by Nate Kenyon
But the first section of the book dealt with the sheer destruction a major attack would bring. The detonation of a fraction of the number of warheads that existed in the world would kill an estimated one billion people, with another billion suffering extensive injuries and radiation poisoning. Fires would rage across cities and forests. Temperatures would drop, the sun would disappear for weeks or months, disease would overwhelm most of the survivors.
I read as much as I could take and then I closed the book. I felt an emptiness inside, a sense of time getting away from me with no clear direction on when it might end. I sat alone while the others’ voices drifted through the closed door, and thought about my mother in the middle of all that death and destruction. If she had survived, she would need medical assistance. She would need someone to help her get from her wheelchair to the bathroom, to help her fix meals, to get into bed at night. I thought about her locked away down in some school or church basement filled with dusty, broken pews and tables, sitting in the corner, calling for help and getting nothing in return, having to swallow her pride and crawl. Who was helping her now?
And, God help me, as much as I tried to block them out, memories came drifting back like dusty cobwebs: my father’s broken, twisted body at the foot of those stairs, the drive to the hospital behind the ambulance, the rush into emergency surgery to try to stop the bleeding and repair his collapsed lung, the sound of the life-support machines in the intensive-care unit like a call to action and his body looking so much smaller and more fragile lying in that bed and connected to so many tubes and needles.
I saw my mother sitting in the chair in the corner, her own arm in a sling, sobbing quietly, policemen waiting in the hall, and me standing there by the bed in my surgical mask, looking down at him and wondering whether she was crying for him or for the two of us left behind. Perhaps she was just relieved to have it all end. His hatred of her had grown worse over the years as his mind had continued to slip toward darkness. It had come to the point where he could not even look at her, and when she spoke he would cut her off with a wave of his hand and a grunt. Those were the good days.
Tessa was right; my anger back then swelled up and overwhelmed me, and I wished him dead.
The doctor came into the room and asked me to sit down too, and explained to us both in low, even tones that my father had suffered an intrace rebral hemorrhage and was clinically brain-dead. He could no longer hear us or understand anything or even breathe on his own. The machines were the only things keeping him alive.
My mother stopped crying. I remember that. “Can he recover?” she asked.
The doctor explained how the pool of blood had killed a large portion of his brain, and he would remain a vegetable for as long as we chose to keep him alive. There was no chance of him regaining consciousness. The parts that had made him human were gone.
She looked at me. “We’ll need to decide whether to take him off life support,” she said.
The doctor, a short Asian man with an accent, gave us some time alone to talk, but we didn’t need it. The choice was simple, really. After all, I’d wished he were dead, and now he would be. The fact that it would also end any suffering he might be going through was beside the point.
An hour later we were by his bedside when the doctor turned off the ventilator. As much as we’d been told it would be quick, my father did not go quietly into that good night. His body jerked upward, then slammed back onto the bed. He gave a deep, shuddering sigh, and then sucked air into his lungs once, twice, three times, the wait longer between each breath. His mouth opened and closed like a landed fish. I smelled shit as he soiled himself. And then his heart stopped, and he died.
We were left alone with the body, to pay our respects. After a while I went out into the hall and one of the policemen asked if he could talk to me. He wanted to know if I was the one who had found my father that night, and whether I knew if he’d been drinking. He asked me if I’d seen him fall, and I told him I had not. And then, more gently, he asked if my father was abusive to me and my mother. Maybe he had seen the bruises on my mother’s face, or her arm in that sling, or the way she did not come too close to my father’s bedside. Maybe he saw the bruises on me. Or maybe there were rumors floating around in the department. That day I’d soiled my bed and my mother fell down the stairs was not the last time the doctor had come to our house.
I shook my head as my mother came limping out into the hall to hold my hand. She tried to pull me away, but I resisted.
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. He was a good man.”
I heard a knock on the door to the other room, and Dan stuck his head in. I’d drifted off there for a while, I wasn’t sure for how long, but the knocking had brought me sharply back into myself and away from thoughts I’d blocked out for years. I felt vaguely sick.
“You okay?” he said. “We’re going to play some poker, if you want to come out. Just try to blow off a little steam. Get Jimmie too.”
I got up and went to the bathroom door and knocked. I heard him shuffling around in there, but he didn’t answer. I put my ear to the door and thought I heard a sound like a low moan, but I wasn’t sure.
“We’re playing cards,” I said into the door. “Dan wants you to come join us.”
Something thumped inside the bathroom. “Everything all right?” I asked. “Jimmie?” I rattled the handle, but it was locked.
“I’m…okay,” he muttered. “Bandage. Be out…pretty soon.”
His voice sounded strange. I thought about trying to break the lock, but decided against it. If he still didn’t open the door in five minutes, I’d figure something else out.
In less than half an hour, he was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I’ve already told most of what happened immediately after that; Jimmie did eventually come out to play cards, but when he did he was too jumpy and he wouldn’t meet my eyes, and the fever was clearly back, judging by the paleness and sheen on his skin. I noticed a dark stain spreading through the new bandage he’d put on his leg, and the hives were getting worse again.
I could smell him as soon as he entered the room, and it was the smell of sickness and rot.
We should have forced him to let us help right then, but as I looked at him a chill settled in my bones, and all I wanted was to keep as far away from him as possible. There was something entirely alien about the way he acted, and I was reminded once again about how I’d felt about him and Jay a few nights back. Husks of human bodies with something else inside.
Like pilots of an airplane, Pete…a means to an end, an inanimate object, nothing more. Puppets getting their strings pulled.
Still, he didn’t deserve what Dan or I did to him. For hours after, as those of us who remained tried to cope with what had happened, I thought about that, about Dan’s punch and the blood dripping from Jimmie’s chin and the way he’d looked at all of us, like a wounded animal, lost and confused and waiting to die.
I thought about when he stood up and started screaming and pulling out what remained of his hair; how much it had reminded me of Jay just before he escaped through the hatch, as if he was struggling with something terrible and could not stop himself from doing it, and so the only choice was to throw himself to the wolves or whatever else waited outside the hatch.
But mostly I thought about how I laughed at him, and what that must have meant. His best and only real friend who had already abandoned him, now ridiculing him in front of the others, my laughter like a razor blade against his throat.
Maybe that was why I tried to make Dan feel better. Maybe I was trying to make myself feel better too, pretending that it wasn’t anyone’s fault. Pretending to care. Because the truth was, I was numb. I didn’t feel anything at all. And somehow, that was worse than everything else. All my life, I had gotten through hard times by making light of everything. The jokes and laughter and goofy looks were my way of coping, and they had served me well. Now my laughter was hollow and cold, my jokes were gone, a
nd I was left with the echoes of my own defenses, unable to hide anymore. I felt raw and exposed and alone.
For the first time in years, Tessa’s presence didn’t help calm me, and that worried me the most of all. She held up better than the rest of us after Jimmie left, but then again, underneath that tiny frame she’d always been the strongest one. I’d depended on her for so long. But now, when she sat with me and held my hand, I felt my anxiety still simmering just under the surface, like the humming of high-tension wires.
Cabin fever. That’s what Dan tried to convince all of us was going on; first Jay, then Jimmie, the two of them feeding off each other. “We have to be aware of it happening in all of us,” he said. “It’s a common reaction to being in enclosed spaces for too long. We need to recognize the signs, and help each other through it.”
I didn’t buy that for a second. Sure, we were all on edge, but whatever was going on, it wasn’t just a psychological reaction to stress. For days now, I had felt something building, that humming sound in my mind growing louder as whatever was coming got closer to the surface.
We argued some more about whether to stay or leave. We didn’t know it then, but before we could make any decision, it would be made for us.
When Jimmie went through that hatch, I thought we might have seen the worst of it. The two most high-strung people among us were gone now, and as much as I missed them and felt guilty about my role in the whole thing, I also felt a kind of relief. I thought maybe we could remain safe down here until whoever had been broadcasting through the radio would come for us.
I thought the worst was over.
But we hadn’t seen anything yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The night after Jimmie left I had a dream about him, but all I remembered when I woke up was that blood was everywhere, and that he started bleeding at the mouth and it got worse and worse until we were drowning in it. My dreams were getting more intense, which was probably pretty natural considering the circumstances. Usually I was glad I didn’t remember much the next day. But that night I lay there trying to remember the details, as if something from my dream could help me cope with what we were going through, some clue to a way out. I found nothing, and after a few minutes I gave up.
After that I listened to Sue breathing in the other bunk. Dan was keeping watch out in the dining room, and Tessa was in the bunk above me. The bed to my left was conspicuously empty. I lay blinking into the darkness, the room illuminated only by the battery-powered lantern, and listened to the humming sound that I had been hearing off and on for a couple of days now. It got into my head like nails across a chalkboard, until I couldn’t think of anything else. This time it was louder than before, and it stuttered like a fluorescent light blinking on and off.
It sounded like it was coming from Sue’s bed.
I turned back in that direction, staring into the faint light. Shadows speckled the space under the top bunk. Sue was lying on her back, and I thought I could just see the tip of one nipple above her bra where it had slipped down while she slept. She had taken to sleeping nearly naked; said she wanted to feel if anything climbed up on her. Normally I didn’t think of Sue in a sexual way, but for some reason the look of her sleeping, her breasts half exposed, stirred something in me. I thought for just a brief moment about getting into bed with her. I’d slept with only one person in my life, a girl two years older named Janice Renalli, who had a bit of a reputation; we had gone out my sophomore year for a couple of weeks, and she had taken my virginity in the backseat of her father’s Volvo one night after a drunken party at her friend Katy’s house. We’d slept together twice more after that, but it hadn’t been particularly good, and then our relationship had just petered out. I didn’t have much to give her, and she was busy with other guys before long. I don’t think I was anything more than a brief distraction to her. Tessa called her a slut, and said I was better off without her. I guess maybe she was right, although I didn’t feel great about it then.
Of course I would never have done that to Sue. It would have been the last thing she wanted. She was still reeling from the loss of Jay, and I felt guilty even thinking about it now.
Sue stirred in her sleep, a mumbled word escaping her lips. She shifted toward me and into the light, exposing more of the soft white curve of her breast.
But that wasn’t what I was staring at, not anymore.
There was something in the bed with her.
It huddled between the crook of her neck and shoulder. It looked like some kind of animal, about the size and shape of a large mouse, but I knew instinctively that a mouse was not quite right. Mice didn’t have wings. I couldn’t see it well, but as it moved, fluttering as it went slightly airborne before settling again, I heard the humming, buzzing noise, a whine like a high-powered engine in the distance or a power tool. And then it stopped as the thing went still again.
A chill ran down the length of my body. I could not move, cemented to the bed, a cold sweat breaking out on my skin as I watched it huddle against Sue’s neck.
Feeding.
That was what it was doing, I realized, as my stomach began a slow, lazy turning, over and over again. The hole in Sue’s neck, like a puncture wound. I was right: she hadn’t gotten it from Dan or me wrestling her to the ground. She’d gotten it from this thing, sucking at her, like some kind of vampire.
As it lifted slightly and I heard the humming again, the spell broke, and I thrust myself up and off the mattress, a strangled shout ripping itself from my throat as I crossed the room and hit the light switch and Dan burst through the door. Sue opened her eyes in the suddenly bright light, blinked and squinted and muttered groggily at us. Then she frowned and raised her hand and waved vaguely at her neck, the movements of a girl with a tickling sensation but too sleepy to care much.
As her fingers brushed its back, the thing at her throat lifted into the air and darted out from under the top bunk.
It looked like a giant mosquito. It was about six inches long, covered with a fine brown fur, with a set of wings that buzzed and hummed as it flitted through the air. A set of multijointed legs hung down from its body as it flew. It had a long proboscis protruding from between two huge, mirrored eyes, and its engorged abdomen ended in a nasty, needlelike stinger.
When Sue saw the creature, her eyes opened wide, and she screamed. She rolled off the bed and scrambled toward us at the door in her bra and underwear, waving her arms wildly as the thing swooped and darted around her head.
The next few moments were lost to me, the utter chaos that ensued mostly missing from my mind later except for the feeling of sheer panic. I remember the terror of not knowing where the thing had gone, and the sound of Sue screaming and Dan shouting something I couldn’t seem to understand. Somehow we all ended up outside the closed bedroom door, Dan leaning up against it and panting heavily, Sue still screaming and me with my hands to my head, trying to slow my breathing down and calm my hammering heart before I collapsed.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Dan said. He turned around, his back against the door. “Sue, are you okay? Did it hurt you?”
Sue’s screams had settled into a nearly constant moan, and she kept brushing at her nearly naked body frantically with both hands, as if trying to wipe the memory of the creature off her. I caught a glimpse of her neck as she moved; the area where it had been sucking at her was bloody and inflamed and slick with some kind of shiny substance.
Slowly I regained control of myself. We were outside and the door was closed, so we were safe for now. But we were missing someone.
Tessa was still in there.
I knew that I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I didn’t have time to figure it all out. Once again filled with panic, I ran into the kitchen and came back with the fire extinguisher. I’d washed it in the sink after the fight with the rats, but as I held it I could imagine the bits of gore still stuck to the handle, and I had to struggle to keep from tossing it away from me. This time I’d make sure to pull the pin. I just h
oped there was enough foam left inside to do the trick.
As I approached the closed door, Dan held up his hands. “Hold on,” he said, “what do you think—”
“Get out of the way,” I said. “Now.” I held up the extinguisher like a club. There must have been something in my eyes because he backed away, hands still up.
“Easy,” he said. “Take it easy, Pete.”
“Close the door after me,” I said. And then I turned the handle, pulled open the door and slipped inside.
The room was empty.
I stood just inside the door and shot the lock through, holding the extinguisher in front of me, so scared I was shaking. I didn’t want anyone else opening that door and letting the thing out. But I was no hero and never had been, this much I knew. I was terrified of needles, I hated confrontation, and I refused to be dared into doing anything I didn’t like. I was the only person in my sixth-grade group never to jump off the high rock into Black Pond, even when the eight-year-old sister of one of the boys did it and the others laughed at me and called me a pussy, and the story dogged me for years. That was one example, but there were many others.
But once forced into action, I tended to strike quickly and hard. I’d only been in two fights in my life, both of them started by someone else. Both fights had been over pretty quick, with the other guy getting the worst of it. I gained a reputation after that and people generally stopped messing with me.
Some might have thought I was brave. Only I knew the truth; when backed into a corner, my fear became so overwhelming that I fought with a kind of animal instinct, my body taking over as my mind shut down.
There was no choice now. I had to act.
I scanned the room, left, right, up, down, looking for any movement. Tessa wasn’t in her bunk, and I couldn’t see the creature anywhere.