On a particularly cold night, the coldest yet, the fire wasn’t helping heat the small building, and both the girl and the woman were chattering their teeth and shivering violently in their bedrolls. The girl was so cold that she felt she might die. She had seen animals die that way many times. Small cats or squirrels lying on a sidewalk or under a ruined car; they look like they are sleeping, but they’re frozen solid, and they never wake from that sleep.
She was picturing herself blue and frozen stiff when she felt that another body was in the bedroll with her. She wanted to fight and run, but she was too cold, and so let herself be enveloped in the woman’s embrace. She too was cold, but where they touched it soon became warm, and as the cold melted slowly away, so too did the girl’s fear, and though she slept only fitfully, she was relieved in the morning when the sun came up and she was not frozen.
***
The next cold night, the girl went to the woman’s bedroll and placed herself into her arms, which held her gently while they slept.
Mother was moaning in her sleep again. Soon it would come to screams. The girl and her mother had been in this dank, cold cave for two years. Mother had refused at first to go back to where there were any houses, where there were crazies, but now, when they had seen no one else alive for three months and returning to the houses would be easy, she was unable to move on her own any more. The girl had to find food for the both of them, and for the last few days, mother couldn’t even feed herself, and even when fed could barely keep it in her mouth. The girl knew her mother was in pain, she’d been sick for months. She’d been trying desperately to tell the girl, but, just like everyone else, her words had been the first thing to go when she fell ill. That was the first symptom and no one was immune to it.
Some people she had met had simply lost their voices, and that’s where it stopped for them, but most people lost their minds soon after, or worse, some were bedridden with inconsolable pain, their bones trying to lengthen and shorten at the same time. Most died quickly from this malady, but some, like Mother, lived on in perpetual agony.
Mother had been screaming at night for a week when the girl finally understood what she needed to do. She walked over to a corner of the cave and grabbed a large rock from a pile of boulders. She took the rock over to her mother’s sleeping, screaming form and raised it above her head.
The woman looked up at the girl, wide-eyed and frightened. She wasn’t screaming. She wasn’t making any noise at all. She was scared, but still and patient and confused.
The girl snapped back to the present and lowered her arms, finding the steel pot in her hands. She dropped the horrible thing and ran horrified toward the door. She struggled with the latch, slicing her hand on the catch before flinging the door open and running from the building. Tears froze on her face as she ran down the street, away from the memories, away from her mother’s twisted, murdered corpse, just as she had done that night, years ago, searching for anyone, anything to comfort her, to tell her it was okay, knowing that no one would ever tell her anything again.
She found no one out in the cold. It had snowed again, and she was barefooted and slightly dressed, running and slipping through the street. Not running toward anything, but just running. When she reached the town wall, here sturdy and made mostly of bricks and steel, she finally stopped. She looked down at her feet and hands, pale and icy. She couldn’t move her fingers or toes, and the wound on her hand was icing over. Her breath was short. Then she was falling and the snowy gravel of the road against her face was her last sensation before blacking out.
***
The girl awoke in the armchair in front of the fire. Her hand was stinging and wrapped in a bloody cloth. Her feet were bandaged as well, and she could tell from the shape of the bandage that several toes were missing. This was more curious than frightening, and she reached out to touch the place where her smallest toe had been on her right foot.
Her hand was grabbed by the woman, unseen beside her, and the woman’s other hand waggled a finger. The girl saw that the medical bag was out again on the table nearby, surrounded by the small, shiny tools she had seen weeks ago on the street. The girl looked up at the woman, who smiled sadly back at her.
***
Spring always came. Even after a cold, long winter like that one, spring always came. When the days grew warmer again, the girl began to think about moving on from the town. She would spend the warmer months, as she always did, searching for her sister, although each year it felt less and less likely she could ever be found.
The girl was packing her important things back into her pack, getting ready to never come back to this store, to this town. As she was placing several unopened water bottles into her pack, she heard the motorcycle start up. She hadn’t heard the motorcycle in weeks, and figured that the woman had decided it was time to move on as well. It was a nice day, and there would be no more cold days until next winter.
The girl realized then that she would miss this town, not for the store, or even for the restaurant, but for the woman who lived here with her these past two months. She would miss the warm soup and the quiet company that the woman had brought, but she’d been on her own for four winters, and she could be alone again without trouble. Soon, she wouldn’t even miss it anymore.
After a few minutes, the motorcycle was still running, and it sounded like it was getting closer. The girl realized that the sound was coming from just outside the store. She grabbed her pack, having just finished loading it anyway, and said goodbye to the store with a pat of her hand against one wall. She went out the heavy backdoor, without bothering to close it behind her, and rounded the building to see the motorcycle.
The woman was sitting astride the bike, dressed the same as she was the day the girl had first seen her. Her helmet was dented, but shiny, and the black jacket and jeans looked comfortably worn in. The woman was holding herself in place with her feet, and when she saw the girl she lifted the visor of her helmet, and the girl could see in her eyes that she was grinning.
The girl looked the bike over and noticed something new. Hanging from the seat behind the woman was a shiny blue helmet, slightly smaller than the one she was wearing. The woman reached back and unhooked the helmet from the bike, holding it out to the girl.
The girl strode up to the offer, long since having lost her shyness or worry about the woman’s nature. She took the helmet and pulled it down over her ears without a second thought. Without really knowing how, she climbed onto the back of the bike and hugged the woman tightly. After some adjustments of their sitting positions, they were ready to go, and as they left the city, the girl hummed along to the words in her head, a song about two best friends exploring the ruins of a lost and forgotten world.
About the author:
CB Droege’s works have appeared in Breadcrumb Scabs, Abandoned Towers, Danse Macabre, and amphibi.us magazines, and he was recently awarded the R.M. Miller Award for Outstanding Fiction Writing. He is a staff writer for the online geek-culture magazine Icrontic, where he covers video game news and reviews.
Ghosts on the Lines
by Diane Arrelle
The cell phone rang.
Brittany did not move off the raft. She looked to where the phone sat and gingerly paddled across the green water, trying not to get more than her fingertips wet.
Avoiding the water as much as possible, she slid off the raft and grabbed the phone. There was silence, then hissing, and finally a lifeless computer-generated voice saying, “Good-Day, we are taking a survey—”
Brittany flipped the phone shut and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the dirty towel on the lounge chair. She stared at the blue sky and knew that the thunderstorms would be rolling in soon, just like they did every afternoon. Her science teacher had explained last spring that the sudden climate changes that made New Jersey much like the tropics were a direct result of global warming and greenhouse gases. She so wanted to find him now and see how he’d wheedle out of being so wrong, but she was
pretty sure he was dead, or a ghost.
She looked back at the pool and wondered if she should ask her dad on his next foraging raid to look for some chemicals to turn the water clear again. She figured chlorine should be plentiful since the ghosts probably didn’t use pools.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Brittany frowned; she hadn’t really been done working on her tan, not that she got a good one this late in October. Tears burned her eyes. There were so many things she missed, and she admitted to missing just about everything, including, to her total surprise, even school. All the tanning and nail salons sitting ready but totally empty. The spas, the multiplexes, the fast food restaurants, the mall! The mall was probably a war zone. And all her friends, all so far away, only reachable over lines haunted by ghosts of a dying world. How long, she wondered, would the phones continue to ring with calls from dead computer-generated voices selling a world that no longer existed?
The afternoon storm wind began to build as clouds darkened the sky. The sickly green water darkened; she picked up her towel and headed inside when the cell rang again. She grabbed it, hesitated, looked to see who was calling, but all calls now read “out-of-area”, so she flipped it open.
“Hi, Brit!”
A smile crossed her face, and it felt stiff and unnatural. Smiles were getting more and more rare. “Hi, I was sure it was another automated call. Thank God it’s you, Nikki.”
“Getting your tan?”
“Yeah, you too?”
“Who’d have thought we’d be spending the first two months of the school year sunning like it’s still summer? If the trees were alive, they’d have turned colors. Oh well, having the world end so slowly does have its upside.”
Brittany grimaced at the idea that this was really the end, although she was almost sure it was. How could those awful people do this to the world? First the climate, then the plague. Didn’t they know it was their world too?
God, she missed everyone, especially Nikki. If only she could see her, but Nikki lived in that high rise building three miles toward Philly. Three miles—three hundred miles—what did it matter now? “Have you heard from Kaitlyn? She hasn’t called in over a week. Maybe her cell broke.”
“No, and I haven’t heard from Kelly or Shawn either. Brit, I think they’re gone,” Nikki said with a catch in her voice. “Even if their cells were broken, the land lines still work. I reached Tiffany a while ago. She told me her parents are gone, went out for supplies and either became ghosts or died.”
A ghost; Mom had become a ghost, one of the first, so they hadn’t sent her away. The tears fell; a shudder shook her from head to foot like a giant, unpleasant rush and she tried to blank out the vision. Brittany still had nightmares from it, and sometimes started throwing up if she remembered it in living color. “I wonder how Dad deals,” she mumbled, then remembered she’d been talking to Nikki about Tiffany. “Oh that’s awful. What will she do for food and stuff?”
“Here’s the really awful part, worse then being left totally alone. That old guy in the next condo came over and made her come live with him, at least, he said, until they find out if she’s really alone.”
“Yeww...that’s, like, totally disgusting.”
“No, wait, it gets even worse. He said if she’s an orphan, he’ll marry her and take care of her forever. Tiff says he licks his lips when he looks at her. Man, that guy’s so old he’ll be dead any day now. He’s got to be at least forty! Maybe she’ll be lucky and, like, he’ll become ED or something.”
Brittany thought about all the people left in her walled development and sighed. A few single women; no one from her high school, no one even from her middle school. Most of the houses were empty because anyone who looked the least bit pale was put out immediately. “At least someone’s there for her. Remember what happened to Mitch, Jess, and Becky? Soon as their mom and dad started to turn, the neighbors threw both of them off the roof of the apartment house. And they made them watch.”
“Really? I hadn’t heard that, how do you know?”
“Rachel told me before she…oh anyway…she said that the people in the building took all their supplies and tossed all three kids out onto the street. Mitch and Jess and Becky called everyone for help, but no one could convince their parents to let them into their enclave. After a day or so, no one ever heard from them again.”
“Man, it’s, like, getting really bad. I wonder how many enclaves are left,” Nikki said, the fear traveling between their cells. “I wonder if we are all going to turn into ghosts.”
“I don’t know, I just want life to return to normal. I want a giant sweet sixteen party next summer, I want all our friends back, I want to hang out at the mall, I want a date, I want my mom!” Brittany started bawling. “I...I gotta go.”
Her tears fell and the storm raged outside, but it didn’t matter. Brittany knew that within the hour it would be gone and the summerlike heat would return. She turned on the T.V. and watched a few infomercials. She pretty much knew them all by heart, just like the cycling and recycling music on the radio, and the haunting phone calls selling to a public that didn’t exist. If the ghosts didn’t crave the light so much, everything would have shut down months ago.
Dad and Mr. Eggers next door had talked one afternoon about how the ghosts kept the power grid up because they needed the light so much. Mr. Eggers claimed the ghosts congregated in the stadiums with the nightlights on, that they couldn’t survive in the dark. Dad had said he was full off shit. Mr. Eggers also told everyone in the enclave that the ghosts skinned people and wore them to cover up their insides. Brittany smiled at the memory of Dad punching Mr. Eggers for saying that. Dad was still sensitive about Mom.
Mr. Eggers stormed out and on the next foraging raid, disappeared. Everyone said the ghosts probably got him. No one said it, but that was probably too bad for the ghosts.
The house phone rang and Brittany picked it up. “Need your carpets clea—”
She slammed the receiver down and looked around the kitchen. The same and yet so different. Nothing was really clean; clear, fresh water had become a scarce commodity after the first few months.
Brittany saw the calendar and stared at the date, Mischief Night! God, how she always loved Mischief Night! She dialed her cell and heard Nikki pick up. “Hey, it’s October 30th. Wanna go to the mall and hang out?”
Nikki laughed. “Yeah, I do. I really do. Oh Brit, what’s the point of all this? We are all just waiting to become ghosts and die. Why’d those terrorists do this to the world? Didn’t they realize they were killing everyone?”
Brittany didn’t say anything right away, but finally found words. “I wish things were normal again...I wish I could see you again. I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to live like this!”
“Me either,” Nikki said and started to cry. They spent the next few minutes sobbing out all the frustrations of living through the end of the world as they knew it.
Finally, Brittany said, “Maybe I can go with Dad, they are going out foraging as soon as it gets good and dark. Maybe you can get out and we could pick you up at least for a couple of days. I miss you so much!”
Nikki’s voice perked up. “Ya think so?” Then she dropped down to a hopeless tone. “Mom and Dad would never allow it. They’d be afraid you’re all ghosts trying to entice me out so you can wear my skin.”
“You’ve heard that story too?” Brittany asked, remembering Mr. Eggers’ words.
“Yeah, someone here actually saw a skinned body and a ghost wearing the skin, dripping blood as it walked in the sunlight.”
“That’s disgusting!”
“So’s having your skin fade away, melt off a few cells at a time until you’re clear and your guts just pulse, shine, and glow in the light while they’re still inside of you!”
Brittany gasped and choked back a sob. The memory couldn’t be stopped this time. Mom—pretty, olive-skinned, black-haired Mom—turning white, and then whiter, and finally transparent as her skin dissolved,
layer by layer, until it disappeared completely and her insides splattered on the floor as she died. And through it all, she didn’t die right away. Her parts twitched and jerked until they finally stopped, and her eyes, still attached to her skull, glazed over.
Brittany saw the whole thing, and since then, often watched her dad for signs of fading. She worked on her tan every day making sure she wouldn’t fade, ever. She wondered every night as she drifted off to sleep how anyone could have purposely created such an awful disease and she hoped that they were still alive to watch everyone they loved fade away and splash out their life onto a dirty floor.
She caught her breath, then let it out, long and slow. “I’m okay, Nikki.”
“I’m sorry,” Nikki said. “Look, I have an idea. I don’t want to live like this anymore.”
“Don’t talk that way!”
“No, I’m serious. It’s Mischief Night, and I’m going to call everyone I know and tell them I’ll be at the mall, just like every year, and that they should join us. If enough of us show up, the ghosts will stay away.”
2013: The Aftermath Page 23