It was Josh and Edward who snuck out of the sterile core. Who dared to remove their masks, and gingerly draw in breath.
And then more breaths. Until they realized it was safe. At least, safe to breathe.
They returned to the core to gather up the others, arming themselves with wrenches and screwdrivers from Josh’s tool cart to use as weapons.
Edward was the first of them to kill. It was his own friend Joseph, who lurched unexpectedly at them in the corridor as they circumvented the outside section of the filling department entirely on their way to the staircase. Edward, who showed that he had the instincts to survive in an altered world, by not hesitating for a moment in jamming a screwdriver to the hilt in one of Joseph’s unblinking eyes.
The tall Ghanian dropped, convulsing as if electrocuted. He had Albert’s blood caked brown on the front of his uniform (powder blue shirt, navy blue trousers), but the thick blood that leaked out of his ears and wept around the blade of the screwdriver was a bright yellow. Color now mocked them. Color had become their enemy. But their real conflict with color hadn’t even begun yet. Not until they came to the first windows that showed them a view of the world outside. The brand new world outside.
* * *
They walked across the top of a town that Josh finally recognized from its church steeples, their tips emerging from the sapphire blue ground; there were a red-brown steeple and a white steeple side-by-side, and a bit of distance away (it would have been diagonally across a street which now lay below them, cars perhaps still parked along it and maybe bodies inside those metal sarcophagi, where people had taken refuge in vain) poked another white steeple. Josh had lived in this town for a time, as a boy.
Tanaka plucked some leaves off the head of a tall tree that miraculously still lived, though its trunk and lower branches had been swallowed up. She smelled their green freshness, let them tumble from her hand, and said to Josh, “Life goes on.”
“Easy for the trees to go on,” Edward grumbled, moving past them with his shotgun cradled in both hands. “The Blues don’t want to eat the trees.”
They were five now. They had lost Dennis four weeks ago, only days after leaving Caduceus Pharmaceuticals. His arm outstretched with a police issue handgun in his fist, he had stood immobile like a Medusa-cursed statue himself, like a God-cursed pillar of salt, watching the animated statue of a small blue child shuffle toward him, croaking in a voice just childlike enough to make him hesitate in firing, tears blurring his vision. He had been the father of two children, both of them with his ex-wife back in Costa Rica. Before the others could cut them down with their own guns, three of the Blues had shambled out from behind the top of an apartment complex, seized Dennis from behind, and dragged him around the corner out of sight. By the time the others bolted and caught up, Dennis’ screams had already ceased. Maria had killed one of the Blues with repeated blows to the head from the butt of her hunting rifle until the skull came open like a sparkling geode, thick yellow blood oozing into the porous ground and the brain sliding out yellow as an egg yolk, all its folds and convolutions smoothed away. She had even stomped the yolk-brain with a new hiking boot, letting out a roar of profanity.
By way of replacement, they had picked up another member for their party a few days later – a 12-year-old Vietnamese-American boy named Michael. Tanaka had given him a spare pistol from her knapsack. He had stayed close by her side ever since, and at night lay spooned to her back, which frustrated Josh a bit but he felt ashamed to be jealous of a child. Michael was mostly quiet, though he tended to whine and weep, even hold tantrums, when he was exhausted from their walking and foraging, too high above the buildings and trees most times to be shaded from the harsh summer sun.
“Look here,” Maria barked, a little bit away from them, close to the lone white steeple. Her call gathered them all in from where they had strayed, but never far or for long from each other.
Near the steeple point’s base were three irregular craters in the hard, rough-skinned ground. Loose, broken chunks of rubble from grain-sized to fist-sized lay heaped around their rims. Usually when they found holes of this kind they were fairly shallow cavities, but these pits were so deep they were black, their depth hard to determine even when Josh stepped beside Maria to point a flashlight.
“Who knows how far down they came from,” Edward said. The weeks under the bald sun had turned his dark skin – and his harsh, forceful voice – much darker. “Probably all the way from the street. There could be tunnels down there, all around us. Tunnels like ants make.”
Usually, it was the Blues not too deeply buried – in areas where the ash had not piled itself too high – that were able to emerge. Obviously, as they had less of the baked-hard ground to dig their way through. But sometimes, while the storm had still been raging, the buried had managed to burrow their way up through the ash before it had solidified, so that when they finally succumbed they were close to the surface. Lately, however, the crew had begun spotting these much deeper openings...which indicated that with time, and maybe not much more time, a whole new wave of Blues would be walking the streets. Those buried under the deeper accumulations of ash. As Edward had suggested – right now, all across this town, under their very feet, might there be hundreds of Blues slowly, patiently inching their way to the surface?
Michael whimpered and drew close to Tanaka, encircling her with both arms and tucking his head against her, eyes crunched shut as if in pain. “I’m hungry!” he groaned.
Tanaka smoothed his spiky black hair. “Shh, baby.” She handed him a foil-wrapped granola bar from her backpack. To the others, she said in her light, musical accent, “In a few hours it will be dark. We need to find a place to spend the night.”
“Hard, in this fucking town,” Maria said. “Too fucking deep.”
“We need to find a taller building we can get inside of,” Josh murmured, glancing about, trying to remember more about the town. Then again, it would have changed a lot since he had lived here. “And hope there aren’t too many Blues inside it.”
“If we have to camp out in the open, that’s what we’ll do,” Edward said. They had done it before, but they had also had to get up in the middle of the night and flee madly, on several occasions, when a wave of Blues had amassed themselves and advanced on them. Fortunately, their gravelly collected moans had given them away, and they were easy to outrun. But strong, so strong. Those outstretched fingers, when they would raise their heavy arms. One had to stay beyond the reach of those crystallized blue fingers.
As they drifted on toward where Josh indicated the center of the town should be, Tanaka further placated Michael with a bottle of spring water. As she had indicated, the sun was lowering in the sky, sending golden light sideways across the acetylene blue ground, making its pumice-like texture all the more starkly picked out in shadow. But soon enough, Josh was pointing toward the top of a flat-roofed, brick-skinned building that looked new to him, though designed to blend in with the much older buildings that now were fully blanketed over. They reached the little plateau, a life-raft adrift in a frozen sea. The upper half of the top row of windows showed above the ground’s new level, and the glass was intact in all of them. No Blues had got in from up here, then – but of course, that didn’t mean they hadn’t gotten into the building from below. Maria and Edward smashed a single window with their gun butts. When the frame was safely free of shards, they lowered slender Maria in first with a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other, as if she were a tunnel rat descending into a nest of Vietcong. A few tense moments when they heard nothing from her, then a blurted obscenity. They all flinched, but she reappeared and gestured for them to crawl inside with her. “I bumped my leg on a fucking desk,” she explained.
* * *
They heard the rumble of a vehicle across the solid dunes, out there in the night. It must have traveled a long way, from a town so thinly coated that it had been able to back out of whatever garage it had been safely sheltered in when the ash stor
m came. A few weeks ago, they might have wormed out of the window and fired their guns in the air to draw the vehicle back, but they knew the person or persons would not want company; the vehicle must already be crammed with supplies scavenged from here and there, plus their group might not all be able to squeeze inside anyway. Also, they had passed other little groups two dozen times in their travels, and found that the survivors tended to favor such small bands because they were easy to maneuver, easy to accommodate in a limited hiding spot, more furtively escaped the notice of the Blues. Josh’s team would stop and chat only briefly with these similar teams, maybe exchange a few articles of food or ammunition. Other times they merely exchanged nods with such a group, as they passed each other in opposite directions. One direction was really as good as another.
Josh was the unofficial leader. Maybe because he had been in a superior position to them at their place of employment, his job title being AET – a qualified mechanic who made the most critical and precise of the set-up adjustments, who had to sign off on the batch papers before each filling machine was allowed to start production. Also, as a National Guardsman, Josh had recently returned from his second stint in the Middle East. He had military training, though he had never had to kill a man during his time there. Since then, all of the crew but Michael had become killers, though of course the people they had killed were already dead.
They had survived this long because they respected Josh enough not to oppose him, not to bicker – too much. This evening, he had directed them to cover all the windows in the upper floor of the brick building, so the glow of their single camping lantern would not as readily be seen outside. And they had barricaded the door in case there were Blues in the levels below them. When they spoke, it was in whispers. Maria had quickly dozed off, and now Edward began to snore loudly. Tanaka nudged him and he rolled over with a grumble on the sleeping bag he had spread on the thinly blue-crusted floor.
Michael lay with his head on Tanaka’s crossed legs. Josh sat beside her, discreetly holding her hand in the shadows between them. She was stroking Michael’s head like a cat beginning to snooze in her lap.
“I miss my mom,” he sniffled. It was an almost nightly lament, as he began to drift into dreams they hoped were blissful...dreams not too blue in color. “I miss my mom.”
“Maybe she’s okay, baby,” Tanaka told him. “Maybe it’s better over there – we don’t know.” When the ash had come, Michael’s mother had been gone on a two week vacation to attend her brother’s funeral and visit her other siblings in Ho Chi Minh City. “Did your mom ever take you to her country, baby?”
“No,” he sulked. “I didn’t want to go. I’m an American.”
Tanaka flashed a smile at Josh. “Yes, you are. Look at us – we all are. Different cultures and colors. And we’re helping each other like we always should have, right, baby? We’re working together to stay alive. Because the living – we’re all so different. That’s good. That’s what people didn’t understand before. In our lives, we needed to be different. But the dead...” Her sweet tone dropped a little, became more distant, as if she said the last words only to herself. “The dead are all blue.”
Michael said nothing. His mouth was squashed open against her leg. Josh crawled forward to help ease his head from her lap, onto the edge of his sleeping bag instead. “Yew,” Josh said, wiping Michael’s drool on the leg of his jeans. He sat back beside Tanaka again, and rubbed her warm thigh where the child’s head had been.
Tanaka was still distracted, running her fingertips lightly across the blue-caked floor, where the mist that had permeated almost everywhere had settled and congealed.
“I think it’s a kind of fungus,” Josh mused, watching her thoughtful hand motions. “Carried on the wind. Maybe even carried from space. Brought here on a comet or a meteor, a fragment of a planet or something.” He was combining theories his companions had previously run through, and why not? “The fungus is symbiotic. Like millions of tiny parasites that need to live on a host. So they smother their host animals, and take over their bodies. Reactivating some of their basic motor functions.”
“Science,” Tanaka said, simply.
“You make it sound like a swear word.”
“I’m not primitive, Josh. But science comes up empty-handed this time. Science was taken by surprise; it wasn’t ready. And now it’s too late for it to catch up. Now we can see how little they truly ever knew for sure. Yes, I believe in science. But science covered only so, so little of what there is to know.” She met his eyes in the murk. She, too, resubmitted theories they had tossed about before. “Maybe it truly is a plague sent from God. A kind of destroying – rather than nurturing – manna from the heavens. In Zimbabwe, we had such a terrible epidemic of AIDS. In the UK, you know, ten percent of the AIDS deaths were from immigrants from my country. I used to wonder if that was a plague sent from God, too.”
“You know I don’t believe in that wrath of God stuff. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
“I know...religion. That’s a swear word to you.”
“I didn’t say that. Maybe the answer is both. Maybe those two words aren’t as mutually exclusive as we always thought. Like you were saying to Michael...it’s time we stop thinking like we used to do. Start putting things together the way they always should have been.” And he squeezed her dark brown hand in his very pale hand, like the two halves of a living yin and yang, for emphasis.
Tanaka smiled at him again, reached out and drew him down beside her on her sleeping bag. Though they were too close to the others to be intimate, at least with Michael already slumbering it was Josh’s turn again to make spoons with her body.
* * *
His ear to the floor, even through the muffling layer of his sleeping bag Josh could hear the bang – perhaps of a chair being knocked over – on the floor below them. A smaller thump after that, then silence. He lifted his head a little to see if anyone else were awake and had noticed. Only Edward looked over at him. He was sitting on the floor, his back propped against a wall and his shotgun across his knees. He pointed at the floor and nodded, indicating he had heard the noises, too.
They waited, looking back and forth at each other. The sounds weren’t repeated. At last, sensing that others had begun to stir, Maria sat up and mumbled some curses as she rubbed at a kink in her neck. Michael whined that he was hungry and Tanaka dug out another granola bar for him. “I’m fattening you up so we can all eat you one of these days,” she told him.
“Stop it!” he huffed, then chomping into the snack.
“I had a dream,” Josh whispered, rising and stretching his limbs. “We were in some town where the ash wasn’t deep...with all these other people, digging up the ground. We were clearing it, so we could use it to plant vegetables. We were making a farm. We weren’t running anymore.”
“Gotta find that fucking town, then,” Maria said. “Right?”
“Right,” Josh said.
“Right,” said Tanaka. And it sounded like Michael mumbled “right” around a mouthful of granola bar.
“We all worked together once,” Josh told them. “We can do it again.”
“We already are,” Tanaka said. “We’re a good team.”
“I’ll see that you all get raises.”
“Thanks a lot,” Edward said. “Huh – been light for a few hours now.” He rose, and moved to one of the windows they had kept shaded during the night to contain the glow of their lamp. Steeling himself against the glare of day, he took the shade’s lower edge to raise it.
A peripheral movement caused Josh to glance at one of the other shaded windows. A silhouette, passing fleetingly across its glowing blank screen. He snapped his head back toward Edward. “Wait!” he hissed.
But the shade was already winding upwards, and through the glass – only inches away – Edward looked out at a face as it stared in at him.
It was like a hairless skull, thickly encrusted with what appeared to be a blue mineral so vivid in color it almost seem
ed to glow. There were no lips, so the yellow teeth were exposed, the only other pigment hinted at. And there were no eyes: even the skull sockets were filled with crust. How the Blue could see him, they did not know, but it had plainly sensed him somehow – for the glass of the window was already shattering in his face and two pairs of blue-caked hands thrusting in to briefly scratch at his head in an attempt to grasp his close-cropped hair, and tug at his ears, before successfully clutching handfuls of his shirt. Bellowing in rage and terror, Edward tried to maneuver his shotgun but he was being pulled off his feet, hoisted up to their level through the window, his arms pinned by his own bulk. His body was raked over the jagged teeth of the window’s remaining glass. And then, he was through and gone. Bright sunlight streamed into the room. Loud screams flooded in, too.
Yelling swears, it was Maria who bounded to the window first, aiming her rifle outside, but she cried, “I don’t see him!” Then, ignoring the sharp glass shards, she began scrabbling through the opening after their friend.
Josh pulled his handgun, and shouted back at Tanaka, “Stay here!”
She and even Michael had their own pistols in hand. Tanaka nodded.
There were three of the Blues outside, two on all fours over Edward like hyenas and one that might have been a woman standing a little apart, weaving as if in a stupor, its mouth working soundlessly as if it thought it were already chewing. Its body was scabrous, pumice-like, but this matter was cracked and split at the joints to permit limited movement. Could that slight lump on one wrist be a watch, sealed over with the rest? Its hands, beneath the blue ash, still moving unseen even now as time continued stalwartly to move forward?
The two that had grasped Edward had pulled him away from the building a little ways, and in a kind of cooperation that was most likely accidental, one held him down while the other one had gathered the fingers of its right hand together in something like a stone knife, and plunged that knife into Edward’s body through his pants, through his anus, tearing his rectum open. The arm was already in their friend past the wrist.
Doomsdays Page 2
