by Evans, John
#
Lena made her way through an anemic crowd to the dance club’s bar, an island of light in a dark expanse.
She leaned against the rail. Glancing down, she saw the opaque liquor case was lit with pink bulbs so the bottles inside were only silhouettes.
The bartender, a slender woman with multiple facial piercings, immediately came to take Lena’s order.
“Tom Collins and a virgin Sea Breeze.”
“I have to charge full price for the Sea Breeze.”
“Make it a Diet Pepsi, then.”
“How about Coke?”
“Sure.”
Lena carried the drinks back to a table near the dance floor, where Nic was waiting. A few dancers were doing their thing but while the beat-driven techno was suffused with energy, their movements were stiff and inhibited.
The couple’s moods had not been in harmony for long. At their first stop, a quieter hotel bar, Nic put away most of a carafe of wine. She seemed weary and lethargic afterwards. Lena was still feeling celebratory, for reasons she was nervously eager to explain.
As Lena approached the table, she saw that over Nic’s shoulder were nebulous color swirls, projected onto a screen. Rather than inspiring the dancers, as they were no doubt intended, their languid circular motions seemed to trace a hypnotic path to nowhere.
“Thank you, baby,” Nic said and took a sip of her drink. To Lena, it looked like a big sip.
Nic’s voice did sound a little slurred as she said, “Guess we came on the wrong night, huh?”
Lena tried to stay upbeat, though she rapidly had a sense that the evening was heading south. “Plenty of room on the dance floor, though.”
Nic shook her head. “Not in the mood. I’m mopey drunk, not wild and crazy.”
Lena scanned the vicinity for alternatives. “Want to shoot some pool?”
“Ummm… Not really.”
Though there was only a two-year age difference between them, on occasion Nic slipped into a little girl mode of manipulation. It was rather like a petulant female asking to be pampered by her man. Lena found it a cosmic irony that gay men and women had their gender’s most difficult aspects turned against them. It was a joke on both genders that they must suffer their own uniquely frustrating sides.
Lena abandoned this slightly disturbing train of thought and kept plugging away. “Air hockey?”
Nic responded with a smile and a squeeze of the hand.
“Air hockey it is.”
She was, after all, really an adult, and a loving one at that.
They went over to a recessed area where a few bar games sat unplayed. Lena swiped her credit card to turn on the air hockey machine.
They slapped the puck back and forth with practiced flicks of the wrist. Before meeting, neither had been much into the game, but there was something magical in the adversarial flirtation between opposite sides of an air hockey table. Since a memorable duel on their second date, the game had become a nostalgic ritual for them.
As the puck zinged back and forth at high speed, sharing the room was a guy in a trenchcoat playing vintage Ms. Pacman and a drunk who’d decamped to this quiet corner to gather himself. He tried to light a cigarette, forbidden though it was, with matches that didn’t strike no matter what he did.
Nic slammed home the winning goal with a vicious snap of the wrist, the puck shooting on a line past Lena’s guard. The table went dark except for the flashing score: 7-6.
Lena felt elated by the compelling game they’d played, but her competitive spirit was left demanding satisfaction. “Thought I had you this time!”
“You nearly did.”
They met for an embrace. Cigarette Man doggedly tried match after match, striking them on the wall, an arcade game, his shoe… Anything.
Lena looked at her lover’s face. Nic looked worn down, for a moment aged beyond her 28 years.
“Call it a night?” Lena asked. She was hoping for another game of air hockey, strangely enough. She was disappointed to see Nic pulling out now. But then Nic’s face changed and she caressed Lena’s cheek.
“No…. No, let’s have fun. You gotta have fun in life, don’t you? Sometimes? Just a little?”
As Lena led her back to their table, again discouraged by the seemingly inevitable course of the evening, Cigarette Man relentlessly scratched a match against the side of a pinball machine emblazoned with the title “The Great Escape.”
#
On the screen, a Volkswagen Bug rocketed off a cliff. It was one of those stubby, precociously cute second-wave Bugs, not the lovably lumpy 1960s version. From within emanated the annoying actor’s singsong, “Oh, SHIIIIIIIT!”
Manuel wasn’t paying much attention. He was assessing Silverfish’s condition. The skinny kid’s eyes were too bright, too large and glassy.
“You all right, homes?”
His junior foot-soldier didn’t respond. The kid only twitched, lost in the convulsions of an intense drug reaction. It looked like the kid’s heart might be exploding. Shit.
“Shit,” Rico agreed, though in fact it was a stream of urine trickling from Silverfish’s soaked pantleg that they noticed simultaneously. Either way, it meant, “not good.”
“Let’s blow,” Manuel said to Rico. Silverfish was gazing into space, a pendulum of saliva clinging persistently to his lips. His body spasmed violently in the seat. You wouldn’t think someone could twitch like that without being electrocuted.
Manuel and Rico discreetly hiked up the aisle and left the theater. Silverfish never acknowledged their departure.
He was already dead.
Voskuil, unawares, absorbed the absurdly inconsequential film with escapist satisfaction. It was nice to lose yourself in a movie that approximated the dream-world they all used to inhabit.
Voskuil was dozing pleasantly when Silverfish, motionless for over a minute, suddenly jerked. His body shook with a different impetus than before. This was not a death rattle, but a birth pang.
Silverfish’s fingers, already cold as his body ceased to generate its own heat, flexed open. They gripped the armrest. Squeezed it.
His eyes rolled into animal focus, as if regaining fundamental equilibrium. They tracked across the scene before him, passing over Voskuil and then returning.
Silverfish rose jerkily from his seat, intense gaze locked on the nape of Voskuil’s neck. Though his heart stopped four minutes and eighteen seconds earlier, the virus fed enough of his brain to compel him forward on its dreadful quest.
In the virus world, propagation was the key. A virus that couldn’t do that didn’t stick around very long. Like the bird flu, this bug was likely to keep changing.
When the blond teen lurched from his row into the aisle, he attracted little notice from the moviegoers. His course merited more attention when he staggered toward the screen rather than away.
Young Hilary Willingham found it easy to pull her eyes from the banal comedy onscreen and redirect them to the odd, drunken movements of the shape in the aisle.
The gracelessness of this slouching silhouette spoke volumes to her. Hilary felt a dread certainty that this was no drunk, no lunatic.
“Look…. Look! It’s ONE of them….” Hilary hissed to her uncle James, whose idea of entertainment better matched the fare onscreen. He grunted disinterestedly, actually mistaking her urgency for the foolish imagination of a 15-year old.
“Uncle J, check it out! That guy’s a FEEDER!”
Possessed with the eternal certainty of the young, she pointed at the tottering figure.
“No it ain’t,” Uncle J. murmured, giving Silverfish the most cursory of glances. “Watch the damn movie.”
Silverfish was mere inches from Voskuil. An inquisitive flailing of his hand brushed the back of Voskuil’s head. He turned to face this apparition in the dark — it loomed over him with one hand pulled back to lash out again. This was the real-life iteration of a frequent nightmare and Voskuil did not doubt for a moment what his eyes told him. He rolled fr
om the theater chair with one hand darting into his coat.
Silverfish pawed at him, snaring his sweater and clamping down on it with clumsy, eager fingers.
Voskuil screamed, firing the snub-nosed .38 before it had pulled free of his camel-hair jacket. The first bullet burned through the coat around his collarbone and buried itself in the ceiling. The second shot, which he got off in the right direction this time, struck Silverfish’s shoulder.
Uncle J. rose from his seat, Smith and Wesson in hand, and took proper care in aiming. As was his luxury, more than 10 feet from the action. He wasn’t going to get any closer, even if it meant a better shot and thus a better chance for the doctor to survive.
The man was, after all, a stranger (a rude one, at that), and Uncle J. had his niece to protect.
He started shooting as Silverfish lunged into Voskuil. The first bullet missed its mark; the combatant it came closest to was Voskuil.
The feeder’s wild attack had knocked Voskuil over the next seat and to the gummy cement floor. Silverfish went with him, an awkward but effective pounce. Voskuil tried to press the gun to his assailant’s ashen temple but before he could, gnashing teeth found the exposed skin of his forearm.
The bite was unlike any Voskuil had experienced before. The sensation of blunted human teeth relentlessly digging into his skin was uniquely disturbing. They were not the teeth of a predator, but of someone just like him. And they were burrowing into his flesh no less aggressively than a cobra’s fangs.
Voskuil beat back the chomping jaws with the butt of his gun. When he finally pressed its barrel to the corpse’s head, he felt the nauseating Pyrrhic victory of the mortally wounded.
“Fuck you,” he hissed, making up for extreme unoriginality with existential venom. The gun discharged, the feeder’s brain was pierced, and its skull’s contents sprayed the seat-backs.
Voskuil rose, unsteadily, to see several people approaching him. Approaching him with weapons.
“He’s bit!” exclaimed the black guy from the ticket line. The sight of the man’s Smith & Wesson, admittedly wavering but still leveled at Voskuil’s chest, was a deafening call to action.
With the thoughtless self-preservation of an animal, Voskuil went into the routine he’d learned in self-defense courses and drew aim. He squeezed the trigger without the slightest hesitation. Hit in the chest, Uncle J. inadvertently fired as he collapsed. The errant shot virtually severed the wrist of his niece, Hilary, who would never regain full use of her hand.
Voskuil turned and ran. Bullets zinged past him as other audience-members shot to kill. He heard the teenage girl wailing in pain and anguish behind him.
Some people would have been deeply troubled by this fleeting auditory detail. These were the wracking, soul-chilling howls of someone who had lost more than they imagined possible, and on top of it felt more raw, physical pain than they could conceive of.
But Voskuil was not the type of man to carry this with him. Faced with an angry feeder or a small child, if it was you or him, Voskuil knew in his heart of hearts the choice was already made.
He banged through the emergency exit doors and onto the street. Racing across a wet alley, he recognized the adjacent parking lot as the one in which he left his car.
Voskuil climbed the cyclone fence like a nimble teenager. He was on the fluid autopilot of the desperate. He had already dropped lithely to the pavement by the time the other audience-members plunged through the exit doors, out for his blood.
Voskuil darted to the driver’s side of his Porsche, crouched and slipped the key into its lock. The door opened and he slithered behind the wheel. Hoping they hadn’t seen him yet, he pulled the door shut as soundlessly as he could.
Only when he’d fired up the ignition and thrown the gearshift in reverse did he risk a glance out the windshield.
His pursuers must have heard the car engine because three shapes were running toward the fence. Someone stuck their handgun through the links to squeeze off a hurried shot.
Voskuil felt his rear bumper crunch into that of another vehicle. He slammed the car into drive and leaned on the gas pedal. The Porsche leapt forward, scraping the front of a minivan before bouncing onto the street.
Voskuil, keeping low, gunned it. In seconds he was a block away and could drive normally as the theater receded behind him. No one else was on the road.
He’d made it.
Voskuil’s elation at his temporary escape melted into terror when he looked at his throbbing forearm. He was in the process of hitting a freeway ramp at 45 miles per hour when he noticed it and he benefitted from another piece of luck (as though someone, upstairs or down, was guiding his course) that the ramp didn’t curve at all. Otherwise, he would have driven straight through the guardrail. For in that terrible moment, his eyes, and his full concentration, was on the bite.
Bitten. A real bite. Skin broken, flesh pierced, blood drawn. No two ways about it. That meant only one thing.
He was infected.
Which meant death, anywhere he went, no matter who he talked to. Instant, summary execution. Euthanasia. Even his own mother was expected to do her duty and put lead in his head. Were she still alive, of course. Voskuil had lost her at a particularly damaging age, 14, and it colored his teens in ways that would make disturbing stories of their own.
Now, it seemed an utter certainty that soon he would be dragged kicking and screaming into a triage like his own, where someone just like him would inject acid into his brain and whisper meaningless, deceitful reassurances the whole time.
Voskuil admitted to himself that the scenario was a melodramatic exaggeration because he would fail the first v-test and be shot on scene. Truth be told, the deed would be done by someone like Lena Gladden’s butch wife.
Voskuil wasn’t ready to die.
He refused to accept his self-diagnosis, however clinically accurate it was. James Voskuil couldn’t go out like this. No… Not at 41, single and alone, because he got bit watching a cheesy road-trip comedy.
No.
He piloted his car onto a lofty intercity arterial, most of the streetlamps burnt out and unreplaced. Voskuil searched his mind. Was there a chance?
The name of Voskuil’s fraternity brother, Wes McIntyre, popped into his head. The most successful of their college circle, Wes had found his way into the Department of Homeland Security. That was a coup, even before the onset of the virus, but since then it had become a veritable royal appointment.
Voskuil hadn’t talked with Wes in almost a year, but he knew his old friend was stationed at the CDC in Atlanta. Obviously this posting put him at the hub of research into the world’s deadliest affliction. We would either find a cure or shuffle meekly into the void, where countless other living things had gone.
Voskuil might have found it ironic when he zipped past a “There is no Cure” billboard except that they were so ubiquitous it was impossible to avoid one. Instead, his mind inexorably returned to the only chance he had.
He pawed the phone from his pocket and paged through the address book to McIntyre. He certainly didn’t have the guy speed-dialed. But they were good friends, once….
Voskuil hit “send” and waited for the phone to connect.
Hoping against hope.
#
While Voskuil dialed, Nic and Lena danced to a supercharged cover of the old Diana Ross song, “Upside Down.” Lena felt completely at peace just enjoying the familiar beat. Strangely enough, she’d discovered dancing post-virus. Now there was a passionate release in the dancing she had never felt before.
She’d once read that in war-torn Sarajevo a sense of fatalistic romance permeated the dance hall culture. Young couples met or courted on the dance floor, never certain if one or the other would be alive the next Saturday night. Many romances bloomed in the sharing of that intensely alive, not-to-be-taken-for-granted opportunity to feel.
This anecdote resonated with Lena more every day. The uncertainty of one’s existence added a powerful emotional d
imension to any melody, and cast the specter of potential tragedy over any relationship.
Dancing with the woman she loved, Lena experienced fleeting bliss. Nic also seemed exultant, in perfect sync with both Lena and the music.
A few clubgoers watched admiringly; no one moved with such grace and passion, so they stood out like paired stars in an otherwise cloudy sky.
When the song segued into a less inspiring tune, Aloe Blacc’s “The Man,” the couple retreated to their table. Lena wanted to capitalize on the tidal wave of good vibes that dancing had produced. She was still tingling with life, in fact, as if she’d just popped Ecstasy and chased it with Red Bull.
It was time.
“So…. Wondering why I’ve ordered virgin drinks all night?”
Nic gazed at her. If she’d been too disconnected to notice that very thing, she was certainly quick to catch up. The knowledge was absent from her eyes one moment and there the next.
“You’re kidding,” she said. Lena was thrilled to see, in that first raw instant before Nic started thinking, a burst of joy. Whatever happened next, that filled her with joy of her own.
“I had it done six weeks ago but the results just came back the other day. We’re gonna be mommies!”
The joy had rapidly vanished from Nic’s eyes. As Nic spoke slowly and deliberately, Elena felt stung by every word. “How on earth…. Do you expect to raise a child in this world?”
This was not surprise talking. It was Nic’s deep-seated belief that no child deserved to grow up in this nightmare. And Lena had predicted just this reaction, which was why she’d taken so long to tell Nic, let alone having it done without her wife’s agreement.
“I know how you are about this,” Lena said, feeling the last of her warmth and security fading, “But it was actually my choice. If you don’t want to be around… That’s up to you.”