by Rob Heinze
“Robert?”
He looked up at his wife.
“Yeah?”
“Can you go to the pharmacy and get me the morning after pill?”
No, he wasn’t ready for it at all.
###
On the streets of Bay Isle, cars that had been abandoned were re-entered and driven home. Traffic lights, which had flashed their dumb, robotic cycle gratefully found humans to obey them. Children who had been abandoned rushed with frantic fever to their parents as the front doors opened. Infants left crying in the crib felt the comforting presence of their mom or dad, and within time their crying ceased. Showers across Bay Isle sprang awake. The water pressure across the Island became erratic, then so low that, hours later, the backup water-tower had to be activated to compensate for the break in pressure. The tide slowly crept up the beach with its ever-reaching fingers, washing away the foot-prints and excretions that foretold of the events that morning. By early afternoon, the north bridge had been barricaded off by the Guard, who had come through the temporary barricades. They were fortunate that all the residents and vacationers on Bay Isle were just coming alert from The Swarm, and none of them had thought to flee. With the strange images on the news, it had been easy to keep people from trying to enter Bay Isle: they were all too scared. Now the island was fully secure. The single docking point near the south bridge, which also rented jet-skis and boats, was also secured. Long hours were spent studying the layout of the island to make sure they weren’t missing crucial docking points. It was, of course, an island, so access could typically be gained from any spot on the three-mile beach. Patrols went up and down it on foot, and patrols in watercrafts went up and down the ocean, inlet and bay.
Until the effects surrounding The Swarm could be understood, the island would remain secure.
This was an Executive Order from the President.
###
A middle-aged man, who staggered home in a haze after The Swarm, got inside, wrote a suicide note, and shot himself with a hunting rifle. The note, which he put in an envelope and mailed to the police department marked “URGENT”, read:
My name is Teddy Green. I live at 2310 Brown Street. I am HIV Positive. I don’t know how many people I infected during The Swarm. I am sorry. God forgive me.
Teddy had contracted HIV from a prostitute in Las Vegas, while on a business trip. His wife had then divorced him and taken his kids with him. She had fortunately never been infected, though there were nights when Teddy still sobbed from the guilt of how he might have killed her.
His head-less body was found two days later by Bay Isle City Police Department.
###
Reagan knew that something bad was coming to Earth. All the signs portended of it. In his mind, there was no doubt: 9/11, financial collapse, mortgage deficiencies, wars, overpopulation and no work for the growing people. Though he only managed the local convenience store, Reagan could fall into a mental fury over things about which he was passionate. One of those things happened to be the End of the World, and how to survive.
He had a small house out on the north side of the island, close to the bridge. He faced the bay and in summer months mosquitoes the size of bats came off the water like demons emerging from embryonic fluid, drawing baseball-sized welts on your legs and arms. It was a small house with no basement because of the high water-table, but there was an attic. Except the only way to get to it was in a closet in his master bedroom. His brother, who was a carpenter, had helped him build the stairs up. No building permits were taken and no one knew it existed save for Reagan, his brother, and Reagan’s wife and son.
In that attic space, he had started to horde food, clothes and other goods. He often shopped at the 24-hour Wal-Mart across the north bridge, often doing so covertly in the late night hours when his neighbors slept. After all, should Armageddon descend and humanity be in hunger, they would come to him first…if they knew he had food. But they didn’t know. He also stock-piled guns: hand-guns, rifles, automatics. These he bought in other States, driving them nervously back into the anti-gun State of NJ. Who the fuck was the damn State to tell him he couldn’t carry or own a gun? Where would all those suit-wearing, loud-talking politicians be when darkness descended and the demon Flagg searched among the ruins? In their house with their guns, goddamn them!
Reagan read feverishly about the end of the world and watched any and all history shows about Nostradamus, the Mayans, and Revelations. He had read several fiction books, during the reading of which he envisioned how he might behave. His favorites were The Stand, On The Beach, The Road. He followed blogs created by other survivalists, posting occasionally his thoughts and advice on how to survive. He had memorized the short and powerful poem, Second Coming, which was to Reagan the ultimate Armageddon verse.
He was prepared. He had relished the first blood that had come onto his hands. He believed that his new duty would be to kill survivors, to conserve resources, and to hide the secret space and stash in his attic.
He got home shortly after killing Angelica Rodriquez, to find his three year old son alone on the couch. A finger was in his right nostril and he was watching cartoons. He seemed unaware or without fear that he was alone in the house.
“Where’s mommy?” Reagan had asked.
“She left.”
“Where’d she go?”
“I don’t know, daddy. Up the street.”
Up the street? Reagan thought. Dear God, she couldn’t have been a part of the swarming…
And there was no reason why he hadn’t thought of it before. He had just assumed that since he was not affected, she too would have been freed. He had been chosen, and so she should have been chosen too.
But she had been a part of it, part of the poisoning…
There was a new puzzle piece. What did it mean? The cleansing. The cleansing had begun, he had started it—had killed the mass-producing spic—so it had to continue, right?
He sat numb on the couch. His mind had a million thoughts, which seemed in danger of breaking his sanity. There was a reason, a reason for his wife’s involvement in The Swarm…but what was it? He knew that his little boy here was the only son, would be their only son, and the reason for that was because his sperm count had dropped. They had been lucky to get the boy at all. That was the reason for only one child—
It came to him then, the way many things did: by willful extrapolation and thought-molding.
“Hark, the Lord Saeth to Him, grow thy Seed.”
“What, daddy?”
He ignored the question and stood. The answer, like a cold drop of rain, had struck him in the forehead and was now seeping into his core by osmosis. He went to the front door. He opened it, and stood sentinel gazing down the street.
In the close distance, she was coming home. It had all been coding into their lives. A line from Second Coming occurred to him: what Rough Beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bay Isle to be borne?
But Yeats was wrong, all wrong. The “Rough Beast” will not be the antichrist: it will be the true Second Coming, the birth of Christ, and it shall pull the gyre back together, stabilizing the center, and the ceremony of innocence shall be renewed.
“I will be Joseph,” he said to no one. “And she will be Mary, the Holy Mother.”
His wife had reached their home, and she came to him. She looked drawn, tired, and scared. Reagan felt all the renewing, renovating love for her steal through his blood like bats escaping from the captivity of a closed cave. In the sunny day, Reagan began to cry and walked down the path to her. She was mute, blind, confused and scared, for in her womb there had begun the gestation of God. He hugged her, squeezing, and her arms hung limp at her side. Reagan knew he would cut his arm off to feed her of his flesh, only so she would be sated. He looked into her tight, long face and the sand grits pressed into her sweaty pores. She looked more the Mary than he could have imagined—though he had never, in all his dreams and visions of survival, imagined that fate would twist
in this direction.
“I’ll carry you,” he said, picking her up in a cradle.
She let him, not arguing, and inside she saw her little boy and cried. The first family had been reunited, and Reagan would protect it at all costs.
Chapter 6
The Chief left his house shortly after his wife’s request for the emergency contraception. Later, he would be very glad that she had thought of it; he certainly had not. The island had only one pharmacy, a Rite Aid, which had been fortunate to open on account of the blue-hairs adamantly refusing chain stores on the island (this despite the small mom and pop pharmacy going out of business ten years back). It was around 9:45 PM on the night of The Swarm when he pulled into the Rite Aid parking lot and went inside. The store was deserted, indicating to the Chief that—like him—no one had thought about the emergency contraception. Inside he didn’t see any employees, so he shrugged and went to the birth control aisle. He saw the Pharmacist, Carol, standing there and looking absently at the shelves.
“Hello, Carol,” he said.
She startled and turned around to see his kind face. “Chief, you scared me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m…I’m just here for my wife. She was part of The Swarm.”
“Oh? Me too.”
There was something terrible in her face that the Chief couldn’t place.
She said: “You better give her this.”
She had reached to a steel rod pegged onto a board and pulled off a box. She handed it to the Chief, who took it gratefully. It was labeled Plan B.
“Thanks,” he said.
She shrugged and her face, which reminded the Chief of a sand-castle just ready to crumble, looked blankly at the Chief.
“How effective is this?” He asked.
“About 75%,” she said. “Not great.”
There was little emotion on her face. She was talking robotically. Her mind had slipped back into the deep part of her brain, where her complex thoughts worked.
“Are you okay, Carol?”
She smiled. “I am. But do you know how many people are on the island?”
The Chief guessed low and said, “I don’t know…maybe 9,000?”
“Probably half of them women?” Carol ventured.
“Maybe less,” the Chief said, “Considering children.”
“Okay, so 3,000 women?”
The Chief nodded. He had no clue what the point of this exercise was, and later he would think how strange it was that the little details—which carried huge importance—could so easily be overlooked. Carol pointed back to the shelf. The Chief looked at it. There were three boxes of Plan B left, and two other brands (including a Rite Aid Generic) hanging there. In total, the Chief counted eleven boxes of the morning-after—or emergency contraception—pill. He should have easily understood what Carol was getting at, but he was bone-tired and weary: his thoughts had been trapped in a smoky room with no ventilation since the start of The Swarm. In hindsight, he could barely remember all the things he had done during it, trying to secure the island and its people.
“Do you see yet?” Carol had asked him.
He shook his head.
“There are only 11 boxes left,” Carol said.
It was starting to register with him. “What about in stock? In the back?”
“I have ten boxes of each brand. 30 total. Plus 11. 41. We have enough for only 41 people.”
“Jesus Christ,” the Chief murmured.
Carol shook her head. “We’re not going to be able to help everyone.”
“Carol, did you take some for…for your daughter?”
“Oh, she’s only 12. No menstrual cycle yet. Besides, she wasn’t part of it.”
“What did you say?”
“She wasn’t part of The Swarm,” Carol repeated.
“She’s not had her period yet?”
“Nope,” Carol said. “I’ve talked to her about it, told her not to panic when it happened and that it was normal, meant she was ready for babies physically…” Here Carol laughed “…but I told her mentally, and financially, she wouldn’t be ready for many, many more years.”
“I had a vasectomy,” the Chief mumbled.
“Excuse me?”
“My wife told me I had a vasectomy. I wasn’t part of The Swarm.”
The Chief paused and looked at the boxes hanging on the shelf in front of him. He saw the connection with The Swarm, as his wife had suggested, but wasn’t sure how it worked together…and not knowing the cause of The Swarm made it more difficult to understand.
“Carol, you’re a science person, what connection is here? Your daughter…without her period…and me, with no path for sperm…what’s the connection?”
“No fertility.”
“I get that,” the Chief said. “But why? Why should that matter?”
“I stopped believing in God once I got into college, Chief. Do you know what I believe?”
The Chief shrugged.
“I believe that somewhere there is a code—like a computer code—that has already been written. My husband’s a programmer, always talking about it with him, and he’s the one who gave me the idea first. There is a code that has been running since the Big Bang, a tremendous number of variables, and each decision produces another outcome, each action a reaction, get it? And so when this Swarm event had been programming into the cycling code, and when the code had been written, the Programmer had decided that people had to be really fertile so that the variable of conception would most likely hold the Boolean value of true.”
“What does that mean? What’s a Boolean value?”
“It means that The Swarm was meant to produce babies.”
The Chief let that settle into his mind. It was meant to produce babies, fine, great: but why, and for whom?
“We need to survey the town, find out who wasn’t a part of it,” he had said, half to himself.
Carol never paid much attention to the high turnaround rate of pregnancy tests in the pharmacy (why should she have?), or of the fertility monitors she had to constantly reorder over the past couple years, or that the tampons and pads seemed to all sell out at the same time every month. She had restocked those items a lot, hadn’t she? It would only occur to her as the superstitious fear began to plague Bay Isle and her idea of some Great Programmer, who had written the Universe’s Code then left it to run without fixing the bugs, would be reinforced.
“What about the EC Kits? What do we do about that?”
The Chief looked at her, forgetting what they had been initially talking about. “What’s that?”
“These,” she said, pointing to the 11 boxes. “Emergency Contraception Kits. 41 kits will hardly put a dent in 3,000 raped and scared women.”
The Chief started to sweat, and his head hurt. He wanted to go home, lie down, and sleep for a long time.
“Can you call your corporate office? Order more?”
“I tried. Manufacturer said 3 days for delivery.”
“How long are these effective for? I mean, when do they need to be used by?”
“72 hours after birth-control failure.”
“Three days.”
A statement, not a question.
Carol nodded.
“Three days.”
“We’re going to have a serious problem,” he said, and for the first time he was really pissed at the old geezers who hadn’t allowed more pharmacies on the island. He looked to Carol, whose pale white face looked ghostly. “Has anyone come yet, besides me?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s occurring to them yet.”
The Chief thanked God his wife’s beautifully sharp mind had thought about it. “Okay, can you help me?”
“Anyway I can.”
“Can you call every pharmacy within fifty miles and ask them to bring their supplies of these kits to the north bridge entrance?”
“Okay,” she said. “What if they say no?”
“Tell them it’s an order of the federal government. Besides, w
ith all the media showing The Swarm, I don’t think they’ll say no.”
In fact, the Chief had a small hope that somewhere the manufacturers of these products had seen the news and had started to ramp up production, knowing it would be needed or seeing a spike in profit. But the window of opportunity had already shrunken; only two days remained. He couldn’t think beyond that—beyond what would happen if there weren’t enough kits. He knew that in the morning the single Rite Aid on the island would be attacked by desperate, scared and angry people.
“I have to get this home to my wife,” he said.
“Okay, good luck.”
“I’m sure you can imagine you’ll have a lot of people coming down tomorrow looking for these things.”
“Yes.”
“I would suggest that you put what you have outside and lock the doors, perhaps even put a sign up and go home.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll have to account for them in the inventory this month, and my time.”
“Carol, I don’t think that will matter in a month…at least not to you.”
With that he left the store and took the Plan-B kit back to his wife, who had been part of The Swarm, and in the warm night he prayed that the extra kits came soon.
###
As he had promised himself, Quentin had begun to drink immediately upon arriving home. It took him fifteen minutes to get a nice buzz, and then he went into the shower and scrubbed himself. He kept thinking about that growth of ass hair and the single red pimple (boil, it was a boil) on the buttock of his co-worker, Yvonne Ryan. Quentin had participated in sexual acts with his mob-pal’s strippers that were far more perverse than what he had unconsciously done on the beach.
Yet he felt as if he might never be clean.
He spent most of the day after The Swarm in a drunken haze, falling asleep on the couch sometime in the early even, and awaking in confusion to his empty house, in full dark, with only the wavering TV to fight the shadows. He was still drunk, a little dizzy, and the colors of his house—of this room—was off.