A homeless man sits on a plastic chair at my bedside, tipping an aluminum can from a hoisted position into his mouth. He is dressed in a ragged brown jacket and sweatpants. Straggly, gray strands fall out of a dirty tuque onto his shoulders. His cheeks are patchy, with no gums behind his unshaven lower lip to stem sauce under the can’s aluminum rim, spilling into his lap.
Seeing my head turn, the intruder realizes I’m conscious and lowers the can. He does not react, rotating his lower jaw counter-clockwise, squashing beans under his tongue in lieu of molars to chew it.
“You’re awake,” he says.
Good. You’re awake.
His words recall another conversation, as I was roped to a wooden chair — shortly before the warehouse over my head went up in flames.
“Who are you?” I ask. My voice carries the question on little more than rasp. “What are you doing in my room?”
The man chuckles.
“Capitol’s gotten dangerous since the plague. Lots o’ dead out there.”
“Plague? What plague? And again, who are you?”
“Name’s Wilson,” the homeless fellow professes. “Had a first name once. Not much use for it now. So yeah, you can call me Wilson.
“Must have been asleep for a while, weren’t you? Wouldn’t have seen the shitshow America’s become. Some strain escaped that Center for Disease Control! Next thing, everyone I knew was dead.”
Dead?
“What do you mean, ‘everyone’?”
“What it sounds like,” Wilson replies, scraping the last of the beans into his mouth and clamping down. The squishing behind his pressed lips does nothing to avert the revelation’s casual horror. “President Smith, the whole Cabinet. Congress. Cops. Citizens. I can go on, if you like!”
Unable to promptly respond to the old man’s information, I rack my brain for any kind of corroborating timeline.
“So how long have you been nappin?” Wilson asks.
I don’t pay the question mind. Rolling my neck back to the position it will no longer ache with unfortunate angles allows me to scan the walls, furniture and ceiling, questioning everything. But as eyes rest on the wide-set window, answers are further than ever.
How didn’t I see it before?
“Help me up,” I tell Wilson. My hand finds more confidence in estranged strength, yanking the IV needle from the web of nerves and veins it obscures. The tubes fall by my bedside, and I pull my useless limbs to the edge.
“What? No, listen lady! You need to rest now, hear?”
Wilson may be a squatter in my current accommodations, raiding the hospital pantry for something to snack on without his bottom teeth, but giving orders is not among his rights. If he won’t help me, I’ll have to do it myself. Thankfully, the homeless man is not without conscience, standing from his chair. I struggle to lift myself up off the mattress— balance proves unsuccessful, and I fall onto my stomach, almost toppling off the side.
“Sure you want to do this, miss?” he asks.
I don’t answer, continuing to struggle. Wilson grasps my shoulders, guiding me back to a flat position.
“Now, listen here, miss! You aren’t going anywhere! God knows how long you have been like this, but your ligaments have shortened while you were asleep. Ain’t going nowhere without extensive surgery!”
“Yeah? You a doctor?” I groan, settling into defeat.
“Former RN. Back in the days they didn’t have too many men doing the job.” Wilson circles the bed to a wheelchair near the open door. The semi-private room has no other patient occupying it, so few will judge my ass hanging out of a hospital gown as the old man helps me into it. He slowly lowers me into the mobile device, keeping hands under my armpits until I’m comfortable. Moving to the chair’s rear, he wraps palms around the handles, and begins to push. “Why are you here?” I ask, though unable to see his toothless grin or dirty clothes. “Hiding in a hospital?”
Wilson pivots the wheelchair to the window, bringing me closer to the sight my tired eyes covet. A squeaky wheel under my right foot revolts in its bracket, drifting the chair left as Wilson veers the other way, overcompensating for its crooked trajectory.
“Things ain’t good in D.C., miss. Plague got loose and killed most. Ones who didn’t die at first did later, or did the killing. Point is,” he says, “there ain’t many good ‘uns left.”
“The hospital is the safest place, then.”
“Yup. Here, we’re at the window, miss. Just like you wanted.”
Using Wilson’s reluctant support, my bare feet touch the floor, straightening out. The old man supports me from the back— my fingers curl into the radiator on level with the window as I soak up the horror beyond our little room four floors above street level.
The United States Capitol—once a testament to Neoclassical architecture and seat of the strongest nation on Earth— lies in devastation. The National Mall’s signature monument has crumbled in the distance, collapsing to the ground in giant halves. The Capitol Building’s landmark dome is crumbled into the interior structure, and what remains of its white facade has been charred and blackened with time and violence. Streets below the window are awash in empty cars; many of their doors are left ajar, but there are no bodies in them— just windows through a journey their occupants never completed.
And then, it begins to come back to me with more clarity.
By reversing your death, we can stop Hardwick and Royce from selling Emily Rickard. But so too will it change everything.
Tim.
The man who calls himself Death— who I met under a kitchen table when I was five years old, and told me darkness was no different than light— just a little harder to love— saved my life. He reversed my murder at Stephen Hardwick’s hand, warning that saving Emily would have dire consequences.
We are tampering with a natural order.
I did this.
People who have died could see their deaths prevented or reversed. For better or worse, it could change the entire course of history.
Tim warned me, and was right. By stopping Hardwick, I condemned the world to die horribly. One little girl’s life— at the time— seemed too great an expense to ensure humanity had a chance at survival. Unhooking my fingernails from between the radiator grills, I sink down into the wheelchair. Wilson watches the connecting threads behind my eyes as they drift from the window.
“Miss?” Wilson says. “Are you alright, miss?”
Are you willing to take the risk with me, Ramona?
“This is my fault,” I confide in him, prompting an inquisitive expression.
“How you figure, ma’am? Unless you ‘was the one who released that nasty sickness, I don’t see how you could be to blame. Been asleep after all, haven’t you?”
There is no way I could make the toothless man eating beans at my bedside understand. Rather than offering a drawn-out, confusing explanation, I return to the argument’s merits, but only in my head—
Before I can begin linking runaway thoughts— saving a little girl ends in apocalypse?— a set of bullets cross the room. Both strike Wilson in the chest. He falls over dead as my gaze lifts to their source.
The silhouette in the doorway has already seen my horrified expression. Disregarding Wilson’s blank gaze, the figure carries a silenced pistol, moving toward me.
For all the (years?) I have been asleep, the Quantico training that trained me for a career with the FBI is rustily embedded. Adrenaline, on the other hand, is not. The masked intruder reaches halfway between the door and my wheelchair; I lunge over the assistive device’s side, hitting the floor. The man’s momentum did not account for my reaction— he barely has time to process I’m crawling on my stomach. As every ligament rages exhaustion, I grab his calf, sharply pulling up. The man’s head arches back with his rising leg. He loses balance, falling to the floor beside me, head smacking off the unmaintained linoleum.
Again, his habit of movement is my struggle, but arrogance is the ingredient for my surpri
se mobility. His outstretched fingers reach for the gun that fell by Wilson’s corpse. My own hand slaps his away as I vault my useless legs over him. We struggle like that for a moment, each trying to gain supremacy over the other. My hand wraps around the pistol’s handle first, yanking the barrel upward. The attacker clasps his hand over mine, aware he’s already lost to a cripple.
The released gunshot shatters his face, propelling the man’s head aside in a bloody mess of brains and balaclava fabric. I topple over him onto the white floor. A growing pool spreads under his skull, tarnishing its unwaxed surface.
What the fuck was that?
The intruder could have back-up, and I am the equivalent of a sitting duck. Wilson’s eyes are equally empty under the windowsill. The rest of him is obscured by the hospital bed. I secure the weapon at its foot, disregarding the wheelchair. Elbows pull me forward until I reach the wide-open door, peering past its threshold into a long corridor. Its throughway of floors littered with garbage and debris is abandoned; clearly, nobody has been treated or worked at this hospital in awhile.
If my assailant has friends nearby, only the pistol will afford protection. I advance into the hallway, dragging useless legs behind me. Formerly dark hair spills down my face, allowing a glimpse at shades of gray it embraced in my slumber. The hospital gown catches on the floor, exposing my bare legs and buttocks as I scurry to the hall’s end.
The two masked men stationed around the corner never see the woman crawling at its precipice. The bullets that split their heads, sending them to the floor, assure me of that. The elevator they guarded is out of service; its stainless steel doors tease the fact that I will have to descend the stairs, whether my legs work or not. The floor is empty now, at least. Hoisting myself over the same floor as the hospital room I awoke and was almost murdered brings me to a thick red door. It warns me that opening it will prompt an alarm, but I have to take the chance. I reach for the push bar well above my compromised position, and miss. Swinging upward again, the bar lapses inward by an inch. Arms fall back to my side, but I am not so easily defeated.
Rolling on my back positions weak legs underneath the bar, and all my dormant strength is required to lift them above my head. The first time misses, the second pushing it a little farther in than before. The third unlatches the door from its frame. One foot to hold the bar in place, the other lowers, pushing its creaking weight ajar. I did it. My other leg comes down, reinforcing the foot propping open the door. Heavy metal pins the ankle wedged between it; I lift my torso from the floor, ignoring cracks in my static spine, thrusting a shoulder into it. Reversing myself, I creep between the cracked door and its frame; it latches as I collapse in the stairwell beyond it.
I don’t know how I ended up at the end of the world, but it surely waits for nobody. I edge toward the descent; each flight is littered in plaster and trash like the hallway before it. The railing helps in pulling myself to a seated position; the floor is cold between my legs, but its stairs are the only way out of this nightmare.
The next landing brings footsteps pounding up from the bottom. The multiple voices wear heavy boots that compete with their words for volume. I reach the corner of the subsequent flight, positioning myself against the wall facing downward, and point the silenced weapon at my arriving targets. The intruders’ conversation is halted by three bullets exiting their barrel. Each connects with my would-be attackers in a critical place— throat, eye and heart, respectively. Twenty minutes after waking, six people are dead; five by my hand, putting the clip at empty. Casting the spent weapon aside, three floors remain. I grab two of the fallen’s revolvers as garbled communications filter from radios at my victims’ hips. I don’t bother pulling off the balaclavas off their faces— I wouldn’t likely not know them, and their identities would not help one iota.
I can do this.
One flight lower reveals no assailants. One lower, and I wonder if that is the last of them. Lowering myself past each flight, the dual weapons may not be needed after all. It doesn’t mean I grip them any looser.
When I was young, my adoptive aunt’s violent boyfriend threatened to beat down the door after being locked out of our apartment. Maya ushered me under a table with a yellow patterned tablecloth.
And that’s when the suited man who called himself Death first appeared to me. He never really said when or how he became the celestial being that confronted the terrified child, hugging her roughhoused stuffed bear. I have bits and pieces of his history, but all that matters is the voice in my memory.
You don’t need to be afraid, Ramona.
Racking my brain for who could possibly be after me— the FBI agents I betrayed before falling unconscious, the numerous enemies made during my tenure— constantly brings me back to the suited cosmic being; the last face I saw before blackness devoured my soul, and Death had come for me.
Who are you? I once asked him, sitting beneath that table with a patterned yellow tablecloth.
My name is Death, he told the five-year-old whose eyes were widened at the sound of Maya’s screaming male companion, pounding on thin wood as she pushed furniture in front of it.
But my friends call me Tim.
It is because of that man I am here now, terrified for my life.
You don’t need to be afraid, Ramona.
The bottom floor brings relief. I return to wiggling along the landing. One final flight remains, which would bring me below ground. With no plan to be cornered, I shimmy to the emergency door. Unlike the three floors above, it must be pulled. A few tugs open it far enough to wedge my wrist between, and my arms do the rest.
The hospital’s ground level differs from those above in a few key ways. The twin sliding doors are frozen open, allowing warm air to flow into the lobby. Other than several mounds of bones suggesting multiple people died here, and were long forgotten, it is still abandoned. A number of skulls accentuate the evidence, and I try not to glance at them on the way past.
The third and most important difference lies beyond the open doors. Several more men pace in the lot just beyond the hospital’s emergency room entrance. Their faces are also covered; one lifts a radio receiver to his veiled mouth, trying to hail their companions upstairs. And at their feet, a black box with a plunger and handle is attached to wires leading inward. In the old days, they might have sent a remote signal using a detonator. Post-apocalypse, the comical cube is attached to wires that pivot through the entrance, past rows of seating. I follow them from my hiding spot near the nurse’s station— the red and yellow sheathing splits off in different directions. I trace the jaundiced wire with my eyes, past rectangular cuts of electrical tape hanging it further up the wall— at its end, grey piles of putty are affixed to strategic positions, ensuring maximum destruction when they detonate.
C4.
There is not enough time to disarm the explosives. Their mission is obviously killing me, and my only hope of escaping is—
Tired of receiving no response, the leader orders his men to operate the device in front of him. One fellow steps up, wrapping his hands around the red bar atop its plunger— forcing it to fully depress. The resulting explosion against my skin is excruciating; its blankets of orange and red blind understanding while the small hairs of my arm sizzle. Flesh is cooked off the bone, and the world in front of me evaporates inside a pulsing fireball. Unable to see the men who sentenced me to this fate, I scream for what seems like forever.
But it is my mind, wandering back to the man under that table, who brought me to this point I could be so easily assassinated.
I think, in times of great crisis, we turn to the best and brightest of us to lead the way.
The inferno subsides— a result of several levels of a hospital coming down, crushing what few nerves remain. It only reinforces the fact I signed up to Hell, and the man who called himself Death personally escorted me to its door.
After that, the only sentiment I know is darkness.
CHAPTER TWO
I am not a monst
er.
As a child, one of my favorite books was Where the Wild Things Are. Maya diligently read it almost every night between the ages of six and eight. During those years, I met the man who called himself Death twice— once when I fell down a ravine behind my house, and when one of my pets left us.
I don’t remember what I loved so much about this damn book. After my parents’ murder-suicide, I can only recall a yearning for independence. I loved the aunt who saved my life to pieces, but the idea of waking up in a strange land, surrounded by otherworldly creatures, was all too enticing.
Opening eyes to linoleum floors and matching walls, a distant hum of electrical tracks should immediately identify my surroundings, and yet it takes a full minute after sitting up to co-relate the train tunnel with a subway station.
Wasn’t I just in a hospital?
There is something more eerie about the air here. It feels lighter, invasive; like someone brought it from another world, and its properties do not mesh with the environment. The subway station is empty, but something else is off. Other than heavy silence, it looks like any other underground platform. Advertisements framed in paid promotional brackets advise a fool and their money will soon be parted. A row of payphones sits at the bottom stairwell, leading up into the world at large. A black stickered rectangle, caked over green bricks stretching to the ceiling, informs me that my current location is West 34th and Broadway.
Am I in New York?
That would be a fair way from the Capitol I have lived my entire life. The sites of D.C. were distinguishable from my room’s window, even with the destruction levelled against it.
Atlas Page 2
