TAGGED: THE APOCALYPSE

by Chiron, Joseph M

“There’s nothing we can do. I’m sorry.” The EMT said quietly but firmly.

  A uniformed police officer appeared at his feet. “I’m going to need to ask you some questions about what happened here, sir.”

  “Is Samantha okay?” Marvin whispered.

  “No,” he shook his head. Out of the corner of his eye Marvin saw the EMT beside him widen his eyes and shake his head, mouthing silently, “don’t upset him.”

  “What happened?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” the officer said.

  “Mom? Mom! I told you she’s alive!” Quincy’s voice rang out beyond his feet. Then he heard a long agonizing high pitched scream.

  “Mrs. Jones lay down. Mrs. Jones…” Then a garbled cry from the EMT.

  Marvin lifted his head up in the cot. This time the EMT beside him didn’t push him down but instead jumped out of the back of the ambulance to give aid to his downed colleague. Beyond the doors was the young police officer with his gun drawn. “Stop now! I’m ordering you to stop!” Two steps in front of him was his wife, crouched on all fours like a lion, staring intently at the officer. Beyond was a bloody corpse lying face down with a tangle of long blond hair that couldn’t possibly be Quincy. Closer was the second EMT on his knees with blood gushing over his hands from a gaping slash wound to his throat. The beast that was Samantha sprang and tackled the officer. He heard the pistol fire and the officer screaming.

  “Quincy, run! Run, baby!” Marvin whisper-yelled as best he could from his cot. He was strapped across the chest and waist. His arms were pinned at his sides. He was only able to lift his head. The pain in his chest and arm was excruciating. He struggled weakly to free himself like a drowning fish in a net. The second EMT turned his back to sprint away, but he was brought down before he took two steps. Marvin frantically peered over the edge of the cot searching for the clasp to release the straps. There it was just below shoulder height attached to the metal cot. He struggled and squirmed to move his left hand to release it but he was barely able to touch it.

  Then she was there in the doorway of the ambulance at his feet. She jumped up like a lion, then stood up on two feet like a human. Her hair was thick and full. She had a mouthful of giant teeth. He could see four pronounced canines in the front and strong claws where her fingernails had been. Her strong body was shriveled and emaciated with her ribs and hip bones sticking out prominently like a concentration camp victim. Her stench was overpowering, like a deer carcass left to rot on the side of the road.

  “Samantha. Samantha, my darling,” Marvin whispered. She looked at him with no recognition in her weird red eyes. Marvin realized that the irises of her eyes had flipped and were now vertical like a cat’s eyes, not horizontal anymore. She parted her lips and showed him strong teeth with four pronounced canines in the front. This is a dream. I am hallucinating, Marvin thought. “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep…” He found himself repeating the childhood nursery rhyme as she slowly leaned over to smell him then savagely tore a fist sized chunk of flesh from his neck with her strong teeth. Marvin screamed.

  CHAPTER 3: September 26, 11 a.m.

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

  “I am here to offer you eternal life through the Lord Jesus Christ.” Warren Dubrowski loudly proclaimed hoping to avoid startling the man as he approached from his blind side.

  The tall man with the loose fitting psychedelic shirt and the dreadlocks down to his waist was clearly startled as he stood in the side doorway of his rambler in the anonymous suburbs of San Jose, California and his left hand immediately went to reach for something just inside the door. Probably a gun, Warren thought. He’s putting his life on the line every day for these people. Warren smiled and held up his empty hands to show he wasn’t a threat. He knew he was a sight to behold by now. He had a week old growth of beard and a burlap sack across his shoulders with a hole ripped for his head. His appearance was intentionally disheveled. Warren could see something very large moving just inside the screened door, watching him intently, and beyond that the profile of a double barreled shotgun. Warren breathed a sigh of relief when he heard the door click shut. “That’s a big dog you have there.” Except for breathing, the dog didn’t make a sound.

  “Boxer-Pitt mix.” The man looked him up and down and then at those in the street behind him.He relaxed a bit eventually removing his hand from the door handle. Then realizing that Warren was not a threat, the man reached into his pockets and pulled out a stubby cigar. As soon as the hippy lit it, the smell hit Warren and he knew that this was a blunt – a cigar mixed with San Jose’s finest weed. With a straight face, the hippy offered it to Warren, “smoke?” Through the open side door, Warren could see what looked like a forest of plants. This was Warren’s first sighting of a cannabis grow house.

  Warren took a half step back and laughed. He knew the hippy with the long dreads was mocking him. He smiled and was momentarily at a loss for words.

  The hippy nodded to the crowd behind Warren in the street, the noise of which had surely brought him out of the safety of his home. Warren knew that they must look like freaks even to this hippy. There were three ‘drummers’ making a lot of disjointed noise banging on trash cans and an empty food bucket and two tambourine girls dancing – Tiffany was actually kinda hot - and trying to play in some sort of rhythm. In the front was a man he knew only as “Samson,” a big man that from all appearances was a former juice head gym rat with exquisitely defined muscles, stripped to the waist and carrying a huge nine foot cross hewn from raw timber and held together with nails and twine. Behind him in a rough line were the flagellates: five men also stripped to the waist, holding various chains, heavy corded ropes, and one with what looked like a leather whip from the S&M sex shop. They beat their backs as they slowly walked down the center of the street. Warren could see the hippy looking them over with interest. On either side, as well as the front and the back, were men holding large bibles, wearing burlap like himself and screaming various canned slogans such as “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” The hippy put his hand over his mouth to stifle a laugh. Warren turned to see what he was looking at, and his eyes rested on the S&M whip being used by one of the flagellates in front. Warren thought his name was Jeff, but he wasn’t sure. He imagined the unholy acts in which that particular whip had participated prior to being co-opted by them.

  “Isn’t that a little dangerous? I mean won’t the blood draw them to you?” The hippy pulled his long, waist-length blond dreadlocks back out of his face with both hands and tied them off with a scrunchy over the back of his psychedelic shirt.

  “We have to save as many as we can.” Warren stood there uncertainly. He glanced at his wrist at a watch that was no longer there. He had traded it for a can of tuna the day prior to joining the flagellates. It was getting late in the day. They would need to find a place to set up camp soon. Those things came out at night. They were always exposed. Warren was exhausted and beginning to wonder if he had really been “called” to go with the flagellates or if he had just been at the end of his rope. Rock bottom as they say. No doubt talking to this hippy would be just a waste of time for both of them. Warren looked back at the slowly moving crowd of flagellates to make certain he didn’t fall too far behind. He would keep this one brief. “The infected don’t attack us. God protects us.”

  “God protects you?” The hippy bent down to cup the blunt in his mouth and re-lit it. He had to turn his face to the left to avoid lighting his giant tangle of hair. “Mind if I smoke?” He said, after lighting.

  “Yes. I mean, smoking is fine.” Warren unconsciously put his head down and squinted his eyes as he opened his giant bible and began flipping through. He knew the hippy was being intentionally rude to him. Why even bother? Warren began to read, “The fifth angel sounded his trumpet and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth…da daa de dum” Warren looked over his shoulder, gauging the distance the flagellates had moved. “…Here it is - out of the
smoke locusts came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads. And the agony they suffered was like that of the sting of a scorpion when it strikes. During those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.” Power came into Warren’s voice when he read the scripture. It just felt so right. It didn’t really matter if this man responded to the Word as long as he was faithful. Warren looked up from reading, surprised to see the hippy listening intently, then continued, “The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle…their faces resembled human faces. Their hair was like women’s hair, and their teeth were like lions’ teeth.”

  “I was outside the night of the eruptions and IT DID look like a star fell out of the sky. What was that?” Sven asked.

  “I only saw it on the news myself. But then the Yellowstone caldera erupted. Supervolcano! Yellowstone erupting touched off a chain reaction down the Pacific Rim and around the world. Isn’t this what the scripture predicted?” Warren could feel the hippy’s interest. Maybe this wasn’t a waste of his time.

  “Darkness and a new ice age.” The hippy shook his head sadly, taking a long, thoughtful pull on his fragrant blunt. “Ok, wise man, since your God did this, any word on when the darkness will lift?”

  “The scientists say it could be years. No one knows really. This is the first time in recorded history this has happened. Many believe that a giant dust cloud caused by a meteor strike in the Yucatan Peninsula is what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.”

  “So you think this could be an extinction event for mankind?”

  “No. I don’t think so, but only because man is smarter than the dinosaurs. We will find a way to survive; even if only a few of us.”

  The hippy took a long, thoughtful drag on his blunt, then blew it out of the side of his mouth. “You said they will seek death but won’t find it. So you think these things are dead?”

  “Yes!” Warren brightened. This hippy was sharp and he was listening. “They’re dead, but they can’t die. They’ve been sent here by God to punish those without the seal of God on their forehead. Sort of like hell on earth.”

  “Why?”

  “So they’ll repent of their wickedness.” Warren knew the moment it left his mouth that the hippy wasn’t going to like what he was hearing.

  The hippy took another long drag on his blunt, this time exhaling the smoke directly into Warren’s face in silent protest. “Let me get this straight. So, the infected don’t attack you? That’s what you’re telling me?” Warren could hear the disbelief in the man’s voice. He’d lost him.

  Warren Dubrowski glanced nervously at the receding crowd of flagellates moving slowly down the block and decided to wrap it up. “We have the seal of God on our foreheads. They can’t touch us.”

  “I don’t see anything on your forehead, dude, except sweat and some dirt.”

  “The seal is visible only to God and his angels.” Warren was clipped and brief. He began rocking his body and moving away from the hippy.

  “Well, now isn’t that convenient.” The hippy was beginning to turn red in the face. God was protecting him, Warren reminded himself, glancing again at the dog and the gun behind the thin screen. “So, the entire world is being bitten by these, these things with the teeth and the hair and the claws, but none of your group has been bitten?”

  “No,” Warren said. “Ok, well, some of the newer converts get bitten, but we think maybe they’re not really saved…” The hippy shook his head and laughed quietly. Warren took another half-step backward, about to depart and catch up to the crowd of flagellates, then said, “Jesus is the lamb of God come to take away the sins of the world. He came as a lamb to be slain, but he has returned as a lion.”

  The hippy hung his head and said something about a lamb Warren couldn’t hear under his breath.

  “Do you mind if I pray with you before I go?” Warren didn’t feel the change in the hippy’s tone, but he always asked if they wanted to pray together before leaving. He was surprised to find that the answer was almost always yes.

  The hippy nodded and silently bowed his head. You can never tell, Warren thought to himself as he clumsily reached up and put a hand on the tall hippy’s boney shoulder, “Lord, may you open the eyes of this blind man before me. As the scales fell from the eyes of Saul, the great persecutor of the early church, may the scales fall from this man’s eyes, and may he see your glorious truth. Lord, may your protection be upon this man from the wild beasts that roam the earth attacking those without your mark upon them…”

  From the instant Warren put his hand on the hippy’s shoulder it was as though there was an electric wire attached to him and a brilliant light filled his mind. Warren blinked his eyes wondering about the brilliant light, but the light was inside his mind. Inside Warren’s head a movie played. The hippy was now a clean cut young boy of Thirteen back in rural southwestern Virginia. The hippy was holding his lamb Buster, in his arms, and telling him that they were running away again. Then the hippy’s father was home, and the boy was putting Buster into the pen behind the house. The boy’s father was drinking and beating the boy, calling him a fag and telling him that he was ashamed that he was his son. The boy cowered and shrank away as his father waved his hands, “accidentally” brushing the boy’s cheek with the lit end of his cigar, burning him. Then came the day that the boy returned from school and his father was on the porch in the middle of the day drinking and smoking. There was the smell of meat on the grill and it smelled delicious. “You want something to eat?” Warren could smell the meat and feel the ache in the boy’s stomach, the vision was so real.

  The boy’s mouth was watering. It was his father’s favorite pastime to force the boy to sit at the dinner table while he cooked up a big juicy steak and a baked potato and ate it in front of him. Then he would send the boy to bed with no dinner. The boy nodded but didn’t say anything. For the past three nights, Warren knew that the boy had been forced to sit at the table while his father ate in front of him. As a result, the boy had a lot of gas in his stomach and was constantly burping and farting. His breath smelled like unwashed ass, and his teeth were getting loose. The boy didn’t know it, but he was starving to death and had developed scurvy and malnutrition. The boy was shocked when his father put a large plate of steaming roasted meat and bread in front of him.

  “Eat.”

  The boy tentatively took a bite, expecting at any second for the food to be snatched away or to be punched or slapped in the side of his head. But his father just smiled that strange smile and took another giant swig of Vodka mixed with V8 juice.

  The boy gobbled down the entire plate.

  “More?” His father smiled again while the boy had a fit of hiccups trying to keep down the food which he had eaten too quickly. It was a weird smile. The boy’s father smiled only with his teeth as his eyes watched the boy narrowly. His father filled his plate again, and watched the boy but didn’t have any himself.

  The boy ate as much as he could but he was full to bursting. He couldn’t finish the rest. His father saw him struggling to eat more. He said, “I’ll save the rest for you. Go out and play with Buster.”

  Buster his lamb always greeted him when he came home from school. Buster was his best friend. Buster was his only friend. His father smiled his cruel smile even more broadly. “Where’s Buster? Go out and play with Buster.”

  Warren could feel his terror as the boy jumped up and looked out of the kitchen window at Buster’s empty pen in the back yard. The boy had a sudden uncontrollable urge to throw up, but he needed the food, so he clapped his hand over his mouth to stop it. The boy’s father laughed and grabbed at him from behind, slapping him roughly in the face and punching him as the boy lost consciousness and the vision went dark. Warren removed his hand.

  “Who are you?” The hippy asked.r />
  “Warren Dubrowski. I was a software engineer for Google up in the valley. I got divorced. My wife took everything. She kept the kids away from me – wouldn’t let me see them. Accused me of just…just the most disgusting things, said I was stalking her, harassing her…I was in court for three years. It was awful.” Warren shook his head sadly, surprised at his own brutal honesty to this stranger, but this was the end and it was likely the man in front of him would be dead by morning. “I was planning to kill myself when this all happened.” He held out his hand to shake, “What’s your name, friend?”

  The hippy had a far away look in his eye. He said something unintelligible.

  “What?”

  The hippy began walking with long, loping strides toward the group of flagellates, “Mene, mene tekel parsin.”

  “Wait, the – earth - has - been - weighed on the - - -scale and - found wanting.” Warren painfully translated the first sentence.

  The hippy absently unbuttoned his shirt and dropped it on the ground as he walked, revealing a tall, almost skeletal form, “Erblomunin brath grymithan, Erblomunin brat er,” he said.

  “God is great. God is one.” Warren Dubrowski interpreted more quickly. “This is incredible. I can understand angelic language. Hey, check it out! I prayed with this guy and he got the Spirit!” One of the tambourine girls looked back and smiled. Tiffany stopped and gave Warren her attention.

  “Tan blrmn a grbnm…”

  “Bend the knee to the Lord of Hosts, who was, who is, and who is to come. The kingdoms shall fall. The nations shall tremble at the mighty word of the Lord,” Warren Dubrowski translated more confidently with each word.

  “The Spirit is upon him. He’s prophesying in the angelic language!” Tiffany, a tall, thin Asian girl holding a tambourine, called to get the attention of the group. The procession stopped. The whips and the cries and the groans paused and waited for the hippy and Warren to catch up.