“Did he just say, ‘spontaneously combust’?”
I looked at Kate.
Kate looked into space.
The news-reporter went on. “What was first thought to be an act of terrorism was quickly determined to be a far more widespread and mystifying situation that any known terrorist cell or organization has the means or the know-how to perpetrate. The majority of the populace of the planet has been,” the reporter seemed to choke on the words, “erupting into flame, either fully or partially.
“So far, no logical cause for the phenomena has been determined. What’s left of the US government has mobilized the remaining military and is in currently in talks with surviving governmental pockets from around the globe. The causation, at present, is baffling the scientific community worldwide.”
“You gotta be fucking kidding me! Spontaneous combustion!?” I declared once more to no one in particular.
“In what’s being described by scientists and scholars as a ‘freak ecological mutation’ all sentient life on the planet, outside of the world’s oceans, lakes and rivers, has been affected by some sort of unidentifiable imbalance in the ecosystem.”
“An imbalance, that leads to human bonfires, right?” I asked my sweat-drenched TV buddy.
“The fires have quickly spread and have destroyed much of the world’s known forestry. Cities and suburban areas are decimated.”
“No shit, Sherlock” I retorted.
“There is little more to report at present. FEMA is currently doing all they can, as are the emergency services throughout each state, though we strongly advise all surviving civilians to remain in their homes, remain vigilant, and pray. This has been Samuel Kendrick, for Channel 5 News.”
And with that, the fucker was gone.
As if to compliment the sheer horror of what had just been reported, the reporter’s shaking, startled visage was replaced with an even less cheery sight, that of a montage of scenes from around the planet.
Yep, the world was fucked…
First came footage of a passenger-jet burning on the lawn outside the White House.
Next up, we were treated to a vast forest fire that had engulfed much of the northern territories in Scotland.
A shot from a helicopter showed Paris burn. The people of the famous city of lights, what was left of them, had taken to the streets, and were looting with wild abandon. The lights had very definitely gone out.
The ones powered by electricity, anyway.
The city was lit up like a bonfire.
The next image was that of a zoo, I have no idea where. In an image so surreal as to almost elicit a chuckle from your rapidly mentally declining host, a blackened, charred, and pain-crazed lion was smashing its fucking head into a Plexiglas window, while outside its confines, a man held tightly to a frantic teenage boy. I assume it was his son, because even as the flames tore through the boy’s body and engulfed the man, he held on to the kid regardless.
I’d seen enough. With numb hands that felt weak as kitten’s paws, I reached for the off switch and turned to Kate.
***
She didn’t appear at all flummoxed that I’d decided we’d had enough entertainment for the day.
She remained sat there, gazing off to some distant shore that only she could see, and wearing that ecstatic, demented grin.
I realized my wife and partner had completely lost her mind.
What little mind she had left to lose.
“Kate? Kate? You okay?” It was all I could think of to say.
She never responded.
Not so much as a twitch of the eye or a flicker of awareness.
My bug-shit crazy wife remained perpetually spaced-out.
“Kate,” I prodded, “this is no time to leave the building, honey. We have to think about getting some help. There’s a dead baby across the street, Kate…a dead fucking baby…and the whole fucking town’s turned to ashes. Honey, snap out of it. We gotta figure this out.”
Still no response.
I thought I’d change tact with her. See if I could reach her on a more basic level.
“We should get in the car and get the fuck out of here, babe. Go see if your mother’s okay.” Her mum had lived alone the past five years and had slipped into a mild, hard-to-watch senility of late. She had an emotional hold on Kate’s heart that I’d never had.
“Let’s rattle the hell on out of here and go see if she’s alright. She may need help with—”
“She’s fine,” said my wife, flatly.
“How do you know? Did you call her?” I asked.
“Phones are down. No need to call her anyway…”
“How do you know she’s safe, then? Don’t you wanna head over there and make sure, Kate?” I was growing more and more uncomfortable with her drugged-out demeanor.
She was calm as Christmas morning snowfall, and that made no sense at all. Not a fucking lick of it.
“She’s safe because she’s in heaven,” she droned, matter-of-factly.
Despite my issues with my once awesome, then pathetic, then zealous and now clearly crazy wife, I really did love her mother.
The woman always had my back, and never took sides. I often figured if she had to choose a team, she’d have chosen ‘Team Donnie’. Only blood’s bond had held her to Kate in recent times. She’d never understood Kate’s religious fervor any more than I did and had hidden her true feelings on the matter from Kate for years now.
She’d been my friend and my consort in all things biblically fucked up.
You can imagine my shock on hearing that she’d died. My mind overflowed with awful images of her, burning, writhing, screaming through the flames.
“Holy Christ! She’s dead!? How do you know!? What the hell happened? I’m so sorry honey. I-I don’t know what to—”
“She’s not dead. She’s in Heaven, Don. Why don’t you ever listen? And please…don’t use the Lord’s name in vain.”
What the fuck!? Was she really trying to pick a fight with me now? “You said she was in heaven, Kate,” I said. “Can’t be in heaven without being dead.”
Won’t be in heaven at all if she has anything to do with it herself, I thought with vastly inappropriate humor.
Her mom was a staunch atheist. Like I said, she didn’t approve of Kate’s present ‘spiritual state’.
“There isn’t any death anymore, Don. Can’t you see that yet? Can’t you feel it in the air?” she asked, smiling that creepy-as-hell smile and never taking her eyes from the thousand-yard point where her tumbling mind had decided to dwell.
“Feel what in the air? What the fuck are you talking about? It’s time we got rolling. We don’t have time for this right now.”
“Rolling?” she laughed. “Rolling where exactly?”
“If you’re gonna go cuckoo for coco-puffs, maybe you should choose your moments more carefully!” I hurled back. Not an answer to her question, I understand, but no one was taking scores. She said nothing, so I revved up and charged on, happy to have some focus, even if it was centered on anger for my increasingly unhinged partner.
“Did you hear what I said!? There's a child fucking spread all over the neighbor’s driveway. Her mother has burned to death! There are fucking bodies everywhere and half the neighborhood’s on fire! Do you think this is a good time to lose your fucking mind!?”
My ranting seemed to have no effect on her. Even for Kate, this was some far-out shit.
“I don’t know what planet you’re orbiting right now, but your better come back to Earth and fast. It’s not enough that you left me in a puddle of fucking blood at the foot of our bed and made toast and fucking tea instead of fucking helping me…it’s not enough that our town and now the whole damn worlds burning up…it’s not even enough that your own mother may be dead! No, Kate…you'd rather just sit here and stare into fucking Dimension-X!”
No response.
“God dammit, Kate, look at me!”
Finally, she turned to me, and in a floating, de
tached voice which I've never heard her use outside the early, drug days, she said, “Can’t you see what this is, Don? Can’t you feel it? Mommy hasn’t died. She's been taken.”
“Taken by what?” I asked, completely at a loss as to where she was going with this.
“Taken by our Lord and savior…Jesus Christ.”
My anger subsided, replaced by a worn-down, all-too-familiar weariness. This shit was getting more ridiculous by the second. “Honey,” I said in my most placating tone, “it’s nothing more than a terrorist attack. I’m sure the news reports are exaggerating. That’s what they do.”
A brazen fucking lie, on my part.
“This is all going to pass soon and—”
“Yes. All things shall come to pass, Don. Even unto the end of the Earth.” She was looking at me, but she sure as shit wasn’t seeing me.
“It’s the second coming of our Lord, Don. He's riding on a chariot of fire and has come to burn away sin and release our tainted souls from this wicked world. We've been chosen…we've been chosen to rise to the Kingdom of Christ. At last, after so many long years, we’re going home.”
“You can’t really believe that, Kate,” I retorted. “What I saw outside was no ‘second coming’. I saw people burning, Kate…dying...”
“Sinners, one and all.”
I clenched my fists. “Does that include the baby!?”
“Was it baptized?”
“What the fuck does that have to do with anything!?”
“We are all born in sin, Donnie. If the baby wasn’t given to God, then—”
“I saw animals burning too, Kate. Have the squirrels been bad little critters and now God’s sending them to some nut-free eternity?” I asked. “I suppose the cat I saw out there calmly licking its dick was one of your lot and on its way to heaven with the rest of you? Is dick-licking a sin, Kate!?”
The faintest hint of a smile was etched on her face. She clearly thought me a fool, or a madman.
Typical.
“You have to snap out of it right now and we need to find help. Enough of this religious bullshit! Grow up!”
I’ve always been gifted with a tendency to open my mouth before I think, and I knew before that last part left my mouth that this was gonna be one of those times. Even in the face of annihilation, it’s best to keep opinions to yourself around crazy.
Kate’s expression changed.
You’d think I was new at this shit. I should have known better than to come between a zealot and her delusions.
The mesmerized, stoned gaze distorted, and a hateful scowl crawled its way to the surface. She even bared her teeth.
“Don’t you dare talk of the Lord in that way, Don. He sees and hears all, and you’ll be left to burn! Don’t you want to ascend with me?”
No, Kate.
I really don’t, I thought to myself.
“We could enter His Kingdom as husband and wife. All these years we've talked about this and now you want to ridicule Jesus on the eve of his glorious return? You'll burn for this, Don! Repent and rise with me.”
You see what I gotta deal with?
Instinctively I reached for the fridge door, my mind seeking solace in the long-lost company of a cold beer. There were none there, of course. “We didn’t talk about this for years. You did. You’ve been babbling about this shit since as far back as I’d like to remember, and it’s probably my fault.”
She just glared at me. I took that as my cue to continue.
Like I said, it’s a gift.
“I fed right into this horseshit! I allowed it to go on. I watched you turn from a space-rocker into a holy-roller, and I supported you on your little journey into dementia. I sat back and nodded my stupid fucking head in agreement at the never-ending stream of bullshit you ranted. I lost my buddies. I lost my fucking balls. It felt like the world ended a long time ago for me, Kate, because of you. And now it’s really and truly the end of the fucking world and you wanna sit here on your ass, eating toast and waiting for the Son of God!? D’you think he's gonna ring the fucking doorbell, invite himself in, eat some cornflakes and then whisk you off to paradise!? You’re a crazy fucking bitch, Kate. You’re a goddam wrecking ball of lunacy and I want you the fuck out of my life! FUCK OFF AND TAKE JESUS WITH YOU!”
A gift.
And before you bring it up, the answer is yes…I do realize my timing for my declaration was a little off. But listen…when you gotta break wind, you gotta break wind, and my asshole was puckering. The world was most definitely ending, one way or another, and I was pretty sure at that point we were most definitely and assuredly fucked. Something in that knowledge set me free. I could feel the older, happier version of myself break to the surface as I’d let loose on the she-devil sat before me.
It was long overdue, and, by the look of shock on her face, I could see that the limp-minded lunatic never saw it coming.
Ignorance sure is a powerful drug.
Kate looked at me with stunned, hurt eyes. Her rage momentarily subsided as the pain set in. I like to think that cold, hard reality hit her in that moment, and for a brief fleeting time she was the old Kate again, free-thinking and fun-loving, a beacon of brilliant light in an increasingly dark and shitty world.
I never had long to ponder all this, though.
The mug of steaming-hot coffee that smashed over my head put all my hopes to bed, fast.
Along with the better half of my senses.
***
“What the fuck!?” I screamed.
It was all I had time to utter before Kate was on top of me. She lunged over our breakfast table like a wild panther going at a startled gazelle. Even in my semi-stupefied condition, I could see what she was brandishing in her hand.
A kitchen knife.
Fear gripped me by the balls, clearing my head of some of the fog that had settled there as I realized that the woman I’d shared my bed with these last five years was planning to stab my sorry ass to death. It was in her eyes, man.
It was in her eyes.
I had no time to speak or to implore before she was on me, a screaming banshee straight from Hell.
Or maybe Heaven.
I raised my hands in defense just in time to block the blade and avoid losing one of my eyes.
She kept those things sharp.
The knife sliced through the palm of my left hand, cutting through my flesh like it was butter. I felt it hit bone, then it was raised and coming down on me again.
This time, I grabbed the blade.
Pain lanced through my senses as I tried to hold onto the blade and push her back at the same time.
She pulled back to take another stab at me, slicing open my already mangled palm from wrist to fingers, cutting a deep bloody furrow in the soft flesh of my palm. To my horror, I realized that, somehow, the tip of my little finger has been shorn off. I wondered dumbly where it was and whether or not I could maybe glue it back on. Blood sluiced from my ravaged palm, soaking my arm, spattering my face.
She raised the blade above her head and stabbed again.
Luckily, in her dementia she must have lost all sense of co-ordination.
I say this as she was clearly aiming for my heart, but, in her rage, she managed only to plunge the blade into my forearm, just above the wrist. It cut deep. Metal scraped bone and wedged there, held tight. She struggled, eager to pull it free for another stab, twisting and turned the stubborn blade in my arm to loosen it while I screamed and writhed and silently willed the blade to avoid severing any major arteries. Between this cut, my ruined hand, my head-wound from last night, and the mug of scalding coffee that had smashed over my face, I was beginning to lose much of my mojo.
If I didn’t do something soon, she was gonna kill me.
This morning had made a mess of me, and Kate looked hell-bent on finishing the job.
With a satisfied grunt from my loving wife, the savage blade slid free. Her satisfaction was cut short, however, when the knife slide from her blood-slicked hand, cla
ttering to the kitchen floor, somewhere to her rear. Her head snapped to the side, searching.
This was my chance.
My eyes were pooling with fresh blood from the wound on my head (which Kate had so kindly re-opened with her teacup), and I was losing vision fast. The world was a maddening blur, filled with sickening motion.
Shadow and light were all I had to work with.
She was still on top of me, her thighs pressed against my guts. I saw the dark shape of her move above me, unsure whether she’d claimed it or not, and I did the only thing I could, given the circumstances...
I threw the best damn right hook I could muster.
Perhaps there is a God.
Because it landed.
It’s awful, I know.
I was fighting for my life, though, and I think I may have had that battle-madness shit I’d heard about in Game of Thrones.
I felt my knuckles crunch against bone and heard the sharp crack as her nose shattered. Something jammed painfully in my second knuckle, a shard of bone.
Kate went down like a felled tree, toppling to the side in a sputtering mess of blood, bone and snot.
I used the moment to wipe my eyes clear and get a bead on what to do next.
In the space of perhaps ten seconds or so, our kitchen had become a warzone. There was blood everywhere.
I’d lost a frightening amount of it during the attack.
A shiver danced through me as I pictured what she would have done had I went down during her frenzy.
No doubt about it, she would have ended me.
This was the final straw. The world apparently had gone just as fucking crazy as my lunatic wife and, in that moment, I figured if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Vengeance overcame me.
She’d ruined the best years of my life, had sucked all sense of joy from my heart, and now, after taking my freedom and my will, she had tried her damnedest to take my life.
Hell, no.
It was time to end this shit, once and for all.
If the world was going to Hell, she was going with it.
***
Consumed- The Complete Works Page 9
