by catt dahman
Taking in a deep breath, he got ready to climb down. He thought of something and told the crack in the hallway, "Reminds me of that movie, The Poseidon Adventure, where all those fools were running around inside the upside-down ship, up one side and down the other… and into the worst messes, trying to escape; maybe this was a good sign since none of them were black folks." He laughed at himself.
He had to get out.
He found footholds and handholds, which made it a little easier; then, he felt swallowed whole in the belly of the beast. At times, the wall narrowed so much that he needed to force himself to squirm through, shredding his shirt and one of his shoulders. Next, there was a wide space.
Next, there was a slide to his side, where a sharp piece of protruding metal had dug into his muscular arm. He raved, talking to people he imagined, played word games, and listed trivia. He pictured a single black thread in a white room, and he grasped it. He was almost stuck again.
At this time and stuck tightly, he inched down, fighting not to lose control, because if he did, he would stay in that tunnel, screaming until he died, like some Poe character. He listed stories and characters by Poe. He went on deeper.
At one point, the space was too tiny, so he felt to the left, finding nothing, then to the right where a block shifted, allowing him to crawl downwards again.
The makeshift rope was given up, but he knew that either he would find a way out or would have to give up anyway; he had come down a long way. His hold on his imaginary thread grew tenuous.
The tunnel he used cut hard to the left; panels flew away; then, Hagan’s feet were hanging in mid-air. Although he stretched his legs in all directions, he couldn't feel anything; the ground had simply disappeared, and he wondered if this were a deep, dark crack in the earth. He'd come so far and dreaded climbing back up, wasn't sure he could even make it. The thought of going back to that small tomb was too depressing. The big black crack was gonna eat him all up, yes, sir and slap-my-ass-and-call-me-Bob.
He took a deep breath.
Like going off the high dive, Hagan didn't think about it, he just let go, praying and visualizing the big white teeth the shark had in that movie when it ate that fellow on a boat.
“Ya’ damned big fish,” he yelled.
With bent knees to absorb the impact, he landed solidly in the hall. A few steps after that to the side, he could see ceiling tiles which he dug through like a rat. It was a miracle that he had landed safely and a miracle that he hadn't fallen on rubble or sharp iron that could've possibly killed him. The biggest miracle was that he hadn't died to begin with in the initial cave-in.
Hagan just sat for a second, feeling literally as if tons had been lifted off his back. He could move. He knew how close he had been to sheer insanity; it wasn’t a bad place at all; insanity is a prison of freedom. He shuddered and took time to settle down.
As he looked around, he grinned big time. He knew this place. Somehow he had landed in the basement, close to a hallway that branched into another hallway, which led right to the cafeteria.
He walked that way until he saw someone.
"Where did you come from?"
"I climbed down from the upper floor." Hagan shrugged as if it were the most natural thing on earth. "Tight in some places."
From across the room, he heard Len hail him. "Where the hell have you been? Thought we lost you." Len shook his hand.
"I was up there.” Hagan pointed upward.
"You gotta be kidding me," Len said.
"Since when does Texas have earthquakes?" Hagan asked.
"It wasn't a quake."
"Huh? Sure it was; what else could have done it?"
"Hi, Hagan, good to see you didn't get burned or crushed." Beth smiled.
"Burned? Is there a fire?" Hagan was getting more confused. Were these people crazy, or was he?
Kim walked over, looking at Hagan closely.
"I'm not burned," Hagan blurted as if that were some secret password that he didn't understand.
"No, you sure aren’t. Where did you come from?" Kim asked.
"Up there," Hagan said. This conversation was making less sense as it went on. Maybe he was dead, imagining this whole thing. "The earthquake knocked everything over up there and almost squashed me like a bug, but I got out and climbed down here." Hagan showed him his tattered shirt and the cuts and scrapes he had. Why did they think he had been burned?
"I can't believe anyone on the upper floors could have survived. You're lucky," Beth said. "He doesn't know what happened; he thinks it was an earthquake." She really hated to be the one to tell him the truth.
This made no sense to Hagan. "What was it?”
"A bomb."
Hagan waited a second. "Excuse me? A bomb?”
"Like a missile. None of us know exactly, probably hit Red River or somewhere," Len explained. "You know that guy with a yellow-tinted Hank Williams, Junior, glasses on? That asshole? He wouldn’t believe for the longest that it was a bomb even though he saw the mushroom cloud."
"You saw it?" Hagan felt that someone had knocked the breath out of him.
"Yes, Kim and I, and the military douche, Bryan, saw it," Beth said.
"Glad you crawled down here and saved us the trouble, Hagan," Kim laughed, "No, seriously, we have so much going on down here, who knows when we would've been able to find you."
Hagan flinched as Len touched the wound on his head. "You have a knot the size of a goose egg. Go get Sally to check it and bandage up those cuts for you. With your head and that lump, I’m surprised you were thinking clearly enough to get here.”
“Glad you made it, Hagan. We lost Billy to the bomb and some black lady to suicide, maybe two dozen in all.”
“Hate to hear it, my Brother.” Hagan patted Len, shook hands with Kim and an older man, introduced as Benny. He hugged Beth. “Lost someone up there? I just saw a foot.”
“That’s bad.”
“Len, who do you think did this?”
“Dunno, Hagan, North Korea or Iraq, maybe we did it to ourselves to clear out the infected. I don’t think we’ll ever really know if it’s like this all over, and I don’t guess it matters.”
Beth snarled, “Matters to me, I’d kill to kick someone in the balls for this.”
11
State of the States
The destruction in the United States was immense. New York City and the DC area had disappeared in firestorms, so huge, and so hot that even those underground and prepared, were incinerated.
Two missiles that had hit the ocean bottom, right off the coast of Florida, exploded on impact, carving out huge craters. Water had vaporized. A ball of fire with a temperature approaching 25,000,000°F had blown across the ocean, slamming over the land within seconds after the detonation, burning everything in its path with winds rising to three hundred miles an hour and squashing buildings as if they were children's blocks. Glass had shattered, melted, and had flowed.
The mushroom cloud of dust and dirt that had been sucked up rose above the ocean, eight miles high. All the fish, for twenty miles around the blast instantly died, sharks sinking into the muck with crustaceans, others bellying up on the surface.
Houston, Texas, had been hit by two hundred mega tons of TNT, and it was as if Johnson Space Center had never existed; five million, mostly Reds or zeds by now, that had been gathering towards the middle of the city, had vanished, leaving two million more behind to be burned, killed by debris, or face the concussion.
Cities such as Albuquerque, Phoenix, El Paso, Atlanta, Detroit, and Seattle, along with the main cities of Dallas, Little Rock, Arkansas, and Colorado Springs, an important part of United States military system, had disappeared.
California, unable to take the damage done to San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and the Valley had shuddered; the area west of the San Andreas’ fault had slipped right off from the rest of the continent, submerging burning cities.
Although the cost was astronomical in terms of the lack of survivors, the
resulting elimination of so many infected who might have traveled east, spreading the virus, was the one action that may have saved parts of the remaining United States.
Missile silos released spears of destruction, going in another direction.
There had been many places, safely between one and point zero, that were directly hit by the missiles. People had seen the mushroom-shaped clouds in the distance and had been glad that they were safe.
But the deadly clouds from the detonation, tornadoes, and raging fires had sent millions of tons of radioactive dust and debris into the sky, and once there, had done two things; first, much of it would remain in the sky for months, if not years, blocking out the sun's rays so that nothing would grow in the cold, brown snow and gray rain that would fall. Just as dangerous, the dust that was deadly with radiation, had sifted back to the earth to poison humans, animals, and plant life; everything that it touched, had been covered by an oily, dusty film.
In Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, tornadoes had crisscrossed over the land, cutting paths like no one could imagine. Floods from the ocean and rivers had drowned seaport cities.
Oddly enough, those infected with Red had been the largest population to be taken out by the bombs, and while there had been mass destruction with radiation that had killed many survivors, the Red in the cities, had been greatly thinned out. It could be said that the cure had been as bad as the original illness, but some would argue that even the bombs and the radiation had been preferable to being eaten alive by the Red Zeds.
Shockingly, with all this destruction, the United States had suffered the least, as other countries had seen the remaining survivors infected and eaten alive and then were lost over the next few months.
12
A Survivor
When it had happened, Tina had been in a hospital room with her sister, two brothers, father, and her mother. Her mother had appendicitis. Amazingly, they all were immune to the Red. They had been in and out of the room but had been standing around her bed, willing her to get well.
All of this was unsettling to Tina. She had been a librarian who excelled in her job mainly because of her OCD, having a specific place for each book and allowing no dust or dirt in the library. It had been perfect for her, as her environment stayed in absolute order: cross-indexed, clean, pristinely neat, the way it should have been.
The hospital hadn’t been orderly or very clean, and she suspected that there had been a spider web in one corner. In the little bathroom off of the hospital room, baseboards had been scuffed, counters had been chipped, and a stray hair had been on the floor close to the toilet.
She had taken Xanax to keep from screaming about everything that she had seen in the hospital days earlier; blood, mucus, urine, and worse. Those fluids had been everywhere. It had nauseated her. Television reports she had seen from the cafeteria horrified her with the images of disorder, filth, and humans, running all around, doing unclean things.
Her mother's fever and sweating almost had driven Tin insane. One of her brothers stared out the window into the parking lot, not really seeing it.
Tina glanced out the window at the lines of perfectly parked cars, columns, and rows neatly formed. She had seen imperfections. Now, she saw a voluminous dark cloud, rolling and billowing with smoke and debris, rise up on the horizon; it was huge, larger than anything she had ever seen.
Tina turned to tell her father that he should look out, just as the room roared with incandescent light. The floor swayed outwards and then inwards. Concrete fell as metal twisted, screaming, and equipment rained down from the upper floors. An enormous crack yawned open in the floor, and Tina watched with horror as her mother's bed began sliding into it, too large to fit. The ceiling bulged, and along the wall, cracks formed.
Tina felt something incredibly hard snap the back of her head, neck, and shoulders, dropping her to her hands and knees and then to her stomach, like a giant flicking at her with a big fingernail. Right before she passed out, the dark rushed at her with the sound of the ocean’s voice. Tina heard the most heart-wrenching wail and a sob that echoed emptiness.
Even when she awoke, she kept her eyes closed, thinking. She knew that for some reason, the hospital building collapsed, and abstractly, she connected the mushroom cloud to the hospital’s falling.
She opened her eyes slowly, lying on her stomach in the rubble, paper, and a dribble of water. It was coffin-like where she was laying, a tiny, oblong space where she could barely wiggle her feet. She could only move her head a few inches. Pointing her toes on only one foot, as the other was numb; she found the end of her coffin. Light showed from there. To either side, she could move her arms and hands.
Under her face was dirty water and grime that made her feel horrible; she painfully rolled over on her back, her skirt scrunching up beneath her, making her more uncomfortable. Her virginal white blouse had come loose and had pulled out from the waistband, so she could feel her back, scraped and dirty. Her Peter Pan collar was pulled to the side.
It felt as if the numbness was leaving her other foot; it was aching now.
Light filtered in from the hole close to her feet, so she was able to see in terms of gray. She froze in absolute horror. Her bladder almost let go. Right above her was the back of a head, an arm that was shredded, and a bluish-grey hand with fingers, pointed down at her accusingly, telling her she had no right to still be alive. No right at all. She thought it was her brother.
She saw a fat black spider on one of the blue-tinged fingernails, crawling closer, and inches above her face.
Not a spider.
A big drop of blood.
It fell, hitting her neck and sliding slowly across her skin to her back. She could almost feel legs scuttling, causing goose pimples.
Without a doubt, Tina knew that the water she had fallen into was probably blood. Her bladder let go, burning, but also feeling good. Hot, searing urine gushed between her legs, stinging her scratches and her scraped back. The blood and urine terrified her.
It was on her.
She screamed hysterically, thrashing and kicking, so disgusted by the nastiness that she felt herself going mad. With dust and pebbles falling across her chest, she stopped moving; screaming now as her foot and ankle throbbed, sending sharp spikes of pain to her brain that threatened to steal her breath.
She made herself calm down, felt in her pocket, and with a lot of maneuvering that caused pain all over, she managed to get a few pills to her lips and dry swallow her Xanax. She waited until she could think again. How many did she have left?
Carefully inching her hands across her thighs and her hurting stomach, then across her breasts, chest, and face, she brushed away the dirt. Tina began to explore her surroundings again, steeling herself against the panic. Toward her feet where plaster had fallen and the ceiling had opened up, she saw her sister’s face; one ear, an eye, and a cheek, torn to the bone. With the hole in her head, it looked as if her brains were oozing through it.
Disgusting.
She scooted plaster over to the side with one foot, and running her bare foot along the floor beneath her, she felt a pillow or wadded sheet but possibly something worse. With the other foot still hurting, she wiggled it a little, experiencing an odd sliding-scraping-thumping-groaning pain in her heel. She didn't think she could take much more.
Another big drop of blood left the fingernail to plop right into Tina's open mouth. Her eyes promptly rolled up in their sockets as her world went black.
As she lay unconscious, the building shifted again, making changes. The little hole, which had let in the light, elongated to three feet tall and six inches wide, a big window but too small to use as a door. Her sister’s head disappeared as her body fell down below. Her brother's body moved upwards, giving Tina more room. Dirty water fell into the hole where the light was dribbling through the cracks, and a thin stream trickled close to her head.
She awoke, imagining the trickle of dirty water was a pure, little spring which she gre
edily sucked down. Then, she slept, again.
The next time she was awake, she looked around, but all she could think about was getting a scalding hot shower that would make her skin lobster-red; she would use disinfectant straight on her flesh. Her fantasy was a shower with lots of clean, hot water and nice-smelling bath gel. Tina was hit by pain that took her breath away. Blinding pain.
She ate another two Xanax, emptying the bottle.
She could sit up a little even with her head heavy as lead. She decided that her ankle was probably shattered, and it felt as if the bones were grinding nauseatingly.
Even with the changes that had occurred while she was unconscious, she found that she was able to rise up a little to look down; her neck muscles ached with the strain of holding her head up. When she wiggled her big toe, it hurt terribly, worse in her ankle. Something was very wrong; she blinked. Big toe? She laid her head back quickly before she could pass out, again. Her bloody, smashed foot was missing its big toe; in its place was just a spongy spot, covered with dirt.
The pain was terrible, she was buried alive with the dead, but somehow, the worst of all was that she was just so dirty. Her bowels cramped painfully, sending fear through her stomach that they would release, leaving her trapped in her own waste. That thought was the worst she had ever had.
Sometimes she wasn't conscious, but when she was awake, her ankle and foot brought the worst pain she could have imagined. Smells were beginning to overwhelm Tina, as the dead had released their bowels and were beginning to smell of decomposition.
While unconscious, again, Tina had fouled herself, and unable to escape the stench and the sticky-mud feeling in her panties, she sobbed and prayed that the next time she was unconscious, she would just die.
No one could live with such filth in her nose and all over her body. The pain was unbearable, and she was so scared here, alone. Oh, and her family was dead.
No one could ever be okay after something like this. Why didn't she just die? She begged her body to let go.
