Last Gasp

by Trevor Hoyle

  There were eight or nine of them as near as he could tell. Pitted and scarred like lepers and dressed in rags, they were huddled around a pathetic fire from which a thin trickle of smoke ascended into the whitening sky. He hadn’t expected this; whatever he had been prepared for it wasn’t children. The oldest was about fifteen. Some of the others were no more than ten, and one, a girl, little more than a toddler.

  He didn’t want to look and yet his eye was held compulsively by each disgusting detail. A head with the flesh hanging off it like strips of yellow tissue paper. A boy with milky-white eyeballs staring emptily into the distance. A girl with scabrous patches of raw flesh on her back and buttocks. Some with a black fungal growth obliterating their face. At least four that he could see with fingers or hands or complete limbs missing, leaving only raw stumps through which the pale bone gleamed.

  And in every eye—even the blind boy—a kind of bloodlust madness that made Chase break out in a cold sweat and his testicles shrivel.

  The bloodlust was real, not his imagination. Near the fire lay two corpses, crudely dismembered. They still had heads, but their tatters of brown tunics swathed armless shoulders and their empty trousers were ripped open to the crotch. The children had divided the spoils, holding their portions on pointed sticks close to the paltry flames and crunching and chewing with rapt concentration and ravenous enjoyment.

  Chase moved away and leaned against the wall. Pearls of sweat covered his face and neck. He didn’t say anything, couldn’t, as Drew gripped the handles and looked into the eyepiece.

  The three men in the concrete cubicle with its garish contorting nudes stood without moving. Distantly, like snapping twigs, they heard the spasmodic stutter of automatic weapons, followed by the fading reverberations across the flat landscape. They heard the screams, too. Muffled by the steel and concrete surrounding them, they reminded Chase of sea gulls whooping and crying in a parody of human pain. Then the screams were not muffled but loud—much louder—as the guards in the corridor slid open the heavy steel door and charged bulkily up the sandblown steps, rifles and machine pistols spitting death.

  No one in the cubicle wanted to witness the carnage thirty feet above his head. Imagining it was as bad, perhaps worse. Chase and Drew still felt sickened by the images of those grotesque children, while Buchan had refused to look.

  Moments later the firing ceased.

  Chase wiped his face and neck with his wadded handkerchief. Would he have experienced less guilt, less responsibility, if they had been adults and not children? Common looters or a drunken mob?

  But there were no comfortable, or comforting, rules anymore, no genteel morality. The only rules, the only morality, concerned survival at all costs. The freakish children had lost their claim to humanity when the sulfur dioxide had corroded their tissues and the needles of ultraviolet radiation had lanced through the depleted ozone layer into their brain cells, corrupting each cell with cancerous madness. Given the chance, Chase knew, the children wouldn’t have stopped until the Tomb lived up to its name.

  He followed Drew into the corridor and up the ramp. The air was cool and would have been refreshing had it not been for the rich taint of roasting flesh.

  “Where do you suppose they came from?” Drew asked in a low voice. He was pale, his thick eyebrows like an unbroken dark bar.

  Chase shrugged listlessly as he mounted the steps. “I’ve no idea. Down south somewhere. You can’t trust government reports anymore. They say that the Devastated Areas don’t extend north of Little Rock, but for all we know they could be twenty miles from here. Right on our doorstep.”

  Behind him, Buchan said gloomily, “Hell, you get these mobs all the time on highway fifteen. Most of ’em are stoned out of their skulls on all kinds of shit. They don’t have a notion whether it’s New Year’s or Halloween.”

  Buchan turned his head as he emerged above the concrete emplacement. His face became a series of horizontal lines, compressed as if the muscles were attached to drawstrings that had been suddenly pulled tight. He moaned and clutched himself and bent over, mouth agape, and brought up the contents of his stomach.

  Two days later Prothero called again from New York. He wanted to know the word on Hanamura. Chase said it was too early to expect a result, encouraging or otherwise. “I’ll get through to you as soon as I hear anything,” he added.

  “You may not have to.” Prothero’s face was gray, the pouches underneath his eyes a livid purple. “They’re evacuating the city. It isn’t official yet, and when it is there’ll be wholesale panic. I’m leaving right away. Is there room for one more in the Tomb?” he asked with gallows humor.

  They’d often discussed the possibility—indeed the certainty—that one day New York would be evacuated, but now that it was actually here it still came as a blow. Another nail in the coffin. “What about Ingrid?” asked Chase.

  “She’s gone back to Sweden. Her parents are there and she wants to be with them.”

  “When are you planning to leave?” Prothero’s wife had left him four years ago, Chase recalled, and his sons were married with families.

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  “I want you to do me a favor,” Chase said. “I have a friend in New York, Dr. Ruth Patton, who works at Manhattan Emergency on East Sixty-eighth. Will you tell her what’s happening, Pro? I wouldn’t like to think of her being trapped there when they blow the whistle.”

  “Sure, I’ll tell her.”

  “If she decides to come with you, can you arrange transportation?”

  Prothero nodded. “There’s a convoy of trucks and buses leaving at midnight on Thursday. I’ll find her a place if she wants to leave.” He looked old and haggard. “She’d be wise to, Gavin. One week from today this town will go berserk.”

  Cy Skrote lay spread-eagled in the warm liquid darkness, the woman kneeling over him, her hair brushing the insides of his thighs. His right hand moved over the soft globular swell of her buttocks to the hot secret place and he both heard and felt her tremulous moan of rapture as his fingers slid deeper, exploring, and she widened herself to his stealthy infiltration. He had never desired a woman so much in his life and had never before received such pleasure from one. It was a fairy tale come true: the beautiful, unattainable princess who falls in love with the shy, bumbling peasant.

  That’s how he’d felt at first—like a gauche young man ill at ease in the presence of an alluring, sensual creature who, quite incredibly, finds him equally attractive and desirable.

  Skrote had never rated a second glance from any woman before. To blame was his unprepossessing appearance, his narrow chest, thin arms and legs, and a fair skin that the sun brought out in blotches. Neither was he handsome. His eyes were large and heavily lidded and set close together, separated by a beaked nose that a childhood accident had done nothing to improve.

  Knowing he presented a rather feeble figure to the world had made him retire inside himself, obeying a natural human impulse to protect the self from being hurt. He wasn’t attractive to the opposite sex and that was that. So the circle had reinforced itself and become vicious: He would make no effort to become what he knew he wasn’t, and the result had been a defensive, unsure, introverted thirty-three-year-old with the emotional maturity of a teen-ager.

  Then from out of nowhere this marvelous, magical experience had grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him over the moon, and Cy Skrote was still reeling from it.

  She had been at Starbuck for several weeks before they struck up an acquaintance. He’d noticed her of course (there wasn’t a man on the base who hadn’t), but she’d been so utterly out of reach that he hadn’t even fantasized about her, as he often did with desirable women seen at a distance. Skrote didn’t even know her name, only that she was one of the scientific observers sent by the Russians as part of the reciprocal inspection pact. They were granted access to the research in Zone 2, while a team of American observers was allowed the same freedom at the USSR research center in Kaz
akhstan.

  Not himself employed in Zone 2, Skrote only chanced upon her in off-duty hours when he and his colleagues went across the lagoon to the clubhouse in the main complex. He wasn’t a heavy drinker but liked to sit nursing a weak gin and tonic and watching the spectacular green and purple sunset while the conversation ebbed and flowed around him. Sometimes he might play pool or, if pressed, sit in on a poker game. But that particular evening he happened to be alone (the others had gone off to the squash court) and his thoughts were several thousand miles away in Portland, Maine, where his childhood still existed, it seemed to him, intact, untouched. Nothing could have been further from his mind than what, by a wonderful coincidence, then took place.

  It started with a jammed cigarette machine.

  Skrote was on his way back from the rest room when he saw the woman thumping and glaring at it with the kind of baffled, impotent rage that human beings reserve for machines that stubbornly refuse to perform the function for which they were designed. Skrote paused in the corridor. He would have carried on if the woman hadn’t happened to catch his eye and thrown up her hands in a gesture of defeat. Even then he was reluctant to go to her aid, mainly because he was intimidated by a vision of beauty that seemed to him then, and still did, sheer perfection. She was tall for a woman—in low heels about the same height as he—and Skrote gazed into her green-flecked eyes for a full five seconds, mesmerized, before nervously touching the thinning patch on the crown of his head and performing an awkward shuffling dance of indecision.

  Her first words to him were: “These machines must have been invented by someone with a sadistic sense of humor. Or someone who wishes to destroy Soviet-American relations, don’t you think?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t smoke,” Skrote responded, immediately struck by the irrelevance of the remark. He moved hesitantly forward. “Have you tried the coin refund?”

  She shook her head, dark polished ringlets bouncing against the white sweep of her neck. “I wanted cigarettes, not my own money.” Her English was faultless, with only the trace of an accent that her low, husky voice made infinitely seductive to Skrote’s burning ears.

  He yanked the lever and coins clattered into the metal cup. One of the quarters was old and worn smooth, and after exchanging it for one of his own, he reinserted the money and asked her to try again. This time a pack of menthol Kools plopped into the tray. Skrote handed it to her, feeling ridiculously pleased, and she leaned forward and impetuously kissed his cheek. If he’d been teetering on the brink before, Skrote now fell head over heels in love.

  They drank and talked the rest of the evening—Skrote doing his fair share without any of his usual blushing, tongue-tied embarrassment. He was quietly amazed at himself. He’d never been so forthcoming, so relaxed, so witty. Natassya laughed at his jokes and became rapt when he spoke of his childhood and thoughtful whenever he ventured an opinion. His confidence grew. It was as if his personality, until now bound tightly in a straitjacket, had been miraculously released, and he experienced a giddy starburst of freedom that was as intoxicating as champagne.

  As for Natassya, she staggered him by confessing that she was lonely. She’d been at Starbuck for six weeks, and apart from her Russian colleagues (who anyway she was sick of the sight of), she had no real friends. And as for male company—her wide sensuous mouth was pulled down at the corners—well, they turned out to be either boring scientists without any topics of conversation outside of their specialized fields or service personnel with but a single thought in their tiny grubby minds. Skrote would never believe, Natassya told him, how clumsy and boorish they could be in their sexual advances. One drink, a bit of chat, and they expected her to fall into bed. Not only was it insulting but also extremely immature.

  Skrote sympathized totally, almost vehemently, shaking his head at such oafish behavior. Secretly he resolved to be a paragon of all the opposite virtues: polite, caring, interesting, amusing, sophisticated, and, above all, not too pushy.

  Maybe he had taken this to extremes, because eight days later, while strolling along the beach in the tropical twilight, Natassya had inquired why he didn’t find her physically attractive. She knew he wasn’t married or engaged; therefore he could feel no qualms about being unfaithful. Perhaps he simply valued her friendship but lacked any desire for her as a woman?

  Skrote was struck dumb. He gaped at her in the mellow golden light, stricken by an unbearable and overpowering yearning. Minutes later they were in each other’s arms and Natassya was smothering his thin face in kisses and whispering endearments in husky Russian. Ten minutes after that they were making love on a bed of ferns beneath the dry, rustling fronds of a palm tree, the gentle lisp of the waves synchronized to their movements, a tempo they soon left behind....

  They had made love every night since that first night two weeks ago. It was dangerous and they had to be careful. As scientific liaison officer for Zone 4, Skrote had been expressly warned against becoming involved with any member of the Russian team, male or female. At a conservative reckoning, about a quarter of the so-called Russian scientists would be working for the KGB. For the American personnel attached to Zone 4, the cover story was that they were engaged on research into the long-term effects of TCDD using human guinea pigs and that this was too hazardous to allow the Russians free access. In the early days some of the Russian military brass had been taken on a conducted tour, but everything they had been shown had been rigged and stage-managed. The real research into genetic manipulation and breeding experiments had been out of sight behind locked doors.

  And Skrote wasn’t without his own suspicions. For wasn’t it, being brutally realistic, such fantastic good fortune that it just had to be a Russian intelligence ploy? He detested the thought (and hated himself for thinking it), but it had to be faced and, somehow, resolved, one way or the other.

  So he faced it by devising a ploy of his own. He pretended to get drunk.

  As Natassya knew by now that he wasn’t a heavy drinker, and therefore accustomed to it, this would have been the perfect opportunity for her, had she wished, to pump him for information. Skrote made it even easier by raising the subject himself. Hoping his slurred speech was convincing, he hinted that Zone 4 wasn’t all that it pretended to be, that some aspects of the research being carried out there were of a highly classified nature. To his delight, which he disguised by a fit of supposedly drunken giggles, Natassya told him pretty quickly that he was acting like a boring scientist and would he please shut up and make love to her at once? Scientific lectures she could do without; what she really wanted was to feel him hard inside her.

  He obliged the lady, ever more deeply, hopelessly, in love. He was as certain as he’d ever been about anything in his life that her feelings for him were genuine and not part of a devious conspiracy. Natassya Pavlovitch had passed the test with flying colors.

  In a curious and perverse way, this made Skrote want to unburden himself to her. Disgust was too feeble a word for what he felt about his work in Zone 4. It made him sick to the stomach. He despised himself for his involvement over the past five years. Five years! How on earth had he stood it? And, more to the point, why? It was a catalog of horror that ranked with the medical experiments in the Nazi concentration camps, and he, God help him, had played a part, been a leading character in this barbarity. He jerked and trembled and felt himself go as Natassya worked him fluidly with her soft mouth, her cool firm hands aiding the spasm of release. He moaned and went slack, his body quivering as the urgent ecstasy died out of it.

  She snuggled close, smearing his chest with a burning kiss, her warm breasts and hard dark nipples flattening against his stomach. Her hair clung to her neck like seaweed. “Was that good, Cy?” Natassya pressed her damp face to him. “Do you like it in my mouth?”

  “It was beautiful, fantastic. God, I can’t tell you. I’m not very experienced with women.”

  “Now, Cy, you’ve told me that before and I don’t believe it. You know how to give a woman ple
asure. You must have pleasured hundreds of women.”

  “Hundreds ...” He laughed weakly. “If that was true, which it isn’t, none of them could have compared with you, Natassya.”

  He stroked her hair, feeling relaxed and at peace, yet his mind was singing with exhilaration. He hadn’t the words to express his gratitude. To be loved was incredible enough in itself, but that it should be this woman who loved him, the most perfect dream-image he could possibly have imagined! His happiness filled up, overflowing.

  As if sharing his thoughts, Natassya said, “You’ve made me so very happy, Cy. I want us always to be together. I never want to leave you.” He thought he detected a strained note of pleading in her voice. There were other emotions buried there, and she was holding on to him fiercely. Skrote felt a convulsive shudder pass through her body.

  “You don’t have to leave me,” he comforted her. “There’s no reason why—”

  But to his alarm and mystification she was sobbing now, dry heartbroken sobs that were muffled against his chest. He tried to lift her head, peering at her in the dim light that filtered in through the slatted blinds; but she resisted, turning her face away from him. “Please don’t, Cy. Don’t look at me like this.”

  “Darling, what is it? What’s upset you?” To Skrote, female psychology was as deep and impenetrable a mystery as the Pyramids. He knew that women cried when they were happy, but these without doubt were tears of sadness, of anguish. “Come on, honey, tell me!” he pleaded. “Let me share it, let me help you!”

  Natassya raised her head and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.

  “I’m being stupid. It’s nothing.” She tried to smile. “While we are together we’ll be happy. If it lasts for only a few weeks ... well, we have that. It’s better than nothing. Let’s take our happiness while it lasts and forget about the future. I’m just being stupid, darling. Forgive me.”