The Imminent Scourge

by J. D. Anderson

  A pang of hunger shot through him, incapacitating him, and mingling with his nausea. Had he had anything in his stomach, he would have vomited—but he was empty. He lay back, submitting to the uncontrollable, roiling pain inside him.

  “The mother of the Stegodyphus spider defends her eggs from male spiders who would destroy the eggs because they were not the ones who fertilized the mother. They defend their own fitness, destroying anything not of their own lineage, for genetic domination. But if the mother is victorious… the mother eats them… and then continues to eat… and eats, and eats, consuming beyond comprehension… and when her offspring are born, she regurgitates what she has eaten for her young. The young feed on her vomit… and then they eat her. And this species has survived from Eden.”

  The nausea and the pain of hunger subsided somewhat, and he struggled harder. The more he exerted, the more his wrists burned, and he was unable to move. He realized then that not only had his wrists and ankles been bound, but his whole body was tied down by lengths of cord.

  “Fire with fire.”

  A chill descended on him. His muscles ached.

  “Death is a necessary end, and it will come when it will come.”

  The nausea and the hunger mingled, but he knew them to be distinct. He sputtered for breath and drew his body from side to side searching in vain for a position less painful. He smelled rank flesh, and blood.

  “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will harden whom I harden, in order to make known the riches of my glory, which I have prepared beforehand.”

  He felt a shuddering motion underneath him, and then the sensation of being lifted up. His wrists burned in agony as the weight of his body shifted. The wound on his shoulder ached terribly.

  “E pluribus unum—annuit cœptis.”

  He was lifted upright by the armpit, his body hanging limply, his feet dangling on floor. From this angle, he saw the maze of false walls and the arrangements of display furniture. He caught a glimpse of a figure just on the edge of his vision to the left, a slight figure from what he could tell, seeming to have no connection with the voice that he had heard, although there was no one else from whom the voice could have come. He strained to look farther over, but could not. Pain gripped his whole body; his insides heaved and pain shot through his arm.

  He was carried by the armpits through the maze of walls out into the main hallway, which was now dimly lit again, this time with the light of the coming dawn. He assumed that he was being carried by the two he knew, Lieutenant Wheeler and Sergeant Taylor. He had seen or heard no one else, except for the voice of General Reepus who remained behind within the dark depth of the maze, and as they dragged him through the hall, he saw nothing but the dark shops by the dim blue light of early morning, and heard nothing except for the echoes of the footsteps and the dragging of his own bound feet toward the entrance.

  They came to the doors. His right side dropped, and Taylor stepped forward to unchain the handles and remove the bar lock. She took up her assault rifle and cracked the door. Pure blue light bled in through the opening. She stuck her head out and then withdrew, nodding to Wheeler. They hoisted him up again and dragged him out into the cool morning. It was well before sunrise, the day still in its very gestation. They pulled him over the ground up to the row of crosses planted in the ground and dropped him in the dewy grass.

  The woman retrieved a ladder that was resting on the side of the building, extended it, and leaned it up against one of the crosses. She climbed up the ladder, a black, lean figure against the glowing blue sky, up to where one of the creatures was hung. She drew a blade from her belt and cut at the rope that tied its feet. Then she climbed a little higher and cut the cord that tied one of its wrists. The arm fell free, and the skin cracked like dry leaves. The body swung off of the main beam of the cross and dangled by the remaining wrist. Then the woman cut the cord and the creature dropped from the cross and landed on the ground, collapsing into itself, bending and breaking like a fallen limb of a tree.

  She pocketed the blade and then climbed back down, the metal ladder clattering as she descended. She hooked her arm under Danny’s armpit, and Lieutenant Wheeler took hold of his ankles and shuffled to the side, swinging his legs around so that he was in position next to the ladder. The woman pulled him up and Lieutenant Wheeler pushed at his legs.

  As they drew him up the ladder, he felt dizzy. The world seemed to sway and rock, and his vision of the blue light of the waking world was flecked with floating swirls of light and dark. His right arm was numb. The transformation was taking hold.

  After they had finally dragged him to the top, the woman leaned him against the horizontal board that cut off the vertical, extracted her blade once again, and cut the nylon cable around his wrists. His arms fell loose weakly, the flesh cut and bleeding. She worked fast; she knew that her activity might attract them at any moment. She tied one wrist and then the other around the wooden plank, testing the cord to be sure that it would hold his weight before she let him drop. Then she descended the ladder and wrapped his already bound ankles with cord around the wood.

  Danny turned his head to either side, observing his neighbors. One was nearly completely dried; it moved its withered head up and down with great effort, its skin cracked and flaking. The other was still relatively fresh; its eyes were clearer and its skin was the usual purple-blue. He wondered when the poor soul had found the encampment—if it, too, had failed the citizenship test—if it were, like he and Nikki, lost, confused, clinging to a last shred of hope for deliverance.

  The woman finished her work and sheathed the blade for the last time. She descended the ladder and then drew it down, leaving Danny strung at the top to complete the transformation and then, like the others, to act as a deterrent. She took the ladder away, leaning it against the building where it had been before, and then she and the lieutenant went back in and sealed the entrance.

  Then he was alone with the quiet, blue dawn, and the others next to him whose form had already been transmuted into what he would soon become himself. He looked to the side at his own arm: his flesh was beginning to turn green. He could feel it in his bloodstream; with each pump of his heart, his vision became clouded with darkness, and his hearing obscured. For the first time in his life, he was afraid of his own death.

  But aside from the personal fear and avulsion he held toward death, he was unsure how to take it. If there were others inside, other citizens, then he was at peace about his own situation. He understood something of the notion of “the greater good.” But this was insufficient to shore up his feelings of loss.

  For some reason, as he hung there on the cross, his thoughts kept returning to his father. Was he still alive? Had he abandoned them, or was he still in pursuit, perhaps already returned to the convenience store where they had been?

  At that moment, a memory arose in his mind like something bobbing up to the surface of water.

  The memory was of his father, and of himself from only a few years ago, when he had been twelve or thirteen. Once, while out and about with his parents, he had happened upon a pet store with a display of impounded puppies that were available for adoption. Among them was a Rottweiler mix. Danny wanted it. At first, his father had objected to the idea because Rottweilers required training, as much or more than any other breed of dog, he said. Danny persisted, arguing that he would undertake to train the dog. Finally, his father had relented, and allowed him to get the puppy provided that he train it; and if he failed, he would have to give the dog away, have it impounded again, or most likely put down.

  His father provided him with books on training the dog and read through portions of them with him, even demonstrating some of the techniques himself on the puppy. Danny tried to emulate his father and tried to train the puppy as best he could. But the more he worked, the more stubborn and resistant the puppy seemed to his attempts. He never went to his father about it, but his father knew, and Danny knew that he knew.

  Danny went to
a camp later that summer. While Danny was away, his father took two weeks off of work and trained the puppy himself. When Danny came back, the puppy acted without a trace of the resistance that it had had before. It was obedient and friendly.

  But Danny hated the dog. He treated it harshly when his father was not around, yelling at it and kicking it for no other reason than that he had perhaps had a bad day at school and felt a measure of catharsis by taking it out on the dog. He hated the dog even more when it reacted only passively to his violence. Most of all, he hated the dog for its obedience to his father—the self-assurance and ease of its submissiveness.

  At last, on an instance when his father was not home and when Danny had stretched out his hand to push the dog, the dog finally gave a timid, defensive bite. Although it had not been the worst bite the dog could have inflicted, it had been sufficient to pierce his skin and bruise the flesh around the bite. Danny bandaged himself, but he knew that his father would see—and his father did. When his father inquired about the wound, Danny lied at first. But the wound was obviously a bite, and his father’s inquiry was mostly strategic. The dog, meanwhile, stood by his father’s side as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. From its point of view, probably nothing had; it had reacted only as it saw fit, and its reaction had achieved its purpose: Danny had left it alone after that. Danny relented and admitted what had happened, but painted the dog as the aggressor.

  Even so, Danny knew that his father understood the full truth about the incident. The dog was loyal. Danny steeled himself for some sort of punishment and for sanctions against his harming the dog any further.

  But his father took the dog to the pound.

  When his father returned, he had put his hand on Danny’s shoulder. His face was hard as iron, but his hand and his gesture communicated an otherwise inexpressible warmth. And that was all; they never spoke of it.

  Danny was not sure why this particular story was the one that surfaced in his mind with such intensity during what were sure to be his last moments alive, but it caused him to miss his father terribly. It seemed to him that he had never missed his father so much, not even as a child. He longed for the warm embrace of his thick arms, the rough feel of his father’s beard against his own skin, that hand on his shoulder. And because of this desperation, he felt himself believing, despite all of his efforts to the contrary, as Nikki had—that his father was alive, and that he was seeking them now where they no longer were. He could not deny his absolute need, and the need was the belief. The weight of it made his heart sink with an almost physical despair. And he hated himself for this despair; and he hated himself for the absurd hope that he could not control; and he embraced his hatred as the only thing that might buoy up his heart in preparation for his death. He looked to the sides at the others, who hung in what resembled death—the form that he himself would soon assume. Soon, he would be transformed, and then he would starve. He stared into the violent dawn, the sun beginning to rise and scatter the sedate blue of the early hours, and tears came to his eyes. Then he put all thought of his father out of his mind.

  He heard a noise in the distance. From his vantage point, he could see the far boundary of the base. To his left was the gate through which he and Nikki had entered, shrouded in trees; directly ahead of him and to his right was the spread of short buildings and minor roads, and beyond them was a tall chain-link fence that barricaded the base that was fortified with barbed wire, strung in lines across the top, which themselves were wrapped in loops of it. The sound had come from beyond the fence.

  The morning light was growing stronger and Danny felt his life draining out of him. His body was insupportably heavy. His wrists burned and ached. He struggled even to keep his head upright.

  Then the sun finally burst over the horizon at the same time that the horde appeared in the distance. He and Nikki had, in fact, been followed. The light nearly blinded him. The figures were difficult to make out. The dewy air had collected on his cooling forehead, and beads of it rolled into his eyes, distorting the light and blurring his vision of the approaching dead.

  The horde had reached the barrier. Those at the front climbed the fence up to the barbed wire. Feeling no pain, they took hold of it with their hands and the jagged metal cut into them. The barbs clung to their flesh, stripping it from them. They climbed up without regard for what was happening to their bodies. They bled dark blood and continued, the wire ripping their muscles, tearing their limbs. The second wave came behind them, pushing those in the first against the wire, driving them farther forward and tearing their bodies apart. This second wave suffered the same. The building clusters of flesh caught in the tangle of wire ripped and spilled slime and vile innards that caught in the chain links as they dropped.

  Then a third wave took hold of the fence and drew themselves up. At the top of the fence, they met the indistinguishable mass of the mangled dead that had piled onto the wire, and these met no resistance; they climbed easily over the slippery, shredded bodies and fell freely into the camp, smeared with the blood of their brethren.

  The horde spilled over the fence and eventually forced it down altogether, trampling over it, trampling over the wire, trampling over each other.

  He watched them, knowing that they would scatter at the sight and smell of their own dead. They would soon part, giving a wide berth to the building and the crosses. They would break ranks and run in a different direction, or many different directions—but they would be driven away. The camp, the last bastion of humanity, would be safe.

  The horde approached. He was still alive and sensible for a few moments longer. In the second to last of these, the penultimate moment, the moment before his sight left him, he saw the horde pass under the crosses undeterred, united in a common raging chaos—and strike the door with the force of their combined mass, a force that would have broken down a barrier one hundred times as strong, or stronger.

  BRAIN GRINDER

  When the very ground of the earth had become contaminated, the graveyards yielded up their dead, vomiting them out of the dirt. Kurt and Randall walked through one of these desecrated cemeteries, stepping carefully to avoid falling in the many pits that yawned in black chasms telling of the violence of second birth.

  “Grave robbery is against the law,” Randall was saying. “What if a man robs his own grave by getting up and walking out of it? What then? Has he still broken the law?”

  Randall was the shorter and fairer of the two. Kurt was squarely built, and his dark hair hung over his eyes. Other than their difference in height and color, the two men looked alike.

  “Well, his body is his own property,” said Kurt. “Can he properly be said to have stolen it?”

  “Well, suicide is illegal too. A man’s life is his own; yet if he takes his own life, it is illegal.”

  “How can the taking of his own life be properly called taking? It seems to me that if one commits suicide, he loses his life. Suicide is not theft at all.”

  “Would it be considered theft in the sense that you are taking yourself away from those who know and love you? In that case, would you be stealing yourself away from people who would otherwise have had the chance to interact with you?”

  “That implies some sort of right that other people have to you or the experience of you. Don’t I have the right to remain silent? Does that include the permanent silencing of my body?”

  “No man lives in a vacuum.”

  “If I am not my own—I mean, if I have no right to myself, whose right am I?”

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Right?”

  “Right about what?”

  “What you were saying.”

  “What was I saying?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Does what matter?”

  “What you were saying?”

  “Why wouldn’t it matter?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t matter if you weren’t right.”

  “Was I? Did it?�
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  “You weren’t. But yes.”

  “Why not, and how come?”

  “Because I care about your feelings.”

  They walked on a little farther. It was getting to be later in the morning, but they couldn’t tell exactly what time. A thin layer of white cloud covered the whole sky as though they were in a false world lit with bright light from behind a sheet, but made to resemble the real world, and succeeding to a great extent.

  “A right,” said Kurt.

  “What?” said Randall.

  “I mean a right belonging to whom am I, not who is.”

  “Whom am?”

  “What?”

  “Whom is.”

  “Whom is what?”

  “No, wait—who is.”

  “Who?”

  “Subjective, not objective.”

  “What is?”

  “Everything, I guess.”

  They walked some more. All around them were the deep gashes where the earth had erupted. Gravestones lay on their backs like old discarded books. The whole of it looked like the set of a play in the midst of being stricken.

  “I would never,” said Kurt.

  “Never what?” said Randall.

  “Take my life.”

  “You can’t take your own life. You already have it. We talked about this.”

  “I mean, lose my life. On purpose.”

  “Oh. Neither would I. Although… if we got separated… then what?”

  “Then we would no longer be together.”

  “Yes, but I mean, what would happen after that? What would you do?”

  “I would… look for you.”

  “What if you could never find me?”

  “What if I could?”

  “What if you did, and I was…dead?”

  “Would you be?”

  “Would I not?”

  “Not if I found you alive.”

  “But if you didn’t?”

  “Find you?”

  “I mean, if I wasn’t.”

  “Alive?”