A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  Their program was quickly cleared of any wrongdoing. It was, after all, discreetly staged and played only at a late hour. And besides, the reasoning went, weren’t they merely doing God’s work?

  Aided by the notoriety of the investigation, the second Bobby & Laura drew the largest audience in the history of this country. Even Gayle put on a headset. She later agreed that it was a remarkably moving experience. Such a feeling of warmth, of being loved, of being needed, of belonging.

  With the blessing of the Church, the show quickly moved into all the foreign mass media, vidcast at midnight in every time zone around the world. Dubbing or subtitles were used in the first half; no translation was necessary for the second. Billions began to look forward to the show each night. Crave it, in fact. Night shifts in factories were interrupted for Bobby & Laura. Even stories of hospital patients left unattended during the show.

  I remember wondering about Bobby and Laura. Don’t care how God-loving and righteous a couple is, they can’t generate that level of emotional and physical intensity on a nightly basis. They either had a method of enhancing the signals they transmitted, or had recorded a library of their best procreational sessions and vidcast these to the eager billions wearing their headsets and waiting for the screen to dim.

  So what? I’d ask myself. Only showed they were as human as the rest of us. The purpose of their show was not to set some sort of endurance record.

  Still went through spasms of uneasiness, though. These would usually hit me after the nightly show was over and Gayle and I were falling asleep in each other’s arms, spent without having moved a muscle.

  Bobby & Laura had been on for well over a year when it came to me that we hadn’t conceived our fifth life as planned. We both knew the reason: Our procreational activity had ebbed to the point where the only thing we did in bed was sleep. That was wrong. Evil. Contrary to everything we believed in. We felt guilty and ashamed.

  And confused. Couldn’t understand what was happening to me. Loved God and the Church as much as ever. My faith was still strong. Hard for me to admit this, but I’d lost all desire for Gayle as my procreational partner.

  I wanted Laura.

  Noticed Gayle’s righteousness slipping, too. Did Bobby fill her thoughts as Laura did mine?

  (11:58 . . . better hurry)

  Guilt made me keep all this to myself. Even noticed some hesitation to attend weekly services. Didn’t feel as if I was doing my part to follow God’s will. But forced myself to go.

  Now I know I’m not alone. The vision told me the birth rate is down. Others have been afflicted as I have.

  And I know why.

  The Devil is sly and ever active. We thought the enemies of the Church had been eliminated. Thought them dispersed and discredited as heretics and blasphemers. Wrong. All wrong! They merely went underground and have been insidiously undermining God’s will all along.

  And their master plot is Bobby & Laura!

  Had my suspicions for a long time now, but last week’s vision convinced me: We have all become sensually jaded and emotionally dependent on that show. We are exposed to such peaks of pleasure and intimacy via the BioCog unit that the human contact demanded by God seems flat and ordinary.

  THE BIOCOG IS AN INSTRUMENT OF THE DEVIL! THROUGH IT WE HAVE BECOME ADDICTED! EMOTIONALLY, PSYCHOLOGICALLY, PHYSIOLOGICALLY, AND NEUROLOGICALLY DEPENDENT ON BOBBY AND LAURA!

  But not for long. I’m going to expose this hellish scheme tomorrow. I’ll put an end to The Bobby & Laura Show for good. I’ll reveal them for what they are.

  (Only a minute to go)

  Exposure of the plot will mean no more Laura for me, but that doesn’t matter. God’s will is what matters. I can break this addiction and return to the True Path. We all can. I don’t need the show. I can wash it away like sweat and dirt, leaving myself pure and clean for the coming Translation.

  (Midnight)

  Bobby & Laura is starting . . . Gayle’s by the set . . . I’m going to join her . . . just for a few minutes . . . then I’ll get back to this . . .

  . . . promise . . .

  . . . just as soon as the show’s over . . .

  (I’m coming, Laura!)

  SOFT

  I was lying on the floor watching TV and exercising what was left of my legs when the newscaster’s jaw collapsed. He was right in the middle of the usual plea for anybody who thought they were immune to come to Rockefeller Center when—pflumpf!—the bottom of his face went soft. I burst out laughing.

  “Daddy!” Judy said, shooting me a razorblade look from her wheelchair.

  I shut up.

  She was right. Nothing funny about a man’s tongue wiggling around in the air snake-like while his lower jaw flopped down in front of his throat like a sack of Jell-O and his bottom teeth jutted at the screen crowns-on, rippling like a line of buoys on a bay. A year ago I would have gagged. But I’ve changed in ways other than physical since this mess began, and couldn’t help feeling good about one of those pretty-boy newsreaders going soft right in front of the camera. I almost wished I had a bigger screen so I could watch 21 color inches of the scene. He was barely visible on our 5-inch black-and-white.

  The room filled with white noise as the screen went blank. Someone must have taken a look at what was going out on the airwaves and pulled the plug. Not that many people were watching anyway.

  I flipped the set off to save the batteries. Batteries were as good as gold now. Better than gold. Who wanted gold nowadays?

  I looked over at Judy and she was crying softly. Tears slid down her cheeks.

  “Hey, hon—”

  “I can’t help it, Daddy. I’m so scared!”

  “Don’t be, Jude. Don’t worry. Everything will work out, you’ll see. We’ve got this thing licked, you and me.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because it hasn’t progressed in weeks. It’s over for us—we’ve got immunity.”

  She glanced down at her legs, then quickly away. “It’s already too late for me.”

  I reached over and patted my dancer on the hand. “Never too late for you, shweetheart,” I said in my best Bogart. That got a tiny smile out of her.

  We sat there in the silence, each thinking our own thoughts. The newsreader had said the cause of the softness had been discovered: a virus, a freak mutation that disrupted the calcium matrix of bones.

  Yeah. Sure. That’s what they said last year when the first cases cropped up in Boston. A virus. But they never isolated the virus, and the softness spread all over the world. So they began searching for “a subtle and elusive environmental toxin.” They never pinned that one down either.

  Now we were back to a virus. Who cared? It didn’t matter. Judy and I had beat it. Whether we had formed the right antibodies or the right antitoxin was just a stupid academic question. The process had been arrested in us. Sure, it had done some damage, but it wasn’t doing any more, and that was the important thing. We’d never be the same, but we were going to live.

  “But that man,” Judy said, nodding toward the TV. “He said they were looking for people in whom the disease had started and then stopped. That’s us, Dad. They said they need to examine people like us so they can find out how to fight it, maybe develop a serum against it. We should—”

  “Judy-Judy-Judy!” I said in Cary Grantese to hide my annoyance. How many times did I have to go over this? “We’ve been through all this before. I told you: It’s too late for them. Too late for everybody but us immunes.”

  I didn’t want to discuss it—Judy didn’t understand about those kind of people, how you can’t deal with them.

  “I want you to take me down there,” she said in the tone she used when she wanted to be stubborn. “If you don’t want to help, okay. But I do.”

  “No!” I said that louder than I wanted to and she flinched. More softly: “I know those people. I worked all those years in the Health Department. They’d turn us into lab specimens. They’ll suck us dry and use our immunity
to try and save themselves.”

  “But I want to help somebody! I don’t want us to be the last two people on earth!”

  She began to cry again.

  Judy was frustrated. I could understand that. She was unable to leave the apartment by herself and probably saw me at times as a dictator who had her at his mercy. And she was frightened, probably more frightened than I could imagine. She was only eighteen and everyone else she had ever known in her life—including her mother—was dead.

  I hoisted myself into the chair next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She was the only person in the world who mattered to me. That had been true even before the softness began.

  “We’re not alone. Take George, for example. And I’m sure there are plenty of other immunes around who are hiding like us. When the weather warms up, we’ll find each other and start everything over new. But until then, we can’t allow the bloodsuckers to drain off whatever it is we’ve got that protects us.

  She nodded without saying anything. I wondered if she was agreeing with me or just trying to shut me up.

  “Let’s eat,” I said with a gusto I didn’t really feel.

  “Not hungry.”

  “Got to keep up your strength. We’ll have soup. How’s that sound?”

  She smiled weakly. “Okay . . . soup.”

  I forgot and almost tried to stand up. Old habits die hard. My lower legs were hanging over the edge of the chair like a pair of sand-filled dancer’s tights. I could twitch the muscles and see them ripple under the skin, but a muscle is pretty useless unless it’s attached to a bone, and the bones down there were gone.

  I slipped off my chair to what was left of my knees and shuffled over to the stove. The feel of those limp and useless leg muscles squishing under me was repulsive but I was getting used to it.

  It hit the kids and old people first, supposedly because their bones were a little soft to begin with, then moved on to the rest of us, starting at the bottom and working its way up—sort of like a Horatio Alger success story.

  At least that was the way it worked in most people. There were exceptions, of course, like that newscaster. I had followed true to form: My left lower leg collapsed at the end of last month; my right went a few days later. It wasn’t a terrible shock. My feet had already gone soft so I knew the legs were next.

  Besides, I’d heard the sound.

  The sound comes in the night when all is quiet. It starts a day or two before a bone goes. A soft sound, like someone gently crinkling cellophane inside your head. No one else can hear it. Only you. I think it comes from the bone itself—from millions of tiny fractures slowly interconnecting into a mosaic that eventually causes the bone to dissolve into mush. Like an on-rushing train far, far away can be heard if you press your ear to the track, so the sound of each micro-fracture transmits from bone to bone until it reaches your middle ear.

  I haven’t heard the sound in almost four weeks. I thought I did a couple of times and broke out in a cold, shaking sweat, but no more of my bones have gone. Neither have Judy’s. The average case goes from normal person to lump of jelly in three to four weeks. Sometimes it takes longer, but there’s always a steady progression. Nothing more has happened to me or Judy since last month.

  Somehow, some way, we’re immune.

  With my lower legs dragging behind me, I got to the counter of the kitchenette and kneed my way up the stepstool to where I could reach things. I filled a pot with water—at least the pressure was still up—and set it on the Sterno stove. With gas and electricity long gone, Sterno was a lifesaver.

  While waiting for the water to boil I went to the window and looked out. The late afternoon March sky was full of dark gray clouds streaking to the east. Nothing moving on West 16th Street one floor below but a few windblown leaves from God-knows-where. I glanced across at the windows of George’s apartment, looking for movement but found none, then back down to the street below.

  I hadn’t seen anybody but George on the street for ages, hadn’t seen or smelled smoke in well over two months. The last fires must have finally burned themselves out. The riots were one result of the viral theory. Half the city went up in the big riot last fall—half the city and an awful lot of people. Seems someone got the bright idea that if all the people going soft were put out of their misery and their bodies burned, the plague could be stopped, at least here in Manhattan. The few cops left couldn’t stop the mobs. In fact a lot of the city’s ex-cops had been in the mobs. Judy and I lost our apartment when our building went up. Luckily we hadn’t any signs of softness then. We got away with our lives and little else.

  “Water’s boiling, Dad,” she said from across the room.

  I turned and went back to the stove, not saying anything, still thinking about how fast our nice rent-stabilized apartment house had burned, taking everything we had with it.

  Everything gone . . . furniture and futures . . . gone. All my plans. Gone. Here I stood—if you could call it that—a man with a college education, a B.S. in biology, a secure city job, and what was left? No job. Hell—no city.

  I’d had it all planned for my dancer. She was going to make it so big. I’d hang on to my city job with all those civil service idiots in the Department of Health, putting up with their sniping and their back-stabbing and their lousy office politics so I could keep all the benefits and foot the bill while Judy pursued the dance. She was going to have it all. Now what? All her talent, all her potential . . . where was it going?

  Going soft . . .

  I poured the dry contents of the Lipton envelope into the boiling water and soon the odor of chicken noodle soup filled the room.

  Which meant we’d have company soon.

  I dragged the stepstool over to the door. Already I could hear their claws begin to scrape against the outer surface of the door, their tiny teeth begin to gnaw at its edges. I climbed up and peered through the hole I’d made last month at what had then been eye-level.

  There they were. The landing was full of them. Gray and brown and dirty, with glinty little eyes and naked tails. Revulsion rippled down my skin. I watched their growing numbers every day now, every time I cooked something, but still hadn’t got used to them.

  So I did Cagney for them: “Yooou diiirty raaats!” and turned to wink at Judy on the far side of the fold-out bed. Her expression remained grim.

  Rats. They were taking over the city. They seemed to be immune to the softness and were traveling in packs that got bigger and bolder with each passing day. Which was why I’d chosen this building for us: Each apartment was boxed in with pre-stressed concrete block. No rats in the walls here.

  I waited for the inevitable. Soon it happened: A number of them squealed, screeched, and thrashed as the crowding pushed them at each other’s throats, and then there was bedlam out there. I didn’t bother to watch any more. I saw it every day. The pack jumped on the wounded ones. Never failed. They were so hungry they’d eat anything, even each other. And while they were fighting among themselves they’d leave us in peace with our soup.

  Soon I had the card table between us and we were sipping the yellow broth and those tiny noodles. I did a lot of mmm-gooding but got no response from Judy. Her eyes were fixed on the walkie-talkie on the end table.

  “How come we haven’t heard from him?”

  Good question—one that had been bothering me for a couple of days now. Where was George? Usually he stopped by every other day or so to see if we needed anything. And if he didn’t stop by, he’d call us on the walkie-talkie. We had an arrangement that we’d both turn on our headsets every day at six p.m. just in case we needed to be in touch. I’d been calling over to George’s place across the street at six o’clock sharp for three days running now with no result.

  “He’s probably wandering around the city seeing what he can pick up. He’s a resourceful guy. Probably come back with something we can really use but haven’t thought of.”

  Judy didn’t flash me the anticipated smile. Instead, she fro
wned. “What if he went down to the research center?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t. He’s a trusting soul, but he’s not a fool.”

  I kept my eyes down as I spoke. I’m not a good liar. And that very question had been nagging at my gut. What if George had been stupid enough to present himself to the researchers? If he had, he was through. They’d never let him go and we’d never see him again.

  For George wasn’t an immune like us. He was different. Judy and I had caught the virus—or toxin—and defeated it. We were left with terrible scars from the battle but we had survived. We acquired our immunity through battle with the softness agent. George was special—he had remained untouched. He’d exposed himself to infected people for months as he helped everyone he could, and was still hard all over. Not so much as a little toe had gone soft on him. Which meant—to me at least—that George had been born with some sort of immunity to the softness.

  Wouldn’t those researchers love to get their needles and scalpels into him.

  I wondered if they had. George might have been picked up and brought down to the research center against his will. He told me once that he’d seen official-looking vans and cars prowling the streets, driven by guys wearing gas masks or the like. But that had been months ago and he hadn’t reported anything like it since. Certainly no cars had been on this street in recent memory. I warned him time and again about roaming around in the daylight but he always laughed good-naturedly and said nobody’d ever catch him—he was too fast.