4POCALYPSE - Four Tales Of A Dark Future

by Brian Fatah Steele

  “Please,” Jillian said.

  Haise put a hand to one side of his mouth and spoke in a dramatic stage whisper. “He eats flies. He’s fucking crazy.”

  Renfield gave Haise an offended glare, and then ignored him as he addressed Jillian, Conaghan and me.

  “Did you know that our most common companion creature is not the dog or the cat, but the common housefly? They have been with us since the dawn of Homo sapiens, eating and defecating and mating alongside us while we carried them into every region of the world. They are almost perfect, far better in their biological niche than we are in ours.”

  “Fuck off, Renfield,” Haise said.

  “The Roman poet Vergil once had a lavish funeral for a fly,” Renfield said, “and had it laid to rest in a mausoleum. He may have cared for the fly, or he may have had ulterior motives—“

  Jillian gave me a what the fuck look and I cut in.

  “The government was planning to confiscate the property of the rich and distribute it to war veterans,” I said. “But no grounds containing burial plots or mausoleums could be taken. Vergil saved his land from seizure.”

  Renfield gave me a nod. He looked like a young Richard Dreyfuss. “For the rest of us, however, flies are simply pests that need to be exterminated, and the genocide of musca domestica has been one of mankind’s enduring efforts. However, the fly has turned the tables on us, by delivering one disease after another into our lives until it found one that could truly annihilate us.”

  Realizing that Haise was probably the crazy one and that the crazy one had a goddamned gun, “I said,” I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  Haise unlocked Renfield’s cuffs and stood back, as if the exterminator might explode.

  Jillian began explaining the few rules at the Palace; everyone pitches in on the work, chock your door open when you leave a room because unlocked doors were few and far between . . .

  I noticed that Haise looked bored, his eyes glazing over. Both Conaghan and Benjamin were keeping a close watch on Haise.

  I walked with Renfield to the now empty Garden Court. Daylight streamed through the stained glass dome; it was the room with the most natural light during the day. I noticed that Randall was still sitting in his chair with Clyde at his side. He hadn’t said a word.

  “Thank you,” Renfield said, as we took seats at a table.

  I glanced at Haise, and back at Renfield. “Renfield. Eating flies, I’d have thought that was a joke, but Haise doesn’t look like a horror movie fan, and even less like an aficionado of classic literature, so . . .”

  A small smile appeared on Renfield’s face, half-hidden by a scruffy beard. “He’s a fool. A terrified, small-minded fool. And for the record, I don’t eat flies, I eat maggots.”

  I was speechless. Then Renfield topped his last statement with one that was even more incredible.

  “The reason Officer Haise had me cuffed and kept me with him is that I told him I knew how to become immune to the disease. Happyface, the smiler bug, whatever you want to call it. Haise was keeping me close to see if I became infected.”

  Renfield raised an arm and pulled back one sleeve of his coverall. “Officer Friendly was responsible for allowing a grin to attack me before he shot it.” Renfield raised his arm. There was a nasty, healing wound on his forearm, and I could clearly see the half-moon imprints of human teeth that had bitten into and broken his flesh.

  “I don’t know if you are aware of how fast the disease manifests, but it is almost instantaneous. I was bitten two days ago. That’s direct contact. Primary transmission. And I’m fine. I’m immune.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “A bite from one of those things is primary transmission, the most immediate, the fastest to take effect. Getting splashed with their blood is secondary transmission. It can take longer, but will still kill you. Tertiary transmission, from infected flies, is the way it all started, and the rarest way to become infected.”

  Renfield leaned close, and spoke softly. “We all need to be immunized,” he said. “And we need to get the hell out of Dodge. The plan has changed. Originally the plan was to drive all the grins out of San Francisco, to try and save the city. Instead, the powers that be are corralling every grin they can find, and the grins are travelling in very large packs. They are going to hold them here, in the city, until the things die off or until whoever is still I charge can figure out a safe option for mass disposal. Firebombing, perhaps, or extermination squads. As for people like you and me . . . well, we don’t really have a say. Now, a lot of people came here to the heart of the city, to escape when the outbreak happened. What if the grins that are wandering around out there follow the same instinct?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, either.

  “Mind if I sit in?”

  Renfield and I were startled. Randall had approached us silently, and he was a big man. I gestured to one of the empty seats at the table and he sat, patting one thigh. Clyde trotted across the lobby to join us, his claws ticking on the marble floor.

  I asked Renfield, “Why did you stay behind?”

  “I stayed behind because . . . well, because I’m an exterminator. I was convinced I could find a way to destroy these things and avoid catching the disease. I heard second hand information from all over the world on amateur radio, theories of the three kinds of disease transmission, the suggestion that it started with flies, which is actually the hardest way to catch the disease, and became a pandemic when people gave the bug to each other through violent attacks.”

  We waited for Renfield to say more.

  “It’s like this,” Renfield said. “The disease began in flies. The parasites came from flies, are carried by flies, but they do not infect flies. Flies are immune. Flies transmitted the parasite to man. Now man transmits it to man, but the disease, the bug, thrives in men. The bug is a parasite. It’s thought that it immediately seeks out the brain, carrying a host of other lesser maladies within it, such as the skin condition you’ve all seen. The bug, the parasite, takes over the brain. Did you know it has a name? It is called giardia motivus and—“

  “Mind control?”

  I looked at Randall. He looked down at his clasped hands, and his voice was a whisper.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me if this bug was created by the military. They’ll fuck with a soldier’s head any way they can.”

  I didn’t want the conversation going off on a crazy conspiracy tangent, so I gave Randall a nod and asked Renfield, “How could a parasite control a human being?”

  “There are fungi that can control insects,” Renfield said, “Disgusting things. Remember, I’m an exterminator and I don’t disgust easily, but some of these fungi . . . they will take over an ant, for example, and make it climb a tree, perhaps simply triggering an impulse to seek out direct sunlight in the canopy of a jungle. When the ant reaches the highest point it latches onto a branch or leaf with a literal death grip and dies. Then the fungus erupts from the ant’s body or head, and releases a little cloud of spores that rain down on the jungle, each spore capable of infecting another ant.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Is there any way to fight this bug? Could you somehow muster enough will power to—“

  Randall said, "He who reigns within himself, and rules passions, desires, and fears, is more than a king."

  That was a line from John fucking Milton. Who the hell was Randall?

  “Doubtful,” Renfield said. “I’m only guessing here, but I would say that the parasite either destroys or consumes any parts of the brain that allow higher thought. Consciousness, memory, all of that is wiped out, obliterated with horrifying speed, and what is left is an automaton, a delivery system to help further the spread of the parasite, a—“

  “A missile,” Randall said.

  Renfield nodded.

  “How do you know this?” I had to ask. Maybe Renfield was as crazy as Randall.

  Renfield shrugged. “Television never really did it for me. I like listening to my radios
, chatting on my CB, and monitoring my police scanner. I found some frequencies used by the combined military forces as well. You’d be amazed how easily soldiers can forget spoken word protocols when the shit hits the fan. Code words and acronyms go right out the window. Which brings me to another important point. I’ve worked with a lot of cops. When you’re an exterminator you get called to houses infested with wasps or ants or whatever and often the people in those homes call the police first, in a panic, I suppose. I was in the street near my home in the Castro when Haise came down the road in an SFPD cruiser. I had managed to incapacitate a grin and I was dragging it to my house—“

  “Excuse me?” I asked, wondering if Renfield was the crazy one after all.

  “I broke its knees using a sledge hammer with a long shaft, and then I shattered all of its leg and arm bones,” he said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world to do. It was quite helpless and hardly a threat under those circumstances. That wasn’t the first grin I studied. I’d done it before, and since I had already begun eating maggots—they are a wonderful source of protein and tasteless if you wash them down with a glass of water—I was almost certain I was immune.

  I was dragging that last grin into my house, hoping I could study it as well, when Haise intervened and treated me like a criminal. I told him I may have discovered how to become immune to the disease and we began to argue. He shoved me, I stumbled on the curb, and the incapacitated grin couldn’t resist tucking in to the arm that fell in front of its face. Haise shot the grin in the head, cuffed me in the street, and since then he’s been watching me to see if I am immune. What is worth noting is that I have known a lot of police officers, and Haise does not talk like a cop. Not at all. In fact—“

  Renfield was interrupted by a harsh medley of screams drifting down the stairwell.

  Most of us ran up the stairs. Benjamin was ahead of me, having recognized the voices of the Morales sisters. I was followed by Renfield. Jillian was behind him, and Conaghan was puffing along behind her. I didn’t notice that Randall and Haise were not following us.

  On the seventh floor we saw the Morales sisters standing near the stairs, both appearing to have been startled out of sleep. Benjamin went to them. Further down the hall I saw Isao and a woman in a business suit locked together in a struggle. It didn’t occur to me that it was a grin until they turned around and around like dancers and I saw that horrible rictus. Her jacket, blouse and shirt were streaked with dried vomit that had been mostly blood.

  Beyond them near the end of the hall and the room they shared with their father were Haya and Haru. Both children were curled up on the floor. Both were bleeding from bite wounds.

  The grin was snapping at Isao’s hands and face, and the older man’s hands were already bloody from bites. Yet he was holding her back from doing any greater injury, and as if in response she let out a frustrated sound, made a choking noise and then regurgitated a syrupy mixture of vomit and dark blood into his face.

  Renfield and I stepped forward, and I realized I didn’t have my sword. I turned to Conaghan and pulled a long screwdriver from his tool belt.

  The grin bit into Isao’s left hand and tore away a patch of skin. He let out a yell and shoved her away.

  Renfield approached them, bouncing on the balls of his feet like he was doing some sort of kooky dance. He was a gangly man with a shaggy head of hair and the sight would have been hysterical if not for the fact that he was playing a deadly game. The grin lashed out at him and he grabbed her arm, swinging her face first into a door.

  The Palace is an old and luxurious hotel. The doors to the suites are paneled in mahogany. The doors are solid. So solid that you can use one to kill.

  The grin’s face smashed into the door and she recoiled, looking up and down the hall in shock as that too thick and too dark blood oozed from her mouth and nose.

  Renfield twisted her arm behind her back, I distinctly heard something break, a muffled snap, and then he slammed her face first into the door again, and again, until her knees buckled and her face was unrecognizable.

  I looked at Isao. He was touching his bloody face with his bloody hands, shaking his head, and saying something in Japanese. He took a few steps toward me and then lurched as if he’d slipped on something. Then he began to grin, and I saw the humanity leave his eyes. He had a nasty cut on his upper lip, and his lips parted to reveal red, bloody teeth. As his muscles contracted his grin became so fierce that his upper lip tore apart.

  “Careful, Bellemer,” Jillian whispered behind me.

  Isao launched himself at me as if thrown by an invisible sling, his arms flailing at me like a man doing a bad imitation of a cat. I leaned out of his way and stuck out a foot, and Isao went sprawling on the thick carpet underfoot. As he struggled to get to his feet I bent down and rammed the screwdriver through his right temple.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, hoping that some part of his humanity remained and understood that I was doing what I had to.

  I worked the handle of the screwdriver up and down and side-to-side, scrambling Isao’s brains as if churning butter. When he was dead, I wiped the screwdriver clean on a fold of his shirt and gave it back to Conaghan.

  I heard the children crying now, and heard Renfield saying comforting words as he stepped towards them. He froze when their cries became idiotic grunts, meaningless vocalizations.

  Renfield looked over his shoulder, his expression bleak.

  Conaghan stepped up and handed each of us a screwdriver as the children got to their feet and took their first unsteady steps toward us. “I can’t do it,” Conaghan said. “Not that. I have . . . had kids, fuck, I don’t even know if they are alive . . .”

  Renfield killed what was left of the little boy. I put down his sister.

  When we were done I went to Jillian. I leaned close to her and realized she was staring at me. At my neck.

  “Oh baby,” she said.

  I raised a hand, touched my neck and winced. There was a deep scratch there. Isao got me after all, with hands that were at least partially covered in the female grin’s blood and bile.

  I moved down the hallway, an equal distance from Renfield and Jillian, and sat down against one wall.

  From downstairs I heard a distant shout and a bang that had to be a gunshot.

  Jillian looked over her shoulder at the stairs, said, “Jesus Christ,” and then looked back at me.

  After a while Randall came up the stairs with Clyde. He stopped beside Jillian and Conaghan and joined them in watching me. I saw he was holding the Glock that Haise had been carrying. I would have asked what the hell had happened downstairs but I had bigger things to worry about.

  Renfield had hunkered down at some point, sitting with the others. Now he stood, walked to me, and offered his hand.

  “It’s been fifteen minutes,” he said. “Bellemer is either very lucky, or immune. If he was going to show signs of being infected, we’d have seen it already.”

  Randall made a gesture and Clyde came close to me, growling as he passed Isao’s body. The dog sniffed me up and down, and then trotted back to Randall, who said, “He’s clean.”

  Renfield helped me to my feet and then Jillian was holding me and about to kiss the awful ruin of my face. Renfield shoved her away. “He may be immune, but you may not be. You don’t want to touch any of their blood,” he said, gesturing to the dead grins.

  I went into a suite to wash my neck, entering the first open door I saw.

  The room was a ruin. The walls were scratched, the curtains torn down. The wall-mounted TV was on the floor. The bedding was shredded, and there were streaks and pools of dried blood everywhere. As I went into the bathroom, which hadn’t faired nearly as bad and dampened the clean edge of a towel to dab at my neck, I realized this was the grin’s room.

  She must have been in here since the beginning of the pandemic, somehow making it into the safety of her hotel room and closing the door just before the infection had taken over. Since then she’d ju
st been a hungry, mindless thing, clawing at walls and floor to try to escape and spread the disease at the command of the parasites within. It must have been just a fluke that she finally struck the door latch and managed to pull it open. It must have been a fluke that she hadn’t turned the deadbolt or engaged the security latch. It must have been a fluke that Isao and his children happened to be walking by when she pulled the door open and stepped into the hall.

  When I left the room only Jillian was waiting for me. We went to our suite. I crawled into bed and slept. I dreamed that Jillian and I were alone in the city and that it was a deserted paradise. “You make me so happy,” she said, and then she grinned.

  * * * * *

  Two months passed quickly. The northern hemisphere slowly turned toward winter and the city was a delight as far as the weather was concerned. Fall was always the best time of year in San Francisco, with warm, sunny days and cool nights. There wasn’t much rain, and there weren’t any TV meteorologists around to tell us California was in another drought.

  People came to the Palace, lured by Benjamin’s sign. Thanks to Conaghan we got all the generators running, but we didn’t power any exterior lights and made sure interior lights were usually cloaked by curtains, the older generation making jokes about blackout conditions in old war movies.

  By September there were over one hundred people in the Palace. A crew had gone from room to room upstairs, popping open doors with pry bars and searching the rooms for surviving grins. They found one alive and killed it, and found two dead. One had apparently died of starvation. One had choked to death trying to eat a luxuriant bath towel. Renfield found that interesting. Benjamin found it hysterical. I thought it was terribly sad.

  While it would be nice to admit that every survivor was of equal value, that wasn’t true. Part of me resented every too-old or too-young survivor. We needed strong backs and ready hands and fighters. Instead we just seemed to gather more and more mouths to feed, more people to care for.

  I was inexpressibly thankful when Anna Anders showed up at the door one night, hammering on the glass and screaming as a grin with some devastating lower-body injury crawled after her, and others grins came running, lured by her cries.