Dead Earth

by Demers, Matt

  They asked for it — I gave it to him. It went something like this:

  “We’re curing one disease with another. We take two of nature’s best pest repellents — cancer and AIDs — and we neutralize them. It’s a swift kick in her face. Believe me, I was as excited as any oncologist in this room, but does it surprise me that it’s come to this? That these two diseases — one that mutates, the other that infects — have become what it is? Hell no.

  Peace and planet,

  Trent Orsol

  ***

  James thought about it awhile. Yes, it was insulting wasn’t it? To think humankind could cheat death. Population control — we needed it. James thought about that many times — mainly pre-cancer — while getting a big whiff of Green River’s petroleum perfume. We had tugged on the Grim Reaper’s robe, in a sense.

  We had it coming.

  Orsol returned with a white Styrofoam box the size of a hardcover book. He placed it on the tray and unfolded it. Cold air escaped. A syringe containing a cloudy, translucent liquid lay inside.

  “No bets,” Orsol said. “I've been freezing my ass off in virology to figure out the right adjustments. To be perfectly blunt, all my patients reacted.”

  “Reacted? What does that mean? Is it going to kill me?”

  Orsol smiled. His voice was light, professional. “Well, that remains to be seen.” He hurried to the head of the bed and pulled out a penlight. “How many rounds of chemo have you had?”

  “Eight. Why?”

  He cupped James’ chin, tilted his head and shined the light into James’ eyes. “Any gamma knife?”

  “Once.”

  “Any long-term memory problems, confusion, depersonalization, depression?” He clicked the light off.

  “No worse than before treatment. I don’t have chemo brain if that’s what you want to know. What’s the issue?”

  Orsol sighed as he plopped into the wheelchair. James supposed Orsol was one of those Patch Adams types —a specialist-buddy hybrid.

  “So you really don't know? I figured brain damage might have cause you to forget, because I thought everyone knew. So… this might come as a shocker.”

  James' neck stiffened. “I doubt it. Not like I have much of a choice, anyway.”

  Orsol reached for the syringe. “You’d think.”

  Orsol eyed the Bearcat for the first time and snatched it from James’ holster. He set it on the tray. James felt naked without it, weightless where there should be mass.

  “Here we go,” Orsol grabbed the syringe. He held it between two fingers, his thumb resting on the plunger. “It’s time to decide, James.”

  Just spit it out.

  “AIV will cure your cancer, but it will likely cause an aggressive form of dementia. You might become mute or speech impaired if you’re lucky. At worst — hyper-aggressive — psychotic rage to the nth degree — when in range of certain scents, including the pheromones that non-carriers release. In cases of even the slightest blood-on-blood contact, you’ll spread it to others.”

  James’ eyes widened. “In other words, I’ll become Tweak, maybe.”

  “The scientific term is AI-VID. AIV induced dementia, and you will definitely become a Tweak. The question is can we bring you back. The cocktail I’ve been working on — antibiotics, immune boosters, vitamins, and quick-release antiretroviral drugs — might do the trick. We won’t know until we try.”

  James remembered the priest, staring up at the orange moon through a hole in the greenhouse roof. Maybe he sought sanity, running fugitive along the moon’s surface.

  You do not grow old. You do not die, the priest had said. You simply fall for eternity with nothing but your thoughts and an ocean of vast darkness. Every moment feels a stone’s throw from forever, from eternity. An Event Horizon—

  God will it hurt—

  Orsol aimed the needle.

  “Get that shit away from me,” James pushed Orsol back with the last of his strength. Sharp pain jolted up James’ arm. He bit down.

  Orsol sighed. “If the ward was up and running, you’d have at least several weeks. Since it’s not — you’re a bed-ridden time bomb. I’ll respect your choice, either way. But you best to make it now.”

  James’ temples flared. “I don’t wanna be walking around like that. I rather you’d Jack Kevorkian my cancer-ridden ass.”

  “It’s not just yourself you should be thinking about. Success or not, your treatment will give more insight than two years of 16-hour-days in the lab.”

  James expected that answer. He thought of the priest. He thought of Jade.

  “I know a Tweak. She’s different from the rest…”

  “Too far gone,” Orsol said. “They’re just a Tweak on low burn and will end up like the others in time. Rabid, angry, hungry. However...” Orsol looked at the syringe and back at James. “You promise to pull through this…” Orsol smiled genuinely. “I’ll promise to help your friend.”

  “Fuck.”

  Now he had to do it. “You promise me another thing, doc. You do me in before I... If I switch teams for good. You hear? I ain’t some pet project to be stowed away and fed dog food."

  Orsol frowned. “Let me assure you, friend. If you go rogue, the last thing I want is you running around infecting everyone. Including me.” His eyes flicked to the Bearcat.

  James glanced through the window, which showed nothing more than the backside of an air-conditioning unit. He turned and eyed the doctor. After a long moment, James nodded.

  Orsol adjusted his grip on the syringe and approached the bed again. “Unfortunately, because AIV requires rapid absorption, the needle is administered through the sclera.”

  “My fucking eyeball, in other words.”

  Orsol nodded.

  James felt a clammy palm on his forehead. Orsol pressed down firmly.

  Better than Gaffer doing it.

  James felt the cold point of the needle against his eye.

  “Usually we would have a special––“

  “Do it already.”

  The needle pushed against the outer membrane of James’ eye. The pressure increased. It didn’t puncture right away and James felt his eyeball compress. It gave an instant migraine, which spread through his sinuses and along the bridge of his nose. It felt like his head was ready to combust any second.

  “You gotta broken nose,” Orsol commented. James forgot how it had happened. It seemed pain — when it shared company — was priority based.

  James felt the sickly pop as the needle broke the surface of his sclera. He felt the cold, rigidness plunge through each layer. Cold electricity cobwebbed down his face. It travelled to the roots of teeth, threatening to pop them out any moment, or so it felt.

  Cold became ice, but it also became fire somehow. It was both. AIV serum travelled through eye tissue giving him the worst brain freeze imaginable. His eyelids fluttered against the needle, sending ferocious heat down his cheekbones with every wink.

  “Keep your eyes shut,” Orsol said, as he finally pulled the needle out. James gagged. Tears ran down both cheeks. He felt a cloth against his face. He took it and held it there.

  "That wasn’t it,” Orsol warned, referring to the pain.

  Every moment feels a stone’s throw from forever, from eternity.

  “I know.”

  God will it hurt.

  James squinted through his good eye. Orsol — barely a blur — sat in the wheelchair, grabbed James' revolver from the tray, placed it in his lap, and wheeled to the back corner of the room. He spun around, observing from the corner with his arms folded.

  James felt fuzziness at first. A static. The same feeling he got from running a hand across the screen of an old television just after turning it on. And just like the TV, it felt strange, yet not altogether unpleasant. The places where he had felt tumors through his skin became hot. There were new areas too. His brain, chest, balls, behind the knee. Few places had avoided Timmy’s wrath.

  Here it comes, James heard, impossible
to say if Orsol had said it aloud or if he imagined it. Before the thought passed, James no longer knew who Orsol was. He no longer knew that he lay in a hospital bed in John Hopkins, or that cancer was killing him.

  But he knew enough. Worst of all, he knew where he was going.

  “Ohmgygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.”

  You never die. You never grow old.

  There wasn’t blackness. There wasn’t even that. Black would be a welcome respite from the nothingness before him. Yet somehow, he sensed the vastness stretched endlessly horizontally, vertically, inwardly. He saw how long — how excruciatingly long! — seconds now became. The length of time it would take to read every single book ever created would hardly be a fleeting moment. Only here, no stories existed to stimulate him. Just the sickening self-awareness of absolutely nothing at all.

  As the year-seconds passed, James longed for the cancer pain. He discovered that the priest proved only partly right about falling endlessly. To James, falling was an action. Here, it felt like receding. He receded from his old life, and the sanity of stimulation.

  He lived many lifetimes over and over and over and over. The time before AIV — a blade of grass on a ball diamond; the time in the void — a slow crawl across the Earth’s circumference for every minute. James felt the urge to clutch at something finite, something that breathed, that quickly, mercifully, died within a century. He wanted to grab at these things and clutch them. To scratch, bite, hit, claw, twist, stab, slam, tear, shred, eat. James screamed, but no sound came, no mouth moved to bellow it.

  No...let me die.

  Ride the wave, James.

  Ride the wave? What wave?

  James’ vision began to return. He still lay in the hospital bed, but by now, all concepts of tangible things were long forgotten. It had been too long. What remained presented itself as a wall of color. Something moved to him.

  “James, it’s me, doctor Orsol. Keep your head screwed on straight.”

  The blur above James moved again.

  “Antibiotics,” it said. Something opened James’ mouth. He felt small things drop on his tongue. Razor blades.

  “Take this water.” Napalm.

  The blur sharpened, but things had changed again. James stood on the bank of the Green River. Something sliced and impaled. He looked down. Instead of pebbles, his bare feet stood on rusted nails and broken glass. The glass shimmered in the night, sparkling as far back as the bank curved west until blocked by the foundation of Valiant Manufacturing.

  James looked across the river. The river grew wider. It expanded until the opposite shoreline — with its industrial skyline — shrank then disappeared. In its place, a wild ocean foamed and crashed against itself in a pointless stalemate.

  James heard a voice.

  My son! My son! My son!

  This time the pleas didn’t come from the highway. No. James knew this voice. The last time he heard it was a three-week vacation in Southeast Asia long before cancer. He caught that something — the owner of the voice — in his peripheral vision. It stood ankle deep in the tide. He should be happy to see her. But James felt the cold air of a tainted being.

  “Don’t look.” A voice beside him warned. It sounded like Orsol, but when James looked he saw Gaffer standing right beside him.

  “We gotta get you to intensive care,” Orsol-Gaffer added. “More AIV, too.”

  “No! I can’t, Orsol. It’s too long. Too long to wait in the dark.”

  “He can’t hear ya, lad,” Gaffer said with a wink. It was Gaffer’s voice. “I’m powering the backup supply to use the elevator.” Orsol’s voice came back.

  That something still stood ankle-deep in the water. James felt its eyes on him.

  Don’t look...

  James looked.

  Mom.

  James’ mother still wore her purple palm tree bathing suit from that day at Nai Harn Beach. Gashes crisscrossed over arms and neck from the debris that killed her. Her skin appeared blue and bloated, fishlike. James had searched the rows of dead bodies every evening. Some no older than kindergartners.

  He had driven his moped from Phuket City to Nai Harn as soon as word spread about the wave. He arrived. There was a beach there somewhere, trapped below the wreckage of huts, cars, e-bikes, and seaweed.

  Paramedics and other volunteers were running with stretchers full of mangled bodies. Most of the bodies looked lifeless, but some were still conscious. That was the worst –– to see that absolute horror in their eyes. In films, people always died calmly, but this wasn't like that. These people knew they were going to die and were terrified. Their eyes darted, looking for something solid to grasp onto, as though Death followed gravitational laws, and all they had to do to escape it was to hold on for dear life. James decided at that moment that dying felt like receding, being sucked into a roaring black hole. Except it’s supposed to end. For Tweaks, they just kept falling.

  James had lost track of time sorting through the wreckage. He’d joined in the search for bodies with others like himself –– survivors who were hoping to find someone. Within hours of the tsunami the hot sun, humidity, and the exposed insides of the victims poisoned the air with a distinctive smell that left James’ permanently prone to queasiness. It smelled of parmesan and fridge mold and something else incomparable.

  He failed to find her the first day and felt tremendous guilt when he finally stopped to sleep, knowing his mom might be bleeding and thirsty beneath splintered debris. By the fourth day, the chances of finding survivors became slim. James helped a band of Tuk-Tuk drivers dismantle a collapsed roof, which had been swept just short of where the tide sat.

  James and one of the drivers picked up the hanging roof sign.

  Pete’s Sea-Doo Rentals and Visa Runs.

  James looked down. His eyes drew to a palm tree on a one-piece bathing suit..

  Don’t look.

  James looked.

  Her bathing suit clung to her putrefying, whale skin body. The corners of her white lips curled into a slight psychotic grin. Her dilated pupils held the evening stars, her gaze so distant it seemed she stared at the break wall of the universe. It was her, yet not her — a cheap replica, like the corpse that now stood before him, still grinning ankle deep in Greenville’s river.

  “I can’t do it, Ma. Not again. Too much hurt. Far worse than cancer. Far worse.”

  “You’re not alone, James. We all hurt. But, once you cross, there are ways to soothe it. Make it dormant for a while.”

  A soft rumble came from far out in the ocean.

  “By killing,” James knew.

  His mother only grinned back.

  The rumble from in the distance rose to a steady roar, blowing a heavy headwind. It blew the nail and glass shoreline into shrapnel, impaling the front of James’ body, splitting across his cheeks, stabbing at his forehead, but it held no candle to the years of nothing.

  “Let it take you,” his mother insisted.

  “What is behind all this?” James demanded. His mother’s grin faded.

  His mother pointed into the roaring wind. “She only seeks to preserve life’s balance. To continue the cycle of life and death.”

  “But why like this? Why so unnatural? So wicked?”

  “Your kind knows much more about the unnatural than we,” she responded.

  A shape approached, the one in his nightmares, in his delusional world. The shape — black as night, rolling, howling, growing larger. James finally knew.

  Good, his mother seemed to say without speaking. Finally, you know. Can you hear it? Death comes to put the wrong things right. And you are its newest messenger.

  James planted his feet against the wind. A tsunami — Death itself — careened toward the shore — thick and black like used motor oil, tall and wide enough to engulf cities whole.

  “Mom, run to the shore!” James cried.

  She cackled, but the shrieking wind masked the sound.

  A little late for that now, son. Only you it wants.


  The tsunami was now close enough for its icy mist to peddle James’ cheek.

  I miss you so much, Ma.

  Her cackle stopped. Something about her expression warmed, and even with the pallor, for a second James’ saw Mom. The real mom who adopted him, raised him, showered him with the love and affection his biological parents couldn’t give.

  “Ruuunnnnn!” his mother screamed.

  James turned from her not just because she warned him, but also because he knew her face would darken, and her corpse would grin and cackle once again if he lingered.

  James ran across shrapnel, into the field in the direction of Riverside Drive and beyond. The cancer pain quickly found him again; his leg once again gave way. James crashed to the earth. He got to his knees and dared to look back, as the tsunami’s crest crashed against the shallow water, swallowing his mother as it did years before.

  He waited for Death to embrace him next and an embrace indeed came, but from behind instead of in front, a slight hug instead of a choke-hold. James turned on one knee and saw Jade.

  Jade... It isn’t safe. Jade kept her eyes fixed over James’ shoulder, at the oncoming waves.

  It hates me, Jade said without speaking. It hates me because I don’t do what it says like the others, Jade admitted. But I’m tired, now. I don’t want to fight anymore.

  She pointed at Death. The tide hit land, holstering the glass and nail shoreline. James turned away, because this was it, and he wanted to remember Jade’s face. That lovely, lost, beautiful face.

  James knelt and held Jade’s hand as they looked at each other for comfort. Glass and nails hailed across his back.

  Good-bye, Jade.

  Earn it, Jade said. Before James could respond, a zip of automatic fire snapped from the highway. Something warm and coppery wetted James’ mouth and tongue. Jade smiled. Her shoulders drooped. Patches of blood seeped through her shirt, spreading. She buckled into James’ arms.

  Long stripes of fluorescent lights cut the sky. It brightened everything, revealing rectangular ceiling tiles.

  “Who is the fu-cking-man now!” A man roared.

  James cradled Jade and stumbled for cover beside a corridor entryway.