the mortis

by Miller, Jonathan R.

  Park just isn’t sure one way or the other. Maybe these monsters are just inborn devils, pure, and the disease is just an excuse to show their true colors. Maybe they’re all the way lost, irrecoverable, and maybe they deserve all of the compassion that can be found in a quick death.

  He moves on from the kiosk, keeping course across the ruined grounds toward the Makoa, quickening his pace. In the wild you learn how to stay low, almost crouched, even while moving. Sometimes you may have to put a hand down for balance, but otherwise you’ll find that you can stay close to the ground and still move quickly, efficiently. After a time it even starts to feel natural—the defensive posture of your arms, the bend in your back—as though you’ve simply reclaimed the loping gait of something simian. The primate that you’ve always had inside of you. Think of it as remembering, not reverting.

  There is a central promenade—glazed ceramic tiling in shades of blue—that winds directly through the interior of the resort, a vein to the heart, but Park avoids that. Instead, he keeps to the covered routes as much as he’s able. The shaded walkways that run alongside building facades, the discreet paths taken by maintenance workers and housekeeping staff. He never breaks cover without scanning the surroundings first, but he sees no one—no visible life afield of him other than the insects, a cloud swarming over the profusion of bodies. Wheeling around furiously, madly chirring. Their deposits of larvae are writhing in the soft remains. He picks his way past it all: the overturned garbage bins, an empty beach tote bag, a full wallet, a pair of children’s sandals. He pauses to breathe. If the rag over his face is helping at all with the air, he can’t tell.

  This part of the resort is where the fires swept through during the early weeks. Park can see where the flames licked and crawled up the white walls, blackening them almost like paint would, and the corpses have been reduced to a dark slag by the heat. All of the vegetation is brittle and ash-colored and curled down. From this distance, the Makoa is visible ahead, maybe a few hundred yards further. Its crisp white structure marks the firebreak line—somehow the building stayed untouched in the middle of the blaze.

  The last stretch to the Makoa passes through the atrium. It isn’t a choice. From where he is now, the atrium path is the only paved route to the suites, and he needs solid ground underneath him, not landscaping, in case he has to run. He checks the perimeter and then walks along the wall of an open-air hallway leading in.

  Tota Sao is what they call it, or at least they used to. The Tota Sao atrium—the words mean Welcome in the Mirasai language. Tota Sao is an expansive, open space adjacent to the front lobby, directly on the other side of a glass entryway. It was the first sight you’d see after you checked in at the front desk, once they took away your luggage on a trolley-cart and you walked into the Lavelha proper and you understood that this place could make you forget entirely about your home. Wherever you came from, whoever you left there. Its faux waterfall cycling endlessly and the sunlight shafting in from overhead and your echoed footfalls. The domelike wrought-iron cage, black, at the courtyard centerpoint. Before the collapse, there were five or six squalling blue and green macaws living inside it.

  In spite of himself, Park remembers standing at the vista point carved out at the south end of the atrium. The balcony overlook. A couple of pedestal tables and wicker bar stools. He remembers leaning over the ironwork of the railing. Day two, day three of the trip, around that time, right before everything around them went to hell. At the time, he was holding a cardboard coffee cup girded with a heat sleeve.

  He waited for Lee. She was off in some gift shop or another, but he knew that it wasn’t going to be enough; she would want to browse the stores in the Trap afterward. Not buy anything, mind you, just browse. Walk in and out of the sun, maybe feed the indri lemurs just so she could say that she had. And he was right about all of it—those were the exact events of that day, at least in his memory—and as they walked together on the cobbled roads of the Trap, Park had said something about the islet being paradise, but she had disagreed with him flatly. She’d told him that paradise is only paradise if the land is willing to welcome more than just your tourist dollars. Only if you can settle on it for generations, only if you are able to own lawfully some small portion of this heaven as property, and only if you can walk through its townships without the locals showing you mal de ojo. It was classic Lee, the entire diatribe.

  The memory of such a simple time is too much for him to carry, and he has to stop along the atrium wall and pause a moment. He looks around aimlessly. Without electricity the waterfall won’t run. In the plunge basin there is a layer of red algae blooming on the rank surface. He looks toward the cage. The door has been pried open and there are maybe five bodies inside, piled together on one end as though they died trying to escape from some terrible thing.

  Park crosses the atrium without incident, without catching sight of any movement, and he exits on the far end. Still not another soul. It seems wrong somehow, the complete absence of living beings. There should be more of the sick here, milling around, he knows that. At the very least, he should be able to hear them.

  He approaches the facade of the Makoa and kneels next to a valet stand just off-path. He pulls the mask down from his face and unties the makeshift bandage from his head, wrings the sweat out into his mouth, and swallows it. There is a red floret spreading on the grey fabric. He dabs at the wound—the bleeding has slowed down. He ties the rag back on and pulls the mask up over his mouth and nose.

  At the base of the Makoa building are the remains of a restaurant terrace, the place where he used to eat meals with his wife, where Melo used to work. Park scans the area, and when nothing moves, he decides to go in.

  The dead are cast across the restaurant patio; Park steps over them. The only benefit to living longer is that you become more and more adept at ignoring the things that can’t be changed. It’s gotten to the point where he barely even registers these kinds of sights—the significance of one mass open grave after another.

  In the wild, the worth of any single thing can be measured in terms of the advantage it can or can’t deliver to you personally. Right now, at this moment, how does it help me that this body at my feet was once animated, that it was likely once a mother or daughter to someone? This body, the one that I’m stepping over now, once did meaningful work that put food on a table. This body was needed, wanted. Someone once held and fed and whispered to that small, empty white shell in the corner of the patio. None of it makes any difference now. The only questions worth considering in the wild are the ones whose answers affect your ability to find and intake calories, to drink something relatively clean, to run the path with the fewest obstructions, and to sleep in a place where waking up again is most probable. The only tangible realities here are the various states of decay, how advanced they are, and the catalogue of all the many things that are beyond hope of saving, beyond all human help. You measure the worth of those realities. And then as you pick your way through them, you find yourself thinking of the terrace as being empty.

  Park goes behind the bar counter and looks around. Shattered pint glasses and stoneware, empty bags made of a thin foil packaging. Cardboard coasters soaked through. Overturned chairs. He picks up a few desiccated lemon rinds with the pulp gone and puts them in his mouth, chews them, and swallows.

  He levers all of the beer taps. He opens the row of cabinet doors under the counter and tips back each aluminum cask with his hand, feeling for swash, and then he pinches the clear hose lines with his fingers. He straightens. He stretches out his arms and his back, his hamstrings.

  At his feet is a single dried corpse laid out on the waffled rubber floor matting, and he kneels down and pulls its leather belt out through the pant-loops until the strap is free. Long and wide and dark brown with a heavy buckle, die-cast with a raised truck logo. Park wraps the belt around his fist a couple of times and lets the buckle hang down on about a foot’s worth of length.

  Behind the bar is a set of
grey swinging doors that lead to a kitchen, and Park goes and stands next to them, looking through one of the circular windows. He listens. He looks through the window again. There isn’t enough light in the interior to make out any detail, but he doesn’t register movement, which is what matters. He pushes through.

  He slips in and eases the door closed behind him, moves out of the path of the window light, and stands to one side of the entryway against a wall in the dark and waits there. His eyes quickly adjust to the black. The belt is wrapped tightly around his closed fist.

  In time he’s able to make out shapes in the room—grey silhouettes of industrial-grade restaurant appliances. The walk-in refrigerator unit. The cast iron ring burners and a flattop grill platform set underneath an exhaust hood. A row of banked ovens, all open. The long countertops are littered with torn packaging from the stores of bulk dry goods ransacked shortly after the collapse. He crouches down on the balls of his feet with his back on the wall, and the buckle on the end of the belt rasps the tile—he freezes, terrified that he just announced his arrival to the entire room. After a time spent listening, hearing nothing, he carefully re-winds the strap so that some of the slack is taken in.

  Park walks the kitchen floor. The aisles with their procession of segmented prep stations. Nested stainless steel bowls, acrylic cutting boards. A row of empty silver chafing dishes underneath a long fixture studded with heat lamps. Scrap trays, all empty. No utensils at all—nothing made of metal that he could hold in his hand, bend inward on itself, and file into a keen edge against the concrete.

  He passes next to an inset bay that holds a deep fryer system and he pauses to sieve through the remnants of the dark oil with his hand. He dredges out some breaded debris, and he pulls the mask down around his throat. He pushes everything into his mouth, licks his hand, and then repeats the entire process.

  When the oil is gone, he moves to the flattop grill unit. He looks down at the dark mantle of grease on the grill’s backsplash—the blackened byproduct of heat and fat and flesh melding together—and starts to scratch at it. His long, ragged nails raking through. The crust starts to break apart after some effort, and then he stops and gathers the charred flakes into a pile and pushes them off the edge into his shaking hand. He waits for a moment and then he eats from his palm slowly in the same way a drugged animal would. When there’s nothing left on the backsplash, he stands and stares at the meat of his hand, losing track of time.

  Park keeps walking through the restaurant kitchen. Touring the dark aisles, drifting past the remains of workstations still divided loosely by a series of lost functions. Treading over broken fixtures and mountings and split PCB boards. He pauses and turns over anything large enough to cover something useful. He severs any fitted connection to see inside of both ends, he unlatches anything that appears secure, and he finds absolutely nothing for his trouble.

  He tries for a moment to think like someone who used to work in this place, a prep cook on the service line maybe. He imagines himself standing in these factory aisles putting together plate after plate on one of those sweltering monsoon nights before everything on the islet went clean to hell. The chatter of voices smoothed over with spiced ginger rum. The strains of music. He tries imagining where he might have hidden something of use, something he wasn’t supposed to have with him while on the floor, but nothing comes to mind. After a while, he moves on.

  Park walks the floor—foraging—finding not a damn thing, and after an hour he starts to feel lightheaded. As he moves, he finds himself listing to one side. Reeling. Before long he’s slumping heavily against anything solid to keep himself upright. His body has gone feverish. At first he holds out hope that the feeling will pass and he stops and waits, locked in his sunken posture, but it doesn’t pass.

  He ratchets down to his knees—he does it by his own will, before his weakness can force him down—and when that doesn’t help he sits all the way back on the kitchen tile. His spine is flat against the wall next to the entrance. He closes his eyes for a moment, but then everything starts to pinwheel around and around in the dark, so he opens them. He wipes his hand absentmindedly on his pant leg.

  For a while he stays on the floor among the surrounding ruin—becoming part of it, his rightful place. Joining in. The grey dust layer around him. Human hair and tissue and bone—once vibrant and fluid, porous—reduced to a blanket of fine, arid powder. The stark, quiet presence of hundreds of desiccated insect husks with their dull, black eyes hollowed out.

  On the floor near him there is an emptied bag made of heavy paper, and according to the label, it once carried fifty pounds of raw, granulated white sugar, 100% Brazilian cane. All of that precious sweetness is gone now. Every last grain of it is long gone, and the truth is that most of it was probably taken by some combination of vermin, the inheritors of the good earth, whether insect or rodent, but Park allows himself to imagine that the remainder was gathered by some fortunate survivor. Cupped in her withered palms and sifted into a container and swirled, dust and all, into any available liquid and swallowed down. Almost unbearable, the taste of something so gentle, out here. Maybe the last confection anyone will ever experience in this short life.

  Park is drifting off, head against the wall. He coughs once, lightly. He wipes his mouth and then he remembers the mask; he pulls it up over his face and smoothes it down, shaping it. The fabric doesn’t help much with the air but it helps some. He crosses his arms and realizes that he doesn’t have the belt wrapping his hand anymore, but he doesn’t look for it.

  Soon his mind drifts to the obligation, the commitment, and even though he doesn’t want to think about it, about anything, he pictures the suite upstairs and the brown zippered pouch and the rows of medicine bottles, brownish-orange with child-resistant white caps. So damn many of them. He yawns and scratches his arm, then shifts his body so that he’s lying all the way flat on the floor.

  He closes his eyes. It’s so quiet in this place. After a short time he starts to understand that he may stay here, that he may not be getting up again.

  A sound from his left side wakes him and he opens his eyes. He goes up onto one elbow and turns his head, listening hard, and soon the sound comes again. The sound of struggle, of repeated failure—the most human of sounds. He climbs to his feet. He stands there, swaying, with his head cocked toward the source as he watches for movement. Any notable difference. Something he may have missed during the first walkthrough.

  On the far wall there is a door, and it’s been obstructed by a stainless steel prep station with a hardwood tabletop crisscrossed with deep scarring, the kind of surface used for breaking down meat. The door is simple—painted the same color as the walls, an off-white color—easy to overlook. On the other side of the door is probably an office for the manager or maybe a break room. Extra storage for the things you can’t find any other place for. Whatever is making the sounds is inside of that space.

  Park goes to the prep station and puts a hand on each support to test the weight. He pulls lightly on the structure—there’s no movement, no give. He kneels and examines the base, and as he touches the steel legs he sees that the caster wheels have been levered off. All four of them. The metal is riding directly on the tile. He straightens, looks up at the ceiling and exhales, rubbing his head.

  He looks down. This thing, this butchery table, was positioned here by someone. The wheels were pried off and it was left in front of the door to keep something inside or to keep someone like him out, potentially both. He needs to find out what could possibly justify all that effort.

  He lays his hands on the supports again, grips tightly and heaves backward, harder this time, and after a few moments the structure skids toward him by about five inches. That’s plenty far enough. He leans over the prep station and tries the doorknob but it doesn’t turn, and so he climbs onto the tabletop, stands up, and stomps on the knob with the heel of his shoe until it snaps free, splintering the wood composite. The knob pings against the floor and rolls in a
few listless circles before settling. He kneels, puts two fingers in the jagged hole, and pulls the door open until the stile rests on the table’s edge. It won’t move any further, and that’s exactly how he wants it. He climbs down from the prep station and he waits.

  Park expects that it will only take a few moments for a gaunt face to appear in front of him. The face will be pressed tautly into the gap between the door and the jamb, and it will be ghoulish and wide-eyed, staring out, straining. He expects to see the face, at least one, but it doesn’t come. Nothing does. There is no pale arm reaching out from the dark. No sounds from inside. There’s not a single sign of life.

  Minutes pass and Park stands and waits, watching closely, and when he feels ready he climbs quietly onto the tabletop, squats low, and puts his face closer to the gap. He stares into the dark, trying to make out the details of the room, but it’s like staring at the fabric of a black curtain; before long, he gives up and climbs back down. He bends at the knees, puts both hands on the steel legs of the prep station, and hauls the table a few feet away from the wall. The sound echoes and then the doorway is free.