the mortis

by Miller, Jonathan R.

  The kayak comes free. It turns itself over and then it’s thrashing wildly on the tether’s end. His spine hits the headwall but he maintains his hold. The rush of water sends the boat surging in his direction, and he uses the line to tow it in the rest of the way until it strikes the outcropping beside him.

  He doesn’t wait. When the wave cycle hits its trough, he scrabbles onto the deck and swings one leg over the carry handle, straddling the rear of the kayak, keeping his chest down and his back flat. He throws the paddle into the cockpit, slides his body forward and then drops his legs through the entryway.

  He pivots and slides into the seat and immediately takes the paddle and starts feathering the water with the blade, steadying himself. The next wave hits, and he braces the boat against the rocks. He rides the wall, skimming alongside, running parallel, with the hull scuffing against granite. He tries his best to align his movements with the wave cycle, moving forward in intervals until he can turn the corner on the outcropping.

  The waters are blessedly calm on the row to shore. He pauses at around the halfway mark, eyes closed, and allows the kayak to skim along. He rests his shoulders, head down. After a time he sets the paddle on the deck and gets to the business of bilging out water from the cockpit flooring—around a foot and a half of ocean, up to mid-shin. It doesn’t take him long at the pump handle before he accepts that the satchel and everything it carried is gone. Some part of him knew already, but now it’s confirmed. He checks his clothes, his belt. The kitchen knife is also gone.

  He unbuckles the vest even though he shouldn’t. He shrugs out of it and lies back, gently probing the wound on his forehead. When he’s satisfied it’s not too deep, he rips off another piece of his shirt hem and ties it on. He tries stretching the stiffness out of his arms but it doesn’t help, and so he quits and just rests his head on the deck and stares upward.

  The sun is at half-mast. Rampant blue skies—no sign of the Bengal monsoon cloudfronts, in spite of the season. A black and white tern, solitary, winging overhead. He closes his eyes and thinks about his sad excuse for a plan and considers reshaping it, but in the end he can’t think of any other way forward so he opens his eyes and carries on.

  Eventually he is able to bring the boat into a longshore current that pushes toward land. He rides the current most of the way in, but at a hundred yards off the coast he digs out and lets the boat drift. He squints at the coastline. The staterooms on the water-facing side of Resort Lavelha. Its white stucco walls and archways, the saltillo terra-cotta tiling and the sculpted botanics of its landscape architecture. The sunlight, shining on the corpses assembled on its beachfront, piled in the sand at the wrackline like pale driftwood. All of their rigid bodies. The disease often ends a life in this way, with a terrible kind of rigor mortis where all of the fibers of the musculature simultaneously contract, locking together. No movement, no way to draw a breath, nothing.

  Park sights a landing position east of the main beachfront. Nothing but a small sandspit at the foot of a steep bluff—out of the way, but still near enough to Lavelha for efficient foot travel. He comes in apace, grounds the boat in the shallows and dismounts, jogging in the sandbar, guiding with a grip on the carry handle. Splashing through. He drags the kayak up onto the narrow shoal. The sound of the keel ridge grating on wet sediment. He tosses in the paddle and starts to scan his surroundings, breathing hard, slightly crouched down.

  Above him on the ridgetop there is enough tree cover to keep the site more or less concealed from the resort. He’ll have to climb his way out and back in again later, but that’s the price of seclusion, a price generally worth paying. He squats down and wrings out his pants at the cuffs, then starts looking around the shoal for something he can use to defend himself.

  During the search, he comes across a few limbs that have fallen from the tree-lined ridge and he tests them, but there’s nothing sturdy enough to serve as any kind of blunt-force weapon. Instead he decides to gather an armload of the fuller branches and drape them across the kayak deck for camouflage, working under the assumption that he’ll be coming back again—that he’ll be making a return trip.

  Just off the sandbank he finds a tapered shard of shingle stone. He hefts it, getting a sense. In the end he decides to pocket it, and then he returns to the boat to check it over one final time. As he examines the hull, he remembers the forward deck hatch—a compartment built right into the fiberglass structure—but when he pushes aside the branches and opens the hatch cover, there’s nothing there. Nothing inside the mesh storage bag, nothing useful anywhere on this sand bank. He re-conceals the deck with the tree limbs, then he approaches the side of the bluff and starts planning how to make his way up.

  It isn’t his first time returning here—he has slipped into the Lavelha out of necessity a few times since the collapse hit, and not just on the outer grounds, foraging; he has actually gone inside a few of the desolate hotel buildings. One of the cafés on the west wing, the fitness center locker room, the Manakory Lounge. The Recreation Annex, the outdoor pool enclosure, the daycare facility. But all of those were on the outer fringe of the resort complex, not here—not in the heart. He’s never been inside any of the guest suites since the collapse, and he’s never been on the grounds at all without his wife nearby.

  The disease is at its worst in this place, on the Lavelha grounds; this is the site where the collapse first took root on the islet. Three months ago, there were around five thousand living souls here. Five thousand. Vacationing, mostly, but there was a conference taking place at the Lavelha also—some multinational based out of Tanzania had sent its executives on a team-building retreat. Zip-lines in the tree canopies and trust-falls and small-group breakout sessions and whatnot. So there were the vacationers and the conference-goers, and they totaled around five thousand. The hotel was proud of the fact—the concierge let him know the figure at check-in time.

  Out of the five thousand, almost all got sick—children, women, men, everybody; it didn’t matter. Almost every guest contracted the disease, and afterward almost all of them stayed in the vicinity of the hotel. Maybe it was the familiarity. Maybe it was the difficulty of traveling anywhere else, or maybe it was pure instinct, staying where the resources were most concentrated, who knows the reasoning, if there was any. Thousands have succumbed to the sickness over the past twelve weeks, but even accounting for the dead, on any given day you could still have hundreds of people walking these grounds. Some of them are outright violent, others indifferent, but all of them without exception are volatile and unpredictable.

  The hotel staff saw what was coming; they got the hell out of the Lavelha early on. Rina included. The instant it became clear that this was a mass epidemic and not a handful of scattered cases, the staff loaded themselves into their three cheapjack buses and hauled off back down the murram, southwest to the town of Cãlo, no looking back.

  At the time, the entire staff was made up of Torluna locals, members of the ethnic Mirasai— all of them dark-skinned, all of them a hundred percent pure on account of their isolation—and Cãlo was home. The Mirasai would commute up the dirt road every morning before sunrise in those buses to work at the hotel or to work in the Trap, and then they’d go back home again at nightfall. Seven days a week. Only a few dozen staff remained on the grounds of the hotel around the clock, but now they’re gone also: everybody is either dead or back in the enclave.

  In theory you could make your own way across the islet to Cãlo. Go West, young man, down the murram. Try to hide yourself among the town’s shanty houses and colonial-era stucco buildings. Cãlo is a safe haven, disease-free as far as anyone can tell, but you can forget about going because they’ll never let a foreigner in past the border. Unless you’re one of the Mirasai people, the town is off limits. They might let in a tourist or two who can show a passport from an African nation, maybe, but even that’s not for certain. It’s all just rumors, the things you hear.

  What Park knows for certain is that the Mirasai hav
e set up vehicle barricades—metal sawhorses and bales of barbwire and rusted-out sedans set on their bare rims—all along the dirt road leading into Cãlo, expressly to keep people like him and Lee out. It doesn’t matter that his skin is brown and hers browner. The Mirasai won’t stand and watch as an influx of Americans and Canadians and Australians and Europeans carry their foreign plague in from the resort. From what he’s heard, there are armed Mirasai militiamen stationed at the roadblocks on the murram around the clock, watching for border crossers.

  The situation in Cãlo doesn’t much matter either way. Even if the town kept its gates wide open to the world, Park would still have to cross La Sielve to get there, which he simply can’t do, at least not on foot. The route cuts through more than fifty miles of treacherous, untouched jungle landscape. The only civilizing influence on La Sielve over the last hundred years has been the single dirt road, the murram, carved haphazardly down the middle. Otherwise it’s nothing but an expanse of wild terrain, impassable to anyone but the most seasoned Mirasai women and men. That’s also just rumor, something he’s heard during his time here, but he believes all of it.

  Park clambers out of the ravine, and then there’s only a short stretch of woodland standing between him and Lavelha. He takes the walk carefully. He keeps his head turning, eyes wide.

  When he looks out at the main resort beachfront through the treeline, it’s like witnessing a killing field. The assemblage of corpses, strewn in their ghastly configurations, the final postures. Above it all, a dark brume hangs on the air—a swarthy pall, like soot smoke—created by the cloud of insects come to feed, wheeling and chirring.

  All of this purposeless death. He tears another strip of fabric from the hem of his undershirt and ties it, bandit-like, over his lower face. He steps out of the brake of trees.

  As he walks, he tries not to look around at the wasted shoreline. Eyes kept forward, he crosses the sand, stepping gingerly over body after body, using one arm to bat away the swarm of insects. The sound of thousands of wings beating, humming, from every side. He walks past the wrackline to the rough steps hewn out of a low ridge overlooking the water, the weather-beaten railroad ties lain crossways for traction, half-buried in the sand like fossil finds. He takes one step at a time, pausing at each before he mounts the next. Watching. To his left and right, green marram grass is growing reed-like out of the dune side. Rigid and brickle-stalked. Rattling, waving together after the wind.

  He crests the makeshift stairs and takes a tile footpath overlain with blue cork sheeting. Halfway along, there is a marble dais with an inset hotel map—You Are Here—and he stops to scan the diagram of the grounds, pausing to look up and down the path once in a while, listening. The sound of his own breath, muffled by the rag on his face, choppy from fear and the work of the climb. He turns back to the map where he finds the Makoa Tower on the southeast end, toward the front lobby, and in his mind he plots out a rough course.

  As he continues on the path, he passes a booth with open shower heads for washing off the sand, and by habit he wheels open all the stopcocks. Nothing. He moves on, passing a few open-air kiosks that used to sell the things tourists thought they needed—parasailing tours, bicycle rentals, swimsuits and beachwear. Grilled crayfish with rice, tilapia wrapped in injera flatbread. Everything has been upended and ransacked of all valuables.

  Park chooses one of the kiosks—the sign says flavored snow-ice—and he vaults over the dutch door, crouches behind the counter and looks around, first outside and then in. The empty glass syrup bottles and the white napkins with green tortoise logos, scattered. A tower of conical paper cups is still standing next to the register. He checks the flooring and finds a broken bottle, picks it up by its long neck, shards pointed out, and tests it, getting a feel. Thickly blown glass. Stout and weighty in the hand, substantial. He decides to carry it for a while. There is an open door leading to a back room, For Employees Only, and he decides to go in.

  chapter seven

  One summer when he was a boy, Park visited the machine shop where his father worked as a machinist on a turret mill. A local shop, nothing franchised or fancy. Maybe twelve men on the floor at a given shift. He was eight or nine years old at the time.

  He remembers his father telling him to stand clear back. An optimal safe distance is at least six feet, his father said. Now take a good look at this thing. Really see it, son. You don’t want to get yourself mixed up in the workings there—you don’t want no part of that. His father handed him a clear face shield, just a headband with a hard plastic visor. Put it on, his father said. Shield comes down whenever the beast is running. Always. And then his father socketed off the spindle brake and started up the machine with his thumb on a green button.

  There was the motor’s immediate droning. The pule of the rotary unit sent on its revolutions. A sound like a circular saw peeling through timber. Park remembers watching his father work underneath the overhead tube fluorescents. The look of the burr quill as it bored its way into the leaden blank, a grey filament curling from the cut site, corkscrewing, like a helix. The safety glasses his father wore over his eyes. A gloved hand steady on the helve of the feed.

  Park watched his father that way for a good while, until he heard a different kind of sound over the mechanical clangor of the shop floor. It was a man’s scream—sharp and abbreviated. He turned around and there was a jobber in a grey bib apron standing two machines down from them. His shirt sleeve entirely torn off, the fabric tangled around a rotor shaft, flagging down, spinning lazily. The man’s left hand was gone at the wrist. The knob of the radial bone, delicate and wet like the head of a small animal at birth. Park remembers the way the man stood still as though posing for one of those old-time photographs. Arm at his side, sending out a red flow like a ruptured drainpipe. Motionless. Pale as paper is. All of the machines on the floor were quickly powered off, and for a moment the only sound was liquid against concrete. Park remembers that he didn’t know what to do, not at all, and he understands now that he hasn’t really known since.

  The back room of the kiosk isn’t much more than a kitchenette—a couple of sterno burners and a double sink and a fridge-freezer combo unit, its doors opened. A few rows of cabinets, all of them emptied. Paper scraps and crushed cardboard containers and boxes.

  On the metal countertop is an industrial-sized machine for freezing ice blocks and shaving them down. A flexible black hose-line snakes from the back, and the other end attaches to a fitting in the plasterboard wall. He picks his way through the shambles, takes hold of the hose, and pulls it from the wall bibbing. He puts the opening in his cupped palm. Immediately, there is a trickle of clear water.

  He raises the hose high to stop the flow and drinks from his hand greedily, and when he finishes he puts the end of the hose in his mouth, drawing hard, siphoning. There isn’t much—only the residual amount left trapped in the freezing chamber. When it comes up dry he goes to the refrigerator unit and puts a cupped palm underneath the front dispenser spout and presses the lever tab. Nothing.

  He sets down the broken bottle, takes hold of the fridge with both hands, and rolls it away from the wall. Kicking trash out of the path. He turns it, exposing the back side. The thin grey feeder-hose is visible at the top of the unit, and he pulls it from the bibbing and siphons out the last drops. When he’s finished, he lets the hose fall.

  He stops and breathes a moment, eyes closed. He swallows a few times, and for the first time in weeks, his throat is slick-wet—he realizes that he feels better than he has in a long while. It was only half a cup of water, maybe, but it helped; every little bit does. Every bit. If you survive this world long enough, you may start to discover that the smallest amounts of a good thing can feel like enough, if you’re lucky, because your level of desire is dwindling right along with the level of supply. He’s almost certain of that.

  He opens his eyes and turns around to pick up the bottle, but he stops mid-reach. There is a silhouetted figure standing, framed, in the open
entryway.

  The features are shadowed by backlight, but it’s clearly a man. Look at the build, the posture. The use of all available space. In spite of his emaciation, his gaunt lines, the man takes up most of the doorframe. Just standing motionless. No sound.

  Park keeps his own movements slow—around these people, you have to. He tries making himself smaller than he is. He reaches out for the broken bottle with the same care you might use extending your hand to a stray animal. The man seems to be watching but doesn’t move, and Park slowly takes hold of the bottleneck and brings it down to his side.

  They each stay where they are for a good while, and Park doesn’t look directly at the man. After a few minutes, the man backs away from the doorway, and Park waits where he is, half-expecting the man to return, charging, but he’s gone.

  These monsters could still be people, real humans, underneath—their humanity ebbing, pulsing weakly somewhere in a confined space inside of their wracked bodies. A pocket of air buried underneath a collapse. It’s possible.

  There could be something trapped inside that can still be salvaged. As far as he knows, the sickness may just be a temporary condition, something reversible, and maybe it can be entirely eradicated in the same way they used to say polio was eradicated, but hell, it could just as easily be the case that this is the new normal. Get yourself accustomed to it. The latest incurable epidemic rolls in, makes its claim on a handful of the population, changes them into monsters and unleashes them. And even if that particular disease moves on, another comes, and more than likely it’s the same one as before, just with a slightly different build or with symptoms that sound different on paper. Give it a new name. Then repeat.