The Imminent Scourge

by J. D. Anderson

  He considered what he was doing an act of love. He was restoring her to a previous, ideal state in which she would be able to apprehend him again, this time for who he really was, and understanding more clearly the things that she should understand.

  Meanwhile, Eric busied himself about the lab. His task was relatively easy—if the body were properly repaired and rejuvenated, it were not much different from an emergency medical technician reviving someone from cardiac arrest. Eric called upon his powers of electrical engineering to create a makeshift defibrillator, and also prepared a round of injections based on those he had designed for cryogenic preservation, in order to stabilize what restorations Paul had made to prevent decay from beginning again before she was revived, should the process take longer than expected.

  It was in the third hour of the morning that Paul finished his work and brought the body to a table that Eric had prepared. She was no longer as she had been even in the moments after her death, in the headlights of the car. Then, she had still retained some of her distinct beauty in the pose of her body and the angle of her face, adorned by the halo of hair. Now, in the lab, her face was pale, and her bald head was wrapped in bandages. The dark eyebrows and eyelashes stood out boldly against her face. She resembled an unfinished porcelain figure of a woman, imbalanced and uncanny. Paul undressed her, baring her chalk-white body to the light. Her nakedness was to him scientific and objective—neither natural nor unnatural, but simply necessary.

  Eric had pulled together materials from all over the building. Paul was astounded at what Eric had managed to accomplish—it was as if Eric had performed an act of magic. It was clear that Eric was Paul’s superior in ingenuity, resourcefulness… but there was no time for petty jealousy now.

  Eric attached makeshift electrodes to Darcy using medical tape that he had cannibalized from a first-aid kit in the lab. He placed one just below her clavicle, and the other underneath her breast on the opposite side. From the lab next door, he had commandeered some plastic tubing and a bag. From this, he had constructed an IV, with a needle placed at the lower end of the long tube and the bag of saline suspended on a shelf near the table. She did not have any blood pressure, so it was difficult for him to find the vein, but he inserted the needle, relatively assured from his powers of intuition that he had placed it in the vein. He had also attached a separate pair of diodes that were connected to a speaker that would act as an electrocardiogram to monitor her heart once it had started to beat again.

  “We need to do it now,” Paul said.

  Eric said, “I know.” He was prepared to administer a dose of the electrical current from a machine attached by wires to the electrodes placed on Darcy’s body. With the push of a button, he sent it. Her body jolted and the ECG registered sporadic beating of her heart, which it reported with a series of beeps. After the surge of electricity, the heart beat spasmodically in a flurry and then died out. Eric administered a stabilizing solution through the IV quickly by switching out the suspended bag for a syringe and then switching it back. He pressed his hands on her sternum, moving rapidly up and down. Then he went back to the machine, and he sent another shock. The heart became active again, circulating the stabilizer into her bloodstream.

  Although he could not be sure, Paul felt that he observed a change come over her face—as though the coloring that she had exhibited in life had begun to return to her face and body, subtly, like fruit beginning to ripen.

  Her heart beat in a more regular pattern that eventually sputtered to a stop again. Eric issued another surge of electricity—this one longer and apparently with more force. Darcy’s body arched up off the table. Her fingers spread like the fingers of a bat’s wing, and they were thin and yellow, appearing skeletal, convulsing with the shock. Her heart beat rapidly, but in a steady rhythm. The shock ended and the heart continued to beat. Her body collapsed limply back on the table. The ECG beeped steadily—the heart was still beating. It was rapid, and somewhat unsteady, but it was beating. She was alive.

  After he had listened to the heartbeat long enough to assure him that no more shocks would be necessary, Eric collapsed backwards into a nearby chair. Paul stood over Darcy, studying all that his senses could take in. He marked that her chest was moving up and down, slowly, taking in breath. He observed that her color had returned, although under the wan light in the lab, it was difficult to truly ascertain the shade of it. Although she appeared rosy at the surface in her cheeks, her whole aspect seemed to exhibit a greenish hue underneath, of sickness or nausea. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were pale. Were it not for the movement of her chest, and the confirmation of her heartbeat by the ECG, he might still have taken her for dead. The heartbeat, which had been holding a steady beat, had gradually slowed, and still seemed to be slowing, normalizing towards a more natural tempo.

  Paul was jittery with excitement, an excitement he had not felt since he was very young. It was like the excitement that he had felt as a young child on Christmas morning, when the world seemed new, all presents still unopened, his knowledge only of great joy and anticipation, and believing that the anticipation would be perfectly and completely fulfilled. It was as though he had, for the moment, reverted to some primordial state, before a knowledge of the world itself: the complications of relationships, the difficulties of adulthood, the struggle of existence.

  Eric looked near death himself. He was pale and the sweat had cooled into a glistening clamminess on his face.

  “You can take all of that stuff off now,” he said. “I think she’s done.”

  Paul, still leaning over the body like a vulture inspecting a carcass, seemed to awaken from some sort of trance. He peeled the defibrillating electrodes off of her body, although he left the ECG electrodes on so that he would continue to be able to monitor her heartbeat. He did not want to disturb her too much by dressing her, so he lay her clothes over her body as a covering. Her eyes were still closed, and she still looked as though she had not been completely restored to life—or, as Paul thought, what we commonly call life. This observation brought up some questions for Paul: of all the myriad activities that occur in the human body that qualify the body as “alive”—were there any that had not been reactivated? And in that case, would it matter?

  He decided to wait. It was still early yet, about the fourth hour of the morning. Eric had fallen asleep in his chair. Paul was too excited to sleep, and felt as though electricity were coursing through his own body at a slow and steady current. He felt almost imbued with a power that might have been mistaken by someone else as a spiritual power, but that he knew was more like the power of knowledge, or of having witnessed a remarkable event. And a remarkable event this was in the history of science. It was unfortunate that it had been illicit—that social mores and taboos would prevent it from ever being known or celebrated.

  Eventually, the excitement mellowed, although he still felt the dull tingle that anticipation leaves when its fulfillment is deferred. He took a seat beside Eric, who had slumped into a position more conducive to the onslaught of sleep that had overtaken him.

  The ECG beeped, and beeped, and beeped, and as fatigue began to lightly prod at Paul with its cotton fingers, he concentrated on that sound. It had grown slow. He realized that it had been slowing ever since it had started. Its slowing down had ceased to be perceptible, but as he listened, he discerned that it was distinctly slow, too slow to really sustain any human. A shock went through him and he jumped up and resumed his former position, leaning over the body, inspecting it.

  There was no perceptible change in her appearance. He watched for signs of her breathing and saw none, although he assumed that her breaths were coming very slowly now. He held his hand to her nose to see if he could feel the exhale of warm air. He felt none. The heartbeat slowed even more. He put his finger to her neck to confirm the slowness of the beat with his own touch. Her skin was not warm. It was cold and clammy. He would have taken it for lifeless were it not so moist.

  The heartbeat be
came slower, and slower…

  Finally, the beat stopped altogether. Shaking, Paul looked up to Eric, who was still asleep. He was about to say something to Eric, but then looked down at the body again.

  The body was perfectly still except for an almost indiscernibly slow movement on the face: the eyelids were lifting. Very slowly and steadily, like the measured, automatic movement of an insect, her eyes opened. Underneath the lids, the eyes stared vacantly upward, cloudy with decay. After the eyes were open, the lids kept lifting, as though they were being pulled unnaturally by something from behind, until the whites around the irises were almost completely exposed, giving the whole face an uncanny, skull-like appearance. The cheeks were sunken and dark as with bruising or decay, and the outlines of the teeth were beginning to show against the thin, pale flesh. The lips lost their color and drew back, shrinking away from the teeth as the lids had shrunk away from the eyes. The jaws opened and took in the air with a raspy hiss, and then the head turned, the eyes shifting mechanically and finally directing themselves upon him.

  They did not fix him in a stare, nor was it even a gaze in any sort of conventional sense. The eyes lacked life, and so any sort of look or gaze which would normally be associated with life—the look of any other creature, including a human—was absent. But the eyes were not characterized by a mere absence of this either. There was something else, as though lack were something concrete, manifested for the first time in this look. It was not the conventional form of death, which is really only characterized by a lack of life. It was a terrifying unity of nothingness and somethingness, but because of this unity, it transcended them both.

  It reached out its skeletal, decomposing hand toward him, and he recoiled in abject fear, falling backward onto the equipment, knocking it away and falling to the floor in a heap.

  Eric awakened at the crash. The thing turned its face toward him—the face with its awful eyes of negation and its skeletal visage in arrested decomposition—the face of neither life nor death, but of something else…

  Eric cried out. The thing sprang at him with agility and strength beyond what it looked capable of, as though propelled through some means other than its own body. It leapt on him, landing with its hands on his chest and its feet on his knees, throwing him out of his chair and remaining on top of him once he stopped, pinning him to the ground.

  Paul got himself to his feet, his back aching from the fall. When he looked up, he saw that the thing had gripped Eric’s head between its skeleton hands and was lifting him by it. Then with immense force, it threw Eric’s head down against the tile floor, cracking the skull. It brought it up and threw it down again—cracking it against the floor repeatedly until the head was a round, indeterminate mess of blood and hair in its hands. Then it savagely peeled the skin away from the mass and pulled away fragments of shattered bone, revealing the soft, red-gray brain still inside. It dipped its jaws into the pulpy brain matter, smeared with blood and dangling bloody, viscous strings of fluid from its toothy mouth, slurping it down, while the blood-spattered body below was still twitching its hands and feet at the suddenness and violence of its death. Then, in some sort of ecstasy or fit, the thing continued on with the remainder of the head, ripping the jaw from the skull and tearing the muscle from the bone with its teeth, great gushes of blood streaming down its jaw and neck and spurting across its face as it gorged itself on the flesh.

  Paul felt about to vomit but closed up his throat to keep it down, and edged toward the door. Then he paused briefly, looking at the thing as it feasted on Eric’s remains, and allowed himself to consider the reasons for this horror, this failure—but even in the instant, he knew that there had been too many variables, too much imprecision, that he had acted hastily and in desperation, and that there was no hope for an explanation. He knew, as his mind raced, that he analyzed the problem in vain, for even if he were able to discern an identifiable mistake or series of mistakes, he could not go back and rectify them. What was done was done, and he did not know why.

  And yet he felt sure that there must still be something of Darcy in the figure that he observed huddled and bloodying itself over the mangled corpse of his friend and partner. He abandoned his retreat, and instead held his position, hoping to have a longer look, maybe even a closer one.

  He took a step forward.

  When it saw him move, the thing stopped and turned its head toward him, its face more deeply transformed than before. The decay had worsened, the eyes had clouded over with a deeper emptiness. The lower portion of the face and the rest of its contorted body was hidden in shadow and the darkness of blood. There was nothing at all recognizable in it. Paul cried out, and then he turned and ran.

  He was vaguely aware of the possibility of the creature following him as he ran hastily out of the lab and down the hallway toward the stairs. He had seen its speed, and he knew that if he looked behind him, he would slow down, and his best chance to escape was to run as fast as he could. He did not know whether the creature had followed him or not.

  He threw himself against the lever for the fire escape exit door. The door burst open and he stumbled into the stairwell. The fire alarm sounded, echoing loudly in the chamber. Paul clambered frantically down the stairs, and in his haste, he lost his footing around a corner and slipped. He fell almost the entire length of stairs to the next landing. His body slammed against the wall upside-down with his head pinned under it, and his neck snapped. He rocked back away from the wall, his head still pinned at an angle underneath his shoulders. He could see nothing but his own immovable legs. He could not breathe. Blotches of light exploded in his vision as he lost oxygen. After another few moments filled with no thought other than an impassive awareness of death, he suffocated. His body lay still in the position of his fall as though it were continuous and he had been frozen still in the midst of it. He never saw the dark and bloody figure looming above him; he never witnessed its slow, deliberate descent down the stairs; he never smelled its rank contagious breath as it knelt over him, and he never felt when it sank its wretched teeth into his flesh.

  #

  Pink fingertips of light stretched through the blue haze of the dead night in preparation for the dawn. As the quiet air expanded and the glass faces of each building glittered with distant light, a figure emerged to mock the yellow promise of the dawn—a figure neither dead nor alive, nor anywhere between, a figure of otherness, a figure of chaos. Staggering into the brightening world, it reached its skeleton hands to the sun and cried out with inhuman tones declaring its uncanny presence on earth—and the city awoke.

  BREACH

  The school was still under construction. Mrs. Cathy Overlee walked after her class as it descended the steps of the portable building that served as her classroom. She followed the students across what were once parking spaces on a patch of asphalt that now served as a pathway for walking between buildings. Looking to the side, she could see the partial construction of what would become a new wing to the school. At this stage, it was simply a plywood cutout skeleton. Crossing the makeshift walkway, Mrs. Overlee and her students entered the main school building. This building was undergoing renovation itself, although the end into which they walked was so far unchanged. The blue paint on the heavy metal doors was faded and peeling. The walls were scored and dirty, and the patterned mottling on the tile floor no longer camouflaged the grime as well as it used to. The fluorescent lights lining the roof hummed and clicked, although the sound was mostly drowned out by the murmur of students moving through the halls—students who seemed to be as grimy as their surroundings. There were heads of greasy hair, there were hunched shoulders wearing hand-me-down jackets and weighed down with backpacks beaten and frayed from years of use. There were faces that, although young, looked aged and worn down.

  Some of them smiled, but Cathy wondered if the smiles that appeared genuine weren’t smiles of malice, mischief, or arrogance. She had been a teacher for many years now, and she knew that with high-school students, appea
rances did not always represent the truth. These days, she was suspicious of all students except those whom she felt she knew well enough to trust. There were not many of them though, and they never smiled.

  Although she had studied music and piano performance in college, Cathy was a humanities teacher, trading off between teaching English and History. She was relatively young, and she was unmarried—although, since she was over thirty, the students already categorized her nebulously as an “adult.”

  She knew she was getting older too because she had felt more and more aloof to her students, especially when teaching literature. Many of the students seemed unable or unwilling to identify with the characters they read about. Their main concerns with literature were mostly rationalistic and logistical (how was Gertrude able to describe Ophelia’s death in such detail if she hadn’t been there to witness it?). They would find and exploit unintended sexual meanings in the language of older authors. Worst of all, they would often make tragedy into a source of amusement. But Cathy did not have time to read much literature with her classes because of the short periods and ever-changing curriculum, and when she did, she usually did so with supplemental materials to guide her students’ reading and thought. She had come to prefer the “canned” method to the more open-ended approach of letting the students make of the literature what they would on their own.

  The masses moved from this section of the building into the next where the renovation was underway. The stale smell of the old hallway was overtaken by the smells of plywood and plaster, fresh paint and drywall. A plastic sheet was all that separated the students from some areas of construction. It always gave Cathy a twinge of anxiety to watch them pass by it, as she knew that at any moment one might breach the boundary in careless rebellion, and that she would then be responsible for the student’s safety and held accountable to correct the situation.