by Ryan Horvath
When the object exploded, the liquid inside aerosolized, and like the first liquid the object had slowly released, it began moving through the atmosphere but as there was much more of this liquid and it was released all at once, it moved across the globe very quickly.
As this gas rippled its way outward from the ground zero of Paris, it began to affect the population of the Earth that had not responded favorably to the previous addition the object had made to the Earth’s air.
Unbeknownst to them, a group of survivors of the Paris riots comprised of two partial neighboring families were the first to feel the effects of this second more plentiful gaseous addition. The families were hiding out in a house in the village of Maffliers to the north of Paris.
One of the fathers had been sitting on the toilet in the house’s small bathroom. He was reading a magazine while he sat. Suddenly, a sharp pain stabbed into his front lower abdomen and quickly worked its way to his lower back and into his rectum. He felt something sliding out of him and heard it splashing into the toilet water beneath him. He slowly lifted his leg up and peered into the toilet beneath him.
Blood was streaming from him.
Not just blood. Bits of…stuff.
Just then, the pain intensified and he tried to get up off the toilet but before he could, he felt a huge gush of liquid and solid-like stuff eject from him and as he sprayed the toilet in a horrific blast of blood, shit, and his melting organs, he fell headfirst into the bathtub and died.
The second father had been getting water outside from a well. A cigarette hung between his lips and sent wisps of smoke into the air. He secured a pail of water and drew deeply on his cigarette. His wife had been nagging him for almost a year now to give the smoking up but he just hadn’t been ready to do that and now that the world had gone crazy around them, he hoped she’d finally stop bitching about it.
When the man exhaled, an unexpected cough escaped him. He’d barely had time to cover his mouth and when he pulled his hand away, he saw a fine spray of blood was spattered on his closed fist.
“What is this shit?” the man said in his native tongue. He touched his lip and found more blood. “What the fuck?”
Had his wife been right? Was this cigarette the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. He looked down at the smoldering cigarette in his hand in disbelief.
Then a fiery sensation blasted from the bottom of his lungs to the top with his next inhale of breath. When he exhaled, a massive cough occurred and he stared in stark terror as dark blood and what had to have been chunks of his lungs spewed from his mouth and landed on the grass before him. He fell to his knees and got one more breath. The release of that breath brought another cough, and upchucked gore from this exhalation terminated the man’s life. He fell face first to the lawn and lay there motionless with blood pouring from his mouth and nose.
Of the children at this house, the only boy, the son of the man who died in the bathroom, had just recently been treated for an ear infection he’d gotten because he was on his high school swim team. The ear still ached a little while he sat in an easy chair and read up on his trigonometry. His father had insisted he keep up studying in spite of the crisis and mathematics was what interested him the most, aside from swimming.
He was working through a series of elaborate drawings of conjoined triangles and calculating the cosine for all of the assigned angles when he felt an agonizing pain stab into his skull from the ear that had been infected. His head had been cocked and he looked down and saw blood dropping onto the seat cushion. Within seconds, it was a steady stream.
The boy jumped out of the chair and perceived a most unusual feeling. On the internal side of the pain in his ear, it felt like something was chewing into his brain. He slapped a palm over his bleeding ear but then his arm pulled away from his head and began seizing on its own. The boy lost control of his bladder and the leg of his jeans darkened as it became saturated. He tried to take a step, to go get help but he could feel that chewing boring deeper into his brain. His legs joined his arms in spasm and he fell over, his entire body convulsing. And, though he couldn’t see it, bits of his brain joined the flow of blood from his ear.
The man who died near the well had twin teenage daughters. As twins they shared many things. In the past that had included clothes, toys, cosmetics and boyfriends, as well as other things. One of the things they currently shared was a concurrent menstrual cycle which had just started for the girls.
The girls were napping while the boy, who enjoyed trigonometry lay dying in the living room below. Each girl occupied a twin bed in the bedroom and snored lightly.
One of the girls unexpectedly sat up fast in bed. She moved her hand to her abdomen.
Worst fucking cramp I’ve ever had she said to herself as she felt the cramp subsiding. When it finished, she laid back down, and closed her eyes. Instantly, she found her last thought had been insanely wrong.
Pain like she had never experienced flashed in waves across her lower abdomen. She felt as if her uterus had been stabbed and was in flames. Seconds later, she saw the blood.
The front of her yellow sleep pants quickly turned a deep crimson.
“Impossible,” she whispered. She had just changed her tampon before lying down.
With shaky hands, she slowly pulled open the front waistband of her loungewear. She wasn’t wearing panties and she could see the blood soaked string of the tampon which was in its proper place. She reached into her pants and tugged out the tampon.
This caused excruciating agony and she gasped and whimpered as tears and sweat fell off her face. When she looked again at her vagina, she saw blood and chunks of something fleshy were flowing from between her legs. She tried to get off the bed and couldn’t. The pain forced her down and in seconds, she bled out, saturating the mattress beneath her with her life force.
Her twin sister died in a similar fashion but the pain did not wake her. Blood poured from between her legs and doused her mattress too but she went quietly, without waking up to her pain or her twin sister’s.
The twins’ mother, and the naggy wife of the smoking man, was the only mother with them as swimmer boy’s mother had not made it out of Paris.
She was preparing lunch for the group in the kitchen when she experienced a burning in her lungs, not unlike what her husband experienced. She coughed up blood on the bread she’d been making sandwiches with and was soon painting the kitchen red with maroon coughs. She had never smoked but she’d breathed her damn husband’s cancer sticks for years.
You son of a bitch was her final thought as blood pooled beside where she lay on the kitchen floor.
It took less than two minutes for all the occupants of the house in Maffliers, France to die.
And, as the second aerosolized substance from the object spread around the globe, people died in similar bloody fashions. Some died alone but others died with friends or loved ones. But those who were not alone when they died were so connected to their own personal pain and suffering, that they might as well have been on a deserted island.
The gas reached the United States.
Ralph and Mitzi, in Farmington, Minnesota died together in their home. He had complained about his glaucoma bothering him before his eyeballs exploded. She had a brief moment to witness this and try to help her dying husband before blood erupted from her nostrils from the beginnings of brain tumor she never knew she had.
Bret and Jessica, the newlywed couple Karen Thomas had met in Farmington, died together outside of Billings, Montana. She had been quite fond of the drink and her liver ruptured, causing her to choke to death on vomit and blood. And though she didn’t know it, Bret enjoyed snorting cocaine with his buddies and his sinuses split open while he slept. He’d been on his back and sleeping with his head at a bad angle and he drowned in his own blood.
Paul, the man who had sold Jack, Brian, and Ian their armaments, died alone. His fate was similar to Jessica’s. He was holed up in his store when he felt agonizing pain in h
is abdomen and subsequently vomited blood in his lap. He tried to stand but fell onto the hand gun display case with a thud instead.
The CIA analyst who had been concerned about his family on the day River, the cat, started to learn English, died with his wife. Their children had been lost in the aftermath of the eclipse and the two were currently hiding in a tent near the North Carolina and South Carolina border. The man had gingivitis that he had neglected over the last few years and all of his teeth fell out of his skull. That might have been okay if not for the copious flow of blood that cascaded from each empty tooth socket. He had lost enough blood to lose his life in minutes. His wife had had a secret guilty pleasure of gambling in pool halls and cigar smoking. Not too often, but she indulged in this recreation at least every few weeks. She had just been out on one of her excursions the night before the eclipse and since then, she’d felt she overdid the cigars. Her throat had been sore and raw for a couple days. When she succumbed to the gas from the object, she was asleep. Her throat opened up and blood flooded into her esophagus and trachea. She drowned and choked while she slept.
Stephanie Morse, the teenage girl who had so well captured the object in the sky during the eclipse died alone. Her parents and brother were murdered in a home invasion after the eclipse. Stephanie’s grandmother had been a victim of breast cancer. Her mother had never developed the disease but it had imprinted on Stephanie’s DNA. She watched in stunned horror and agony as her right breast grew in size at an alarming rate before it popped beneath her shirt, killing her instantly.
Dr. Blake, the physician who had been so taken aback by Jack Voight’s recovery from HIV, also died alone. He had holed up in his basement panic room after the eclipse. Unfortunately, days before the eclipse, he had somehow contracted shingles. While in his panic room on Monday morning, the rash took over his entire body and reduced him to a blood and pus soaked mess.
Gary, the animal control employee who released Blaze the Dalmatian to Karen Thomas, died alone. His love for high proof alcohol had given him several stomach ulcers which quickly enlarged and released deadly stomach acids into his body cavity.
Jennifer, the gate agent who had been so helpful to Simon Shepherd, died alone as well. She’d once been a victim of a sex crime and had anally contracted herpes. The virus quickly consumed her bowels and she died trying to get off the toilet.
And CIA Director Hayes died alone too. He was using a urinal in the washroom attached to his office at his home when he felt searing pain drive out of his testicles and move up to his bladder. He staggered backward as he saw his urine stream become replaced with thick blood. As he fell down, his penis sprayed a stream of blood on the floor where it speckled the tile.
His dying thought was this: I shoulda listened to the wife when she was playing with the jewels the other night. She had told him she felt something funny while she was cupping his scrotum as she performed fellatio on him a couple weeks ago and he had dismissed her. I just didn’t think it’d happen so fast. His life was over before the blood stopped leaking from him.
Humans died. Those who didn’t respond to the first emission from the now exploded object from deep space anyway, and that was a lot. A whole lot. Around the globe it was horror and pain as they came in contact with the deadly second emission.
Within hours, the Earth had been fully exposed to the latest addition to the atmosphere.
Five billion, six hundred ninety two million three hundred seventy four thousand, two hundred and six people joined the billion that had already died since the eclipse.
The world went to sleep quietly that day. There were less than five hundred million people left on the Earth.
71
MOVING
On the morning that the majority of the human population was dying, the group in Orono was outside checking the gear in the cars and making adjustments for the women and Blaze and the items they had acquired from the assassin Brian had killed.
They had all watched, hours before, as the electronic image of the object exploded on Simon’s tablet.
Immediately after the explosion, Jack took to watching the sky through a window, expecting to see it light up as fire spread across the planet and burned the oxygen up like no sunrise had ever done before. Brian joined Jack, his arm around Jack’s lower back, his head on Jack’s shoulder, and his eyes closed. Seconds later, River bounced up to the window sill and looked outside. Amanda and Ian moved to the couch, sat, and held each other, her trembling and him comforting. Karen and Simon, however, continued to watch the screen of the tablet while Blaze sat between their legs.
“What happened?” Karen asked Simon.
“Not sure…,” Simon answered as he began rapidly looking at different things on his tablet. A few moments later, he continued. “I thought… I thought… Well, that liquid had to have gone somewhere. I thought I saw it aerosolize. Like the first gas did.”
“So does that mean it’s in the air? That the thing did something else?” Karen asked.
“Not sure…,” Simon said again and focused on the tablet.
Simon had started looking at satellite weather recordings for France and central Europe. After a few minutes, he said, “Nothing. No changes. Temperatures are the same. Weather conditions are unchanged.”
“That’s a good thing, right?” Blaze woofed. Karen translated.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” Simon answered. “Shit!” he added a moment later as the tablet screen went blank. “Battery finally died.”
No one had moved or talked much over the next hour. Each had been lost in his or her own thoughts. None of them wanted to believe they had survived the attack from the Miste man, and the mass death that followed the eclipse, only to helplessly choke or burn to death after the object blew up.
As the sun had come up, they had moved as a group outside into the dawn, autumn chill.
“Hey guys, do you see that?” River meowed after the sun had risen a bit more.
“What? What is it?” Ian asked.
“The sky. For a couple seconds. Well, the color was different. It was green, like the grass,” River responded.
“Something just happened,” Jack said, his nose twitching as he sniffed the air. “I just caught a whiff of it. Here one second and gone the next.”
“He’s right!” Blaze barked in agreement.
“I’ve never smelled anything like that,” Jack said, grimacing.
“So we’re breathing it? Right now?” Amanda said worriedly.
“We can’t do anything about it now if we are,” Karen replied.
“Anybody feel anything… anything different?” Brian queried and looked around the faces in the group.
“Nothing. Fine. The same,” were some answers.
“Good,” Amanda said dryly and she looked over at the grave of the man who had abducted her. “Let’s get the fuck out of here then.”
“Where are we going then, Jack?” Simon asked.
They all looked at Jack but it was Ian who ended up speaking.
“I may have an idea,” he said.
Jack looked relieved and he said, “Spill it, buddy.”
“I saw a show about it and did some digging with Simon’s tablet. It’s a long drive but… well, it just might be worth it,” Ian answered.
“Damn it, Ian!” Brian slapped Ian’s arm.
“Nevada. More specifically, the Hoover Dam,” he finally revealed.
“What? Why there?” Karen questioned.
“Well, a lot of reasons really. It’s a power plant, first. Supposedly it can run itself with little help from humans for decades. Warmer climate, endless supply of fresh water, places to hunt,” Ian said, counting the points with his fingers. “Not to mention, super easy to defend, short of a missile attack, that is, I guess,” he added.
They all thought about this for a few moments. Finally Simon said, “I think Ian may be on to something.”
“But that’s, what? Two thousand miles away?” Karen said, sounding exasperated.
> “Around seventeen hundred, actually,” Ian answered. “We have plenty of food, water, and gas to get there.”
“But there’s still six billion people out there,” Karen retorted, not knowing that she was extremely wrong by now. “Hurt, scared, lawless people with no government to keep them in check. We might not make it five miles before another group of people shoots out a tire and picks us off while we’re trying to change it and makes off with our stuff.”
Amanda stepped forward and faced her older sister. “Look, Karen. I’m not staying here. Not with…,” she paused and looked over Karen’s shoulder where the assassin was buried. “Him.” She continued on before Karen could interrupt. “Yes, I know. He’d dead. Fine. But dead or alive, I don’t want to be even on the same planet as that monster. But since that’s not gonna happen, I’ll settle for a couple thousand miles away from him. I’m with Ian and you’re with me. We’re going.”
Karen opened her mouth as if to protest but Amanda stared firmly at her elder sister and gave her a look that said she would not be swayed from her decision so Karen said curtly, “Fine. We’ll go.”
“Everyone else?” Ian asked the group.
The humans all nodded in assent while River and Blaze made vocal approvals. And they then busied themselves re-loading Jack’s SUV and Ian’s Honda. Simon killed the generator but said if anyone needed water, there’d be enough pressure in the lines for a bit more use.
Three and a half hours after the object had blown up over Paris, the sun was shining brightly down on Orono.
Finished with their preparations for travel, Brian pointed and asked, “What about that?” He was pointing to the black sedan that was missing its rear bumper.
“What about it? We got everything we can use from it. We don’t have enough gas to drive three cars. We leave it where it is,” Jack replied.
Brian looked unsure. He shifted his gaze from the grave to the car and back to the grave.
“Ready to roll?” Simon said, coming up behind them and pulling Brian from his thoughts.
