me,” Doc Koehler said.

August, along with thirty-nine other residents of the Linus Valley commune—confirmed by examination—had swollen ankles, veins ballooning, hair falling out, and pores expanding. Symptoms to the knees and damned itchy all over.

“Lots of folks having that going on. More of the lightning trouble, I suspect. I have a case of it myself.” Doc Koehler scratched at his hip.

“What about this?” August spread her toes. The webbing had grown a half-inch past where it had been the morning prior.

Lea looked on in amazement as her mother revealed this oddity. “Lucky gots that too!” she said.

“He does?”

—

“Fool me once, oh fool me no more!” Piper was in the middle of a tirade denying what he’d proclaimed earlier an act of God. “This is the work of Satan, and we must rise up and walk on our own. Disown these deformities! Now cut!”

The citizens of the commune followed Piper Amonte into this land of promise and seclusion eight months earlier. They’d paid a flatbed water taxi to cart the trailers, yurts, and building supplies, and then the residents, until all arrived from the crowded island. It had been good and peaceful, everyone loved everyone, and that love spun the planet, lit the stars.

This was not love.

“I said cut!”

In the makeshift pews, the bare-footed parishioners wielding steak knives, jackknives, and box cutters began carving into the flesh of their feet. Blood leaked and pained groans abounded.

“Mom?” Lea looked to her mother and then beyond to Walter Breen who attempted to jerk away from his father as the man let blood from the child’s swollen ankles and carved into the extended webbing. “Mom, you ain’t gonna—?”

“No, never.” August tossed the knife she’d been instructed to bring, though never told why, into the dirt. “Come on, we’re leaving.”

They rose and Piper’s voice boomed, “Heathens in our midst!” His index finger pointed to the departing mother, daughter, and dog. The webbing between his fingers had begun to creep, tightening his digits. “Stop them. We’ll cut away the devil as the devil won’t cut away itself!”

The others weren’t ready to act against one of their own—not yet—and the Reddings ran to their trailer. Footfalls trailed them, many in number though slow in pace. After barricading the door and then the windows, through the cracks, mother, daughter, and dog peered at their friends and neighbors.

—

“Accept the Lord or you shall pay dearly,” Piper said.

“Leave us alone!” August rubbed her eyes as she shouted.

“You are death and sin. You are the only marked ones left.” Piper’s expression cast righteous certainty, Bible in hand, closed in his fist.

“Look at them, Mom,” Lea said.

In their underwear, undershirts, and bras, the citizens of the valley wore pink bandages over their denial of the changes brought on by the lightning.

“Don’t look no more, okay?” August petted Lea’s head.

A fat white candle sat on the floor in the middle of the patch of space typically designated as a living room. With no TV or radio, mother turned to the only books on hand to distract her daughter. Shirley Jackson was an outlier just as they’d become outliers.

The crowd outside remained through the first nine pages of We Have Always Lived in a Castle, read aloud. The crowd sang and made demands, even pleaded. When the light drizzle began pinging on the roof of the trailer, on the tops of their heads as well, the crowd dispersed for the night.

—

New wet; the valley had been dry, aside from short, underwhelming bursts for the better sum of three months. Church again met and held vigil outside the Redding trailer.

“God is rewarding our stand against Satan’s deformities, but it will not last. It cannot last, not while devils remain in our Garden of Eden.”

Familiar voices:

“Come on, it’s not a big deal, stops the itching.”

“If you have love in your hearts, you’ll come out.”

“August, don’t make us come in there.”

Lea turned to her mother, wide-eyed and terrified, not only of those outside, but of what had happened to Lucky, what she saw happening to her mother and herself as well. Swollen all over, skin greasy, body almost entirely hairless, pores gaping, digits fully webbed and pinching tight.

“Time for a new book,” August said. “Have I ever told you about Randle P. McMurphy?”

Lea shook her bald head. The singed and melted stubble had fallen away a little more every hour until it was all gone.

The crowd remained late into the night.

—

The rain grew heavier, and quickly, inches pooled. Tents and yurts were flooded. The shed, which acted as a church, was a mud pit.

“You’ve damned us!” Piper somehow looked more foreboding sopping wet.

There were nine torches in hands. Others held knives. Two had rifles.

“God will drown us unless we all, all rebel against these deformities! To doom yourself is to doom us all, now come out!”

The crowd was lively, angry, feeding on the negative energy.

Only one hundred pages in, August put down the Ken Kesey and took her deformed daughter under stiff and puffy arms. They cried together. Lucky squatted nearby, awaiting invitation.

“Come out or we’re coming in!” Piper said. After ten silent heartbeats, he commanded the torchbearers to, “Burn it down.”

Lea pushed back from her mother. August heard this and was set to burn.

“It’s okay, honey. Burning is the cleanser of the soul.” August rocked the child.

“But… No. Mom, please, no.”

The rain pounded in a torrential effort. Gasoline and used oil, black as tar, coated the trailer. Brilliant light filled the dim world and August held her daughter to her chest. Smoke and sea salt tickled at their noses.

“Mom, we gotta go!”

“Shh, shh. Amazing grace, how sweet the…”

Lucky voiced his disagreement, did not care to see his masters upset. He chose a side as Lea wriggled and fought against her mother’s hold. Lucky bit down on August’s ankle, silencing her song momentarily.

Lea fell backward. August hugged her arms over her chest and continued to sing to her faith. “T’was grace that taught my heart…”

Flames broke through the wall and voices outside caught onto the song, together they sang as the fire feasted. Lea maneuvered her hands under the carpet to the crawlspace hatch handle. The trailer began filling with smoke. Despite the heavy rain, the fire raged.

Open, path clear, Lea said to the dog, “Go. Out.” She coughed into her shoulder. The air was grey and stung in her chest. Once into the blackness beneath the trailer, she followed the dog to the edge, looking out through the foot of water to a wall of scarred and bandaged humanity.

Bursts and cracks, the fire ate the home she’d had since her mother took her from her father and joined the commune, though back then, the trailer was on the island. It was difficult to remember much before that. These people were the people of her world and they wanted to roast her alive.

“She burns! The devil in her burns!” Piper waved his arms and the crowd at the back of the trailer rounded to the front.

Lea saw her chance and scurried into the dark, rainy night.

—

August Redding’s remains were draped over piled crates, lifted above the ever-rising water. It made Lea sick. She stuck to the outskirts and the trees but crept close to listen.

They knew she hadn’t died. The continued rain was proof.

“What do you think?” she asked the dog who didn’t look much like a dog anymore. “Are we causing the rain with this?” She lifted an arm, it was sorer than ever before, the pores had hardened and, of course, webbing removed the gaps between her short fingers. The digits were tight together, soon they would be like a wooden doll’s hands. “Do we die like Mom?”

Lucky nudged her palm for a pet.

—

“Holes! We must find her!” Piper was enraged, tipping to lunatic. There were three boats. Lightning had struck holes in each vessel. The lumber they had was lost to a quick acting rot. “We find her, and we save all our souls!”

Lea cried as she watched the heavily bandaged hunting party. The water rose and it was an effort to remain submersed when the residents, turned posse, waded in her vicinity.

For three days, she hid and swam.

—

Lea and Lucky found sleeping atop the water had come easily once the feathers covered their skin, once their legs thinned and shortened, and once the soreness in their arms dissipated with the rearrangement of joints.

The first body to float by was Doc Koehler’s. He was pale and bloated in only his boxer shorts. The cotton was translucent, the black patch and the ugly pink nub that was his genitalia forced Lea to look away. Within an hour, twelve more bodies floated past her hiding spot, one was the blackened leftovers of August Redding.

There was pain in this, though not much.

Above, the rain finally ceased.

—

Piper clung to his pulpit. He was alive. The sun banked down on his shiny, exhausted face. Lea swam toward him, Lucky close behind.

He opened his eyes and his gaze suggested that he did not know her identity, nor that he thought humanity had ever resided somewhere about her frame.

Lea quickened and poked her beak into the man’s hand.

“Shoo,” Piper said.

Lea pecked again, harder.

“Shoo.”

Again, she pecked at his hand.

This time Piper Amonte lifted his arm to swing. Lea charged, flapping her wings and kicking her stalky legs. The leader of the dead commune slipped from the pulpit and dropped. He worked and jerked toward the surface. Both Lea and Lucky pounded him with beaks and skinny webbed feet.

Water ate his voice, drowned his last message. Bubbles rose, his eyes bulged. His corpse hung below the surf like a marionette.

—

Lea Redding swam about the flooded valley until the transformation concluded and she was no longer Lea Redding. The recognition of friendship remained between the former girl and the former dog as the two deep blue petrels with black faces and yellow beaks floated away from the valley commune, toward the ocean.

XX