by Ray Wallace
AFTERMATH
Close to nine months have passed since the six of us made that journey. A period of time that has not been nearly as eventful as the three months that preceded it—for which I am grateful—but that doesn’t mean there have been no matters worth recounting. Quite the contrary.
In October, Stella and Richard, the youngest of the group, both of them just into their twenties, announced they were going to have a child together. In all honesty, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the idea. I guess it just seemed too early. The horror of what we had endured too fresh in our memories. And I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the kind of world that anyone should bring a child into. This empty world with its empty houses and buildings and streets and playgrounds... So much emptiness. So quiet. But what mattered was that Stella and Richard were excited at the prospect of being parents and I was happy for them, I really was.
Dana and I were staying in the house my parents used to own. Stella and Richard were living next door. Patricia and Jeff resided one house further down.
One night in mid-October Dana found the strength to tell me about what she had experienced while in her coma. The two of us were sitting on the porch swing, looking out over the front yard to where the sun was going down. Even then she still hadn’t said a whole lot, mostly only responses to questions or statements put to her:
“Are you hungry?”
“Not really...”
“I’m going on a supply run. You want to go?”
“Okay...”
“None of us have any real medical experience. I wonder how difficult delivering the baby will be.”
“I’m sure we can handle it…”
That sort of thing.
Then all of a sudden, that night, the words started pouring out of her.
“It was… It was awful. The most awful thing imaginable. I was convinced it would never end.”
She said it was like the hallucination we shared the day the bugs came. But what we went through then was only a brief moment compared to the seemingly endless torment of her ordeal. No wonder the words had refused to surface for so long. I have a hard time even thinking about all the terrible things she told me that night. On and on it went, the unimaginable suffering. For what seemed like weeks. Then years. Decades and centuries. Inflicted upon her by the winged demons with their endlessly inventive and varied tortures. There were places she was taken at times, alone, fished from the lava river in which she was forced to swim and brought to any of the countless caves which had been carved into the face of the obsidian hills and mountains that rose from the banks of the rivers. Inside theses caves were simple rooms carved from the rock and inhabited by a different species of infernal being, wingless fiends that walked on legs and elongated arms like apes. And they would use those arms, unimaginably strong, to bind their victims to or enclose them within various devices of torture, medieval machines meant to induce and prolong agonies of all variation and description. In their long-fingered grips these foul beasts would wield crude surgical instruments or whips and knives, picks and saws to heighten the torment of their victims. Dana recalled a time when her arms and legs were slowly and excruciatingly removed from her body. Then the creature torturing her roasted one of her legs over an open fire before making a feast of it, tearing at the flesh with its curved and crooked teeth, and all the while she was forced to watch, her eyelids peeled away. Finally, at long last, her head was cut from what remained of her body and she was allowed to die. In what seemed like no time at all, however, she found herself resurrected upon the shore of that glowing red river, forced once again into its scalding currents by one of the winged monsters, weapon in hand and taunting words spewing from its mouth.
I had an arm around her, holding her close as she spoke, aware of the trembling of her body which felt so light and thin. I knew that she wasn’t eating all that much. Just another symptom of her psychological problems, I assumed. And really, who could blame her? If she had emerged from her ordeal sound of mind, well, I think that would have been a concern all its own. When she was done with her awful story she fell silent and just sat there like that for a long time, letting me hold her. I didn’t know what to say so I kept quiet too, hoping that my mere presence would be comfort enough.
The night air was fairly cool. A gentle breeze stirred and the great oak that stood in the front yard—the one that had been there since I was a child when I used to climb its branches—made a soothing, rustling sound, its leaves starting to dry and change color in preparation for the cooler weather ahead. The only other sound was that of the generator around the side of the house, its near constant hum something I hardly even noticed anymore. Everything else was quiet, just as quiet as the world could be. No crickets chirping. No rush of distant traffic. No dogs barking. Nothing but the trees and the grass that had grown so deep within the medians that divided the roads, sprouting up along the fronts of buildings and in the yards of homes where no one lived. An empty world that could make you a little crazy if you thought about it too much. So you didn’t. You pushed past it. You survived.
After that night, Dana started speaking with more regularity. She also started to eat more. Within a few weeks it was evident that she was filling out. The haunted look was fading from her eyes. Just a bit. We slept in separate rooms. I let her have my parents’ bedroom. I stayed in the guest room which used to be my bedroom when I was a child. It had been totally redone since then, held none of my boyhood memorabilia. Presumably, all the stuff I had never taken with me was in the attic, packed away in boxes. I had yet to go look. I had never been an overly sentimental person and told myself it had all been packed away for a reason. Even still, that room gave me a sense of comfort, a feeling of belonging that let me know I had made the right choice in coming here. I kept waiting for one of the others to suggest we go somewhere else or to say that they were leaving, returning to places they had once known themselves, but they never did. Whatever their reasons for staying, I was grateful.
One night, about two months after we drove out of Florida, the door to my bedroom opened silently as I lay in bed. “Thomas?” came the sound of a soft whisper. I could just make out Dana’s form in the wan lighting of the moon coming in through the open window. She was wearing a long t-shirt that came down to mid-thigh, her legs bare. As I watched she crossed her arms in front of her. “Thomas?” she said again.
“I’m awake,” I said.
She came into the room, closed the door behind her, walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, her back to me.
“What is it?” I asked.
She didn’t say anything, just slipped under the covers and lay down, facing away from me. Her hair was damp and smelled freshly washed. I placed an arm over her, my hand down by her stomach. Neither one of us said anything. Eventually I heard her breathing go slow and steady with sleep. It wasn’t long before I drifted off too.
*
The first snow came in early November. I threw on some of the winter clothes—pants and boots, thick coat and gloves and a wool hat—I’d gotten at a local store the week before. Outside, I stood on the porch breathing in the cold morning air, watching the flakes drift down all fat and lazy. Dana was already out there, standing by the side of the road, bundled up herself. She was facing the street, her head tilted back so that she could stare up into the sky, the sun a muted glow behind the bank of thick gray clouds above. In a moment’s inspiration, I descended from the porch to the yard which was already covered in about two inches of snow, crouched down and made a snowball. Then I stood and tossed it at Dana, hitting her in the back of the head.
“Hey!” she shouted and spun around to face me. I was already scooping up more snow, packing it firm and tight in my hands, and letting it fly. This one hit her on the shoulder.
“Oh, you jerk!” she said. “You’re in for it now!”
And apparently I was. Who knew she had such an arm on her?
“Shortstop on my high school softball team,” she informed me a
fter I took a snowball in the face. It was then that I decided to stop fighting fair. So I rushed her, pulled her down to the ground. She squealed as we rolled around in the snow, as I pinned her down and grabbed a handful of the frigid white powder, threatened to smear it in her face unless she said uncle.
“Uncle!” she cried.
Then, before I even knew what I was doing, I lowered my face and pressed my lips to hers. I had about half a second to tell myself this was a really bad idea before her arms encircled my neck and she kissed me back and we stayed just like that for a minute or more on the cold, hard ground with the first snow of the winter drifting down upon us.
Then somebody was whistling, laughing, saying, “Hey, good for you guys.”
It was Richard, standing over near the border of his yard and ours. He was wearing boots and gloves, a leather jacket and a black knit winter hat. Stella stood next to him, smiling. Suddenly embarrassed, I got to my feet, reached down and pulled Dana to hers.
“How long have you been there?” asked Dana.
“Long enough,” said Stella.
“Oh, a couple of pervs, huh? Enjoy what you saw?”
“As a matter of fact…” said Richard, followed by: “No, don’t even think about it.”
I wasn’t sure what he was talking about until I noticed that Dana had ducked down next to me and was packing a snowball. Then she was standing and letting that deadly arm of hers do its work. The snowball smacked Richard in the middle of his chest. And just like that, another battle was under way. There was shouting, laughter, the most laughter I could remember hearing in… Well, since before the beginning of summer, that was for sure. Patricia and Jeff came out on their porch to watch but they didn’t join in.
“Oh, children, having a little fun, are we?” Jeff called out. He managed to just dodge the barrage of snowballs that came his way.
Later that afternoon, we wandered over a few blocks and did some sled riding along a stretch of road that descended along a moderately steep hill there, nothing too dangerous as none of us had any real skill in setting bones or sewing stitches. Richard and I had spent an hour searching nearby homes until we’d found a toboggan and a large, deflated inner tube. Ten minutes of putting a bicycle pump to use and the inner tube was ready for action. We stayed out until the sun started to dip below the horizon. Even Patricia and Jeff got in on the fun this time. When we finally called it a day, I felt like I had when I was a kid and I could hear my mother calling my name, letting me know that playtime was over and it was time to go home. It filled me with a sweet, nostalgic feeling that brought a tear to my eye which threatened to freeze as it ran down my cheek before I wiped it away with a gloved hand.
With December came the heavy snows. I got to experience my first white Christmas in quite a few years. For Dana, who had been born and raised in Florida, it was her first. She had seen snow a couple of times before on vacations up north but never on Christmas. We tried to make it as normal a holiday as possible, going out in the days beforehand and gathering up presents for one another from the shelves of local stores. The women spent most of the day cooking, managed to bake some more than edible cookies and cakes and loaves of bread out of flour and dehydrated milk and various sweeteners they found at a nearby supermarket. We ate over at Stella and Richard’s house where Patricia, Jeff, Dana and I were shown the spare bedroom that was being converted into a nursery for the baby. There was a crib and a mobile with plastic moons and stars dangling over where the baby would sleep. Boxes of diapers were stacked in a corner and a small dresser was filled with baby clothes in both boy and girl colors. On one wall was painted a rainbow cutting through a cloudy blue sky over a field of green grass and flowers. On another was a prancing unicorn, all of it done with a skilled hand.
“Was this already here?” I asked, motioning toward the illustrations on the walls.
“Stella did it,” said Richard. “One of her many talents.”
“Wow,” said Jeff appreciatively from where he stood in the doorway. “It’s really good.”
Everyone else agreed. Stella blushed from all the praise and then we went back downstairs and listened to Christmas carols on the stereo while Richard played a video game on the TV in the living room. Turned out that he was quite the game addict. The one he was playing was a gift Stella had given him along with about a dozen others she’d found. He sat on the floor in front of the couch, controller in hand, eyes wide as he went about the business of destroying various monsters and mutants with a variety of weapons ranging from hand grenades to a machine gun to some sort of energy weapon.
“Wanna play?” he asked, offering me the controller after he was eventually killed.
“No thanks,” I said. Video games had never appealed to me all that much so I wasn’t very good at them. With a shrug he restarted the game and the sights and sounds of destruction and mayhem poured forth from the TV screen once more.
“You know,” he said to me at one point, eyes still on the screen, “I have a theory.”
The others were seated around the table in the dining room talking. I was the only one who could hear him. His words caught me off guard.
“A theory?”
“Yeah, about what happened. About what’s still happening. I’ve been thinking about what you told us a few months back. Toward the end of our journey here. About what Ron had told you. Why we’d been brought here. How we brought all this—“ He motioned to the room around us. “—with us. It doesn’t make sense. Not to me, at least. I’m not buying it. I got my own idea of what’s going on.”
“Oh, yeah?” For some reason I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this.
“It’s all a game.” He grimaced as his character on screen was attacked by an enemy airship. “Virtual reality. They’ve been talking about it forever. Hyping it for years now. Shit, since the eighties. And now it’s finally here. Totally immersive. Totally realistic. And we’re in it. A horror RPG. The entire goal of it is to survive. That’s it. Just survive. And we did. The six of us. We survived. We won.” He took down the airship with a well placed shot. “A game so fucking realistic that eventually you forget it’s just a game. Something totally new. Revolutionary. Could still be beta testing it.” Just then an armored, troll-like creature grabbed his character and ripped it in half. Richard looked at me and smiled. “Sounds like something I would have definitely signed up for. But they haven’t written an ending. The game’s still running. Only one way out, it seems.”
“What way is that?”
He motioned toward the screen. The words GAME OVER were printed there, his character lying on the ground in pieces, blood everywhere.
He hit the reset and started playing again. With a sinking feeling in my gut, I got up and went over to where the others were gathered, grabbed a seat and listened to their conversation. Eventually, the night grew long and people got tired and Dana and I went home. I didn’t mention what Richard had said. Should I have? Would it have made a difference? Would it have changed anything? I don’t know. I like to tell myself that it wouldn’t have.
*
A week after Christmas there came a frantic pounding on the front door of the house. It was early. I was in the kitchen. I heard Dana at the door, answering it, then Stella’s voice, loud and high-pitched. Moments later, the three of us rushed over to the house she shared with Richard. And there he was, hanging by the neck from a length of orange extension cord he’d looped over one of the crossbeams that supported the roof over the back porch. A white, plastic lawn chair lay kicked over beneath his feet which were dangling only about six inches or so off the ground, toes pointed downward. I rushed to him, wrapped my arms around his midsection, lifted him up and yelled for Dana to find something that could be used to cut him down. She went into the house, came back out with a serrated knife from the kitchen. After righting the fallen chair, she stood on it and sawed at the extension cord with the knife. It seemed to take a long time for us to get him down but in reality it was probably only a minute or so.
And then Richard was lying on the floor of the porch, Dana and I kneeling to either side of him, Stella standing a short distance away, hands covering her mouth, tears streaming down her face. Dana had taken a CPR course some years earlier and so she did what she could but it didn’t take long to realize that her efforts were futile. Who knew exactly how long he had been hanging there? Minutes? Tens of minutes? An hour? More? Later, I learned from Stella that Richard had been gone from bed when she had awoken. Exactly when he had taken his life was hard to say. She had gotten up once to use the bathroom around four o’clock in the morning so it could have been any time after that. Later, it was discovered that he had left a note. It was written on a folded piece of notebook paper left lying on the kitchen counter.
Stella,
I’ve had enough of this game. Time to for it to be over. I’ll understand if you’re too afraid to follow me. I’ll do what I can to end it, to get you out too. See you soon. Out there. In the real world.
Love, Richard
“What does it mean?” asked Stella in a raw voice barely above a whisper after Dana had finished reading the note aloud. “What could it possibly mean?”
“He thought it was a game,” I said. “All of it. He thought that by dying he’d be able to get out. And bring you out too, apparently.”
Stella could only stand there, her face filled with anguish and disbelief. Her hand went to her stomach. Dana went to her, stood there holding her for a while.