Fallout

by Wil Mara

  Help me, please … Sarah.…

  He knew the cellphone was his only chance, and he was absolutely certain it was in the front left pocket of his pants. But it might as well have been on the other side of the planet, for he was also reasonably certain the humerus bone on that side had become detached from the scapula—a classic dislocated shoulder—and that his left wrist and possibly both the radius and the ulna in that forearm were fractured. If I move … the smallest movement …

  No choice.

  I have no choice.

  “God…” he said in the voice of a ninety-year-old. Then he shut his eyes again and thought through every word of the Lord’s prayer.

  * * *

  He prepped further by taking several deep breaths. “Cleansing breaths,” he called them when trying to soothe his patients, but there was nothing remotely cleansing about those he labored to produce now. Each one carried a wheezing rasp that told him there was something seriously wrong with his respiratory system.

  First step was to roll onto his back. This couldn’t be done slowly, he decided. The broken bones and floating fragments would crunch around like potato chips wrapped in a towel. I’ve got to do it quickly, he told himself. One rapid motion, then it’ll be over.

  He tested his right arm by flexing the fingers first; stretch and close … stretch and close.… Then he rotated his hand and, finally, lifted his arm. He was momentarily alarmed by the crumpling sound that accompanied this until he realized it was nothing more than the protective suit’s brittle outer material. There was no discernible physical pain through any of this, which seemed like a minor victory.

  Setting his gloved hand on the cracked and filthy concrete, Emilio steeled his nerves and pushed off hard. Brilliant agony raced from his left arm through the rest of him with electric speed, stopping at the nerve center of his brain and ringing it like a carnival bell. The scream he let out was a single gruesome note at the peak of his register. The damaged arm lay motionless beside him, feeling like a sock full of broken glass.

  He paused again to let his traumatized system recover. Perspiration streaked down the sides of his head, some of it running into his ears and behind his neck. Something very similar often happened on warm nights while he was lying in bed, and it drove him crazy. Today, however, he barely noticed.

  Next he had to get the suit open. This was simple enough in theory, but it would leave him fully exposed to the irradiated rainfall that was still coming through the windows overhead.…

  There’s no choice.

  No choice.

  Using his right arm, he felt around under the front flap of the head-covering until he found the plastic slider of the suit’s zipper, which was parked all the way at the top of the strip. He brought it down slowly so it wouldn’t snag on his EMT uniform. Cool air rushed greedily around his body like a living thing, and it felt amazing. He got the zipper as far as the middle of his thigh but could stretch no further.

  He had to stop and catch his breath again, and the fact that he was growing winded so easily set off alarm bells. I need air. Good air. He remembered the mask—he had been wearing an oxygen mask, to protect himself against the … the bad air.

  What happened to it?

  His good arm flailed around on the floor, seeking the mask. There was nothing on the concrete but puddles.

  Could it still be…?

  “Oh, no,” he said aloud.

  Lifting his hand to his head, Emilio immediately discovered the mask, protruding like a giant wart from right side of his face. Exploring further, he found that it was still attached to its rubber straps, one stretched over the bridge of his nose and the other in a broad stripe across his forehead.

  I can’t feel it.… There’s no feeling in my face.

  He probed around with his fingers to confirm the point. It was like pressing against the pliable rubber of a child’s doll.

  Neuropathy. My God … The parts of his body exposed to the radiation were suffering a total loss of sensitivity. The nerves are dying.

  He tried to move the mask back into place but it wouldn’t budge. Only after several attempts did he figure out he had to lift his head first. Adjusting the mask required significant stretching of the straps, a process he loathed under normal circumstances because it often produced mild rashes on the skin and painful pulls in the hair. This time he felt nothing at all. It was as if he was positioning the straps on a mannequin.

  Once the mask was in place, he went back to the business of retrieving the phone. It had binged three more times since his second voyage back to consciousness, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t felt the sympathetic vibrations against his leg. From this he could only conclude that the neuropathy was gradually spreading to the rest of the body. Which makes perfect sense if you consider how much radiation you’ve probably absorbed into your lungs, which in turn has been seeping into your bloodstream, and then into your nervous system. And once it’s firmly rooted there, you will—

  He forced himself to stop this train of thought and refocus on the current objective.

  The phone is your only chance. The phone is your link to Sarah, and Sarah is your hope.

  An image of her bloomed in his mind, sending warmth through him. She had always been his source of hope, his reason for rolling out of bed every morning. He had never told her in direct terms how deep the need had become. He never wanted her to feel burdened by his emotional dependence, fearing it would drive her out of his life forever.

  Now he focused on her to the point where she and that accursed device became one in the same—get the phone … get Sarah … get the phone … get Sarah.…

  He managed to hook two fingers into the top corner of his left pants pocket, but the laws of physics prevented him from going any further. When a second, slightly more determined attempt achieved nothing, he wondered what would result from jerking the right side of his body toward the left. Might he be able to slip his hand into his pants?

  What happened instead was an explosion of pain from the peak of his dislocated shoulder to the tips of his mangled fingers. His scream seemed to pass straight through the oxygen mask and rattle every loose object in the room.

  Falling back to the floor, Emilio began softly sobbing. Although he had always been sensitive, he wasn’t much of a crier. He believed this was the result of years of harsh conditioning by a stepfather who loathed the sight of children grieving—his or anyone else’s. Even now the instinct to suppress any outward manifestation of despair was strong, but his suffering was stronger.

  Even as he wept, he tried to think of other options, like lying flat and pushing his lower body upward in the hope that the cellphone would slide out under the influence of gravity.

  There’s only one way, and you know it.

  “No … dear God, no.”

  His throat bobbed as he swallowed. He noticed that his right hand and left foot had begun to twitch. Involuntary tremors; the nervous system is breaking down. The seizures wouldn’t be far behind. His body was rebelling against the foreign elements invading it, and the body had about as much chance of emerging victorious as a unicyclist in a NASCAR race.

  You have to get the phone.

  You have to.

  You’re running out of time.

  He knew all this, even through the fog of disorder and misery.

  He knew perfectly well what he had to do.

  * * *

  Emilio lay still for a time, gazing upward without really seeing anything, his thoughts moving about like a swarm of lazy fireflies. Breathing slowly and steadily, he made a conscious effort to attain a state of restfulness. He would need to summon all the energy he had left, all strength and resilience. He’d always had a high pain threshold, but he’d never really experienced torment like this before. During a soccer game in eighth grade, he’d sprained an ankle, and that had hurt like a mad bastard. But once the assistant coach rubbed some stuff on it and packed it with ice, the discomfort faded, and the next morning he’d barely felt
a thing. He knew he wouldn’t be so lucky this time around.

  He willed his left forefinger to move, just a twitch, a tiny up-and-down motion as if he’d just had the digit installed and was testing it out. The movement sent a bolt of heat shooting through him; the rest of his body quivered in response.

  Jesus …

  “Go slow,” he said into the darkness. It would hurt like hell either way, but if he went gradually, he would probably be able to handle it. This is not like a Band-Aid, where you rip it away in one stroke. At least that was the working theory, but who really knew? If one of his patients had tried to move a fractured wrist or a dislocated shoulder, he would’ve put them under sedation. And from that thought came the wish, more sincere than any before it, that he had a syringe loaded with morphine sulfate at his disposal. A barrelful of that stuff and he’d be doing one-handed push-ups on that side while the broken bones jutted through the skin like spear points.

  As he lifted his left arm, arrows of pain began firing in all directions. Clenching his teeth, he moaned like an old ghost. The hand dangled downward on the flaccid hinge of the shattered wrist, and when the fingers finally lifted off the concrete and gravity stepped in, the sound in Emilio’s throat was remarkably similar to that of meat being fed through an industrial grinder.

  He got the hand up to, and then onto, his hip, but could go no farther without a hiatus. His heart was buffeting at a psychotic pace. Tears and perspiration soaked him from the neck up. There was another lighthearted bing! This is hell, Emilio thought. If it exists, this is it.

  In one swift movement, running against all the logic and strategy he’d so carefully considered, he worked the fingers of his left hand into the top of his pants pocket and used his right hand to shove it farther in. The resulting screams came from the very bottom of his soul. Gnashing his teeth, Emilio spun out a string of profanity that would’ve flushed the cheeks of an old whore. Nevertheless, he managed to seize the iPhone between thumb and forefinger and drag it free. Both the arm and the phone dropped to the floor.

  It was time to breathe again.

  * * *

  The numbness was spreading fast. He no longer had sensation in his legs and hips, and felt nothing in the back of his head, where before the unyielding concrete had been a source of considerable discomfort. The rambling incongruity of his thoughts was also advancing, making it increasingly difficult to hang on to any rational notion. I have to do this now.… NOW.

  He stretched his good arm as far as it would go, and, in what had to be the only lucky break of the last few hours, found the phone with no particular difficulty. He brought it to his chest, stood it up, and thumbed the button on top. The screen came to life and two smiling faces appeared behind the bank of icons. It was a black-and-white photo he and Sarah had taken in a booth during a visit to the Jersey Shore. He’d scanned the image he liked best—the two of them perfectly equal in height and depth, which he always interpreted as a metaphor for the perfect equality they had fostered in their relationship, and grinning in a supremely contented way as if to tell the world, As long as I got him/her, I don’t need anything else.

  For an instant, he felt the elation that always spread through his system when he saw her face. Then it was smothered by sheer horror when he realized he was having trouble seeing clearly. The image was blurring into unrecognizability, as was that of the icons, the phone itself, and the hand that held it. His immediate thought was that the tears from all that wussy-boy crying was responsible. But when he set the phone down flat, wiped both eyes thoroughly, and brought the phone up again, there was no improvement. If anything, it was worse.

  Another round of tears threatened to break out, but he forced it back.

  The message. Just send the message.

  He was having trouble remembering the program. Notes? Notepad? No, that was on the other computer. The one in.… In where? There’s another computer somewhere. Is it here? Maybe it’s.…

  No. Stop.

  He looked over the icons, sure that one of them would spark the right memory. There was a blue one with a lowercase f. Facepack, he thought, knew it was wrong, then discarded it from his mind. There was a gray one with what looked kind of like a ship’s wheel. Settings. One was sky blue with the silhouetted profile of a little bird. Tweety, or Twitty; something like that. Others didn’t look familiar at all. And then, in the upper left, a green one with an empty word balloon, like in the comic strips.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  He tried to thumb it open but missed the first two times, opened two other apps whose purpose was not immediately obvious, and had to feel his way to the circular home button at the bottom in order to start again. When the messaging program finally launched and a blank text message zoomed up, he knew through pure intuition that he was in the right place.

  Oh, God … those tiny letters …

  It was the keyboard, he knew that much. Or keypad; one of those.

  Now what do I say?

  He gave it a moment’s thought, decided the shorter the better, then moved his shaking thumb to the first letter: i.

  He brought the phone close to his face to see if he’d hit the right key, but it still looked as though he was peering through an ice cube. He moved the phone back a few inches, then side to side. Nothing helped.

  I’ll remember, he told himself. I’ve done so many of these. My fingers will remember.

  Which was true. He was a much bigger texter than caller. He knew people who hated texting but loved calling. (The same people, he had discovered through the years, generally didn’t care much for emailing, either.) He had sculpted a theory that callers had more aggressive personalities by nature, whereas texters (and emailers) were the more passive. He definitely put himself in the latter category, and for more reasons than just his communication preferences. He and Sarah spoke on the phone maybe twice a day, but they probably texted two or three dozen times. And he preferred to keep in touch with all his friends this way, too. So much more efficient than blabbing on the phone. A phone call more easily afforded the luxury of wasting time, whereas texting more or less forced you to get right to the point.

  He moved the phone back into place and got the thumb moving again.

  help me im at

  A seizure grabbed him like a giant hand, twisting him into a fetal position while all four limbs quaked. A disorganized mass of facial muscles quivered and shuddered as if governed by a computer that had gone haywire. Emilio’s eyes blinked rapidly and his hands—broken and whole—flailed about like flags in a hurricane. As his chest tightened and his breath was choked off, his lips took on a bluish, corpselike hue. His teeth clamped together and raggedly sliced off a bit of his protruding tongue. Blood began to pour from the wound, running down his chin, creating the appearance of a carnivore in the full and lustful throes of the kill.

  The episode lasted less than thirty seconds, and when it subsided Emilio was, miraculously, still clinging to consciousness. His breathing came now in staccato hitches, like a child settling down after a crying jag. His brain was so overloaded that it was barely receiving the pain signals from his shattered left arm. As his vision cleared, he perceived something beyond amazing—the phone, lying just inches away and still glowing.

  A beacon of hope.

  A gateway.

  Back to Sarah.

  Back to life.

  He forced his body to move, determined not to give in to agony or fate or the outrageous circumstances that had put him here.

  Grabbing the phone, he needed every fragment of willpower he had left to finish his message, type the first few letters of his wife’s name into the recipient box—knowing the trusty iPhone would fill in the rest—and hit SEND.

  Emilio smiled. He had won.

  Then the darkness took him once more, and all was quiet.

  28

  They were flying low enough so that Sarah could almost feel the brush of the treetops on the helicopter’s underbelly. The man in the pilot’s seat, whose i
dentity was obscured by his protective suit and mask, had not spoken a word telling her to strap in. She had seen the town after dark a thousand times, but never like this. The crazy aerial perspective was bizarre enough, but the emptiness, the stillness, the deadness of it …

  The pilot switched on the searchlight as soon as they lifted off, directing the beam with a little joystick on the control panel. Sarah followed the bright circle with both intensity and a macabre fascination. There are no signs of life down there. Silver Lake is a ghost town.

  The streetlights had come on, in accordance with their programming. The pallid sodium glow seemed particularly eerie tonight, shining on empty streets. There were no cars rolling along, carrying people returning from a long day’s work or a pleasant dinner, no cyclists or walkers with their dogs getting their evening exercise, no herds of noisy teenagers strutting about like they owned the world. The houses were all dark, their windows as blank as the eyes of the dead.

  There’s nothing down there. Nothing at all.

  “We are almost to Prince Park,” the pilot said. In spite of the continuing rain spatter and the steady thrum of the chopper’s blades, she could hear him clearly through the headset. “According to the information I have, it’s just over that rise.” He pointed straight ahead.

  She nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Ten-four.” He eased the stick forward and accelerated, causing the craft to tilt down slightly.

  Sarah didn’t know Kate Soames well, categorized her more as an acquaintance than a friend. She’d believed, however, they could become closer if they spent a little more time together; the potential for that seemed to be there. Sarah had only met Kate’s husband a few times, but he seemed all right to her, possessed of a roughly equal supply of qualities she liked and those she didn’t. Kate’s older son, Mark, seemed a typical adolescent—rough on the surface, but with more underneath. The younger boy, Cary, with whom she had a playful rapport, was a doe-eyed darling.

  What do I say to her if I find her husband and oldest son dead? How could she—how could anyone—possibly be comforted in such a situation? What are the right words?