The Last Bastion (Book 1): The Last Bastion

by Callahan, K. W.

  Between the aluminum Christmas tree and the bar, and set end-to-end, ran three festive table-cloth-covered rectangular banquet tables. These were skirted by several dozen metal folding chairs. Most of these tables and chairs were temporary additions to the space to accommodate holiday dinner guests. Only one of these tables was used as a buffet during the New Year’s celebration where Ms. Mary always got a little tipsy and inevitably danced the Egyptian Ela.

  Just down from the bar and dining area, the basement ended in a sort of communal living area. There were several well-worn sofas, a couple recliner chairs from the early 90s, and during events like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve, extra folding chairs that could be moved or removed for dancing (especially for Ms. Mary on New Years). In this space there was a massive oak cabinet-encased box television set from the late 80s. There was also a vintage Wurlitzer jukebox with multi-colored glass tubes running along its edges that played a variety of pre-1960’s music on actual records. Beside this stood a nickel slot machine from the 1940s that paid out small jackpots in a mixture of war-era and buffalo nickels.

  No doubt, the place was dated, but it was dated in just the right ways. And to the Blenders, it felt right – like home. Changing or updating it would have detracted from the space, and it would have interfered with many of the memories made in the basement, which for the Blender children, went back as far as they could remember.

  The Hines family carried the side dishes they’d brought with them downstairs. Along their descent they detected the sounds of a party atmosphere – a cacophony of people talking, children laughing, a blaringly loud television, and the clatter of balls on the pool table. It all commingled into a wonderful whirling array of noise that wafted up the stairs toward them.

  Exiting into the basement, the newcomers were hailed with a collective greeting from the already-arrived Blenders. The Hines adults were immediately pelted with questions regarding what sort of cocktail they’d like. They were given updates on the score of the football game. And there were welcoming greetings directed toward Victoria’s mother.

  Meanwhile, the Hines children were hustled off by the other Blender kids who were already involved in assorted age-based activities. The younger ones were searching the walk-in pantry for Al Capone’s lost loot. The older kids were comparing cell phones and discussing which of the latest and greatest models they’d like as replacements for Christmas.

  It was the prelude to an afternoon of leisurely drinking, rowdy football watching, stuff-gutter eating, restful recovery, and dutiful digesting.

  As darkness settled across the Chicagoland area, a light snow – the first of the year – began to fall. And several neighborhoods away in Lyons, a much smaller group was sitting down to a far more subdued Thanksgiving dinner of their own.

  * * *

  “Welcome!” Charla opened their condo door. “Happy Thanksgiving! Please, come in.”

  Charla and Wendell had invited their next-door neighbors, Paul and Diana Richardson to Thanksgiving dinner. Joining them was a new arrival to the condo building, a young man in his early 30s named Chris Williams. Chris had just moved in across the hall.

  Paul and Diana operated a small coffee shop in the suburb of Oak Park. Chris worked for a tree trimming service in Lyons.

  Hugs, handshakes, and cheek kisses were exchanged among the group. The invitees handed over a mixture of side dishes and bottles of wine to their hosts as their contributions to the dinner.

  “Oh, thank you,” Charla accepted the dishes. “I think I’ve already made too much as it is.”

  “You can never have enough for Thanksgiving dinner,” Paul Richardson, a sophisticated looking middle-aged man with streaks of silver in his otherwise thick head of dark brown hair, laughed.

  “You say that now,” Charla looked at him. “When you’re still eating leftovers in a week, you’ll be singing a different tune.”

  “There are so many things you can do with turkey, though,” newcomer to the group, Chris Williamson offered with an award winning smile that Charla had found instantly charming the moment they’d met. “Turkey and mashed potatoes, turkey sandwiches, grilled cheese and turkey, turkey and eggs…”

  “Turkey and eggs?” Diana Richardson exclaimed as she eyed him warily and with a hint of disgust.

  “Sure,” Chris grinned. “Hey, when you’ve been outside cutting trees all day, turkey with just about anything looks good!”

  “Well, I don’t think I’ll be putting it on the coffee shop menu anytime soon, but,” she shrugged, “to each his or her own.”

  “Feel free to make yourselves comfortable,” Wendell waved the group into the living room. The television was off and the sound of smooth jazz trickled from a stereo set inside a book-filled shelf. Scented candles and a white-shaded lamp in one corner lit the room. A high-end serving tray with olives, fresh vegetables, and an avocado sauce was set on the coffee table beside a small holder of toothpicks. Red and green holiday-themed cocktail napkins were neatly arranged around the vegetable tray.

  “Well, this is certainly cozy,” Diana smiled.

  “It’s all Wendell’s doing,” Charla explained. “He loves ‘atmosphere’ as he calls it. Personally, I would have gone for chips, dip, and the football game, but Wendell is the host and entertainer in the family.”

  “Very nicely done, Wendell,” Diana complimented. “I will be expecting the same effort from Paul at the coffee shop. Take notes, sweetie,” she said with a smirk.

  Her husband just smiled and nodded dutifully.

  “I have decent taste in certain things,” Chris interjected. “Candles and music aren’t among them,” he smiled, mostly at Charla.

  “Same here,” Paul Richardson agreed.

  “But wine is certainly in your repertoire,” Charla chimed in. She inspected the bottle of red wine Paul Richardson had given her when they arrived. “Mind if I open this?” she asked, cradling the bottle almost baby-like in her hands as she read the description on the bottle.

  “Go right ahead,” Diana nodded.

  “As long as we get to try it too,” Paul laughed.

  “Ooh, hints of black chocolate and cherries,” Charla cooed, reading from the label. “I’ll pour us glasses now. Chris, would you like some?”

  “No, thank you. I’m not a big wine guy,” he smiled pleasantly, gazing at the candles set around the living room almost as though they were foreign objects.

  “Can I offer you a beer then?” Wendell asked.

  “A beer would be great,” Chris nodded.

  “Light, amber, dark? I have a new pale ale from a local micro-brewery if you’re interested. It’s supposed to have a hint of grapefruit,” Wendell led Chris out to the kitchen

  “Uh, a light beer would be fine. Bud, Miller, something along those lines if you have it.”

  Wendell looked somewhat caught off guard. “Oh, well, I think we might have something like that,” he tried his best to hide his distaste for such a request after his having offered what he considered far superior options. “Charla’s nephew visited a couple months ago. He’s in college. I think he might have left a six-pack of something like that behind when he left.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Chris nodded agreeably, trying his best to hide his disdain for Wendell’s beer snobbery. “I’ll try not to drink them all,” he joked.

  “I don’t really care for that fancy beer either,” Charla came up behind Chris and hissed in his ear. “But Wendell loves it. I think it’s more about the fancy artwork on the labels than the actual taste of the beer. Half the time, I just drink it to make him happy,” she moved to rummage in a drawer from which she pulled out a corkscrew.

  Chris found it nice that Charla and Wendell were such good hosts and had invited him to join them on Thanksgiving. But he had a feeling he would have had a much better time were Charla calling the shots regarding the event planning. Chips, dip, beer, and the ballgame sounded like a heck of a lot more fun than candles, Kenny G, and green looking glop to dip
his veggies in. Charla just had more of a laid back, easy-going attitude about her while Wendell seemed more up tight. But that was the way with most couples he knew, the “opposites attract” factor.

  Dinner was served about an hour later, once a couple more bottles of wine had been opened and a few more beers had been consumed by Chris. Wendell almost seemed relieved to be getting rid of the bottles Charla’s cousin had left behind. There was turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberry relish, and hot-buttered rolls.

  The conversation remained light. Wendell talked about what subjects they were studying in his history class, which nearly put the table to sleep. Paul and Diana discussed how business was at the coffee shop lately. And Chris mostly listened and answered a few safety-related questions about his tree-trimming work.

  When Chris asked the group if anyone wanted to join him on the balcony for a smoke once they were done eating, he thought Wendell might pass out from shock. And he almost laughed aloud at the look on Wendell’s face when Charla answered with a “Sure! That’d be great.”

  “But you don’t smoke!” Wendell cried, aghast.

  “Not often. I used to have a cigarette every once in a while back when I was in college, especially when I’d had a few too many glasses of wine. And guess what?” she whispered, eyes wide and with a mischievous look on her face as she followed Chris out onto their balcony.

  Wendell just watched her leave with an incredulous look on his face, like he didn’t even know who his wife was.

  “Better be careful,” Chris smiled as he took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered one to Charla once they were out on the balcony. “You’ll give your husband a stroke.”

  She smiled, accepting the cigarette, and paused as Chris lit it for her. “Thanks,” she nodded, taking a puff and exhaling the smoke into the chilly winter air. “Sometimes I just like to screw with him a little bit for the fun of it,” she grinned. “He’s strung a little tightly, but he’s a good guy.”

  “I know the type,” Chris nodded. “Takes a little while of getting to know them before they start to loosen up.”

  “Problem is, I’m still waiting,” Charla laughed softly, almost like she was making the comment to herself.

  In fact, Chris couldn’t tell if she was joking, serious, or whether the comment fell somewhere in between.

  “You’ve smoked for a long time?” Charla shifted conversational gears.

  “Maybe five years…on and off. I don’t smoke a lot, usually just when I’m stressed.”

  “You’re stressed now?”

  Chris looked a little embarrassed, like he hadn’t meant what he said to be taken as a personal commentary on the evening. “Well, not here, not now…with you. But back inside, well, yeah, I’m a little out of my comfort zone. I’m used to hanging with guys who use profanity as every second word.”

  “You don’t seem like that kind of person,” Charla eyed him with interest.

  “Around them, I suppose I’m probably more like that. But around people of a higher caliber, I can clean up my act…or at least pretend to,” he grinned his award winning smile at Charla.

  “Well, I’m glad. I’m glad that you can clean up your act as well as that you think we’re a higher caliber of people. At least we have someone fooled,” she laughed.

  She had a pleasant laugh. It was a laugh that was loud and honest enough to be contagious but not one that seemed overplayed.

  They finished their cigarettes and crushed them out in the pot of a withered perennial suffering through the Chicago winter.

  Back inside, they helped clear the table in preparation for dessert. It wasn’t until dessert was served that the conversation livened up a bit.

  Over coffee and their choices of pumpkin, apple or French silk pies, the subject of the new and horrific affliction that had sprung itself on the Chicagoland area arose. Due to the graphic and rather stomach-churning details of the events surrounding some of the recent attacks, those at the table had postponed discussing it during dinner.

  “So what are they calling this thing?” Chris asked after swallowing a bite of French silk pie.

  “Who knows,” Paul shrugged and shook his head. “I’ve heard ‘Walking Dead Disease’, ‘Zompire Sickness’, and ‘Nosferatu Virus’.

  “Doctors have officially termed it the ‘Carchar Syndrome’,” Wendell clarified. “They said that while people are trying to sensationalize the disease with names that incorporate zombies, vampires or some aspects thereof, they are trying to keep the name unrelated to simple pop culture references. Officials feel that it affixes a little more civility to the disease and shows some level of sympathetic respect to the infected.”

  “To hell with respect. One of those nut jobs tries to eat me and they’re going to get it!” Charla shook her head.

  “Most people are just calling them zombies because they attempt to bite and eat other people,” Wendell continued. “But they appear to be somewhat cognizant of what they are doing, at least in the early stages of infection.”

  “Apparently they’ll eat other stuff too. I heard they saw one eating a dog the other day,” Chris chimed in.

  “Eating here, thank you,” Charla gave him a half-disgusted grin as she raised her forkful of pumpkin pie for him to see.

  “Sorry,” he grinned sheepishly.

  “I heard that the first patient they got has really gone down hill,” Diana said and then took a sip of her coffee. “I guess he had to be restrained because he kept trying to bite the hospital personnel treating him.”

  “Do they know what’s causing this?” Charla asked.

  “They still don’t know for sure,” Paul shook his head. “There was a good interview on the news the other night. The man they were interviewing said he thought the origins might have something to do with those bodies they found in the basement of that south side apartment building.”

  “I remember that,” Diana nodded. “It was so horrible.”

  “The man in the interview was one of the two men who discovered the bodies. He said the other man was bitten by something, a rat or a mouse or some sort of small creature. He thinks the bite might have infected his co-worker with whatever this is.”

  “So what, they think that the mouse or rat or whatever was bitten by one of those people and became infected?” Chris frowned.

  “Impossible,” Paul shook his head. “Those people died back in the nineties. Rodents don’t have that sort of lifespan. No, from what I’ve heard, they think the rodent might have eaten some of one or more of the corpses…”

  “Again,” Charla held up her full fork. “Eating.”

  “Sorry,” Paul apologized. “I’ll keep it as clean as I can here, but it’s kind of tough. They think the mouse ingested some infected material and became infected itself, probably infecting other rodents inside or around the apartment building. The infection must have stayed dormant inside the rodents until it finally mutated enough or was simply given the opportunity to be transmitted to humans. And here we are, now finding ourselves having to deal with it just like the rodents did.”

  “Rats on a sinking ship,” Wendell snorted.

  “But since they think they might have isolated where the disease came from, can’t they figure out what’s causing it? That’s what they always do in the movies, right?” Charla asked.

  “I don’t think it’s always that simple,” Paul shook his head. “And it takes time. I have a feeling that since it may have been passed from humans to rodents and back to humans again, it could make the process of isolating the underlying causes of the disease far more difficult. Heck, I think they’re still trying to understand transmission methods and symptoms at this point. They’ve release more information about the infected people. There are at least twenty cases currently isolated in Chicago area hospitals. And I heard on the news yesterday that the first cases in Indianapolis and Milwaukee were just reported.”

  “That’s not good,” Diana frowned
, shaking her head and taking a sip of coffee. “That means they didn’t contain whatever this thing is to the Chicago area. And if someone got on an airplane with it, well…it could be really bad.”

  “They said the first guy to come in with the disease is no longer communicating with doctors,” Paul went on. “He’s in a perpetual state of agitation. And doctors say he stopped responding to any sort of treatment. His neurological functions appear to have decreased dramatically and he is functioning on a much more impulsive, almost instinctual level without apparent regard for rules or consequence of action. He is also supposedly refusing regular food.”

  “Regular food?” What does that mean?” Chris frowned inquisitively.

  “Means he won’t eat cooked meat,” Wendell grimaced.

  “Or worse…he’ll eat only human flesh,” his wife looked at him with gritted teeth in a horrified grimace.

  “Therefore they’ve hooked him up to an IV drip to keep him sustained while they continue to treat him,” Paul continued with his analysis of the situation. “They still can’t isolate exactly what is causing this change in him, but they say that there are several pronounced physical changes taking place. One is his change in dietary preferences, but the other is related to his teeth.”

  “His teeth?” Chris frowned. “What’s up with his teeth?”

  “Well, from what they were saying on the news…” Paul took a small bite of pie, chewed, and continued, “…portions of the patient’s front upper and lower teeth have broken off. It’s almost as if they’ve sheered off I guess. This has supposedly left the remaining portions of his teeth somewhat jagged, very sharp, and extremely strong through what they described as a sort of calcification-like process. When the doctors were inspecting the teeth, they said that one fell out and they took it as a sample to be sent off to a lab and studied. But they noticed that it had been replaced by a similar tooth by the next day. The reporter on the story was saying that an inside source at the hospital had told her that the guy’s teeth are longer and super sharp, almost shark or piranha-like.”