by McBain, Tim
Moments like these hadn’t come around often for Mitch; moments that shook him out of the half awake state in which he plowed through much of his life; moments that made him open his eyes and see reality in a flash of searing light, all the painful truths illuminated all at once. He saw his life with brutal clarity in this instant: He dragged through days at work and spent the evenings motionless in front of the TV, his brain more or less hibernating. During the weekends he helped it stay asleep by chugging Coors Light while various football games flickered across the plasma screen in the living room. His wife and kids shuffled in and out of the room periodically to share these moments with him in some sense, but it was like none of them were all the way there. None of them were all the way engaged in life, all the way connected to each other. They were just kind of half there.
Or here, he supposed. This was not some theoretical “there” in his imagination. It was here – a concrete world where real live human beings breathed and laughed and dreamed, blood thrumming through their veins.
And got sick. They got sick, too. Sickness unto death sometimes.
And sometimes something worse than death.
Janice blinked, and the motion brought him back to the kitchen. It occurred to him that she’d been talking when the sound of the real world faded in with her mid-sentence.
“-maybe 8 to 12 hours,” she said. “Maybe less.”
The world got swimmy along the edges. His knees buckled below, but he caught himself.
He braved another look at her face. Her voice sounded detached. Cold. Distant. Like she was toughing her way through. She looked so soft, though. Her expression betrayed the sound of her.
There’d always been something hard in Janice, some toughness that Mitch never possessed. She was the hard-nosed one. When their older son, Kevin, got bullied in first grade and the school wouldn’t do anything about it, she went down to the office where her temper exploded like a hydrogen bomb. The principal went all bug-eyed. The bully got a one week suspension within minutes. It was the same woman sitting there in front of Mitch now, but the toughness had been plucked from her being.
He didn’t say anything. He kneeled down, opened the cabinet under the sink, pulled the half gallon bottle of Black Velvet free, removed the lid and pressed it to his lips. The whiskey burned all the way down in a way that made him feel a little alive even still.
The kitchen was small. Cramped. Janice often complained about the lack of counter space. With the tension in the room, it felt claustrophobic. For Mitch, at least.
He thought he’d buy her something nicer someday. One of those ridiculously huge kitchens that they cook in on Food Network. Granite counters that stretched out into the horizon. The stove top would be set in an island in the middle of the room with a big griddle built into it.
But no. None of that was real. This would be her final kitchen after all. Cramped and shitty.
He sat in the chair across from her, put the bottle on the table between them. He tried to piece together the bits of what she’d said, make some sense out of them. He felt like there was a big piece he had lost in the shock.
“What were you saying?” he said, his lips juicy and tingling from the booze. “I’m sorry. I can’t concentrate.”
She eyed the bottle a moment before answering. He thought she was about to take a slug, but she didn’t.
“I’m sick,” she said again.
As though to provide evidence on this point she sneezed and two strings of snot rocketed out of her nostrils and hung from her tilted head. It reminded Mitch of the ropes of saliva dangling from the corners of a basset hound’s mouth, except the shade and opacity of butternut squash soup. Her hand reached out for the box of kleenex, but she couldn’t quite reach. He pushed the box to her hand and took another big gulp of Black Velvet as she gathered the mucus.
“Good thing it’s not airborne,” she said, and a couple of snorts of laughter came out of her nose, sniffles accompanying them.
Only Janice could laugh in this moment. He wanted to be mad about it, but he couldn’t.
“If it’s not airborne, how did you get it?” he said.
She leaned forward and peeled the cuff of her jeans up toward the knee. It took Mitch a second to realize what he was seeing. An oval shaped crater of angry red pocked her ankle like a chunk had been torn from her leg, and rivulets of black snaked out from the wound in all directions. They looked like wisps of smoke trailing about her lower leg, the longest almost reaching her knee.
“What the fuck?” he said.
“I got bit,” she said, letting the leg of her pants fall back down.
“Bit?” he said. “Bit as in the past tense of bite?”
She hesitated a second, nodded.
“Yesterday afternoon. In the break room.”
“And you didn’t mention that? A human being broke your flesh with their teeth, ripped free a chunk of ankle meat, and you didn’t see that as noteworthy enough to bring up at dinner last night?”
“Quiet now,” she said. “The kids will hear.”
A little bit of that hardness crept back into her face as she scolded him. It made him feel the slightest touch better, like some part of him still believed she couldn’t actually die. She was too tough for that.
“What the hell happened?” he said, his voice hushed but somehow still intense.
She took a deep breath and the words came trickling from her lips.
“I told you about the rumors at work. About Carlos being sick.”
He nodded, his jaw clenching and unclenching involuntarily.
“I guess they were true after all,” she said. “He came in looking like warmed-over death. Looked sick as hell, all pale and sweaty, but he said he wasn’t bleeding or anything. Not like they described the people bleeding on TV. He said it was just the flu was all, and he didn’t have the sick days left to stay home. Couldn’t argue with that, though I planned to keep my distance.”
Her index finger traced along a divot in the tabletop while she talked.
“He went to his cubicle and got working, but not for long. He looked out of it, kept resting his head on the desk. Eventually he shuffled into the break room. Never came back out.”
Her fingernail now scratched at the flaw in the wood, a scrape-thump at a steady rhythm that seem to lay a slow drumbeat under her story.
“A good 15 or 20 minutes went by, so I went to check on him. When I stepped through the doorway, he was sprawled on the floor, face down, lips mashed into the carpet. Motionless. I mean full-on, not-breathing motionless. I froze for a moment in shock. It was so still. When I got a hold of myself, I took a step forward, and he lunged. He was gums deep in my ankle before I could react. He was like a wild animal. It wasn’t Carlos, you know? The look in his eyes. He was gone. It was someone else. Something else. Anyway, I guess I screamed and people came to help me. I don’t remember it very well, but I remember they got him trapped in the break room, and I took off. Never looked back.”
She looked far away.
“Wait. When was this?” Mitch said.
“Like I said, it was yesterday afternoon,” she said.
Mitch thought a second, reaching through the fog of shock to recall the night before.
“So we all sat around here last night eating meatloaf with you knowing this,” he said. “Jesus, Janice. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her shoulders twitched in a half-hearted shrug.
“I was scared,” she said. “You saw all of the stuff on TV. About Florida and all. I guess I thought maybe it’d go away. Like if I kept it quiet, it didn’t have to be real. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want you panicking. The boys panicking. And what difference would it have made? Can’t you see how it wouldn’t change anything? Knowing or not knowing? Nothing can change it.”
He sat quiet a moment, his mind feeling along the edges of this impossible idea: his wife sat here in front of him, breathing, talking, alive and normal like any other day. And this time tomorrow sh
e wouldn’t be.
“24 to 36 hours,” she said. “That’s how long it takes from bite to death. A few cases have been reported making it a little longer, but based on the way my wounds look, I won’t make it through the night.”
“What if you’re wrong?” he said. “I could call the sitter and take you to the emergency room, get a doctor to look you up and down. Maybe you just need some antibiotics to clear up that infected stuff swirling off of the wound. That’s all.”
“Antibiotics won’t do shit,” she said. “You’ve seen the stuff on TV? Well, that’s the edited version. That’s what the government wants you to see. The internet has the real shit. A bunch of photos of bites that look just like mine, yeah? All those people die. And they don’t just die. They come back. I will turn like they did. Like Carlos.”
Mitch realized he was holding his breath and made himself inhale. Then he took a big drink of booze.
“I don’t want that,” she said. “I want to die in my own home, on my terms. We’ll do it in the basement, I figure.”
“You know I can’t do that,” he said.
“You have to,” she said. “I can’t do it myself.”
It took him a second to catch her meaning. For her, suicide meant an eternity in hell.
“Think about it from my perspective, Jan,” he said. “If I do it, I’ll wonder forever if maybe I was wrong. Maybe you could’ve pulled through or something.”
She pressed her lips together, and wrinkles surrounded her mouth. This expression always surfaced when something wasn’t to her liking.
“Fine. You’re right,” she said. “I know what we can do.”
Mitch plugged the tip of the bottle into his face and drank long and deep.
“After this, you have to get out of here, out away from the city. Pack up everything you can and find a place away from everything. A place fit for living without electricity and all. A place with a well with a hand pump and a fire place or wood burning stove or something like that. A chimney, you know? My parents’ cabin on the lake would work, maybe. I can’t remember if it has a hand pump.”
“I think it does.”
“No matter how all of this plays out, you have to take care of those boys,” she said. “Because I can’t help them anymore.”
Tears welled in her eyes. He watched her face shrivel as she fought to hold them back, her bottom lip shimmying like it always did when she tried to avoid crying. Mitch could tell it wasn’t going to work, though. Not this time. He moved close to hug her.
Baghead
Rural Oklahoma
9 years, 126 days after
He followed the dirt trail across the field, the grass reaching dewy blades out to smear their wet against the ankles of his pants at every opportunity. Clouds of dust kicked up with each step so it looked like his tattered shoes were smoking, and his head stayed angled toward the ground like it always did, eyes peeking through eye holes to watch the earth slide by below. The strip of dirt cut a diagonal way toward the village, a gash through the weeds where feet had pounded the life out of the plants.
He didn’t mind walking. He’d done it plenty. For where he was headed next, he would need a car, he knew, though, and he would need gas. You had to know somebody to make that happen. You had to talk to people. And so he would.
He thought about dead mice as he walked, the decapitated ones that littered the ground outside of his car. The gray cat always left them there. After he’d eaten the heads, of course. Sometimes the cat even managed to get one into the car, climbing through the hole in the rear windshield that served as his cat door with a carcass pinned between his teeth. He wondered if his cat would still be around, still sleep in the car with him, by the time he got back here. If he ever did.
When he didn’t dream of the dead cities, he dreamed of women. Nothing sexual, at least not usually. Just variations of the same dream over and over. He’d be staying in a cabin somewhere with a girl, and she’d get to asking about his hood. And in the dreams, he could peel the fabric from his head to find his old face underneath. Clear, clean flesh restored, filling him with an almost religious feeling, like something one would feel upon witnessing the resurrection of a dead child. He’d stare in the mirror, tilting his head to look upon himself at every angle, overwhelmed with relief, overwhelmed with the sense of his self made whole once more.
And when her fingers reached out to brush along his jaw, he felt the smooth skin of all of femininity. But that’s what always woke him up, what made him realize that this was a dream, that it couldn’t possibly be real.
Reality wasn’t feeling whole, he knew too well. It was the other kind of hole. It was a hole you never stopped falling into.
The bar was mostly empty this early. Light flickered behind the frosted glass of the sconces along the walls, the flame trying and failing to fight off the gloom in here that persisted even in broad daylight. Day or night, it felt like walking into the shade of a thick patch of woods to enter this space. Dark and dank.
He stopped a couple of paces inside the door, glanced around the room, examining things in silhouette, waiting for his eyes to adjust. He saw the shape of the bartender standing over the bar, the flickering light reflecting off of the glossy wood countertop before him.
He saw a figure a couple of feet to his left that he first thought to be a man and now believed to be a coat rack draped with a couple of jackets. He moved into the room, striding down two steps and weaving around a couple of tables on his way to the bar.
The bartender didn’t look up. He never looked up, at least not at the bagged head that stood in front of him now. Lots of people were like that. They didn’t like looking at his baghead, at his one messed up eye visible through the hole. He thought it looked insect-like in some way, the bad eye.
“Guy in the corner was looking for you,” the bartender said. He flicked his head to the left, eyelids fluttering, though he never looked up.
Baghead turned and headed that way. Color and contrast began to repopulate his vision, rising up to replace the shaded tones. The tables and chairs came fully into focus to his immediate left and right. Looking beyond them, a man sat in the corner, heavy stubble shrouding his jaw, shaggy hair hanging in his eyes. The man stared straight at Baghead as he approached, a half smile curling the corners of his mouth. He brought a cigarette to his lips, the smoke spiraling through the candlelight over his head.
As the gap between them whittled down to arm’s length, the man spoke.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you’re the guy I’m supposed to meet here. The one who signs his letters ‘Baghead.’”
Mitch
Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
43 days before
Mitch got the kids fed and put them to bed early. He thought shock must have fully set in by now. He didn’t panic. Instead he watched the world through a lens adjusted to a soft focus, just on the edge of getting blurry. He stared off into emptiness, nodding periodically while his younger son, Matt, described the plot of an episode of Sponge Bob. He supposed the whiskey helped keep things that way, helped keep reality at arm’s length.
Janice slept on the couch through this process, and she still slept there afterward while he watched TV from the recliner next to her. She hadn’t wanted to sleep, had fought it, but he coaxed her into relaxing for a few minutes, and she passed out. She needed it. Even if she was right and she didn’t have a lot of time, she needed it.
He flipped through the channels. Most every station spouted grisly details about people shitting and coughing up blood until they croaked all across the southeastern United States. CDC people rehashed the same talking points as always: blah blah ebola-like symptoms mixed with flu-like symptoms, blah blah reasonably contained, blah blah no cause for panic, blah blah wash your hands. That was his favorite. Wash your hands. Like if you start hacking out your insides, just spritz a little water on your hands. Should clear things right up.
Janice’s shoulders jerked, and she moaned fa
intly in her sleep. As his eyes swiveled to her, his mind lurched back to that moment when he walked into the kitchen and she dumped all of this on him. He still couldn’t quite grasp it. The concept was too big. His brain couldn’t digest it all at once. Not only would his wife be dead in a few hours, he would need to kill her.
What the hell? Kill her? But then... Maybe that would be better than bleeding out through the eyes, ears, nose and rectum. That was how they described bleeding out the ass on the news. “Rectal bleeding.” Or maybe it was better than...
Christ on a crutch.
He didn’t want to think about it, so he stopped. He clenched the tip of the bottle between his teeth and tipped it back for a long guzzle. The whiskey was almost gone now, but there was an old bottle of rum under the sink as well, a few beers in the fridge.
His gaze fell back to the TV where a government official spoke directly into the camera, assuring everyone this wouldn’t spread to the rest of the country.
Right. It’s all sunshine and cookies from now until the end of time. Definitely no rectal bleeding for the lot of us.
Mitch turned the volume down and watched the images flicker on the screen in total silence. The end of the world was happening, and he was watching it on network television. As reality TV goes, this wasn’t very entertaining. He’d rate it a 3 out of 10 on IMDB so far.
Janice’s ribcage expanded and contracted on the couch in slow motion. She was all the way out. He wondered if she’d be mad that he let her sleep. Maybe it would be best to wake her up before long here.
He remembered how things used to be, when they first met. Before life became a blur of kids and work and asses parked on the couch all evening every evening, they’d been happy. Life had been exciting and strange. Every experience was new.
They went to film festivals and concerts. They were still young enough to seek out connections to art and culture in earnest. As adults, movies and music felt more like commodities than anything human or honest that meant much to anyone. But when they were young, they were on fire to figure out the world around them. They wanted to connect to it however they could, to connect to each other however they could.