“Yeah, sure.” Ren looked concerned, but she said nothing. “Do you want—” She stopped. I knew she had been about to ask if I wanted her to come with me, but she had reconsidered. She chewed her lower lip for a second. “Twist?”
“Yeah?”
“Be…be careful,” Ren said. I nodded and started to walk away from the camp, but Ren called back. “Take a gun, at least. If something happens, shoot. I’ll come running.”
I didn’t feel like I needed a gun. Part of me wanted to willfully ignore her like a petulant child. You’re not the boss of me! I knew that would only lead to more discussion between us, her pleading and me protesting, and I didn’t want that at the moment. I reached into the Greyhawk and plucked my gun belt from its spot. I didn’t fasten it around my waist, like normal. I just threw the belt over my shoulder. I was wearing nylon basketball shorts and a pair of Adidas flip-flops. It wasn’t the sort of look that said bad ass gunslinger. If you’re going to carry a weapon, you should at least look the part. Long pants. Boots. Look like you’re ready for a fight. I looked like I was ready for a quick pick-up game of three-on-three. As an afterthought, I grabbed a flashlight, too.
I meandered through the beachfront properties, shining my flashlight into the windows. Most of the homes had suffered damage over the previous year. Windows were broken. Palmetto trees were toppled. The formerly manicured hedges and lawns had grown out of control. Chunks of siding or stucco were ripped from homes and lay on the ground to be slowly reclaimed by the Earth.
I walked north for maybe a mile, maybe a little less than a mile. I found a gated community with houses that easily would have been in the half-million dollar-and-up range before the Flu. Nice places, all vaguely similar in design and coloring, but different enough to not quite be cookie-cutter. The large, wrought-iron gate at the community’s access road was no longer secured. Both halves had been opened, probably to allow ambulance access while the Flu was becoming epidemic. A few of the homes were looted. Most of them weren’t. On a whim, I walked into one of the looted homes because the front door was wide open, propped open with a heavy iron doorstop. The house had been looted and destroyed. The looters had survived late into the Flu, apparently. They had put holes in most of the walls, smashing through the drywall with hammers, feet, or fists. They had smashed mirrors and picture frames. Carpet had been lit on fire and swaths of it burned. On one wall, someone had spray-painted The Flu is a Government Lie Created to Get Away with Killing the Poor! On a large entertainment center, a massive flat-screen TV had been shattered, the orange-handled claw hammer used to do it still hanging from the center of the broken screen. The house, without the damage, would have been amazing. The kitchen was large and open, the living areas equally so. It was a house that my parents would have willingly sold me to a pit-fighting ring to have, and we hadn’t been even been anywhere close to poor. My parents worked to have a very distinct average middle-class life. This was a high-end upper-middle class home, maybe even on the lower end of upper class.
I moved to the stairway and walked upstairs slowly. I didn’t smell a lot of human death in the house, possibly because it had been well-aired out over the past year, but it didn’t smell right, either. There was something unusual about the air. There was a muskiness to it, like feces and rot, but not the standard rot smells. It was different. It was something I had not smelled in my travels to that point.
The stairs exited at the second floor hall. A half-dozen doors were visible along the corridor. All but one was open. I moved to the first one, the only closed door, and tried the handle. Locked. That made it much more curious. I backed up and kicked the door police-style, planting my foot flat on the door just above the handle. The door cracked loudly, but didn’t give. Two more kicks broke the doorframe. Beyond was a bathroom, a large, marble-tiled room with a standing shower, a toilet and bidet, a large pedestal sink, and a wooden armoire for storing towels and supplies. The bathroom’s only window had cracked, a corner of it broken out. In the corner of the large shower was a dried corpse.
At this point, I was becoming so jaded to skeletons and mummies that I didn’t even blink. They still weren’t my favorite things to happen upon, but they didn’t faze me like they used to. I crept over to the skeleton and knelt next to it. The skin had rotted from most of the skull, but there was still moldering flesh and tissue beneath the clothes. Judging from the clothes, this was likely the person, or one of the persons who trashed the house. The body was lying on its left side, head tilted to the ground. The sleeve of his jacket was rolled up on the left arm, a needle still stuck into the dried flesh at the crook of the arm. A lighter was on the floor of the shower, as well as a dirty, brown-stained spoon. Heroin. I guess it seemed a better way to go out than letting the Flu win. I wondered if that person had even been experiencing symptoms of the Flu. It might have been accidental overdose, too. But why here? There were a billion questions I would never get answers to, and this was one of them. I left the corpse to its resting place.
I went to the next room down the hall. There was a study filled with books. The smell of mold was heavy there. There were two small bedrooms. They lacked personality. Guest rooms, probably. At the end of the hallway, I peeked into the final bedroom. This would go down as one of the great regrets of my short, young life.
My flashlight caught eye-shine first, and then I heard a low, throaty rumble. I saw bones, the remnants of a small deer in a corner. Its head was bent back at a horrible angle and most of its body was missing. Dried tendrils of tissue extended from the carcass. I caught a glimpse of a massive animal curled on the king-sized bed in the room. It took up a great amount of space on that bed. I saw a lot of rusty orange fur intermixed with thick, black stripes. A tiger, a broad-headed, glossy-eyed Bengal tiger, had turned the bedroom into its lair.
My heart stopped for a moment. I clicked the flashlight off and backed out of the room. I took two steps backward, spun on the ball of my foot, and sprinted for the stairs. I was out of the house in a flash, my legs carrying me with speed that I hadn’t known I possessed. Terror does a lot to help you run. Even in flip-flops.
The tiger followed, though. I’d disturbed its slumber. I had invaded its lair. And I had run from it. Of course it was going to follow. The tiger might have been a zoo escapee or one of the animals released by a keeper in the waning weeks of the Flu. It might have been one of those exotic animals trafficked to America by drug dealers or idiots with too much wealth and not enough IQ points. It didn’t matter. It must have known humans, because it had been living comfortably in a home, and it had followed me. Maybe it thought I had food. Maybe it was just curious. I don’t know. I saw animals in the wild on my travels. Most predators will run from humans. If you make noise, black bears will run. Wolves avoid people altogether. Coyotes fear humans. This tiger followed. It knew humans. That made it particularly dangerous. Was I food to it? A plaything? Or a provider?
The tiger was out the front door by the time I made it to the end of the driveway of the house. I made it to the street before the animal caught me. It was three hundred pounds of sprinting apex-predator. I couldn’t outrun it. I felt claws slash my lower back and left butt cheek. It ripped through my flesh like tearing paper. White hot pain flashed through my body. There was so much pain that I couldn’t even scream out. It was paralyzing. The tiger’s broad head and shoulder smashed into my back and sent me sprawling face down on the asphalt. The skin on my knees and palms was shredded on the rough pavement. I couldn’t get breath. I could feel blood seeping into my clothes. A steady stream of blood was seeping from my back to my sides. The tiger had veered to the left slightly after taking me down. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. It was rounding back on me. I fought to make my arms work. Every move hurt. The flesh on my back was shredded. The muscles had probably suffered some damage, too. My breathing got labored. A wave of cold fear rushed over me, the kind of fear that shakes you to the core of your being. I started to get light-headed and I felt a wave of nausea. Sh
ock? I bit hard on the end of my tongue. This was not the time to pass out.
The gun belt was still looped over my left shoulder. I rolled to my right side, my right hand flailing, trying to catch the handle of the gun through some sort of miracle. The tiger snuffled lowly. Its head was down. It was moving slowly. It saw me writhing. It knew the game was almost over. Its massive head snuffled at my shoulder. I felt teeth start to sink into my shoulder. The power in the animal’s jaw was immense. I felt my skin pop beneath its pronounced canines. I screamed out in pain. I think this scared the cat. It released my shoulder and backed up a half step.
I caught the pistol handle and somehow yanked it free of the holster. The tiger stepped forward, a massive paw reaching for me, steel-black talons bared. It slashed at my forearm, toying with me like a house cat would with a mouse. I felt my forearm tear open beneath its claws. I fired. Once. Twice. The first bullet clipped the animal in the rear leg. It leapt to the side. The second bullet hit it higher in the flank, near its rear hip. The tiger snarled and backed away. I fired a third time with a wobbly arm. The bullet flew wide, but the noise and sudden pain of the first two shots was enough to make the tiger retreat. It turned and ran, disappearing in the night in a flash of orange and black.
My body was shuddering involuntarily. I was hurt. Badly. Every move—even breathing—sent waves of crippling pain through me. Those stories about people gaining superhuman strength or determination when they were injured—that wasn’t happening for me. I think I might have even pissed myself. There was so much blood seeping to my groin that I couldn’t be sure. I was getting cold and weak. A mile, in the grand scheme of the universe, is nothing. It is an inconvenience. At that moment, it was about a mile back to the RV, back to Renata, back to my only chance to get help before I bled out or went into shock. It might as well have been interstellar travel. It was an insurmountable distance in my condition. I came to terms with a cold reality: I was going to die.
Death was not scaring me at that moment, though. I think I was ready for it. I had been ready for it since the Flu first started knocking off wide swaths of the world’s populace. I had made my peace with death. I was willing to go. But, then I thought of Renata. I thought of her trying to make it in this world without me. I did not doubt that she could—she was tough. She was a Brooklyn girl. She would be fine. But, I realized that I selfishly did not want her to live without me. I wanted to be there with her in this world, even if it meant only being near her, and never with her. Near her would be enough. I did not want to abandon her. I needed to keep living.
I had twelve more shots in the semi-auto. I squeezed off three more into the night sky. I would have done more, but the strength in my hand failed. Three was all I could muster. Renata hearing those shots was my only hope. I dropped the gun. I remember laughing, thinking of the absurdity that she would hear the pistol shots so far away. She was near the ocean with its constant static noise of waves. There was wind. There were other sounds in the night, dogs and insects. There was no way she would hear those gunshots. It had been a slim chance, at best. I did not want to resign myself to death, though. The will to keep fighting reared up inside me. I absolutely did not want to die.
The MagLite lay six feet to my right. Using my right leg to propel myself, I was able to rock my body across the pavement to the flashlight. It took more effort and energy than I thought it would. I could feel myself getting weaker by the second. I bounced and scraped along the pavement. I extended my hand, grabbed the heavy handle, and thumbed the button. The bright, white light lit the darkness. I pointed the light down the street toward the campsite, toward Renata. Then, I let my head drop to the pavement. The ground was still warm from absorbing the sun during the day. It felt good, not too hot. Pleasant. I started to get sleepy.
I tried to fight unconsciousness, but shock and blood loss took over. I felt sick and cold all at once, a wracking shudder ran through my entire body. I started seeing amoeba-like blobs of black swimming across my vision. The pain in my back and shoulder lessened, and then it left me entirely. Comforting darkness blanketed me. I closed my eyes and let it.
I only remember bits and pieces for a while after that, little flashes and fragments of memory and experience. Some of them felt so strange that I think they were dream-state hallucinations. Some were definitely real.
Bigfoot tending to my wounds was likely a hallucination. I remember clearly seeing an ape-like visage up close, a friendly, rubbery Sasquatch face smiling benevolently. The shaggy mop of ape-fur around his leathery face smelled of violets and summer grass. I felt thick, heavy fingers prodding at my back and sides. “You’ll be okay,” Sasquatch said to me. “I will make sure of it.” I tried to thank him, but he swirled into darkness in a whorl of black fog and disappeared.
The RV headlights roaring down the road toward the MagLite’s beacon. That felt real, at least more real than Bigfoot did. They looked like the eyes of an angry monster, brilliant and blinding. For a moment, I was scared, but then my body and brain told me I was too hurt to be scared. I relaxed and decided the monster could kill me if it wanted. I would not fight it anymore.
Renata going into full emergency room nurse-mode was definitely real. I have vague visions of her leaping out of the cab, rushing for the First Aid kit, and falling to her knees by my side. There are sound bites and flashes of vision lodged in my memory. Gauze. Iodine. Ren sniffling back tears. Ren yelling commands at me. Don’t go. You stay here with me! Swearing—mine and Ren’s. A fire. Boiled water. Volcanic, white-hot pain as Ren scrubbed the wounds trying to clear out whatever manner of toxic infestation the tiger’s dirty claws might have put into me. There was the warmth of my own sticky blood running down my sides. I remember being dragged into the RV. For a petite, diminutive woman, Ren somehow muscled me into the camper with incredible strength. Did I help her? Did I stand and walk with her support, or did she lift me? I can’t remember. After that, there are great gaps of darkness. I woke at one point and found myself lying face down on my bed, my head propped to the side so I could breath. I tried to roll over, but lightning bolts of pain kept me facedown. I felt feverish and sweaty. Sick. Sicker than I had ever been in my life. I was immune to viruses, but not bacteria. Why was I so sick? Did I throw up? My stomach felt empty. My mouth tasted like death. I worried about what the bile from my stomach would do to my teeth. I let the darkness come back.
It was two days before I remember waking up and being fully conscious, fully aware. Even then, I was not well. I was sick, feverish. I was hot and cold all at once. The blankets I had on my legs were simultaneous too heavy, too hot, and not warm enough. Everything on my back hurt. My left ass-cheek felt like a hunk of rawhide leather, stiff and unwilling to bend. I was lying on my bed. I would have thought that I would have needed to pee, but I didn’t. I realized that I didn’t feel quite normal down there. My first instinct was that the tiger got my penis. Let me tell you—that was a blast of panic the likes of which I had never experienced. If you need a reason to suddenly be a hundred-percent conscious, just pretend a man-eating beast got your junk. You, my friend, will be wide a-friggin’-wake. After a few seconds of self-examination, I realized there was a tube coming out of my urethra. Renata had put a catheter in me. I didn’t know where she’d gotten a catheter, but there were plenty of hospitals out there. I am sure she knew what she was doing.
I was naked beneath a sheet on my bunk. I could feel thick, heavy bandages on my back. The RV was swaying, and I could hear the sounds of the engine and tires-on-road. We were traveling. I was suddenly aware that I was thirsty. My throat, my tongue, my lips were dryer than desert air. I was thirstier than I have ever been in my life. I felt weak from thirst. I tried to call out, but it came out a croak. I tried to summon wetness from my salivary glands by kneading my tongue into the roof of my mouth until I was able to approximate something close to speech. It was weak and feeble, but I was able to call her name. “Ren.”
She heard me. The brakes immediately locked up and
the RV lurched to a hard stop. The sudden change in momentum hurt. I groaned involuntarily. I heard the transmission shift to park. I heard the seatbelt being unbuckled. I could not look back over my shoulder, but I could feel her coming. She was at my side in an instant. “Twist? You there? You awake? How do you feel?”
I licked my lips. I coughed. I felt the bed move slightly as she knelt on it. She rolled me to my side and placed a bottle in my mouth. I was able to suck down some water, lukewarm, but clean and wet. It made me cough. Coughing hurt. The muscles along my left side were torn and sore. “Feel okay.” I grimaced. Any hope of being cool and stoic went out the window. I was in a bad way. “No, that’s a lie. I feel bad, actually. Everything hurts.”
“I don’t doubt that.” Ren laid me back on my stomach. She started looking in my eyes with a penlight. “You got ripped the hell open by some kind of big animal.”
“Tiger.”
“Really? A tiger did this?” Ren shook her head. Her tongue made a clicking noise. “Amazing. You lost a lot of blood and you had a fever.” Her hand cupped my forehead. “You still do. You’re very warm.” She left the bed and returned with pills. “I would have given you something intravenous, but it was all expired or stored incorrectly because of the lack of refrigeration. I couldn’t risk it. I made do with a little saline solution to help you get back some fluids. That stuff will keep for a long while.” She put the pills in my mouth and made me take more water with them. I swallowed them, but they felt like large chunks of gravel in my throat. I coughed and struggled to get them down.
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