Inflictions

by John McIlveen

  Alex walked to the mouth of the cave and peered out at the bloodied skies. His gaze moved to the wound on his arm that had expanded to the size of a silver dollar. There were also a number of small, newer sores starting over the rest of his body, as with Cullen, probably due to them drinking contaminated water from the only source they could find. The sickness had clearly found a home on them, negating another reason to stay within the confines of the cave. Leaving was imperative if they hoped to learn whether Kelly or their mother had survived the devastation.

  That was the question, Cullen thought. Do I want to find out?

  And what about Alex? He had no wife or children. His marriage had been a passionate, short-lived affair that had quickly fallen victim to Alex’s seventy-hour work weeks, the fate of all his relationships. As a lawyer, Alex had only one love: the court room. Half of Alex’s family was in the cave with him. Besides Cullen, Alex’s only family was their mother, and between them had been many disagreements that had never been resolved. He wondered if Alex was now regretting his stubbornness. He looked at his brother’s haunted eyes as they scanned the valley, and was quite sure he did.

  Cullen’s life revolved around Kelly. He had to know the truth. If there was even a remote chance Kelly was alive, Cullen needed to know. Alex was a natural-born fighter who would do whatever it took to survive, as he’d so often proved in work, love, and play.

  Their week’s worth of food supplies, stretched out to last more than three weeks, had dwindled to a can of sardines, some crackers, a few dried pineapple chunks, and three Slim Jim beef sticks. The result of their rationing was evident, especially in their faces. Cullen, who was a little on the soft side, could feel a tightening of the skin under his chin. Alex, whose face always looked lean and hard, was positively skeletal. Cullen scratched a sore on his arm, feeling the oily filth of the contamination in his skin.

  They left the cave carrying only their backpacks and sleeping bags, their minds set on the arduous search ahead. They would first travel toward Portsmouth and Exeter, and then onto Seabrook—a trip of about eighty miles from where they stood.

  On the first evening they reached the town of North Conway, where they found their first signs of human life. Most of them watched the brothers from the safety of buildings or from behind trees and structures. The only similarity to humanity in the bald and poisoned creatures was their two-legged gait and chapped remains of arms, legs, backs, and breasts; most faces were indistinguishable behind scaly fissures. The stench of rotting flesh permeated the air, enticing rats, cats, and dogs to feast harmoniously on the dead. There was no need to fight—there was plenty for all.

  Words were few and garbled, mostly incomprehensible pleas for help. A man, wracked in agony, yet whose eyes still held a spark of sanity, staggered by them.

  “Who did this?” Alex asked.

  The man didn’t stop or even look at them. “Does it matter?” The only other words they heard were spoken by an old man. Though he was physically the least harmed, he was nonetheless mad. “Zap!” he yelled. “The aliens burnt everything. I seen ’em!” This he would repeat continuously, an account for no one.

  The brothers walked warily through the town, stopping at an abandoned gun shop where they selected two twenty-two caliber pistols and several boxes of ammunition. Their search for a vehicle proved fruitless, finding most without keys, and the few with keys would not start. It wasn’t until they were walking by a Kawasaki dealership, that Alex remembered his dirt bike from his youth. Kick start … no electronics!

  They had little trouble gaining entry since all the glass had already been shattered by vandals. With two motocross bikes selected, Cullen pointed to a plastic two-gallon gas can on display. Alex grabbed the jug, saluted the corpse lying near the counter, and followed Cullen outside the store. He found that even a false sense of humor took a little edge off of the horrors before them.

  Siphoned gas from a pickup truck filled both bikes and the plastic jug, which Alex strapped to his backpack with bungee straps. The bikes started with a deafening whine in the dead, dark silence. A few of the harmed watched as Alex and Cullen started from the dealership, horrific but harmless.

  Morning wore midnight’s cloak. Daylight was nonexistent under the floating pillows of dust, lacking even the counterfeit glow of electric lighting. The brothers traveled side by side as they entered the town of Newmarket at nine o’clock.

  It’s a ghost town, Cullen thought dejectedly. The Fox Run Mall seemed like a Romero movie that had stopped mid-frame. Cars had died and been abandoned where they sat. The parking lot itself was nearly full with vehicles. There was movement beyond the darkness of the mall doors … better left alone. Bodies lay at irregular intervals along the congested streets, amidst the darting of rats and other unnamable creatures.

  Alex abruptly stopped his bike, nearly causing Cullen to rear-end him. Ahead of them sat a burned woman, recognizable only by her deformed breasts, holding a dead infant. Her wounds were beyond the sickness they had witnessed in the previous towns; her flesh was literally melted, yet somehow she managed to hold on this long. Some sense of priority did remain even through these abominations.

  “Let it go,” Alex said softly. “Damn it, woman, just let it go,”

  Cullen looked at Alex. Were those tears? He had never seen this kind of emotion from Alex before. Alex booted the bike into gear, and was soon weaving through the cars and human debris cluttering the thoroughfare.

  It happened so fast, Alex was dead before Cullen could pull the gun. Three figures leapt out from behind a bridge abutment and pulled Alex from the moving bike. Cullen spun his bike around to face the assault. Alex sat on the ground, propped by the backpack and gas can, a large red crescent where the blade had slashed his throat.

  Cullen drew his gun, aimed at the approaching atrocity and pulled the trigger. Though he aimed for the chest, the bullet punched a clean, quick hole in its throat, forcing the creature to stagger backward. It clutched at its throat, releasing a guttural gurgle as it fell to the ground. Cullen squeezed the trigger at the other two, but he didn’t wait to see the result. Others were descending the embankment of the bridge.

  Stuffing the gun back into his waistband, he spun the bike around and fled toward Exeter. The last image he had of his brother was of his body being dragged to the roadside. There was nothing he could have done, yet guilt tore into him with scissoring teeth. He broke into sobs and couldn’t stop until he reached Exeter.

  The night world transformed the dreadful into utter hopelessness. What had been horrible was now malignant and had reduced humans into monsters. What little optimism he had of finding his daughter alive had now vanished.

  After leaving Newmarket, Cullen approached each bridge with caution. He had to use the gun two more times, his final attempt resulting in the gun responding with terrifying silence. He stopped at a four-way intersection, which offered the safety of open fields on all sides, and reloaded his gun before continuing on.

  In Exeter, he made his way to High Street and drove to the familiar but now eerie shape of the home he’d once owned. He stopped the bike in front of the building and climbed the front steps.

  Warily, he opened the door, gun drawn. The house was silent and empty, except for the sickness-blistered corpse of his ex-wife. She sat on the floor with her back against the couch and her legs extended under the coffee table. Seeing her in that position was so devastatingly familiar and sad, it reminded him of another lifetime, one he lived so long ago. Her hands rested on the coffee table clutching two pictures, one of Kelly, her eyes shining with adolescent audaciousness and beauty, the other of Cullen himself. Anne had died alone and longing. A terrible sense of sadness and guilt washed over Cullen, even in death Anne still held power over him. He searched the rest of the house, hoping, but knowing he wouldn’t find Kelly alive. He searched her cluttered bedroom, but found nothing else.

  He left the house, his breaths labored as he forced them past the lump in his throat. He cli
mbed on the bike and throttled away from the house, down an alien street that had no longer resembled the place he remembered. As he rounded the corner, a once-human figure—female, evident only by the clothing—emerged from around the side of the house, coming quickly at him and emitting a sound that was becoming quite common—a low, throaty garble. Cullen halted and drew the gun. He took aim and shot the creature just off-center of the forehead. He no longer considered it killing, just mercy.

  He drove away, bound for Seabrook and his last hope of family. He dreaded the thought of entering Seabrook for the bridges that must be crossed to enter the town. The afflicted and crazed appeared to favor bridges as vantage points. Their appearances had become much less frequent since he had entered the real “hot” areas.

  He entered town from the north, on the Hampton Beach side figuring the size of the bridge and depth of the water allowed more possibility of an uneventful passage, and better chances of escape should anything transpire.

  Cullen crossed the bridge cautiously, scanning the side rails for hands, or any other beacon of trouble. The Seabrook nuclear plant sat like an abandoned fortress over the inlet. How the people had feared the structure, protested its presence. Even if they had defeated it, their efforts wouldn’t have changed this outcome, he realized. Fate had a sick sense of humor.

  He let down his guard after crossing the bridge unscathed, and thus didn’t see the four figures dart from behind the cinderblock structure that was once the Seabrook Police department. He shifted his gaze from the bridge to the road ahead just as an arm caught him solidly across the chest.

  Cullen hit the road hard, though the backpack saved him from any serious injury. The motorcycle rolled onward at least eighty feet before crashing to a wobbly, ungraceful stop. Cullen rolled desperately away from the lunging atrocities and grabbed for his gun as he rolled onto his back and tried to aim, but one was already on him.

  “What the fuck do you want?” Cullen screamed. It answered by clamping its teeth into his shoulder. The pain was immense, and Cullen realized that he was food, and all that more appetizing without the rotting flesh riddled with festering scabs.

  Wrapping his arms around its back, Cullen grabbed a handful of hair and pulled its head back, put the gun to the side of its head, and fired. Pushing the dead weight from him, he scrambled to his knees, crawled furiously for the side of the road, and tumbled over the embankment. Somersaulting down the ten-foot incline, he landed with his back to a fence, sat up, aimed, and shot two more as they topped the road’s edge. As the fourth abomination advanced down the hill, Cullen’s gun failed to fire.

  Cullen yelled in fear, thinking of the bullets in his pocket and the time he didn’t have to reload them. The creature advanced, and Cullen lashed out, connecting solidly between skull and the butt of the gun. As it staggered backward, Cullen took advantage of the moment and clubbed angrily at its head with the gun. Arms shaking, Cullen stared at the downed, bloodied form before turning his back and starting up the embankment. He walked to the bike, while yet another being crested the other embankment.

  “Where did you come from?” Cullen yelled. It stopped, as if taken off guard, and stared at him.

  Cullen swung the gun in a wide arc, but the greasy, gore-covered weapon slipped from his hand. The gun glanced solidly off the creature’s head, then ricocheted over the embankment.

  Cullen mounted the bike and kicked it into life. The creature released an extraordinary, garbled moan and looked at him almost beseechingly. He booted the bike into gear and rode off toward his home, leaving the creatures half a mile behind.

  Upon entering his house, he found the familiarity eerie, and terribly heartrending, but he pushed such sentimentality aside. First priority was to find a weapon. Before this nightmare, Cullen was not a firm gun promoter, so the best he could come up with was a twelve-inch culinary knife.

  Next, he would barricade himself inside the house. Even when death was inescapable, one’s sense of survival was priority. The doors were securely locked, but windows could be broken. Fearful to draw attention by hammering, Cullen chose to blockade as many windows as possible with furniture: a bookshelf in the living room, the hutch in the dining room.

  He moved the refrigerator a quarter of the way in front of the kitchen’s paned door, when a sore-ridden face with a bloodied gash on its forehead appeared in the kitchen window. Cullen slammed back against the wall, his heart hammering painfully. He pushed the refrigerator in front of the door in a sweaty panic.

  That couldn’t be the same one he left near the bridge! Yet, he knew better.

  The creature bellowed in that dreadful rasp and started hammering on the glass. Cullen heard the panes breaking as he rushed into his bedroom to cover that window with his dresser. There was a shattering of glass in the bathroom, promising Cullen that he would never cover all the windows in time.

  He rushed into the living room, grabbed the knife, and then entered the bathroom. The creature was trying to pull itself into the house through the window. Cullen slashed at the arms, splaying wide the disintegrating flesh and severing muscle and tendons. It responded with a shattering scream of anguish and frustration.

  Gathering a thought, Cullen rushed into the basement and grabbed a cinderblock left from when he built the utility shed. Returning upstairs, then up to the small second floor, Cullen opened one of the dormer windows, and climbed out onto the roof. Lugging the block to the end of the roof, he looked over the edge above the front doorstep. Nothing was there.

  “Hey, scumbag, where are you? Cullen called and raised the block high over his head. The creature rounded the side of the house, looked around questioningly, and then spotted Cullen.

  It moved under Cullen voicing its guttural protest.

  As easy as that, Cullen thought to himself, and let the block fly. It caught the creature level in the face, sending it instantly to its death.

  Cullen returned to the job of blocking the windows. He made up his mind to risk a trip to the local dealer shop to lift another gun.

  Selecting a can of Spam from his kitchen cabinet, Cullen downed a quick meal. He pulled a heavy jacket from the closet, slipped it on, and then left the house by his front door.

  The creature lay sprawled on its back, halfway up the steps. Cullen pushed it off the steps with the flat of his foot. It toppled over once, then onto its back again.

  That was when Cullen saw it, and his sanity slipped a few notches. Something was imbedded in the scorched flesh of the creature’s chest. He reached down and probed it gingerly, then with a great sob, grabbed the object.

  It was a cameo broach. He turned it over. Engraved on the back was:

  TO MOTHER

  From

  ALEX & CULLEN

  Cullen trembled violently. He rose, clutching the broach, and entered his house.

  He didn’t need the gun. He had all he needed here.

  He sat at the kitchen table, looked at the broach, and remembered.

  He remembered a terribly mutilated person. A person who had stared at him in need, not hunger.

  He remembered a horrifically scarred person he shot in Exeter, about the same size as a thirteen-year-old girl. He was sure that if he had taken the time to check, she would have had braces.

  He also remembered wondering … was he lucky to survive the bomb?

  No, he thought, and then slid the blade across his throat.

  Hope

  David fumbled for the snooze button. The asthmatic crank of an alarm clock can make seconds can feel like hours. He pushed the plunger in, giving it a little extra jab for justice; the clock didn’t complain. The nasally rasp of that little General Electric clock had startled him awake nearly every morning for the past fifteen years, yet not a day passed without the urge to hurl it out the window.

  At least that hasn’t changed, he thought. He sat up, and the cool hardwood oak floor sent a chill through his feet. He rubbed his face with open palms and raked his fingers through his sleep-tousled hair, t
rying to shake away the somber dreams and agonizing memories. David looked at the other half of his bed, the reason for his restless nights.

  Empty.

  For the first time in more than thirty years, he had to face his mornings alone. The queen-size bed, big enough for two, seemed cold and desolate, the abandoned half appeared boundless. Its vast, snowy whiteness held the memories of thirty-two years of love, laughter, anger, and tears—like the ones that blurred his vision.

  His breath hitched and fate’s hand gave his heart a squeeze.

  He wasn’t ready for this.

  He wasn’t ready for the knock at the door four nights ago, or the policeman who stood there. He knew why they had come, but he wasn’t ready. It was too soon.

  It wasn’t fair. Someone you love should live a long life and die a quiet, painless death, not at fifty-one years old, and especially not lodged between a dump truck and a bridge abutment.

  She wasn’t ready.

  “We weren’t ready!” he cried. “Oh God, I can’t take this.”

  He stood and contemplated the suit he had set out the previous evening. The pant legs were a little wrinkled, but nothing significant. It was an expensive suit Laura had insisted on buying for his mother’s funeral only two years earlier.

  She was eighty-two, Laura, not fifty-one.

  The clock number wheel rolled, protesting with an arthritic creak.

  7:44 AM.

  The funeral was at nine.

  Better shave and shower before I’m late for my own wife’s funeral, he thought. He walked out to the kitchen clad only in his briefs. He thought of Laura and how she would have reprimanded him for running about in his boxers.

  David pushed the curtains on the kitchen door aside. The brilliant sun greeted him, and the earth glowed rich and green. A blue jay screeched and swooped from an oak to a willow. He let the curtain fall back in place. How could it be so beautiful on such a dismal day?

  David opened the refrigerator to a medley of salads, fruit bowls, and meat dishes. Friends and relatives had dropped the food off, a consolidation of condolences. He grabbed a carton of orange juice, popped the spout open, and took three long swallows straight from the carton. Yet another behavior Laura would have found distasteful. The juice was sweet and snappy as it washed sleep’s mud down his throat. Nothing like “o.j.” to veto morning breath, or “blasphemy breath,” as Laura would have said.