“YOU are the first line of defense!”) hung a portrait of the President, who always looked like a smirking dimwit in Stan’s opinion. Pale blue paint on the walls, piles of paper on the desk. Smiling faces shone from gilded picture frames standing amid the drifts of bureaucracy. Next to the dark computer monitor sat a black office phone.
He rushed inside and snatched up the receiver. No dial tone. He couldn’t bring himself to think of it as dead. Without thinking, he tapped the switch a few times, then tried to dial 9, thinking that maybe it would give him an outside line.
As soon as he pressed the button his right index finger broke off at the first joint.
He felt no pain, none at all, so at first his mind couldn’t register what had just happened. When his hand went too far forward, he thought for a moment that maybe the phone had collapsed. Then it finally clicked, and looking down he saw the tip of his right index finger broken clean off and disintegrated all over the desktop into a scatter of coarse brown dust.
He held his hand up in front of his face, shocked. Looking at the stump of his finger he saw that the tip was gummy with blood, but not gushing like it should have been. As he watched, the blood dried, crumbled, and tumbled down his palm, as the rest of his finger started to darken.
And then finally, in his mind, everything came together.
The piles of dust covering the clothes in the hallways and outside. The surgical pins lying among the security guard’s clothes outside, also in a pile of dust. The piles of dust in the seats of the crashed helicopter. The radiation coming from the artifact in the garage.
“Oh no,” the old man moaned. “Oh no, no no!”
He dropped the phone and staggered backwards out of the office. The holster with the gun in it fell unnoticed to the floor. To hell with this place. He had drunk his fill of water, now he would take his chances in the desert.
He scrambled back to the door through which he had entered this building. When he pushed on the door to open it the first two fingers of his right hand broke off and shattered on the floor, as if they were made of dried clay. Dust drifted from the holes where his fingers had been.
He thought of his ex-wife. She had been thirty years younger than him and still he had cheated on her with half a dozen women. She had divorced him, taken half his money and was now living with her twenty-year-old lover in San Diego. If he survived this he would go to her and beg for forgiveness.
He staggered into the blinding sunlight. In his panic he had left his makeshift parasol behind. Forget it. He ran to the open gate.
A cramp seized his stomach. He felt his gorge rise and he staggered to a halt, seizing his middle. But what came out was not vomit but great hot cloud of dust, which drifted away in a hazy brown cloud.
If I survive this I will find Stan Jr. again and tell the world he’s my son and that I love him!
He managed to find his feet and ran with a panicked old man’s hobbling stride through the gate. He stopped, whirling in panic, and when he saw the cloud of smoke from his plane rising in the distance, he saw next to it a smaller, lighter cloud rising as well. A cloud of dust, but this was the kind that would rise from behind a moving vehicle. One that was coming towards him.
He shouted, “Here! I’m here!” And then he doubled over, coughing out great brown clouds of dust. Dust clogged his vision. It was pouring from his eyes instead of tears.
He managed to run two steps towards the vehicle in the distance, and then his legs broke off at the knees and he fell to the ground. His legs had already disintegrated by the time he pulled himself back up. Dust poured from his stumps. As he clawed at the ground in his attempts to crawl forward, his right arm broke off at the elbow and turned to dust.
“Help me!” Stan screamed. “Please help m—“
His lower jaw broke off and landed with a plop on the ground in front of him. For an instant he saw his own tongue squirming like a worm between his lower teeth, the white gleam of his jawbone, and then it too withered to dust and was scattered by the wind.
His last thought was of his son. Stannie, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!
And then a dust devil rose up out of the desert, a whirlwind such as the one that had visited Job. It came upon him in a whoosh, and he was gone. The four winds took the dust of his remains and scattered his clothes.
The engine of the approaching car died long before reaching the abandoned base. The men inside saw the white buildings in the distance and thought perhaps their missing boss had taken shelter inside of them. They got out and walked on to investigate, leaving behind their footprints in the drifting dust, which lay everywhere like sands around the decaying statue of an ancient king.
The End
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If you enjoyed this story, you may also enjoy the stories of my collection, Strange Times, as well as my novels The Blackwater Flood, Peculiar, MO and The Storms of Eternity.
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