the mortis

by Miller, Jonathan R.

  Park enters the room. The thin light spilling in from the open door behind him isn’t enough—he steps in blindly. Right away, he moves to one side out of the entryway, crouching low, and he keeps still. He listens like he’s still new to the wild, like he still believes that the results he gathers can somehow be used to his benefit.

  Soon he can make out the bleary cast of a metal file cabinet and an L-shaped desk and a swivel chair. Framed artwork on the wall, just a row of solid black rectangles without any visible detail, like voided windows. The dark carpeting underneath him. As far as he can see, there’s no one else here.

  When he feels ready to move, he walks carefully, arms extended, to the file cabinet and rattles the metal drawers, five of them, but they don’t open. He runs his palm along the top of the cabinet through the thick cake of dust and bits of drywall, but nothing is there. He wipes his hand on his pant leg.

  He turns to the desk unit, and when he does, he sees a number of taut cords strung across the work surface. It’s jarring, seeing them there. Running corner to corner, lashing diagonally and laterally. A thin class of rope—the kind that has a braided sheath spun over the thread core, like what a rock climber might use. He kneels down and sees that the end of each cord is knotted around a desk leg.

  He needs to leave this place. He immediately turns toward the door and begins feeling his way toward the thin light coming in from the kitchen. The sound of his hurried footfalls, his breathing. He is nearing the entryway when he catches sight of something he missed on the way in—a recessed alcove with a handful of appliances and a three-cushion sofa. On the sofa there is a prone figure, a pale woman, tied down with cord.

  You should never approach them, the helpless—not in the wild. There are no helpless. The term has no real significance.

  Out here, there are only the dead and the surviving, and some of those who have survived for this long will label themselves helpless so they can draw you in close, feigning injury the way animals do. When you’re close enough they’ll turn, and their strength will be startling to you—it will knock you back on your heels. And for that reason you should always leave the so-called helpless be. Allow them to stay consigned to whatever sorry situation they’ve gotten themselves into, real or simulated, accidental or inflicted.

  Park should walk clean away from here. He knows good and well that he should immediately turn and leave this room, but instead he goes to her. He walks to the woman and stands over her. All too-white and wild-eyed. Skeletal. Her chest rises and falls against the restraints.

  On top of everything else, the woman is sick—you only have to look at her for a moment to see it. The way her eyelids have receded and her mouth widened as though the body has adapted itself purely for the purpose of consumption. The impossible paleness of her. He reaches for the bonds, and she watches warily as his hands move. He loosens the cord across her stomach, the same brand of cord that was lashed over and under and across the desk unit. He kneels and unknots the ligature where it’s fastened around the wooden support. He unthreads everything from the shoulders down, stopping at the rope tied over her throat, leaving that where it is. He straightens himself and looks down at her.

  “I’m going to take this off now,” he says. His voice is hoarse. “Don’t you even try to put a hand on me. Hey.” He takes hold of her face and angles it so that their eyes meet. “Do not make a move toward me. You understand what I’m telling you?” He nods back over his shoulder. “I want you to walk out of that door. Do not even look in my direction.” He turns her face toward the exit. She has a tattoo of a red, fork-tailed bird in flight—a swallow or starling—on the side of her neck.

  She shows no sign of comprehension, and Park doesn’t expect her to. He crouches down and unbinds the last restraint, but he doesn’t let it fall. He holds the end in his fist and bears his weight down on it, even as he climbs to his feet. The woman’s hands go to her throat and her mouth opens, a yawning cavity, and there is a purling sound from somewhere deep in her.

  “I’m going to let go,” he says. Still gripping tightly, he steps back and to one side, providing full egress. “Remember what I said.”

  He pauses, watching her. Her hands are at her neck but she acts as though she’s alone; she is focused on the doorway. He waits for a moment, and then he drops the rope. It falls and there is immediate slack in the line.

  The woman struggles to her feet. The crook in her posture, her bent back. The sight of her spinal column straining at the translucent skin. Her breathing is labored, like someone in the middle of drowning, and she doesn’t look at him. Right away she begins to stagger, tremulous and bleeding, toward the exit, and he watches her until she’s taken herself completely away from the darkness of the room.

  Park stays in the small alcove. There is a round white bar table and a few stools, a coffeemaker with a glass carafe, a microwave and a compact refrigerator. A filtered water dispenser with two spare blue tankards, both emptied.

  He sits at the bar table in the nearly absent light and he takes apart the coffeemaker—the filter unit, the housing, the plastic polytubing of the water reservoir. Every component is baked to brown, boiled dry. He goes to the water cooler and examines the spare tankards on the floor beside it. He checks the body of the main dispenser. The sediment filter and the regulator assembly. With the heel of his shoe, he snaps the blue spigot from the dispenser face and the jagged hole yields a palmful of leftover liquid, warm and stale, and after he drinks it he snaps the red spigot off, but nothing comes. He opens and then closes the door of the compact refrigerator.

  Enough time has gone by; the woman isn’t coming back for him. She won’t appear quietly in the entryway, not after this long, but whoever tied her down and left her on the sofa might, so Park needs to leave soon. The only thing left to do in the room is to try the filing cabinet drawers again, just give the locks one more go. There was a time, soon after the collapse, when he levered open a locked file drawer in the daycare facility office and found a bottle of spring water, two liters’ worth, mixed with what tasted like vodka but might have been plain rubbing alcohol; it’s hard to say. Whatever it was, Park remembers the heat of it against his throat, the weight in his belly like a warm stone. He had downed the entire bottle himself, right there in the office, while Lee was in the other room.

  He goes to the cabinet drawers and tries them again in sequence, top to bottom, and each drawer has about a centimeter of give, but then there’s the familiar hard stop. He finds the lock assembly at the top-left corner of the metal stack, and he puts a finger on the steel face of the tumbler. He traces the scratches around the keyway. It might be possible to pull the handle hard enough to bend the ward-arm and free the drawer, but he can’t risk the noise it would bring. He needs to find the key; either that, or just abandon the whole notion.

  He turns to the desk unit—if the key is anywhere in the room, it’s in the desk. He stands and stares at the beige leather blotter on the tabletop, its collection of stains. The web of cords criss-crossing the surface. He walks around the L-shaped structure to the side with the chair, the business side, where the drawers would be.

  On the floor behind the desk, beside the four casters at the base of the swivel chair, there is a slumped figure. Another woman—as injured as the first. Equally sick. Her right arm is extended straight upward, still pinioned at the wrist by the cords tied to the tabletop overhead. She looks up at him with bloodshot eyes, hate-filled.

  It is never a question. Park is going to do it again, set another helpless one free, in spite of the fact that he knows better. He approaches her and takes her distended hand, cold and rigid, by the wrist. He works to unwind the knotted cord. She recoils but there’s nowhere to go.

  After a few moments he untwists the last of it, but he continues to grip her arm tightly in his fist and he tells her to be calm, to stay down. Stay on the floor until I have a chance to move back, he tells her. Do you understand? Do not try to stand up until I tell you to.

&nbs
p; There is no response and, again, Park isn’t surprised by that. He straightens and walks backward by a step, still bearing down on the arm with his weight, controlling her. When he reaches a safe distance he drops the arm. Still watching, he moves around the desk unit to the opposite end so that the heavy structure is standing as a barricade between them.

  The woman rises to her feet. The left arm pendulums uselessly at her flank, dislocated at the shoulder joint, but she doesn’t cradle it, doesn’t keep it close to her body. She just stares—at Park’s hands, not his eyes—and when he sees the expression on her face he instantly understands the extent of his mistake, the actual gravity of it. He raises his hands, palms toward her, showing them as empty, without threat. Supplicating. I am not the one, he says. I didn’t do this to you. All I want to do is walk out the door.

  He clears his throat and tells her in his firmest voice that he’s leaving. Don’t you move, he says. You better not goddamn move until I’m gone, he tells her. And then he begins to back toward the entryway, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds for alignment, and the woman just stands where she is, still watching his hands as though they’ve wronged her somehow. That’s right, he says. Everything is okay. Park is almost to the door when he sees her mouth begin to slowly open.

  When it happens, it happens like a detonation: she starts scrabbling feverishly over the tabletop of the desk unit. The dead arm swings wildly. She crests the tabletop and slides off the near side and then she is loping, ungainly, toward him. She seems to vibrate; her silhouette is blurred. He turns away from her and runs.

  It only takes seconds for him to reach the lighted exit. He bursts into the kitchen and throws the door closed behind him, but because of the shattered knob assembly, it doesn’t catch. The wood just thumps weakly, loosely, against the jamb. He vaults the prep station, lowers his shoulder into the frame and bulls it toward the wall. The structure scrapes loudly, piercingly, against the ceramic. But before he can shore up the entryway, the woman emerges, casting aside the door like it’s a curtain, and she lunges over the prep station and everything happens so quickly; he can’t move away in time. She strikes him at chest level with the weight of her entire body and he falls backward.

  They impact the floor together, entwined, and his head cracks against the tile. She is straddling his stomach. Her teeth are gnashing at his face, his throat, his fingers as he pushes her back, trying to fend her off. With both hands, he takes hold of her black hair and pulls hard. He twists his body and dumps her off to one side of him. She falls, thrashing and sliding around in the lubricant of her own blood, and her limbs smack the floor wetly.

  Park gets up. He runs for the double swing-doors, eyes trained on their circular windows, and he can hear the woman’s bare footfalls behind him. He bursts through the twin doors to the outside, and the light is blinding.

  Park staggers in the direction of green—he needs to make it to the treeline, to hide somewhere underneath the shaded canopy where the light is softened, a place for the weak. His hands are extended in front of him and he is stumbling over the bodies strewn across the patio terrace, and with every step the decay is yielding under his feet. Behind him he hears the sound of the swing-doors slamming open.

  The woman is on him in seconds. She mounts his back, throwing a forearm across his throat, and he falls forward into something soft and sickly warm and wet. The stench of decomposition, the awareness of a silken substance extruded between his fingers. He can hear her breathing. She sinks her teeth deeply into his scalp over and over.

  Park is writhing on the ground, trying to unseat her, and she is tearing insatiably into the crown of his head, his back, the nape of his neck. The blood is pouring from him. Pooling around him. He covers his head with his hands, tucking under as though he’s preparing for a crash, but then he feels her teeth go into his knuckles, down to the bones, and he manages to turn his body over. He is facing her now, but he can’t see anything but a dark outline. A shadow, frenetic. The limbs of the silhouette rise high in the air, poised, and he closes his eyes, readying himself, but then all at once the weight of the woman’s body is lifted from him.

  Park doesn’t move; he stays down on the ground with his eyes closed. Soon, a set of hands and arms hoist him to an upright position, and then to standing. He sways, mouth open, and his fingers slowly probe the wounds on his head, his neck, taking stock of the damage. He opens his eyes and there is a man in front of him, smiling genuinely, cupping both of his shoulders as though considering the idea of bringing him in for a full embrace. You’re okay, says the man. It’s over now. Let’s go inside and get you cleaned up.

  Park is escorted into the Makoa building through the front doors, past the front desk where he spoke to Rina, the manager, such a long time ago. His body weight is supported at both flanks. They usher him into a guest room on the ground floor and encourage him to sit on a sofa covered with a bloodstained plastic tarp, and he tries to protest but they ease him down. They tell him everything is okay.

  A single beige pill is placed into his hand. Someone passes him a white ceramic mug with the hotel’s green tortoise logo, and there is water inside—it goes all the way to the lip. Not a visible trace of sediment or rust or metal shavings or anything impure. He drinks deeply, and then someone grabs him by the arm and tells him to swallow the pill first and he does, and then he finishes the cup. When he reaches bottom he nearly weeps from it.

  His wounds are cleansed, and the water that runs off of his body is collected and saved in a container. He is sewn closed with a needle sterilized over a match flame. Everything is bandaged and bound. They guide him to another guest room and ask him to remove his clothing, his shoes, and he surrenders the clothing but he keeps the shoes on. He covers himself with his hands. He is given a pair of jockey shorts and he puts them on.

  Someone takes his clothing, that bundle of rags, out of the room. He is offered the mattress of a queen-sized bed and he accepts it, and the crisp fabric of the sheets still smells faintly of scented detergent. They provide him with small portions of food and he takes everything, gratefully, and all of these various tasks—each and every one of the services he receives in the Makoa—is performed by a young woman somewhere in her twenties. There must be six or seven or eight of them. Quiet and drably dressed and efficient. Dust masks over their noses and mouths. More individual women in one single room than he’s seen in the past three months all put together.

  Soon they leave him, and when he no longer hears movement in the hallway, he stands up. He goes to the door and quietly turns the deadbolt and slots the privacy chain, watching through the fish-eye lens, but there’s no one, so he returns to the mattress and lies down and just looks around at the room. This guest suite, more lavish than the one he occupied with his wife prior to the world’s coming to an end. Everything around him is impossibly preserved. Intact. A blanket of dust coats the surfaces of the nightstands and the cocktail table and the vanity and the flat-panel television, but all of these structures, these objects, are still standing. The incredible thing is that they still exist.

  A few minutes pass, and then he starts to feel the effects of the pill, or at least he thinks it’s the pill; lately his mind does this—comes in and out of focus—all on its own, unaided by anything medicinal. His thoughts immediately lighten. The heat in the room is overbearing but with the open windows the air is still breathable. He stares at the outside, at the trees moving, and soon he drifts off.

  chapter eight

  Before the collapse, the online comments had been widely referring to the disease as the mortis. The name was debated, the way all things used to be debated online in comment sections. There were other ideas, other nominations. People spending their energy hotly contesting the proper term for what was coming to take their very lives from them. It was as though they believed that the assignment of a label would itself confer some kind of immunity, as though they could somehow use the shiny new moniker to simply shout the darkness down and be done wit
h it.

  Park had started reading about the sickness just before the power failed. Things were already bad then, but not Bad. He found a connected PC tower in a concierge office of the hotel and he crouched under the desk with the monitor and he read, terrified. Pausing every few minutes to listen for movement in the adjoining concourse. Three, maybe four different nights he came back to the office and huddled there, and by that point the disease had already been spreading rampantly, flu-like, on the mainland. Back home, around the world, everywhere. As the collapse began—before it became clear that it was the Collapse—hopefuls like him were foolishly scouring the internet, last-ditch, for any updated reports on improvements, any status changes for the better. If you began typing the query Why Is Everyone Getting Sick, it would be auto-filled for you in the search field by the middle of the third word. If you typed in the mortis, there would be homespun articles on the illness at the top of your results feed.

  He’d absorbed as much information as he could manage given the time he had—the wire releases, the blog postings, online forums, anything textual. Official or otherwise. The consensus was that the illness was caused by a sequence of junk DNA, of all things. Non-coding. Something residual from one of the dark, forgotten recesses of the serpentine helix. Up to that point it was believed by the establishment to be completely inert, without any known purpose. A simple carryover. But in some people this sequence had become active. Something was triggering it to be translated and read by the body so that its quiet directive would be carried out. And it was evident that the instructions were to manufacture something virulent—homegrown, developed by the body itself—and to flood the system with it, creating a kind of purposeful chemical imbalance in the bloodstream, destabilizing the structure from the interior. It’s as though the code contained an imperative for self-annihilation, like an emergency kill switch.