by Unknown
“And yet,” said Ray, “even with a despair that I could sense at the end of your driveway — even with all that you’ve personally lost — even after you’ve been attacked in your own home by one of my kind — you open your house and your … hospitality—” He lifted the empty eggcup. “—to a stranger. To a vampire.”
Barry shrugged. “It’s the way I was raised. What can I say? I guess I look upon vampirism in the same way I view homosexuality or vegetarianism.”
Ray laughed. “How’s that?”
“I don’t really understand any of them. But, just because I don’t understand them, that doesn’t really give me a right to judge, does it? They’re all just different ways of getting by in the world.”
“And that’s what it’s all about nowadays, isn’t it? Getting by? For your people … and for my kind.”
Barry looked into the bottom of his empty coffee cup. “You know,” he said, “until that vampire came running through my front door, I never really gave your kind much thought. Afterwards … well, I got to thinking on how difficult it must be … how desperate your people must be getting. And how unfriendly it is out there for you.”
“Is that why you let me in?”
Barry considered this for a moment. “Nah. You had the decency to knock. You needed help. Really, what else could I have done? How are you feeling, by the way?”
Ray’s hands came up from the table and he turned them. They had lost some of their pallor. The skin seemed less loose. His fingers no longer shook. “I don’t know what to say. You’ve given me my life back. How can I repay something like that?”
“You can’t and you don’t have to. I had a little something you needed and it didn’t hurt me any to give it up.”
Ray sat contemplating as an awkward silence filled the room. Finally, glad to feel that strength had returned to his legs, he rose to his feet. “Will you let me try to repay you for everything you’ve done?”
“There’s no need.”
“Do I have your permission to try?”
“I suppose. What do you have in mind?”
Ray moved to Barry’s side of the table.
“Should I get up?” Barry asked.
“No,” Ray said. “Seated is better, I think. Remember what I told you about how we can dial up someone’s fear.”
“Yeah,” Barry said with a hint of uncertainty.
“Well, I’ve never tried this before. I doubt anyone ever has, but as I sat there across the table, I got to thinking: What if I could dial it back?”
“But I’m not afraid.”
“You’re telling me. You don’t have a hint of fear about you. I suppose after the worst thing imaginable has already happened, there’s not a lot left to fear. But I’m not talking about fear.”
“What then?”
“Your despair. You have so much. What if I could take some of it away, even if for just a little while?”
“I’d be a fool to say no.”
Ray lifted his left hand. “I’ll need to touch your face.” Barry nodded. “Remember, I don’t know if this will work.”
Ray’s fingertips came to rest on Barry’s cheek. At first Barry felt them as icy yet clammy, but after a few seconds they seemed to warm.
Ray breathed deeply and concentrated. Instead of projecting a wave of anxiety, he focused on Barry’s overwhelming despair. For just an instant Ray felt the entirety of Barry’s loss, the sum of his suffering, the depth of his loneliness. His knees grew weak until finally he broke the contact and staggered back to his chair.
“Jesus,” Ray whispered. “How do you cope?”
Barry gave his head a shake. “Most days, not very well.”
Ray waded through the lingering effects of Barry’s grief, rubbing his hands over his face, and then said, “I’m sorry it didn’t work.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
With a crestfallen shrug, Barry nodded at the bundle of clothes he’d brought down after shaving.
“You look about my size.” he said. “There’s a bathroom and shower just off the living room if you’d care to get cleaned up. I need to say goodnight. It’s getting late and 5:30 is chore time. I don’t know if you’re planning to move on tonight, but you’re welcome to spend the day here in safety. I’ve got a root cellar and a sleeping bag. It’s not much, but it’ll be dark.”
“I am in your debt.”
“Think nothing of it. You may not have been able to siphon off any of my sadness, but I am genuinely glad to have made your acquaintance. Which reminds me … I never did catch your name.”
The vampire extended his hand.
“My name is Ray.”
“And I’m Barry,” said the farmer. “I’m really pleased you stopped by.”
* * * * *
David Beynon is a writer of speculative fiction who lives in Fergus, Ontario with his wife, two kids, a Golden Retriever and what increasingly appears to be an immortal cat. David’s novel, The Platinum Ticket, has been shortlisted for The Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now First Novel Contest. Symbiosis is his first published story, about which he says: “Symbiosis arose from a news story about thermal imaging used to screen for spiking fevers of clientele at a nightclub in Singapore. I wondered what they would do if they discovered someone registering as room temperature.”
POST-APOCALYPSE
Forest-Bathing
By Heather Clitheroe
The rule was that the person who shit in the bucket had to empty it. The piss could collect in the bucket, but once somebody pinched off a loaf, it had to be dumped. That was the rule. Otherwise the stench would go from bad to worse, and it was already pretty disgusting. Everybody was holding it as long as they could, hoping that somebody else would get to the bucket first and carry it out to the gutter behind the embassy wall and dump it down the drain. It was easier, so much easier, to empty the bucket if it was your own shit in there. If it splashed on your shoes, well, at least it was yours. The kids never had to empty the bucket, but they held it too — you could see them jumping from one foot to another, jiggling their legs and dancing around. Nobody liked using the bucket. But there wasn’t enough water. There hadn’t been any water pressure for days, and nobody was really certain if it was about to crap out — oh, the pun — altogether, and since the electricity was off, they expected the water would be gone soon, too. They had to save what they had.
Jake hated the bucket. There were nineteen of them camped out in the lobby, and another fifteen in the reception area, where they could look out the windows at the green grass and the gardens that lay within the long, white walls and the iron fence. The gates were closed. Nobody was coming or going. They didn’t go outside. Too dangerous; the virus had gone airborne, but nobody knew how airborne, and the trips to pour out the bucket were accomplished as quickly as possible, with mask and gloves. That was the other reason to hold it for as long as you could — to make as few trips outside as possible. If you didn’t shit in the bucket, you didn’t have to go outside. Better to stay inside, just in case. It felt safer inside, away from the sky and the quiet, and the virus that hung in the air, invisible and deadly. It was too late to go anywhere else. And anyway, there was nowhere left to go.
Traffic had vanished. The streets were silent, in a way Jake had never seen — not even early in the morning. The embassy was closed, the phones were silent, and all they could do was sit and watch the news in the employee lunchroom. The news broadcasts were terse, the official messages nothing more than instructions. Stay indoors. Go to quarantine centers if you show symptoms. Watch for fever, headache, and bloody discharge from eyes, nose, or mouth, in urine or feces. Isolate victims. Place bodies in a cool, dark room and wait for collection.
The stateside casts were worse. More ominous. Rioting, looting. Images of people sitting in quarantine tents and clinics, blood running down their faces, more talk of the spread of the hemorrhagic fever and less of the survival rates; a person wouldn’t live long once they’d contracted i
t. Once it started. There was discussion about that, in the lunchroom, but when the power went out the ambassador’s assistant told them that they had to conserve the diesel fuel for the generators, so they could only watch television for a couple of hours at night, after the kids had fallen into an exhausted stupor. The ambassador was already dead.
When it had seemed that the excrement was hitting the ventilation system — Jake’s expression, not really a pun, but had seemed funny at the time — he’d left his apartment and headed for the embassy. He thought he’d catch one of the last flights out, because he’d heard that they were evacuating Americans. Taking them to a hospital ship sitting out in the Sea of Japan, or to one of the carriers. Taking them home. The airports and train stations were closed and commercial traffic grounded. The only chance he had of making it home, before the bug came to Tokyo, was the embassy. But by the time he’d made it inside the gates, it was too late. They told him to sit and wait. Then martial law was declared by the prefecture, and a curfew. He couldn’t leave if he’d wanted to. He hunkered down in the lobby and, one by one, the people inside got sick. Then they died. He helped wrap the dead in plastic and carried corpses down to the basement. He soon figured out that nobody was coming to pick up the bodies. Transports had stopped. You couldn’t call for help — hospitals weren’t answering phones; maybe nobody was left to answer the phones. So they continued to take the bodies down to the basement, and then close the door. Jake didn’t mind carrying them. When the power went out and took the water pressure and the flush toilets with it, hauling bodies became preferable to emptying the shit bucket.
Just how many people were dead? How many people were sitting in tenements with obasan wrapped in a quilt and left in the stairwell? How many gaijin were freaking out in neighborhoods where nobody else could speak English? Jake didn’t know. Nobody really knew. What they said on TV wasn’t necessarily the truth, and the main networks were down, only the emergency station broadcasting. He couldn’t get to Twitter. He couldn’t email. Couldn’t Skype out to find out what was really going on. Like the others trapped in the embassy, he sat and waited. Waited because it was somehow better to wait inside, with people who knew where you were from and why you wanted to go back there.
But the talk:
We’re not getting out of here.
The radio is dead.
Not dead, nobody’s broadcasting.
Same thing.
It’s all ending.
What’s ending?
Everything.
The world.
All of us.
We’re all going to die.
Just like that. The world, ending. With a whimper instead of a bang.
Jake carried the bucket to the door, opened the door, walked outside down the cement path and carried the bucket to the gutter. He poured the contents down the sewer drain, stood and looked around. The gates were still closed but not locked, though the guards were long dead. The sky was overcast, the color of an old bruise. The world was silent and felt damp. He stood for a moment, listening to the peculiar silence that hung heavy over the gardens. Tokyo was dying. Dead, really. The embassy was a mausoleum. We’re all going to get it. We’re all going to die. There was food enough and bottled water. The paranoia of the embassy staff — the great fear of terrorism — had left a larder well-stocked with meals, ready to eat, and tins of fruit cocktail. Even a handy supply of toilet paper, and the bucket. The damn shit bucket. He laughed, a sound like a sob. Lots of food, but only one decent sized bucket for shitting in. No foresight. It had been the janitor’s bucket, a big heavy one with wheels and a wringer for a mop. When you crouched over it, you had to jam the bucket against the wall and lock the wheels with your feet so it didn’t scoot away at a critical moment.
He scratched the back of his leg with his foot and shrugged. Might as well stay out here and wait, he thought. He was tired of the arguments inside, the endless poker games to pass the time, the whining of people’s children. He put the bucket down, carefully, and walked away from it.
He strolled the gardens like a man without a care in the world, straightening his shoulders and tipping back his head to take in a deep breath of air. Throw caution to the wind, he thought. The gardens here were still neat, still immaculate, and without the hum and rush of traffic just beyond the walls, he could imagine himself back in Georgetown on a Sunday morning. If the breeze hadn’t shifted and brought with it the stench of decay and rot, the fantasy would almost have worked.
Jake held his breath. Waited. The breeze died, the smell faded. Almost. What he’d give for a breath of fresh air. Real, fresh air. He sat on a bench, stretched his legs out and folded his hands in his lap. Behind the clouds he felt the sun climbing higher in the sky. Still morning. He wondered if he ought to be doing something. If there ought to be something for him to think about. If there ought to be something to worry about in the headache that had started that morning. The pain had settled in behind his eyes with a bothersome throb, now accompanied by shooting pains in his neck and shoulders. Tension? Tension headache? Tension headache and a stress fever?
He began to laugh then, softly at first, and then louder. Yeah, right. He thought about the metal bucket, the one he’d taken to the gutter to empty, and how there was probably somebody waiting impatiently to use it. He laughed harder, and then coughed. He looked at his hand, and saw the blood. Let them come out here and get the damned bucket!
Perhaps then he should have been afraid. The sight of blood in his hand should have brought a thrill of fear to him, a quickening of the pulse, a sharply indrawn breath. It should have. But didn’t. He was tired of waiting. Tired of waiting for it to happen. Tired of waiting for somebody to wrap him up in a plastic sheet and drag him down to the basement with what was left of the others. He shook his head and bent to wipe his hands on the grass.
When he sat up, a woman stood before him. That made him jump, startled him so that his heart skipped a beat and his breath caught. He coughed again and choked on something salty that he was afraid to spit out.
The woman stared at him, and cocked her head. Said something to him in Japanese.
“Watashi wa nihongo ga hanasemasen,” he said. ‘I don’t speak Japanese.’ He’d learned it from a phrasebook. That and ‘Want to have a drink with me?’ Now he wished he knew how to say something more, like ‘It’s a charnel house in here. Go away.’ Or ‘Stay back.’ He shook his head. “I don’t speak the language,” he said.
She sighed, and he saw how truly beautiful she was: a lithe, small woman, with hair dark and glistening, dark eyes that looked out from under a slightly furrowed brow as she gazed at him. Then she smiled. Her teeth were small and even, her lips extremely red. He thought she looked like a girl he would have wanted to know, before. Before the shit bucket days.
“English,” she sighed.
“Yes.”
Her clothes were old. She wore a kimono, but not the kind he’d seen the girls in the neighborhood wearing. Maybe it was silk? It was the color of moss, subtle and faded, but when she moved it seemed that the color shifted with her, moving slightly as she cocked her head to the side, again, and looked at him.
“I’m not well,” he said. “Don’t come near me.” He coughed again, and touched his forehead. “I have fever.”
“Ah, fe-ever,” she said. She shook her head. Her hair, loose around her face, mesmerized him. He thought, slowly, that it would shine if the sun were out and the sky not overcast, if the mist would clear and the blue sky were visible above with all the buildings crowded underneath…
“I’m sick,” he said again.
“Yes,” she said.
It wouldn’t take long for him to go. The others went quickly. Once the coughing started, it got worse. Once the headache started, it got worse. It would all get worse. An hour, maybe more. But this woman, this impossibly beautiful woman … she should not be so close.
“Please, stay away,” he said, and he tried to push himself up, thinking that he would walk away f
rom her, but strength seemed to have left him.
She narrowed her eyes. “No,” she said.
He felt pinned to the bench, held against the concrete and wood like a butterfly pinned to cork.
“I stay,” she said. She took a step towards him, and smiled. He saw now that her teeth were not just small, but small and pointed. Sharp. He stared up at her in confusion, wondering why he could not move. Why he could not stand.
A bird fluttered suddenly and her gaze shifted, her head swinging around as an animal’s would, and he thought of a fox scenting prey. And as her head moved, he found his strength and scrambled to his feet. He stood, chest heaving, head filled with blinding pain and an urgent throb that kept time with the thumping of his heart.
She turned back to him, her eyes pinning him. “Sick,” she said.
“I’ve got the bug,” he said.
“Oh, yes.” she said. She blinked slowly, and then took a step towards him. “You are sick. All men sick.”
“Don’t come near,” he said, but once again found himself rooted to the ground, held in place by the force of her eyes. Her eyes … her eyes were dark. Hell, all Japanese women had dark eyes. But the woman in the green kimono, with the hair that fell around her beautiful face like a curtain of ebony and silk, who looked at him this way and that … her eyes were not dark but darkness. Black. Matte black, no pupils. No whites to her eyes.
Very long ago, when he had first come to Japan, he had known a girl from Canada who had come to work as a translator, who had gone with him to the temples and the museums. She had been a tall girl, who walked with long strides and wrapped long legs around him when they made love. Once, in the summer, when they lay sweaty and tangled in bed, listening to the rain falling on the pavement outside the window, she told him stories of the demons that the peasants feared. The demons that walked the earth and brought the end times with them, that soared in the sky on scorching waves of heat, or walked through the forest and carried death with them. The demons that stood between this world and the next. The ones with the black eyes. They walked through the forest on this side, in this world, she’d said. On the other side lay death. Or eternity. Something like that. He didn’t quite remember.