He looked to the furnace, the red glow beckoning him closer. A single thought formed in his mind as if sent forth from the fire itself: A Purging.
It was up to him now. He looked to Leroy’s body, reviled every diseased blood cell in it, his fear exchanged for the immutable desire for a city freed from the Plague. A Purging must be done.
Coal pushed himself to his feet. Unopposed, he opened the furnace door and shoved the wood inside, reveling in the blast of warmth it ushered back to him. He pulled more wood from the stockpile, shoving piece after piece into the furnace, two and three at a time. The fire fed on the abundance of fuel Coal provided, the heat growing more and more intense until he could barely stand to approach its ravenous maw. The old furnace reached temperatures it was never designed to withstand. Soon it would fail, flames bursting from its chamber, the steel cracking, unable to contain the fire, blasting outward into the building, leveling its foundation and taking those who carried the Plague with it.
Coal fled from the basement room and up the flight of stairs to the lobby, out the building and back into the snow-swept city. Without a coat, without his gloves, and without his scarf, Coal marched down the city streets, a mission carrying him onward every step he took, the heat of the fire burning within him―it could not be extinguished.
Try as it might, even the storm could not hold him back now.
-7-
Coal stepped into Mama Ruth’s soup kitchen, the warmth of the dining room welcoming him inside. It was the only welcome he expected to receive.
Patrons sat pressed shoulder to shoulder at long wooden tables that stretched across the dining room, none aware as a shell of their mayor’s once sterile and isolated self shambled his way through. Blizzard raging, Ruth’s kitchen was a place of refuge for the night―somewhere to lose ones wages in cards, or pass the hours trading hearsay with those from other ends of the wall.
Having sunk in a level of appearance to that of a soup kitchen regular, it took Ruth several glances to realize it was in fact Coal who stood now staring in her direction. It’d been a long time since she’d laid eyes upon his naked face. Since childhood, she thought, but couldn’t really say for sure. Removing herself from her place in the corner, a place she had not abandoned since the first of the evening broadcasts, Ruth spoke not a single word. She simply pointed Coal toward the kitchen.
Stepping through the swinging double doors, Coal followed Ruth through the kitchen, across the red tiled floor, down the line of stoves topped with tall double burners and pots of steaming soups. Electricity buzzed all around them, in the lights, powering refrigerators―such an exorbitant amount, yet Coal’s office knew nothing of it. Ruth had her ways, even beyond her association with Coal.
Cooks paced between the stoves and the line, moving portions of ingredients from countertop to pot, four of them down the stretch in total, heedless of Coal’s existence as he tried rushing past as if through a gauntlet, Ruth passing them by without effort, well-practiced at the art.
She led Coal to a freestanding metal prep table at the far end where she took a chef’s knife in hand and proceeded to chop a carrot into quarter inch coins. Coal’s eyes blinked forcefully with every hard knock of the blade upon the cutting board, each knock severing the carrot one piece shorter. Ruth remained silent as she worked her way to the end of it.
She grabbed a potato next, staring Coal dead in the eyes as she cut into the meatier vegetable, requiring more force of her wrist to push through it, to make that same disconcerting knock upon the cutting board.
Coal felt very much in her domain. In the wolf’s den. He was being sized up.
“Look, Ruth, I’m sorry,” he said. Someone had to make the first move.
Ruth’s head bobbed doubtfully, her attention returned to chopping. “I heard the broadcast, you know.”
“I know.”
“Yet you still thought it was a good idea coming down here.” Ruth huffed. “Exile me. Stamp a price on my head. Then come say howdy-do. You got some balls, I’ll give you that.”
“It was a mistake, Ruth. I was rash, not thinking straight. It doesn’t have to happen.”
“They’d be down here dragging my ass out the front door right now if it wasn’t for this storm―pushing me on out the wall.” Ruth chopped harder, one hand steadying the knife atop the curve of the potato, the other pushing down, driving the blade through.
“Listen to me, Ruth, I can have it undone. You know I can.”
“And what price do I got to pay for that ‘favor’? How many people do I got to kill to save my own neck?”
Ruth transferred the chopped vegetables to a plate and carried it to the stove, sliding them into a pot of boiling water. Coal observed she kept hold of the chef’s knife as she stood stirring various other nearby pots of soups and stews. He eyed the cooks down the line and stepped in closer to Ruth, uncomfortable speaking so close to unknown ears.
“It’s worse than I thought, Ruth. Much worse.”
“Mmhhmm.”
“I mean it. Tonight I saw it with my own eyes. It’s not just here and there anymore. It’s everywhere. Entire buildings, Ruth. It’s taking control of the city―my city!”
Coal grabbed her arm, latching on tighter than he intended. Ruth pulled heatedly away, raising the knife in warning. The cooks on the line ceased their work and took notice. “Touch me again and I swear I’ll chop more than just vegetables into this stew.”
Coal relinquished and took a prudent step back.
The cooks returned to their duties, but Coal could feel their eyes continuing to watch him closely. Beads of sweat formed along the crevasses of his brow, the blue flames of the stoves suddenly hissing loudly in his ears. As in the basement furnace room, his vision began to blur.
“Don’t talk to me about what you’ve seen,” said Ruth. “I see more of this city passing through my kitchen every damn day than you ever will from your ivory tower. And from what I’ve seen, the problem ain’t down here. I knew you were bad off…you know,” Ruth waved the tip of the knife in the direction of Coal’s head, “upstairs. But I didn’t realize just how far gone you really was. Take a look in a mirror, Henry. You look like shit.”
“I’m not crazy―”
“Bullshit. You’d have me lay waste to half the city in your crusade. Forget it.”
“Better we do it than the Plague. We’ve got to control this before…” Coal faltered, disoriented, catching himself against the countertop of the stainless steel line. The room spun uncontrollably around him.
“Heat getting to you?” said Ruth. Coal stammered, searching for a reply, anything, but found none. “I like the heat. I find it comforting, especially on cold nights like this one. You see, Henry, the cold has a way of freezing things up, making them still. Like a bear hibernating―lights out come winter. Harmless. But soon as that warmth comes, honey, it wakes up hungrier than ever and dangerous as hell. When the heat’s on, that’s when you see things for what they really is. And you know what they say: If you can’t stand the heat, darlin’, you best get the hell out of the kitchen.”
The flames of the stove rushed impossibly high as if taking their cues from Ruth. The room spun in a whirlwind of flame and steel. Coal reached out for balance, but found none. Ruth pulled away, leaving his hand to fall upon the flames of the stove’s front burner. “Fuck!” He swung around in pained confusion, anger, crashing into the line, sending several stacks of bowls crashing to the floor.
The entire kitchen fell silent, save Coal. Ruth looked on him in disgust as he cradled his seared hand between his knees, looking wildly about as an animal trapped in a cage. She waved off the cooks as they approached. Coal’s eyes met with theirs, faces now that appeared to him as decayed, scabbed over and masked with black lesions. “Christ, Ruth! When the fuck―”
He stumbled and crashed his way down the line as he scrambled out of the kitchen, bolting through the swinging double doors and into a dining room he now perceived as table after table of the diseased.
God help me!
Coal flung himself out the door and back into the storm’s clutch, a rat in a maze, racing headlong down streets that were now the Plague’s bastion―a mad flight to his last remaining refuge in a city of blight.
-8-
Ruth’s kitchen staff stood trading perplexed stares, paralyzed by the display just witnessed, baffled even more so by Ruth’s serenity over it all. “Who was that asshole?” asked one.
“That, boys, was our mayor,” said Ruth.
“Shit, looked more like a junkie to me. That son of a bitch must have been high as fuck.”
“He’s sick,” said Ruth. “I’ve seen it before. Hallucinations―that’s how it always starts.” She pulled a hand-rolled cigarette out of her apron pocket, lit it on the stove, and slipped down her scarf for a drag.
“Then what?”
Ruth let out a cloud of smoke. “Oh, it only gets worse from there.”
“Fuck! Is it contagious?”
“Let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t neglect washing your hands tonight,” she said calmly with a smile, taking in another prolonged drag. “Go on and wash up now.”
“What about you? Ain’t you worried?”
Ruth took up a wood-handled spoon and returned to stirring the soups bubbling on the stove behind her. “Me? I got bigger problems on my mind.”
As much as the cooks feared for their own wellbeing, it was the welfare of Ruth that concerned them most. They refused to quit the kitchen, loyal as soldiers to their general, awaiting orders, each one willing to lay down their life for the cause if need be.
Ruth chuckled at the gesture, showing a smile that quelled even the great unease rising in the cooks’ hearts. “Don’t you worry about a thing, boys. Ain’t nothing a little of Mama Ruth’s soup can’t cure.”
-9-
Coal arrived home with the appearance of a man who had walked through Hell. It was his own personal Hell he’d traveled―his greatest fear manifesting before him at every turn, no corner of what was once his city left untainted. In the matter of a day, everything had been stripped from Coal’s hands in what had ultimately amounted to a desperate, futile grasp at control.
But there was still Eve. His only solace.
The entire city of his was lost, yet none of it mattered as long as there was Eve; everything else could decay in ruinous disease for all he cared. It hadn’t been a love for the city that drove him to take his position of power in the first place. It was Eve―to protect her, and nothing more.
He moved the house key pinched between his frozen numb fingers toward the door of his sanctuary, his convulsing hand struggling to line the key with the lock. But all his effort was for naught. The door pulled open at once with his angel that was Eve standing before him having waited on watch for his arrival all night. She ushered him through the front door into the warm embrace of her arms. For the first time in an unending day, everything felt as it should, if only for a brief moment.
“For Heaven’s sake, Henry, you’re frozen!” Eve cried, cradling his bare face between her hands to warm him. “Your clothes―what happened to your clothes?”
Coal shook his head and wept. “I tried to stop it, Eve. I tried so hard for you―for us. But it can’t be stopped.”
Eve looked upon her crazed husband and pulled him into her arms. “What are you talking about, Henry? What can’t be stopped?”
“The Plague,” he uttered as if the word itself were poison. “It’s taken the city, Eve―a stranglehold that can’t be broken. It’s too late to fight it. God knows I’ve tried.”
“An outbreak?” Eve guided Coal to the couch, incapable of processing such unnerving rambles. Could it be true? How could he not have spoken of such things before? Outbreaks didn’t happen overnight. Had his love shielded her eyes to the point of blindness?
She wrapped the knitted blanket around the both of them as they were wont to do those winter nights. Coal shivered uncontrollably in Eve’s arms as feeling crept back into his thawing body. “We’re all that’s left, Eve. Just us. Maybe there’s still hope. I don’t know.” His mind weighed what was once an unspeakable notion. A last ditch effort. “It’s my fault. I’ve waited too long. Stupid. We have no choice. We’ve got to leave.”
Eve could hardly keep up. Where was this coming from? “Leave where?”
“Away. Anywhere. Far away from this city as we can get.” Coal clutched a brass key in hand and recalled the location of a door pinpointed on a map he had committed to memory. The key to the city―a way out.
Eve pulled the blanket tighter around them as if shielding Coal from the world that frightened him so. She rocked gently with her loving husband in her arms, calming him into slumber. Together, they fell asleep wrapped in that same purple knitted blanket, trading worries of a crumbling city for the comfort of one another―for dreams of a way out.
-10-
The hours of night slipped away and Eve awoke as the chill air enveloped her alone on the couch in the early morning, the blanket left hung open in the void where Coal once sat sleeping beside her, now gone. Eve wiped the sleep from her eyes, wrapping the blanket over her shoulders and holding it closed by the corners as she rose from the couch, taking it with her as she inspected the dark home for her husband.
A faint smell of smoke drifted through the air, prompting Eve to the kitchen first. Empty. Next she approached the stairs, and it was on this path that the smell grew stronger. Her hands gripped the rail tensely as she bounded up two stairs at a time, calling out her husband’s name. There was no answer. She rounded the banister into the short hallway leading to the open door of their bedroom. A thin wisp of black smoke trailed out of it while the pulsing glow of flame painted the pale walls within.
“Henry!” she cried.
No answer.
She entered the room, spotting a squat metal trashcan sat in the opened doorway of the abutting bathroom, flame reaching out the top of it, feeding on the clothes Coal had worn and come home in the night before. There was the sound of water pattering against the bathtub as clouds of steam poured out into the bedroom.
Eve stepped deeper into the room, slower now than her frantic approach up the stairs had been. She moved around the edge of the bed and peered through the doorway of the bathroom. Coal stood outside the shower allowing the steam to pour over his naked flesh, his back to the fire. Patches of black skin, boils and lesions, paraded his body, wrapping from the bottom of his legs to the base of his neck, concealed only on his scalp by hair.
“Henry?” Eve whispered.
Coal swayed, but did not turn, caught once more in a snare of warmth―a disease dormant within his blood now fully awakened, urging its host to nourish it more, to consume his body in the heat.
“Henry!” Eve shouted, her heart beating out of her chest, angry and confused, her world crumbling.
Coal turned and gazed upon his wife. But he did not recognize her. Not anymore. Eve knew, as all in the city did, this was how it began. First, the Plague took its painful toll on the skin, scarring it black, agonizing boils engrossing its host until no recognizable visage remained. But the real work of the disease, where it truly thrived and took control was entirely cerebral. The worst conjured fears buried deep in the recesses of the host’s mind played out in torturous hallucinations before their very eyes, producing ever dangerous and violent actions to see those fears destroyed.
Coal had experienced such hallucinations in small doses over the months of late, unaware of the monster traversing his veins, dormant in cold, waiting for its opportunity to erupt in heated full, swaying his every action if only in the slightest of whispered insinuations. The dawn of the Purgings.
As Eve gazed upon his Plague ensnared body, so too did Coal look upon his wife, sharing the same revulsions of her. In his eyes, his corrupted eyes, she was the only monster in the room―one he intended to destroy.
Eve rushed from the bedroom and down the stairs as Coal chased in mad pursuit. She tried pulling open the f
ront door, but her hands fumbled with the lock, caught up in the curtains nailed around the frame. It was a precious few seconds lost. Coal was too quick on her trail.
Her instinct drove her to run for the kitchen next. There were knives in the kitchen. She could defend herself there. She pushed through Coal, only barely escaping his grasp as he battled with his own sense of balance in a world that was still spinning around him. She slipped and slid as she darted down the hardwood floor of the hall in her socks, Coal’s bare fleet slapping hard against it behind her as she braced against the wall to keep herself upright.
Eve lunged straight for the butcher’s block, snatching the fat, wide handle of the cleaver. Raising it into the air, she spun to face Coal as he shambled into the kitchen after her, stopping to gauge the threat.
Incessant tears streamed down Eve’s reddened cheeks as she begged―begging not for her life, but for the life of her husband. “Please, Henry, stop! It’s not you. I know it’s not you. Please, don’t make me hurt you.”
If Coal’s Plague-manipulated reasoning registered any of Eve’s tear-choked pleas, his vile, deranged expression did not show it. Yet, he did not advance. He stood gazing into her eyes.
“Let me help you, Henry,” Eve pleaded, her compassion for her husband remaining as it always had been, undiminished.
Coal’s eyes, if only for a moment, shed the concealing fog that clouded his every judgment of the world around him, blinking into a clarity that Eve was certain signified she once again gazed upon her loving husband. It was a triumph of willpower over tyranny, of love over mindless hate. The rarest of victories in the history of the Plague.
An unexpected glimmer of hope stifled Eve’s tears. Only one word came to her mind, the last word she would ever speak to her husband again. She could think of no other. “Henry.” Yet in that simple word, the sad, affectionate way in which it had been delivered upon his embattled senses, gave to Coal that most wonderful and unique gift as only Eve could offer: compassion. Within it, she packed every lover’s laugh, passionate embrace, and “I love you” she had ever hoped to share and more in a lifetime together with Coal. The most burdensome sentiment of all however was without question her final goodbye.
Plague City Page 3