…love.
Forgive me if I sound a little forlorn or pathetic. It’s just that reliving this shit gives me the blues.
I ain’t looking for sympathy, folks, merely understanding.
You see, if you push a man so far from himself, he loses sight of his original spirit, two things can happen: he’ll snap and leave your sorry ass for pastures new or, if he’s of less strong-willed stock, he’ll succumb and give himself over completely. And that, dear people, is exactly what I did.
I’d long since packed in my job at Hershel’s and had found myself (at Kate’s request) a desk job working in life-insurance. Kate felt that working in a bar would put me in far too close vicinity to the grasping claws of temptation and was adamant that it was time I grew up, took on a real job, and traded my long hair and flares for a flea-bitten sixty dollar suit and a crew cut. With no fight left in me to speak of, I went along with her demands. I feel like a weak-minded sonofabitch saying it now, but I had no sense of myself by that time.
Thinking on it now, the one thing to which I hadn’t succumbed was her love of the Lord. Shit, man, I’d never been any kind of believer anyway, and by the time she’s reduced me to rubble, I saw the fucker as the enemy. How strange to have an enemy that you don’t even believe exists…
He’d taken my Kate into his warm embrace and mangled her head into unfathomable new shapes that, so help my shameful soul, made me pine for the drug-addled rape victim of old.
Anyone who’s been in this sort of situation and escaped will tell you the same thing, be they male or female, they all understand that ‘love’ can be a by-word for dependence and weakness. Insecurity and doubt stealthily replace passion and lust, and all those memories of when you first met this person who you adamantly believed was your soul-mate while flowers fucking bloomed in your heart…well, that’s all nothing more than dust and ash, friends.
Christ, I’m depressing myself reliving this shit. God only knows how you guys are feeling. I set out to tell a tale of the strangest day of my life, and it’s become a goddamn confessional. I’m starting to think I should have left you to your assumptions about my character and got down to the nitty-gritty…
So, with that being said, and my wounds being freshly fucking opened, let me tell you how the world ended.
***
We’d been awoken by the sound of sirens at around 4am.
Far in the distance at first, and in small numbers, the urban symphony soon became a cacophony. They were drawing ever closer. I was sat up in our bed in seconds. Kate just laid there, eyes open and a look of numb Buddha-calm on her face. At first, I assumed there had been some sort of accident. Perhaps the steel mill over on Brook Avenue had caught fire, or some drunken fuckhead’s car had veered off the road with fatal aplomb. My thoughts on the matter soon changed and my anxiety soon mounted, in tandem, with the ever-increasing sonic swell of chaos coming from outside.
At first it was only the sirens.
Then came the sound of howling – agonized, desperate, and tortured.
I finally got to standing on legs that felt like lead, and slowly, numbly, made my way to the window that overlooked our backyard. The loudest wails were sounding from that direction. The curtains were still drawn, and I don’t mind admitting it took every ounce of my willpower and courage to pull those fuckers back. Taking a deep breath and steeling my nerves for what I may see outside, I pulled on the thin, hanging fabric that stood between normalcy and the seeming chaos beyond.
Animal lovers beware.
Here is what I saw.
I’m not sure why it was only the dogs that let their horror be known in those early moments. Perhaps it was because they had been roaming the streets all evening while their masters slept, and whatever came to end the world came on the night-time breeze, reaching them first.
Perhaps it was merely that their howling was louder than whatever else was going on out there, yet howl they did. It sounded like every dog from Lassie to Cujo was getting in on the action.
Some of them out there were perhaps howling in animalistic compassion for their canine kin.
Most though, were howling because they were on fire.
On Old Man Joe’s lawn (a frequent drinking buddy in the days when I still had drinking buddies), what I can only assume was his beloved dog, Sally, was a writhing mass of flame and smoke. I could make out two legs, feebly kicking at the uncaring skies for endless seconds before her hell-sent release.
Across from Joe’s place, the next garden over, a man was rolling on the ground tussling with what looked like the king of the Rottweiler kingdom as it went for his throat, lashing out in its panic and in its pain. The fucking thing looked like a goddam burning meteor with teeth. I watched in horror as my neighbor (or whoever the hell he was, I mostly kept myself to myself since my bitch of a bride cut my balls off) lost his desperate fight against the flaming beast. The burning mound of mutt tore out his jugular in a geyser of blood, and as the man’s screams turned to liquid acquiescence, the poor, crazy, four-legged fucker succumbed to the flames that licked away at its flesh, joining him in death.
The two of them, man and beast, lay side by side. The torrent of blood that flooded from his ruined throat was almost enough to put out the flames that poured from the hound.
Almost.
To the rear of our garage, just to the side of where Kate’s car rested in mechanical slumber (even amidst the lunacy I was witnessing out there, the sight of the ‘Jesus Saves’ banner that emblazoned her rear window made my dick shrivel), a little Jack Russell was stupidly running in circles chasing after its own tail. In my stupor, I vaguely hoped the little fella never caught up with the damn thing. After all, its tail was lit up like a fucking Fourth of July sparkler and he’d be in for a mouthful of red-hot awful should he succeed in getting his fangs into it. I saw what was left of a cat sizzling atop our picnic table, and yet another one, alive and well and not in the least bit char-grilled, sat close to its cooking kitty buddy, licking its balls like it hadn’t a care in the world.
“Yeah, um, Kate?” I muttered, “I think…I think someone’s setting dogs on fire out there. And a cat. Just the one cat, though,” I added, like the fuckwit I am. It was all I could muster by way of describing the scene to my still near catatonic wife. Her response, much like our sex life, was dead on arrival.
I turned my back on my lovely wife, who remained wrapped under the duvet and under the spell of her constantly corroding mind, and surveyed the scene once more, though my attention never held long enough to learn the fate of that little pooch who’d been chasing his tail.
The night was suddenly filled with a new sound…
I’m not the best man to describe how it sounded, but if the hell that my darling wife was thought I’d be attending when I died had a soundtrack, it would sound a whole lot like this. It was a symphony of agony, a concerto of pain. Prolonged wailing and screeching that scared me in some deep, primal way I’d never known or cared to know existed. It was the sound of death and dying, torment and anguish. A tidal wave of hurt that seemed to be push in on the walls of our unhappy home to revoke our safety forever.
And it was human.
There was no mistaking it - people were dying out there, on our very own streets. And, from the sounds of it, in every damn street in San Quentin. And these were no tame and tepid horror movie screams spat forth from the lungs of Hollywood dollies. No…these were soul-freezing testaments to untold tortures being endured.
Finally, my wife sat up. I don’t know how long I stood there by that rear window, frozen in shock and horror at what I was hearing, but it felt like both a million years and a single moment. Time took a back seat to gut-level terror, and in the few moments when the wailing died down to near silence, it was all the more horrifying.
In those silences, I could hear the humanity behind the hurt.
Somewhere out there a man was screaming a woman’s name in a voice that had long since passed hysteria and hurtled into the land
of the mad. His daughter? His wife? Who the hell knows. There were countless maniacal treaties for mercy sent forth to the almighty, and the almighty was clearly off-hours.
At one point, I even heard laughter.
Somehow that was more chilling than the screams.
Worst, by far, was the sound of the children.
I’ve always had an issue with crying babies. Something paternal in me comes to the surface when I hear an infant cry out. It never fails to break my heart, and it sure didn’t fail to break it on this dark, terrible night. Bad enough that I could discern at least four screaming infants nearby, but the images my mind was forcing upon me were taking me from the brink of terror to outright blind panic.
Where were the parents?
What the fuck was going on?
I turned to Kate to find that she had frozen in place. There was no expression on my wife’s face. None. I’d figured that perhaps her usual pious demeanor would be well and truly extinguished, giving way to the more humane side of her than had been known to occasionally surface in recent years, but she may as well have been made of stone. Her eyes were a double-zero, her lips were drawn tight, and she was unmoving.
Shock…it had to be shock.
I was just about to reach for my wife when the smell hit me.
Fresh waves of terror coursed through my veins. The once relaxing scent of lavender and thyme that filled our sleeping quarters was mingling with an alien smell, creating an odor so pungent it made my stomach roil. I recognized that intrusive smell though. Hell, if I didn’t! Normally, it would have been a smell that would put a smile on any red-blooded American man’s face, but in this moment, it promised of horrors unimaginable.
It was the unmistakable, sickeningly familiar smell of cooking meat.
My mind tried its hardest to take in the scale of what was going on out there, but a sort of dull, shell-shocked idiocy was beginning to take hold of me. I made my way from the window where I stood to the adjacent one that looked out onto our front yard and the street beyond.
Once again, near shitting myself, I pulled aside the curtains.
The scale, it transpired, was pretty fucking huge.
Many of the houses were ablaze from top to bottom, rooftops were collapsing in on themselves, and there were people in many of the windows, screaming in either panic or pain as the flames tore through their properties and eventually through their flesh. Lawns were ablaze, garden sheds burned and the trees that lined our humble corner of the world were little more than towering blackened infernos.
My mind reeled.
What I was seeing out there looked like Armageddon, and Bruce Willis was nowhere to be found. Maybe he was drinking with the Almighty, because that fucker still hadn’t shown face either.
I witnessed death and destruction everywhere my eyes landed, man. It was hell.
I saw a kid’s tree-house that had become a bonfire with the poor kid still in it. I’d watched that little guy whoop and holler with joy when his dad had built the thing for him last spring, now I could see his blackened, charred hand grasping at thin air from the tiny window his father had so lovingly crafted. I thought my heart would shut down as I watched that one small, crackling arm drop for the last time as the boy was eaten by immolation. The only respite was the ending of the screams. Those screams were almost as bad as those of the infant’s I’d heard earlier.
Speaking of infants, directly across from my once happy home, I saw a sight that will stay with me till the day I die (which may not be very long, all things withstanding).
The house across the way was the home of the Dawson’s, a family respected and loved by most of our community, Christian and non-Christian alike. Mr. Dawson was a stand-up guy, and never passed the chance to smile your way or to offer his help in any way should he see you struggling with your car or cutting wood. Mrs. Dawson was, forgive me here, the cougar to end all cougars. A damn fine specimen of womanhood have I ever seen one. They’d just recently celebrated the birth of their first-born child, an absolutely beautiful baby girl called ‘Patricia’, and they’d never seemed so happy as when she came into their lives. Mr. Dawson walked taller and prouder, and seemed to have aged in reverse since little Patty joined the gang, and his wife had lost none of her luminance post-labor. In fact, she looked even more radiant.
Right then, though, there was no sign of Mr. Dawson with his open grin and kind blue eyes. Right then, directly across the street, and mirroring my own second-floor bedroom, staring straight into my eyes with silent pleading and unhinged despair, there was only his wife.
And little Patty, innocent and unaware in her terrified mother’s arms.
The window was obviously locked my neighbor struggled desperately to open it, and there were flames inching ever closer to them from the entrance to their room.
There was no exit and less time.
As I watched, numb with misery, I saw Mrs. Dawson scream something from behind the glass that encaged her and her child, I couldn’t hear a word, but I got the idea.
She was praying, or begging, or both.
Mrs. Dawson raised that beautiful little six-month-old bouncing baby over her head and threw her straight at the window.
I looked away just in time to avoid seeing little Patty’s end.
But I heard the glass smash.
I heard little Patty’s confused and helpless cries.
I heard the wet impact as her tiny precious body hit the driveway and suffered the awful silence that followed.
It was then that I blacked out.
***
When I finally came to, I had no idea what the fuck was going on.
I still lay where I’d fallen, and a pool of dried blood had matted my hair to the bedroom rug. Slowly lifting my head from the sticky mess, I gazed around the room, hovering in some nether-dimension between shock and concussion. The floor seemed miles below me in my dizzying, vertiginous state. With the blood and all, the carpet was in a pretty bad way, and on any other morning I’d already be worrying about Kate’s reaction (or overreaction) to such a calamity, but today, of course, was different.
A tell-tale blood-splash on the sill of the window pointed to the reason for the agonizing headache and the red mess on the carpet. I’d fainted, fallen. But why had I fallen?
I stood there staring at the blood-spill for only a few seconds before the screaming pain in my head slowly began to make way for coherent thought. My vision returned to full clarity, and along with it, God help me, came memory.
That poor woman. Oh Jesus…the baby.
I frantically reached for the curtains and with my heart threatening to burst from my chest I opened them once more, my eyes squinting in the new morning sunlight. Please let it be concussion. Flashback. Anything. Don’t let it be real.
The street was quiet. But the sight of that poor broken infant betrayed the truth.
I quickly turned away from the hideous scene below and took in the morning’s tale. It was clear from the smoldering, smoking wasteland out there that what had transpired was over, at least for now, but the devastation was everywhere. Small pockets of fire still burned throughout the district, and a number of huge blazes lit up the grey morning far off to the north. A could still hear the distant cries of the dying and but there was a chilling absence of the sort of sounds that such a massive tragedy would surely come hand in hand with.
Where are all the fucking helicopters? Where’s FEMA, for Christ sakes!?
I scanned the skies, and they were free of all flying things, mechanical or otherwise, save a few carrion crows that were no doubt scavenging for meats and treats of the sort I didn’t want to think about. There was no longer a wall of sirens tearing up the city, only a deathly graveyard emptiness that somehow seemed louder and more deafening that a whole goddam platoon of choppers ever could. It was as though whatever had swept through the city had vanished just as quickly as it had come, and with an equal measure of finality.
The world beyond my window felt dead.
I was broken from my reverie by the sound of our television downstairs and, in that moment, I realized Kate was no longer in bed. Thanks for the fucking help, Kate, I thought, as I dragged my wretched self to the bedroom door, opened it, and made for the staircase.
When I arrived in the kitchen, I found my dear, sweet wife sat before our 32-inch widescreen, munching on a slice of half-burnt toast, and grinning.
Yeah...grinning.
She looked like she’d just won the fucking lottery, like all those ecstasy pills from her past had re-blown her all at the one time in concentrated moment of sheer, blissful abandon.
Like the fucking city hadn’t just burned down before our very eyes.
Like right outside our front door there wasn’t the fresh corpse of a little baby splashed across the tarmac.
She looked elated. Elevated. Enraptured.
The droning voice emanating from the TV started to take hold of my attention.
I wish it hadn’t.
She was watching a news channel. I’m didn’t recognize the channel’s name as I never watch that depressing bullshit.
Today would be an exception.
I felt justified in that.
Onscreen was a live report, coming in from New Jersey. A handsome, well-groomed black guy who was visibly battling to maintain his composure against some internal protest of his obvious fear, stood before a massive building, perhaps a bank or a library. Who the fuck knows? What matters is that the thing was torched.
“At around 5am, Eastern Time, the United States and the world met with devastating tragedy. An as-yet-unexplained phenomena appears to have simultaneously affected the entire world, decimating entire populations in its wake.…human, animal and aviary alike. Whatever this phenomenon is, it’s causing mass numbers of individuals to…and this is backed up by hard factual and incidental evidence…spontaneously combust”.
I stared, slack-jawed at the fucker as my mind turned in on itself.
Consumed- The Complete Works Page 8