by J. M. Clark
Dwight smacked the shower tiles next to his leg and cursed. Fuck this place. He thought about the constant idea always looming at the surface of his mind. That the government had done all of this to them. He just knew they’d somehow made everyone sick for their own purposes, and he was going to find out why.
Dwight’s father had been a full-blown aluminum-foil-cap-wearing conspiracy theorist who believed every video he watched on YouTube. Always watching conspiracy videos on the living room computer that was donated to them by a well-off cousin to help his mother find a job. Infowars was his favorite website to get his information.
Unlike a lot of the people who had forgotten most of their old lives, Dwight remembered his prior life more vividly every day. It was the only thing that kept him going in this place. Of course, he could put on the good-boy mask when need be, but the truth was he hated the Palace and everyone inside of it. His father would watch and often quote this fat idiot from the website who was always screaming until his face turned red. Dwight’s mom had hated the screaming fat idiot. FEMA camps, underground bunkers, and vaccinations meant to wipe out the entire planet were common ideas expressed in Dwight’s household. Turns out you were right, Dad. Another drop of water thumped his forehead, sending trickles down his face.
After a few more minutes, he stood up in the shower and walked out of the bathroom, over to his perfectly made bed. He sat down on the side of it, wiping the water off his face with the back of his sleeve. He didn’t want the camera in the television to pick up on what he was doing. They were tricky in this place. He lay back on the bed with his feet still flat on the floor and put his hands behind his head.
It’s time I break out of this place. He was already thirty years old, or something close to it. There seemed to be no days, weeks, or months in this monotonous place, so it was hard to keep track. They were all just waiting for something to happen—something that might never happen for some. He’d never be on the teacher’s-pet list to get into the Greater Understanding Program. He saw the way everyone looked at him, like he was crazy or something.
Dwight turned his head to the left to look at the television, expecting to find the “Please Wait” message on the screen. Only this time it didn’t say “Please Wait.” It was time for Sirus to say the prayer and eat supper with everyone. Dwight knew better though. He was betting that on the other end somewhere, there was a room of teachers watching him, watching them all.
He was going to have to find a way to get his hands on one of those protective suits the supplies teachers wore when they came in from outside of the safe radius. It couldn’t be too hard to beat up one of those guys and get his suit. Then he could leave. Dwight had no idea what he’d do once he was away from this place, but anything was better than being here, learning the same shit over and over. He’d have to plan before he could make a move, but it was a necessary action he needed to take. He would soon be driven inane by these walls, the pods, the stupid courtyard. He had to go.
Dwight popped up from the bed and made his way to the door of his pod. He touched the knob, then paused. He walked over to the television and touched the screen with a finger. Looking directly into the screen, he stuck his long dirty tongue out. “Fuck…you,” he said to the screen. No need to play nice anymore, he thought as he walked out of his pod, slamming the door behind him. Enough was enough.
Chapter Twenty-One
Nicholas
Nicholas Johnson sat on the white couch that mirrored the same exact couch of every pod in the Palace. A silver tray of breakfast sat on the table before him. A banana, apple, pancakes, and sausage. Same thing he ate every morning. Not because there weren’t other options, but because it was the last breakfast Wendy had made for him the day before he lost her. Before he lost everyone. Everything is fine…just fine. That’s what he’d been telling himself for the last twenty years. More mornings than not, his mind went back to that day twenty years ago.
They had eaten breakfast before taking their twelve-year-old daughter, Stephanie, to get a sports physical for basketball season. They had also stopped at a sporting goods store to buy her some new basketball shoes. Stephanie had conned him into getting her the new Michael Jordan shoes by promising she would rake up all the new leaves in the front yard. The deal was made, and they shook on it.
Nicholas peeled his breakfast banana, and the beginnings of a smile appeared on the left corner of his lips. He’d been doing a lot of reminiscing about the past lately, and it made him feel excited about his future plans.
Wendy had made pork ribs in the oven that night along with his favorite sides: string beans and macaroni and cheese. She knew he liked his mac and cheese the way his mother made it for him, in the oven with melted cheese on the top. She was amazing like that, and she had never missed out on a moment to show him exactly how much she loved him, and that made him love her that much more. After dinner, Stephanie went upstairs to watch a movie in her room and get some sleep. Wendy cleaned up the kitchen and living room while he went upstairs to their room to find a movie for them to watch before hopping in the shower. He had been careful not to use up all the warm water. Wendy would bite his entire head off if he did that.
This thought brought a full smile to his face as he bit into the banana and washed it down with a cup of coffee. In these times, all you had were your memories. And the memories you chose to remember had everything to do with how you regarded the past. This morning he would choose to remember them in the best of lights. That last day they had together felt as normal as any other day: mundane errands and the taken-for-granted times when he should have asked for another hug, an extra kiss from Wendy. Or maybe told Stephanie how proud of her he was. Hindsight had the vision of a powerful telescope though, and it worked to the advantage of no one.
He and Wendy had taken a shower together that night. And after, when they were both smelling fresh and clean and lying on the soft sheets, they had sex. Not just the normal routine sex they had twice a week. They had amazing sex, with the same passion that they had for each other as seventeen-year-olds over twenty years before that night. He brought Wendy to an orgasm three times, even had to put a hand over her mouth to stop the loud moans from disturbing their daughter. When they had finished, Wendy collapsed on his chest, legs still shaking while she struggled to catch her breath. That wasn’t the end though. She then got up and used a warm washcloth to clean the sex from their bodies. She even went back downstairs to make Nicholas a bowl of ice-cream for dessert.
The thought of that last night with Wendy excited Nicholas even today, but there was no time for that. Masturbation was not allowed in the Palace anyway, so he hadn’t done it in years. Instead he grabbed a sausage link and placed it in the middle of a pancake, then curved the pancake around the sausage, poured syrup over the makeshift corndog, and took half of it into his mouth at once. He and his daughter Stephanie always ate their pancakes like that. It was their thing.
Nicholas had sex once more with his wife that night, and then they fell asleep watching a movie. In the middle of the night, Nicholas woke up to use the bathroom. On his way back to the bed, he heard Stephanie in her room coughing up a storm. An hour later, Wendy woke him up with the burning touch of her skin. Her leg grazed his in the middle of the night, and he remembered it being so hot that it scared him. Not long after that, the coughing began, along with the running back and forth to the toilet to spit up what sounded like huge amounts of mucus. Then came the constant vomiting.
From 3:00 a.m. until 11:00 a.m. that morning, he had tried to help the two most important people in his life. Running ice to one room, a bucket to the other room, all the while calling nine-one-one as he checked on his wife and child. The phone line was busy all night. There was no help for them, and he would later find out there was no hope for anyone. His night was a carbon copy of millions of nights for millions of people. The few who lived through the sickness would suffer the memories of it all. Nicholas didn’t count himself as lucky. Lucky would have been dyin
g in bed with his wife.
What the united governments of the world have done is amazing. I’ve told the teachers and anyone who would listen as much, Nicholas thought as he ate the remainder of his pancakes and sausage. He then drank the rest of the coffee.
After they both had stopped breathing that day, Nicholas ran out of the house, finally breaking down to his knees in the front yard. It was one of the most beautiful days he had ever seen, so bright, perfect weather, and yet there had not been a soul in sight. No one to help him. He went to both neighbors’ houses. The cars were parked out front, but there were no answers when he knocked on the doors. He pounded and screamed at the top of his lungs for someone, but no one came. It was as if the entire neighborhood vanished.
He had gone back to his own home and sat on the porch steps, trying to call the police, the ambulance, the attorney general—hell, anyone that would answer. After ten minutes of non-stop calls with no answer, he pulled up the news apps on his phone.
Nicholas had spent the next hour sobbing and reading about how the world was literally ending. His own world had already ended when he couldn’t save his wife and child. He knew there would be no cavalry, at least not one that would come to save lives. The orders from the president of the United States were to get to a hospital, government building, or the closest sporting arena.
At 3:00 p.m. that day, Nicholas accepted the fact that at age twenty-seven, his life was over. He stripped his wife naked and washed her body clean, like she had done for him hours ago after sex. Crying like an infant the whole time, hardly able to contain himself, he had cleaned his wife and daughter. They deserved that. After stripping the comforter and dirty sheets off his marriage bed, he laid both bodies on the clean mattress, kissed them both on the forehead, and left the bedroom. But not before getting the 9 mm pistol from beneath his side of the mattress. Nicholas went into the living room and sat on the couch, cried a bit more, then inserted the gun into his mouth. He closed his eyes, and then it happened.
He heard a vehicle on the street. The big white van…
* * *
In the last twenty years, Nicholas had done his best to work through what happened to him, to his family, to the world. He had been successful at accepting what was to come, and he had lived a decent life since the events that took place back then…when the world was different. Some kinds of hurt would never go away though. It wasn’t even a matter of getting over it; he was over it. He didn’t cry about Wendy or Stephanie anymore. But he was tired of living without them, and for him, that was enough to do now what he should have done on the couch of his family’s home twenty years ago.
Nicholas abruptly grabbed the knife meant to spread butter on his pancakes and plunged it into the right side of his throat. It didn’t go in so deep that it came out the other side of his neck, but it was in deep enough. Blood squirted out of the puncture like a water sprinkler, pumping from his neck, covering his shirt and the white couch in blood.
Nicholas did not cry out for help; he didn’t cry at all. There would be no help for him, just like there had been none for his loved ones. He grabbed the arm of the couch to steady himself as his legs bucked out like an angry bull. They were involuntary movements from the trauma and pain, but in his brain, he was as calm as a sleeping child. It was time, and he wanted nothing more than to be with his girls again. So much blood came spurting from the right side of his throat that his entire shirt and jeans were now red, and half of the couch looked the same. As the pain began to subside and his heartrate slowed down, he laid down on the couch and let death take him off to wherever it was that death took men. Today he didn’t care where that was, as long as it was out of here. Hopefully he would end up back in the arms of Wendy and Stephanie. That would be just amazing.
* * *
The room was now quiet. There were no sounds of any kind. Nicholas Johnson decided to check out of the Palace suites early. He laid there with his left hand dangling off the couch, both legs curled beneath him, and a smile on his face. No one could be happier to be dead. The television watched, “Please Wait” plastered across the screen, as usual. Two teachers later walked into the pod and closed the door behind them. They carried Nicholas into the bathroom and washed his body clean. Disinfected and replaced the now crimson furniture. His items were removed from the pod, and the room was prepared for someone new. No one saw or heard from Nicholas again, and no excuse was given. The only authority of the land owed excuses to no one.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jacob
Jacob laid in bed with beads of sweat peppering his face. He’d been tossing and turning, fluffing and re-fluffing the pillows, kicking the sheets off, then grabbing them for comfort a second later. The dreams were back. These particular dreams had become a regular thing for Jacob, to the point that he tried to stay up as late as possible to avoid sleep.
Ordering coffee all day and night, drinking and thinking until he crashed in the a.m., the dark circles under his eyes had become heavier and more pronounced. He looked as though he had an iron deficiency, and the late nights caused him to lose focus in the waking hours of the day. Last week he’d missed out on an exercise activity in the gym with some friends (excitement here was few and far between) because he forgot the time. The dreams came in spurts. For a few months he had them on a nightly basis, and then for the next month or two, there would be nothing; he’d just sleep through the night and dream of nothing at all. These weren’t nightmares or anything that would scare a normal man or even a child for that matter, they were just dreams. For him though, he would prefer nightmares about vampires, swamp monsters, or falling into a bottomless hole. He would prefer that over the memories of his life...before.
As much as he tried to fight it, Jacob felt himself drifting off.
While driving home from the Little League Championship after a big win, Jacob and his family stopped at McDonald’s to get something to eat. His friend Logan, who was also the team’s umpire, rode in the back seat with Jacob. Logan was a bit bigger than Jacob even though he was a few months younger. His honey-mustard blond hair was cut short into a buzz cut. Logan’s father was in the navy, and they both kept their hair that way. His small pig nose and beady eyes made him look angrier than he actually was. Logan was a sweetheart and had been Jacob’s best friend up until the end of his life.
The smiles on their faces were seemingly laminated on. Their cheeks were humming with pain from smiling, but they couldn’t stop. They examined each other’s trophies as if they were different, switching them back and forth.
“Let me see yours!”
“Wow, this is so awesome.”
Jacob’s father, Mathew, watched them through the rearview mirror, and Jacob could see himself through his father’s eyes. He could feel what his father felt. Mathew enjoyed watching them in their element, in their childlike, carefree state that all adults watched in secret jealousy. To be young again with the entire world at your feet, that would be the best. Mathew held Valerie’s hand as they drove into the McDonalds drive-thru. He rubbed the top of her knuckles with his fingers, and when she turned to look at him, he wrinkled his nose a bit, making a funny face that would always get a giggle out of her.
Both boys in the back wanted happy meals. Jacob’s parents got sweet teas, and apple pies for later. They always got the same thing when they went there. Mathew said that McDonald’s was made of rubbish and pig innards. Jacob said, “I don’t care what’s in it, Dad, it tastes so good.” His tongue came shooting out of his mouth with mushed chicken nuggets covering it, and he ducked the swinging hand coming from his father. Jacob loved his mother a lot, but the connection that he shared with his father was unmatched.
After dropping Logan off at home, Jacob’s father dropped his mother off at the house and told him to get in the front seat. Mathew told his wife that he would be taking Jacob to get a surprise gift for winning the championship game today.
His father told him on the way to Walmart that he was very proud of him, and
that his mother was as well. They both knew just how hard he had been working at hitting and fielding as a first baseman. Hard work paid off, and they wanted to do something nice for him. Jacob felt like he had the best parents in the world that day. Away went thoughts of all the punishments for fighting outside with neighborhood kids, getting a C in science class, and being a bit too lippy with his mother. None of that mattered today. He was loved.
They got to Walmart and walked up the electronics aisle. Jacob’s father stopped in front of the game systems and called over an employee to get one out of the cage for him. The employee waddled over to them like a giant pear with feet, looking angry about having to do work. Imagine that.
“I’d like to get the PS4 if you have any available. Thank you,” Mathew said to the Walmart employee while tousling Jacob’s chestnut hair so that it got in his eyes. Jacob smiled from ear to ear and brushed the hair away.
On the ride home, Jacob stared out the window, replaying the baseball game in his head. Mathew looked over at him and pushed his shoulder a bit.
“Hey kid, you happy about the video game thing? I kind of expected you to be a little more excited. Everything okay?”
“Yeah, I’m happy. I’m gonna hook it up as soon as I get home. I was just thinking about the baseball game today. Thanks for buying it for me. I said that when we were in the store.”
Jacob reached in the back seat and grabbed the big box. He looked on the back at the unique features and other doodads included—faking interest to show his dad he appreciated it.