Sludge continued to invade, flooding the theater and parking lot around it with ten feet of thick, lumpy glop that poured around. It gushed over counters and ticket booths, shoving the two vehicles against the glassless front doors and then out of them.
Angela and Marc flipped on their penlights to see the dim stairwell and bowed-in door below them.
"Is that mud?"
Marc shined his light on the bottom of the door, where thick, blackish silt was gushing under and he waved a hand, looking upward. "Yeah. A slide." He waved her up the steps. "That door's not gonna ho…."
CCrraack! Sswwwooosh!
The door gave way, buckling under the weight of the sopping mud that began to flow into the dark hall from a doorway. The soggy dirt was almost up to the ceiling, and pale worms the size of pencils squirmed all over each other and the debris, trying to rebury themselves. It horrified Angela. It was normal that the smallest and fastest breeding animals would begin to change first; snakes, rats, worms, but the sight was enough to wake that steel in her spine.
"Those are wrong. They shouldn't be that big," Angela stated with an odd tone to her voice, feet rooted to the spot as the desire to kill them flooded her. They were a future danger, an abomination. They needed to be handled.
"Not by us, Honey," Marc nudged her further up the steep, twisted stairs. "Keep going. It'll take a full day to go back that way."
She turned reluctantly, and they moved to the roof's exit door, but Marc pulled her back before she could step out, both of them listening for Dog in the light wind. "Wait. Check it out first. Always."
"Teach me how to do this."
He nodded, leaving his eyes on hers. She really would have made a good Marine, a strong fighter. "Stay no more than two feet away and step where I do. If I were to fall, you should come back here and start digging your way out with boards or whatever you can find."
Angela kept her head down at the thought of losing him, and her mind flew to her gifts. She'd do what she had to, no matter how forbidden it was.
"The whole hillside's gone."
They stood just outside the doorway, the rest of the roof cracked, crumbled, missing in places. The Show Me state gave them an awful view of missing homes, businesses, and roads that had been between the hill and the theater. Even the reeking turkey farm and rye field beside them was now a twenty foot high pile of uneven, treacherous mud and debris as far as they could see to the east. Small puffs of smoke and dust rose eerily in the early morning chill.