The Alt Apocalypse (Book 4): Affliction

by Abrahams, Tom

  The guard’s hooded head snapped back and he stumbled, falling onto the street. He dropped his rifle, which bounced and then skidded a few feet.

  Danny whipped his head in both directions, scanning the preoccupied crowd to see if anyone had seen what he’d done. He half expected to be tackled from behind, but nobody came for him. Nobody, it seemed, had witnessed it.

  Confident the guard was unconscious, Danny took two big steps to one side and picked up the rifle. Now he had two weapons. And he had Maggie. That made three.

  With his wits still about him, he walked toward the trucks and found the closest guard who appeared to have some semblance of authority. He walked up to him, Maggie in tow, and called out, “Hey, we’ve got an infected guard. He’s sick. Told me he needed to puke and then he passed out.”

  Danny aimed the rifle toward the guard still lying motionless on the street, people walking around him as if he weren’t there. Danny hoped he hadn’t killed the guy.

  “All right,” said the man next to him. His face shield followed Danny’s lead. “Thanks. We’ll get a team on him immediately.”

  Danny thanked the man and disappeared into the crowd as a trio of suited medics hustled past him carrying a stretcher, yelling for the crowds to clear a path.

  No sooner had Danny reached the fence than he wanted to turn back. What he saw in front of him was beyond anything he could have imagined. He suddenly understood the setup at the checkpoint for Infected Zone A4 and the gravity of what had befallen his home.

  He now knew the people being loaded onto those trucks were the healthy ones. They were sent without any of their belongings to prevent latent transmission of the bacteria. It made sense now that he’d figured it out. As much as he hurt for that little girl and her rabbit, as much as he sympathized with the dad fighting for his family’s last material possessions, the guards had done what they were supposed to do. They were sending off that family to stay healthy, to get them as far away from the deadly illness as they could, as unpleasant as the journey might be.

  Danny’s eyes welled with tears as he stood a foot from the fence and soaked in the macabre tableau that played out before him. It appeared to him like Dante Alighieri himself had drawn the epic scene that was anything but poetic. It was death incarnate and something Danny regretted he would never unsee, in this life or any other.

  The ones inside the fence, the caged people who’d lived in Infected Zone A4, were the sick ones. There were elderly, infants, people in various stages of decay as they descended to the next level of the inferno. Danny was grateful his filtered air blocked the odor of anything beyond the petrochemical suit and the now faint musk.

  His pulse was still amped. His eyes darted from one story to the next: a man cradling a dead woman as he coughed up blood; a child facedown on the pavement, motionless and alone; an elderly man grabbing the back of his pants and wincing as he waddled aimlessly around.

  Inside the fence there were no yellow suits. There were only the dead or dying, the infected and infectious. It was flesh and gore and excrement multiplied endlessly within a finite space.

  His attention was on a far-off corner of the space, where a woman was holding a child whose arms were limp at her sides, when a cry and the rattling of aluminum snapped his attention to the fence in front of him.

  A woman leaned into the fence, her face pressed against the diamond pattern of the links. Her fingers gripped them and pulled. Her nose was bleeding, her eyes were swollen, and her hair was matted with vomit or something else. Her clothing, what there was of it, was stained varying shades of brown.

  She was hissing at him. Her voice was so weak Danny couldn’t understand whatever it was she was trying to say.

  He didn’t move. She couldn’t see his misty eyes or the concern etched into his forehead. He was hidden behind his reflective mask and he was frozen.

  She became more agitated, like a caged animal seeking freedom or attention. Danny could tell she was urging him closer to her. He considered that she was speaking so softly not because of the illness, but because she was trying to draw him in toward the fence and within her reach.

  He held his ground and checked to make sure Maggie was there with him. She was sniffing the air, her front paws dancing as if on hot asphalt. She could sense the misery beyond that fence much the way she instinctively knew to lick his swollen knees after a long session at his dojo.

  Danny considered telling the woman he couldn’t hear her. Before he could, she reached above her head, her long, stringy blond hair draping like a curtain across her arms, and grabbed the fence. Holding it tightly, she pulled herself up enough to curl her toes inside the links a good eighteen inches off the ground.

  Her body was suspended now, her fingers and toes sticking her to the fence. She was elevated a few inches higher than Danny’s head, and she looked down on him and wailed.

  “Hellllllllp meeeeee!” she cried, blood leaching onto her gums and framing her teeth. “Hellllllllp meeeeeee!”

  Danny trembled and stumbled back two steps. Maggie tucked her tail and lowered her ears, her eyes remaining fixed on the woman on the fence.

  The woman kept pulling and pushing against the links with her hands and feet. She was gaining momentum. The fence rattled and rippled as she shook it back and forth. The concertina wire atop the fence chimed and echoed like a plucked slinky toy.

  Maggie whimpered; then she barked. Danny tried to hush her, but he couldn’t. Her shoulders were squared now and she snarled between gasping barks that the woman on the fence began to mimic. She tilted her head back and howled.

  “Let’s go, Maggie,” Danny told her.

  He could sense other guards would be descending upon the scene, and he wanted no part of it. It occurred to him in that moment that it might actually serve as a genuine distraction so he could exit the checkpoint and move a step closer to his home. If he could make it there, he’d be safe. It was already checked and cleared. He doubted anyone would come back again if he stayed out of sight and quiet.

  But Maggie wasn’t playing along. She inched closer to the woman, still barking, spit flapping from her muzzle as she argued with the dying woman, who was clearly at her wit’s end.

  “Maggie,” Danny ordered. “Now. Let’s go.”

  It was as if the dog didn’t hear him or was completely ignoring him. She was in a zone and had one focus: the woman rattling the fence and her cage. She edged closer to the fence, aggravated but intrigued. There was something about the screeching woman that mesmerized her.

  Danny looked around, searching for oncoming trouble. There wasn’t any yet, but people inside the cage were paying attention. They were gathering around the feral, stringy-haired beast clamoring for attention. They were shouting now too, which only served to further agitate Maggie.

  Danny stepped toward her and put his hand on her back. “Mag—”

  She turned on him and snapped at the air before realizing it was him. Danny recoiled with shock and backed up.

  Maggie cowered for a beat in submission and apology then returned to the task at hand. She swung her large head back to the fence, looked up at the woman shaking the fence, and pawed another step closer. She was inches from it now and barking fiercely. Each throaty snarl exploded into an emotive percussion. Maggie was incensed. She was defensive and aggressive at the same time.

  Her sinewy muscles flexed. Her neck thickened and her shoulders rolled forward. The thin spray of spit had become yarns of saliva that hung from her jowls. Her teeth, yellow at the gums, were bared, her snout curled up. The hair on her neck and back stood straight. She inched forward again.

  Beyond the fence the crowd was in the dozens now. The sick cell block of prisoners was closing ranks. In varying stages of decay they somehow found the strength to rally in protest.

  On some level, Danny sympathized. He understood their anger and frustration. They were dying, yet nobody was helping them. There was no dignity in this: sent to a cage in the middle of a Los Angeles intersec
tion, exposed and abandoned to suck in a few last painful breaths surrounded by strangers.

  But the more consuming emotion was fear. He could see the posts that held the fence in place beginning to shift as a man joined the woman on the fence. He was larger and heavier. His weight strained the linkage as he swung his heft in sync with the woman.

  Maggie inched forward again. She snapped at the woman, her teeth grazing the fence. She’d timed the bite wrong, missing the swing’s movement closest to her. The woman flopped her head back and howled. The man bellowed. A third and then fourth diseased prisoner jumped aboard.

  One of the posts bent and the fence bent forward. It wouldn’t be long before it collapsed outward.

  “Maggie!” Danny called. He stepped next to her and tried to get her attention. For the first time since he’d adopted her, he was afraid of what she might do to him.

  Maggie snapped at the woman. This time she caught her foot and held the woman in place for a moment before letting go. It was enough to draw the woman’s foot free of the fence. She lost her hold and tumbled from the fence onto the hard street below. Danny couldn’t hear her connecting with the asphalt, but saw the woman’s body contort unnaturally when she landed. The woman howled again; this one was darker, racked with pain. Her foot was bleeding.

  Maggie edged toward the man, no dip in her intensity. Danny moved with her and tried to focus her attention on him. But the circus behind the fence was too much for Maggie to ignore. The sights, sounds, and odors must have combined to become sensory overload for the normally obedient dog.

  Danny stole a glance behind him. Where were the guards? What were they doing? Nobody was responding.

  He swung back in time to see two more people jump onto the fence. They rode it like a bronco, swinging wildly, pushing it outward so much so that it now looked as if they were crouched on top of it instead of hanging from it.

  And then the cavalry came.

  Danny didn’t know what was happening, despite the sound of firecrackers exploding behind him. He could only see that one fence-rider and then another were falling from their respective perches. They’d jerk suddenly and then fall to the ground. It wasn’t until the fourth prisoner spasmed that Danny saw the mists of blood spray from bullet wounds.

  He swung around to see a half dozen yellow-suited guards take aim with their rifles. The weapons were pulled tight to their shoulders, their hoods tilted toward the sights. It was a strange sight, as if watching an alien army attack.

  Armed with two weapons himself, Danny didn’t want to use them. He wasn’t going to kill people who already had a death sentence. Of more importance was getting clear of the gunfire, the fence, and the rabid throng of diseased protestors.

  He took the butt of his rifle and jabbed it at Maggie’s rear haunch. It was hard enough to grab her attention, but without enough force to hurt her.

  The dog whipped her snarl toward Danny, thick noodles of spit flying from her jaws. She pivoted her body, snapping at the air. Then she lunged at him.

  Had she forgotten he was in a suit? Did she suddenly think he was the enemy?

  Danny was dumbstruck by the attack. Maggie leapt at him and knocked him to the ground. He dropped the rifle but still held the pistol in his left hand. She had his suit in her mouth, jerking her head to tear at the Tyvek fabric on his arm.

  Danny wrapped his arms around her and pulled her flailing body toward him into a bear hug. He rolled onto his side, fighting off her attack.

  The constant pop of small-arms fire, the screams of those inside the fence and shouts of those outside it, and the nasty growl of his dog made it difficult for Danny to focus his thoughts.

  “Maggie!” he yelled through his mask. “It’s me, Maggie. Stop! Stop, Maggie!”

  Then he felt the thick, bruising puncture of her teeth in his arm. He grunted but refused to fight back. She released her hold and bit down again. Tears welled in Danny’s eyes. His hot breath fogged his mask. He swallowed hard, the thick knot in his throat growing more intrusive as the confusion and pain of the moment began to overwhelm him. His best friend was attacking him, fighting to hurt him, but he was more worried for her. How frightened she had to be to lose her senses and unwittingly attack her only companion and caretaker.

  Danny tried grabbing her muzzle. She shook free and bit down again, grazing a spot she’d already chomped. He tried rolling over onto her, trying to pin her down and gain some leverage over her so she’d submit. But as soon as he tightened his own grip around her body, he felt an immense, sudden weight on his side. Maggie yelped and squirmed, but she stopped her attack. The sudden push against his side knocked the air from his lungs at the same moment a warning light flashed inside his mask. The filter was almost dead. He’d lose oxygen flow in less than five minutes.

  Danny couldn’t move. His arms were trapped. His legs were pinned. Maggie whimpered soft cries beside him. The fence had given way and collapsed on top of them. Darkness surrounded him. Only thin ribbons of light shone through to his visor.

  The weight keeping Danny on the ground, and Maggie virtually immobile, was from the bullet-riddled bodies of the fence-riders. A couple of them moved or groaned. A thin trail of dark liquid traced its way from one side of Danny’s mask to the other. He was certain it was blood.

  His arm throbbed from Maggie’s attack. He’d lost hold of the pistol, and his left hand felt thick, as if he were swollen from too much salt. His right arm was trapped underneath the dog. She was breathing heavily and trying to maneuver herself free.

  The display in Danny’s hood flashed red. He had four minutes to get the mask off or he’d start asphyxiating. He twisted his body and felt some of the weight on top of him shift. He tried pushing with his right arm to lift his body. He moved up maybe an inch and then collapsed again.

  Maggie squirmed against him. He spoke to her in as calm a voice as he could, aware that every breath he took was one closer to his last if he couldn’t free himself.

  “It’s okay, girl,” he said, not really believing it. “We’re okay, Mags. It’s okay.”

  With his trapped arm, which was underneath her body, he managed to rub his gloved hand along her side. His arm was going numb. He could feel it at his shoulder.

  He worked hard to suck in short breaths through his nose. His heart raced, his arm hurt, and his back ached. Yet he fought the overwhelming urge to panic.

  This couldn’t be how it ended, at the bottom of a human pile, suffocated inside a hazmat suit.

  That’s as unlikely as dying from a mountain lion attack.

  Why that thought had popped into his head instead of a shark bite or lightning strike was beyond him. But there it was, the image of a large cat bearing down on him.

  Another warning came from his hood. Three minutes.

  The bodies above him weren’t moving anymore. They were quite literally dead weight. There was no sound aside from Maggie’s soft whimper and his own quick, suppressed breathing. The muffled sounds of the outside world were gone.

  He pushed again, tried using his legs, knees, and even the elbow of his injured arm. Nothing worked. Slight shifting of the weight on top of him only proved to make things worse. The heaviest of the pressure was on his hip now, and his left arm was essentially immobile. He could move it below the elbow, but not much more than that. He tried raising it toward his hood so he could unlatch it and try to breathe external air, as fetid as it might be. That would save him for now. But no matter how much he wiggled, twisted, grunted, or nudged, he couldn’t do it. He screamed inside his hood so loudly it hurt his ears and left his throat feeling scratchy and raw.

  Maggie whined. Her body moved up and down against his pinned arm. He tried to stroke her again but couldn’t feel his fingers. He tensed and relaxed his body, giving in to the weight that surrounded him.

  Two minutes, the hood warned. One hundred twenty seconds and counting.

  Danny sipped air now. He tried slowing his heart rate as his sensei had taught him. That might buy him
an extra minute or two. Not that it mattered. They were stuck. They were buried alive. They were invisible.

  Danny focused on the slivers of light that shone through the dark shapes above him. He tried to think of happier times. But instead of sunshine and lazy days at the beach, his mind drifted to darker places.

  He saw himself fighting for his life with a knife-wielding assailant, of wandering through an ashen wasteland he barely recognized as Los Angeles. His mind filled with memories of sitting across a table from his nemesis, the man who’d taken his wife from him. They were talking about headaches and déjà vu.

  These felt like memories to him, like his life playing back in a loop. And while it seemed as if he’d experienced these things, he knew he hadn’t. He’d never had a real conversation with his ex’s new man. He hadn’t seen SoCal covered in ash, nor had he been in a knife fight with a man he was certain wanted to kill him. None of those things had happened, but he felt them in his core as if they had.

  Danny tried refocusing on images he knew to be true: Maggie catching a Frisbee; the sounds and briny aroma of the surf roiling onto the shore in Malibu; funny conversations with Arthur, his fellow fry cook, while they flipped burgers or scraped butter across the grill. But the other, dingier “memories” kept floating to the surface.

  Suddenly his head throbbed at the temples, enough so that he forgot about the equivalent pain in his wounded arm. Was it oxygen deprivation already?

  One minute now, according to the hood. Danny held his breath as long as he could before replacing it with the tiniest inhalation he could. His heart rate increased as he lessened the flow of oxygen into his body. In the back of his mind now was the image of a ticking clock counting down with seconds to go.

  He wasn’t sure what was worse, the images of a past he hadn’t experienced in this life, or the one that subtracted the final moments of his existence with an ambivalent ticktock. Neither was preferable.

  Instead of thinking about himself, he focused on Maggie. He gave up conserving air, deciding that was only prolonging the inevitable. He stroked her side with what movement he could with his fingers. He shushed her and tried to make her comfortable.