Rule: Forget your history. Your purpose is in your trigger finger.
I’m running on full, beaten instinct now. Hard earned in years and burning flesh.
The butcher’s shop is rotting and almost totally devoid of light. Broken tubes of florescent along the ceiling. Sprigs of crumbling herbs, rosemary and sage, hang from the ceiling by lengths of butcher’s twine. They add a soft accent of the desert to the wide, wet smell of rot. And that rot is thick as cement in the air, clogging my lungs and throat. I regret my choice, but I don’t stop. I scan.
Rule: Sweep your corners. Sweep the room. Know your blinds.
Blinds: The shadow behind the glass counter. The space through the open doorway at the back of the shop. To somewhere dark. Maybe more blinds mixed with the unidentifiable sludge piles of rotting, gray-green meat in the broken display case. I take my flashlight off my belt and move quick. Leading with my .45. Sweeping my blind spots as I come to them. I breathe through my mouth, but I can taste old death. The sour edge at the end of every story.
The door behind the counter leads to a small kitchen. A butcher’s block stained a deep maroon. A steel sink. Knives lined up, stuck to a strip of magnet on the wall. Several missing.
I scan. The sweeping beam of my flashlight lighting everything in brief, curved seconds. Blinds: Everywhere. Small, open doorway. An office? Other side of the table. Inside the open locker. My destination. Blinds. Every shadow I turn my back on.
The locker hums soft and electric. Still running. A tattered scrap of luck.
It’s dark, light creeping at my back from the front of the shop and the street. I point my torch at the locker and start moving toward it.
I hear a dry shuffle of movement. Amplified by the com buds. Skin and cloth rubbing quick. Someone choking on words through a seizing throat. I spin toward it, toward the office, shifting backward at the same time. My beam hits a shuddering human form, sudden like the appearance of a wild deer on an empty country road.
He’s got a slight, teenage body and a patchy growth of facial hair. Late teens, early twenties. His skin is bright red and shines with fever sweat in the flashlight. He holds a breaking knife, a twelve inch, slightly curved grin of steel, loose at his side and something dark coats it. He speaks rapid and breathy and stuttering his f’s. As if trying to memorize a speech.
“It’s not my f-ault. Fault. Not mine. I just, wanted to live. My f-ault?”
Late stage two.
Something in the way the kid stands, shoulders hunched and all his bones jangling under his skin, makes me think of my first girlfriend. Her strawberry lip balm. And the simple lives we’ve all left behind.
“It’s nobody’s fault,” I say. Though for whose benefit, I don’t know.
“It’s somebody’s f-ault. Mine? Mine!” He screams without moving the rest of his body, mouth so wide I expect it to pop out of its hinges. The smell of rot is everywhere, and the air is cool and has a settled feeling. I’m sweating anyway.
Rule: Don’t waste. No loud noises. Usually, hiding is better than fighting.
“I’ve got a .45 tacked to your forehead. Ready to freeze all your thoughts and take away your dreams. If that’s what you want, keep shouting.”
Some stage twos can still understand. The rabid scribbles of our words. Mangled chalk drawings on the air. And the words hurt in the newly burned skin of my face.
His body twitches in place as if it’s missing something. For a moment, I’m reminded so powerfully of the past, it freezes me.
And he’s faster than I expect. The sudden arc of his falling butcher’s knife. The sweeping sound of cut air. The blade, silver in my light. A shooting star in a void. Suddenly, I feel the urge to reach out and catch it, like the stars I watched as a child. Empty hands up to a black sky.
I jump back. Not fast enough. The blade grazes my hand. A deep graze. The flashlight clatters to the ground like mad laughter. Its jumping light bouncing off stainless steel and old meat. I lunge in and grab his knife-holding wrist with my bleeding hand. He’s surprisingly strong, gnashing his teeth, wild and painfully near my face. In the semi-illumination of reflected light, I try to angle the gun in my free hand. The cut doesn’t hurt yet, but I know that void of space without pain can never last.
We stumble backward. Clumsy dancers we humans are.
“Do you want to die?” I half-whisper, half-yell. But he just keeps ripping up the air with his teeth.
I feel the solid thud of a wall through my back. Enough leverage to push. I push him hard. He stumbles back. I raise my foot and kick. Feel the young spring of his solar plexus. He collapses backward and falls into the beam of the flashlight. His baby brown eyes are wide and confused. Questioning.
But I’ve got no answer for any of this. None but one.
The shot is loud, too loud. The Ice Cube blasts a chunk of his forehead open and backward, above his right eye. And the rapid decompression of liquid cool freezes his ruin of splintered bone and tangled, fleshy neurons. A hole gaping at the world. And the world gaping back.
I hear a moaning, and a sudden whoosh of air from the street. A sound I know. The lure must have died by now, and, as I feared, the stage four heard the shot. My rising temperature. It can see the hot core of my still beating heart through the walls. The stubborn human part of me that refuses to die.
I jerk into gear. My hand starts to sing. A bloody, familiar song. I holster the gun and scoop the flashlight off the ground. No time to worry over blinds. No time to worry about corners. I step into the meat locker and grab the door just as a crashing, flickering boom explodes in the front of the shop. And I smell things burning. Burning meat mixing with the odor of rot everywhere. I slam the door shut.
I’m surround by the jerky humming of the locker’s motor, the darkness of its burned out lights, and its hanging slabs of petrified, dried out beef that, in the shadows, look like mangled bodies. Slim racks of flesh covered in a gray mold like moss or scruffy body hair. Just about Samantha’s size.
Not yet.
I push thoughts of her down again.
For the smallest part of a second I can feel, I let myself breathe. Then I’m moving again. I transfer the flashlight to my teeth, rubber grip clicking in my bite, and draw my ice lady. My .45. Fighting the smell, which is everywhere like the looming pressure of an ocean on my lungs, I gag and fight it down. Eyes watering from the effort. I try to think of other smells. I slide forward through the hanging racks and empty hooks. I move careful. My roaming eye. Blinds everywhere. A thousand crooked corners of cast shadow. And light from my teeth. Through the door at my back, I hear a muted, wet cracking. Like something breaking new bones in its teeth.
Rule: Remain calm.
The sound is probably the stage four ripping into the still warmth of the new dead I left behind. Not far enough along in the stages to be useless to the four as fuel for whatever mystic fusion keeps it burning. Jumping hydrogen, and the dance of softly splitting atoms. The hyper-slow fission of a new universe born with a dead heart from the old skin of a person.
I reach the back wall. I turn around and slide down till I’m sitting. Half my burned face pulses in dull time with my slowing heart. A blinking light. My hand sings, hard and high. I’m facing the door now. I sweep my head. Take a last scan of the room. Hanging shadows. Empty corners. Shelves half stocked with random cuts and slabs of animal. Everything sunken and spoiled by the new, inescapable heat of the world. These shadows, misshapen and only familiar through the squinting corners of my eyes, are all that’s left of the childhood of the world. And the hidden places where all of us were born.
I’m alone. The world’s hollow and filled with spoiled food.
I take the light out of my teeth and set it down. The cold around me is growing deeper. Blowing in from a fan on the wall.
Rule: It’s best to be alone. Easier.
In the solid dark, I put down
my lady and pull a tin of Vaporub out of a pocket. Dab it under my nose. Old cop trick, a Sergeant told me once. He had one dead eye and he drank flat water and vodka at room temperature. He’d been a detective, back in the dream of his real life. Before the end of the world. Then, like the rest of us, he became some form of monster hunter. Some form of insomniac. Some form of wild man who had no dreams he could remember.
The menthol fumes on my lip overwhelm the stinking dead. Sweet and eye watering. A kind of artificial mint. Cutting deep into my mind. I put the tin away and take out a knife. With some difficulty, I cut off a sleeve and wrap my hand. Tight as I can with my teeth. The pain sends bolts through my bones and into my head. But I’ve left it open too long as it is. Anything violent could crawl up into my blood.
There’s a million ways to die.
I use the flashlight to check the dressing. It’s covered, at least. I shut the light off. The dark is comforting, and it makes it easier to keep my mind from spilling out through the cracks in my skull.
I’m settling now. The sound of my breathing echoes. Maybe only in my head. Through the door, I hear small movements. Too soft to know.
It might see me. Feel me like an itch in its eye. It might not. It’s cool now, in here, and the hanging meat might help obscure its vision.
Either way, I’m not letting it have my mind. Early on, on a beach along the East coast, when we were still using iron bullets with exploding copper coats, I watched a stage four melt a man. Skin like a collapsing star. And a fluid embrace like a hard sea. It looked as if the ten-foot stage four was crushing the man in a bear hug. The way a father might embrace an injured child. The four cast dirty flickers of light over the mellow flats of sand dunes. We hadn’t quite worked out Ice Packs then, stage fours were something new. Rumors in a time when everyone was mad and no one could trust the sun.
We emptied our useless lead into them both. And the heat made our eyes water and turned all our skin red. The screams died quick in the impossibly wide night. The man, a private, like me, whose name I didn’t know, was limp. His skin and muscles unraveling and flowing through the four’s long, thin arms. And its dislocated, toothless mouth. Biting him even as the skin dissolved in the heat of its jaw.
Not me.
I hold the gun loose in my good hand.
Rule: Just in case.
And I let myself drift on my small pains. The only things in the world I know are mine alone.
I am from a city like this one. As anonymous and American as a thousand places settled at the edges of other places. Main street strip of pawn shops and liquor stores, and ten thousand tangled bus routes like knotted hair. These towns all have soft, plain names that read like the names of graveyards. Citizens’ Grove. South Haven. Lock Meadow. Outer suburbs packed dirty with outer people.
Like me.
Before the end, twenty-year-old me would drive my ancient F150 down the open verse of the highway and into farm country. Pull over and walk into the huge fields of dry wheat, get high, and fall asleep. Daring the thresher and the broad warmth of the sun. Watch the tails of wheat wave as if dancing to some slow song I believed I too could hear.
At night, Mom watched me with heavy brown eyes.
“What have you been up to?” And she’d regret asking as soon as the words left her lips. I could see it. Taste it in her baked potatoes and uneven cuts of overcooked beef.
“Nothing.”
Dad would make up rules on the fly and recite them like military code.
“Rule: No job, no more truck.” Then he’d smile, earnest in a way I never was and never will be. “I know you can do this. Rule: It’s okay to be scared.”
He had a face like mine, but softer and better looking. Clear eyed and no real scars.
I’d nod vacantly at him, and later, I’d connect the battery wires and starter wires in the truck so I could go buy my kid brother and his friends beer with my fake ID.
I took for granted my eternal youth. The endless time bursting my pockets. The broad sky was mine. And the road.
When the news of the end, of a final kind of mortality, started to come, it came quick. Suddenly, a burning crowd. A field of moaning dead.
We watched the news as a family. A clumsy fear we refused to name necessitating our touch. Cities burning and spreading fever. Dangerous hospitals, centers of carnage. A heat wave emanating from our bodies.
Mom got sick. And Dad. And kid brother was bleeding from his eyes. And one night, I woke to screaming. I grabbed the brick I used as a paper weight from my desk. Flirting with the grit of a harder life.
I stumbled into blue midnight. The hallway. Kid brother—Danial. Can’t you even say his name?—was waiting for me. Trapped in the hall’s shadows like a wild animal in a net. Thrashing. An open pocket knife, two-and-a-half inch blade, in one hand.
My first scar.
He was spitting gibberish. Repeating himself. Early stage two. Later, I’d learn all the names and all the symptoms. In the hall, in the childhood of the world, I thought he was having a seizure. Back then, I still believed in the story of our fate. The world in our hands. The certainty of my inheritance as a ruler of the universe. And the screaming was my father. Fractured voice and dry throat. Somewhere beyond the standing seizure of my kid brother. In a dark that was mine to enter.
“Brother get me high. High. Hey. It’s cool. Cool. Cool brother. Cool world. Oh, cool world.”
He laughed like the jangling mad, and I told him to relax. When I touched his forehead, he shifted and buried his little knife in my shoulder, a solid piece of the timeless night.
And instinct drove the brick into his head. And my arm, the smooth mechanism of the only true fate in the world.
Chaos.
And a road of dreamless nights to here.
In the almost dark, I could see his broken skull. Deeply dented by the corner of the brick and jagged edges sticking out wet. The body attached to it as still as the lifeless moon. My first kill.
In one, blank motion, I tore the short knife out of my arm. And dropped it. Gritting my teeth hard enough to crack.
Mom was chewing on Dad. And Dad was almost done screaming. Through their open curtains, I could see a distant fire lighting the horizon. Something terrible waking in the broken, western sky. Where the sun disappeared. And the light distorted their bent forms further, until they looked twisted and inhuman. She didn’t notice me come up behind her, bare feet soft on the carpet. I broke her spine where it showed. Soft mounds at the base of her neck. With the brick. I pulled her off the bed. She was the limp heavy of the dead I didn’t yet know. Dad was spitting blood bubbles. And his eyes were everywhere. Then they were on me.
“Rule: Survive no matter what you have to do.”
And there was something in his voice, suddenly hard and heat wave clear, that I recognized. Something in it was like the stone promise lodged in my chest. The self-assured promise of my own importance that I could no longer believe in. That was crumbling with each new, heated breath.
A dream I was just about to wake from.
“Sure, Dad. I will.”
Then his breath, jerky and short, stopped. And something was gone in the night. But I thought, delirious and cold, that he might come back, even though his neck and shoulder was a mess of open flesh. So I turned him over and broke in the back of his skull with the brick. Like a thick egg breaking. And the dull and human sound.
I buried the brick in the backyard. The sun was still deep under the horizon, but a kind of dawn was all around me. The wild light of something burning.
I buried it deep.
Later, at an evac’ hospital, an Army doctor told me congratulations. I had type one resistance. Less than five percent of the population had T1R. For me, infection required intimate contact.
“Intimate?”
The doctor had hunting owl eyes, scavenger eyes of a survivor,
and a sloped, protruding lip, like a beak. A night animal. Like me. He tapped his wrist with a pen.
“Blood n’ blood.”
Even a bite might not be enough to bring me in line with this new, atomic fate. Where all lives are short and bright as super novas in the perfect void.
The world’s a blotchy mess. Always has been. Mix of dreams and broken glass pebbles of truth. I’m drifting through the useless past. The lack of light is so complete I could be dreaming one of my empty dreams. It’s very cold now, and it has blunted the smell down to a stiff mold.
The pain’s pretty bad. The blood in my dressing has gone stiff and the hand is numb. I wonder what my ruined face looks like, but I don’t touch it. The sensation of cool air over my cheek tells me enough. It’s soft and painful, like it’s stroking my ruined skin. A lover or a mother.
“Oh, cool world,” I mutter into the nothingness. Chuckling lightly. Which sends cracks of pain through the skin around my mouth.
The air on my face is like a woman’s fingers. Small. Warm. Familiar. Exactly like fingers.
My eyes crack open. I fumble the flashlight.
“Samantha?”
My voice is dry in the air. How long was I drifting? The beam lights a section of the dark ultra white and sterile. Hanging meat, gray and green with mold. I sweep corners. The light’s shaking in my hands.
Rule: Time to get up.
I stand. All my bones grind against each other like frozen gears. That, and the slow choking of the walk-in blower, are the only sounds in the world.
I take my lady in my right hand. Gently, I hold the flashlight in my left. Try to shake the past out of my head.
When I open the sealed door, a wave of warm rot hits me like sudden consciousness. The scent of burned hair and scorched human oils mixes with the now-familiar scent of spoiled neglect. I vomit, hot and cutting in my throat. Sharp and quick. I try to keep my eyes open and forward. And they water profusely. A kind of empty crying.
It passes and I spit. Try to focus on the smell of menthol wafting from my upper lip.
It’s dark. Through the doorway leading into the shop, I see the brilliant, jagged reds of polluted, ashen aired sunset.