by E. E. Giorgi
“What about food?” David asked, grimly. He’d been holding off that question as long as he could. But it had to come up. All these people were soon going to be hungry. He already was.
Jeff sighed. “Why don’t we settle for the night? We’ll think about food tomorrow. Maybe Joyce will have some good news in the morning.”
“Or maybe we’ll wake up and it will all have been a bad dream.”
He knew it wasn’t true. He knew that whatever was happening they had to keep fighting, work through the night to find a solution. Yet a deep, heavy exhaustion was taking over his body, numbing his limbs, his fears, his thoughts.
The voices of the people settling for the night made a nice, comforting buzz in the background. Green, David thought. Green like a freshly mowed lawn. The thought brought back happy memories. Sparks of hope in such a bleak day.
Jeff and he got a blanket and a pillow each and settled on the floor just outside the common area, for fear of stepping on people.
“Thanks for your help, man,” Jeff said, his voice turning into a tired slur. Siri—his iPhone—told them it was past 3 a.m. They had spent the last eight hours going up and down the stairs and rescuing people. They both felt exhausted in a weird, surreal way. Everything was surreal.
“Nothing to thank me for,” David replied. “We’re all in this shit together.”
Jeff snorted. He shifted, his blanket rustled against the wall. A click, some static. “Look what I got.”
David raised his head then slumped back on the pillow. As if he could see.
“What is it?”
“Listen.”
The familiar crackle of static.
“A radio?”
“Had it in my room, got it while we were sweeping the fourth floor.”
“You think you somebody will be broadcasting at a time like this?”
“You never know. Radios have been man’s best friend during wars and all sorts of catastrophes.”
He had a point. David yawned. The crackle and whistling of static continued.
“Who is this general who came visiting today?” he asked. “Do you know?”
Jeff’s deep voice rose above the crackling static of the radio. “I’m not sure. He’s from Thailand, or Vietnam, maybe. And I’m not even sure he’s a real general, you know? He wears a uniform, but I think he’s more of an extremely wealthy Asian who doesn’t quite know what to do with all his money and so he decided to donate it to H7N7 research. A philanthropist of some kind. Of course, one should wonder how come the US suddenly are ok accepting a huge chunk of money from a wealthy, self-proclaimed general. He seems to be schmoozing a lot with Senator Greg Terson, for some reason.”
David let out a sardonic chuckle. “Maybe the guy’s philanthropic deeds included anonymous donations to the Terson reelection campaign.”
Jeff snorted. “Quite possible, actually. These days it’s not too hard to pay a law firm to make money transfers that end up being completely anonymous. You heard Joyce. He gets lots of love from the Senate Committee for Energy and Natural Resources.” He sighed. “One of those things we’ll never know for sure. The CIA has its own friends in Indochina. They can prop up or destroy people at will.”
David was quiet for a few minutes, his fingers brushing the hem of his blanket just so to have some noise to fill the emptiness of his blindness.
Jeff kept turning the radio knobs.
“Anu never mentioned this general visiting today,” David said, after a little while. “Maybe she didn’t get the memo.”
“Or, most likely, she just trashed the email without opening it. We all do stuff like that. Too many emails, too many insignificant memos.”
“You think Anu will be ok?” David asked, unable to stop thinking that she was the only one of their small group still unaccounted for.
“I don’t know,” Jeff replied, a little too coolly to sound sympathetic.
“She’ so… damn stubborn.”
Jeff sighed. “She is. You had to see her yesterday, confronting the soldiers. She couldn’t care less that those guys were armed to their teeth.”
“All she cares about is her data.”
Jeff fumbled some more with the radio then left it on some random frequency that whirred softly in the background.
White noise. Can’t be bad. Fills some of the darkness.
“What about you, Jeff?”
“What about me?”
David realized he’d been with Jeff so many hours and he still hadn’t given a color to his voice yet. Or asked him anything about his personal life.
“Anu’s fighting this virus because of her mom,” David explained. “What about you? What keeps you doing this?”
Jeff ruminated silently. David heard the soft rustling of his head against the pillow, his fingers brushing the blanket. “I’ve been working on influenza for fifteen years,” he said at last. “I thought—I thought I’d seen it all. Yet when this flu strain arrived… Man, who would’ve ever imagined? It was so devastating…”
He exhaled deeply and David guessed that there was more to his words than he was willing to say.
“Someone… someone close?” David asked, tentatively.
He heard nothing, at first. And then a long, repressed sob. “I came home one day,” Jeff said, his voice broken and high in pitch. “I came home to find my house a bloody mess.”
Silence, again. Silence deeper than a starless night, heavier than a load of cement. David said nothing this time. Waited.
“My wife—she’d killed the kids and the—” Jeff choked, swallowed hard, then resumed the account, his voice cracked by wounds too deep to heal. “The baby. I found the baby crushed on the floor. She’d tossed her from the loft. Slashed the kids’ throats with a kitchen knife. By the time I found them, there was nothing I could do. I just—left.”
David held his breath. God. How many horror stories like Jeff’s were out there?
“Your wife—?” he asked.
“Dead. She’d killed herself, too. I always wondered about that. Did she kill herself because of a last spark of lucidity? Did she ever see with her own eyes what she’d done?” He paused, then added, “I hope not. I hope she never saw what I saw.”
More silence. The crackle of static from the radio. The murmur from the common room abating and turning into soft snores.
“Kill me,” Jeff said.
David blinked, his eyelids heavy with exhaustion. “What?”
“If this ever happens to me, please kill me. Before I do any harm. Before I do anything I would regret for the rest of my life. Even if there ain’t any more life to live. Just—kill me.”
Jeff said nothing more, nor did David ask anything more. Silence fell, softly, cradled by the snores from the common room. And then the radio took over, magically tuning to a broadcasting frequency, one of the few left, maybe the last one… A strange voice droned into the night, suspended between dreaming and wakefulness, between life and death, between the world they knew and the one yet to come.
“… I’m blind and that’s you see- you can’t see, no one can see apparently, everything’s gone dark, and I’ve been lucky enough to grab a fire hose (I think it's a fire hose, I’m not sure, I’m blind but something long is spraying water around and I’m sure it’s not an elephant trunk I grabbed twenty minutes ago). I’ve been forced to use it against the damn other six people I’m locked in this bunker with, Mother Midnite getting the first tsunami. I’m sorry, but you all are just freaking the hell out like a bunch of badgers thrown together in a burlap sack. Time for Daddy to use the water.
For those of you who just tuned in …
Hello friends and kitties, it’s the prophet of Pahrump calling, and this is the Midnite Special, broadcasting from Pahrump, Nevada, and relayed through "the X" station in Acuña, Mexico.
I can fiddle around with these radio controls and I can spray all I want because I’ve been trained in darkness and blindness. I’m not Bane, friends and kitties, but I know the dark I was
held in a V.C. camp in the late 1980s doing some runs for the Reagan Gang and I know how to crawl around like a quiet little weevil and live blind as I had to spend 100 days in a tiger cage with a sack over my head. I used to take every Sunday and every other Friday off to put a blindfold on and just wander around the house doing karate kicks against the walls in case I had home intruders after dark. That’s why the Blue Velvet Suite is messed up in the dry wall (not that you can see it right now! Oh! Oh! Oh!).
I feel a new power coming. I bet you can feel it too. All that crap about the Golden Triangle and then the Golden Crescent… no, not crap. Money. And you know, money is evil. Veeeeeery evil. We all love it, though, don’t we? We all want a piece of the pie. Until it comes and eats you all up. The pie. What do you know? Too late.
Hear, hear. You hear me, you’re blind too. Nothing wrong with that. It’s been planned ordained and fired down and it’s nothing to be worked up about. These things happen. The flu happened. That’s something to worry about. Not blindness. Flu. Besides, some of you can still see, right? Out there, there’s a chosen tribe of a few who can see and can peek around the curtain and see the little men working the Wizard machine. Am I right? Or do I have to spray you with the hose again? I’ll spray again. Some can see.
Maybe all of us if we know where to look.”
* EIGHT *
Night, everywhere. A night so black it swallowed all light, even the tiniest sparkle, shadow, glow.
Nothing survived. Nothing but pitch black.
Anu was never too fond of nighttime.
Back in graduate school, she’d work through her papers until late at night, yet she kept all lights of her small, one-bedroom apartment on. She couldn’t stand darkness. That’s why she loved New Mexico so much. Sunshine pretty much all year long, even in the dead of winter.
The elevator jerked to a stop and the doors squeaked open. Anu took a mental note of where the sound had come from. She gingerly trailed her fingers along the side, headed to where her ears told her the way out was, until she felt the sticky mess spattered on the wall, bits of flesh still entangled in. She remembered the splat she’d heard earlier, followed by Christine’s agonizing bawl, and ran. She slammed against the open door, found the emptiness next to it, and fled out of the elevator and into the darkness.
And then she froze.
The darkness was everywhere, so thick it made a constant buzz in her head. An the utter sense of loss took hold of her. Of helplessness. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to escape from the emptiness that surrounded her. Her shoulder burnt, where Christine had bit her. Her muscles were strained and sore.
She dropped on her knees and cried.
“Please,” she sobbed. “Please, help me.”
If I can’t see, if I can’t have those samples, I might as well die.
I might as well…
A squeak.
Distant.
A squeak and a thud, both gentle, both repetitive.
Who’s there? she thought, though this time she refrained from calling out loud. Not Christine. Or another one like her.
How many could there be?
What if Christine did infect everyone in the lab yesterday?
Are we all going insane?
She decided she didn’t have a choice. She wiped the sticky mess off her hand, stood up, and followed the sound, her arms stretched out to see what her eyes could no longer see.
She stepped into a wall, brushed her hands against it and followed it toward the sound. Squeak, thud. Squeak, thud. Her heart started racing. It sounded like a door. It had to be a door. Was somebody moving it or was it just a draft? She resisted the urge to call out for help. One careful step after the other, the rhythmic sound got closer and closer.
And then she stopped. She felt cool air on her face, from the outside, tainted with smoke. The sound was in front of her, taunting her with its soft cadence, squeak, thud, squeak, thud. She stretched her hand out and stopped it.
The door.
Cold to the touch, the air outside chilly. Nighttime.
All doors to the outside were supposed to be locked. Had been locked. The one exception, the door in the basement she’d used to access the building.
I closed it back.
I know I did.
Had somebody followed her inside the building?
The thought prompted her to push the door open and run outside. By now, she’d learned to keep her hands up to shield herself. She bumped into the tree stump fallen across the stairs up to the ground level, ducked underneath, and clambered up the stairs. The reek of smoke was so strong it made her eyes water. The sounds were muffed, the ground cold, confirming what she’d already noticed: out in the world—if there was still a world that hadn’t been sucked into the blackness—it was night.
And in this weird, twisted night, something was on fire.
Anu tried to mentally picture her location. She was standing outside the genomic lab, down the incline at the back of the building. The ground was uneven, scattered with rocks, junipers, and ponderosa pines. Depending on how close the fire was, it could potentially jump to the tree crowns in a matter of minutes, given how dry everything still was, even after last night’s downpour. She had to get back to the street and find help.
Where? And how?
Up. The street is at the top of the incline. She stretched her hands out and waded upwards, one step at a time. She tripped into a rock and plunged forward, smacking against a tree. She almost felt like crying. No, it wasn’t the pain, though her bitten shoulder hurt like hell, her face was scraped and bleeding, and every joint in her body ached. It was the desperation, the sense of helplessness. She was a prisoner in her own mind.
Suck it up, Anu. How many blind people are there in the world and they all lead a normal life?
They were born like this. They learned to deal with it.
Then roll up your sleeves and learn too.
Right.
She sniffed, listened to the fire as it sizzled and hissed and popped. It sounded alive, like a beast devouring things along its path.
Why aren’t there firefighters? Or helicopters? Or sirens blasting and people running back and forth and yelling to get out of here?
Where is everybody?
As she stood there, hugging the tree she’d slammed into, she heard a burst, followed by a loud snap. She turned to the noise and squinted, spots forming on her retinas. Spots. After hours of being stuck in complete darkness, she welcomed the change. Another burst, and the spots crackled and moved upward, glimmering.
Glimmering…
She slowly let go of the tree and took a step forward, her hands groping in front of her.
A swoosh and then a crack, the sound of a tree falling, and then more crackles as flames enveloped it, a wave of heat yawning on her face, the sounds so vivid now, she could clearly imagine the scene… orange flames rising against the black sky, casting an eerie glow on the darkened building around them…
An eerie glow…
She blinked.
It wasn’t her imagination.
She could see the glow.
It was faint, and blurry, like a reflection on a fogged mirror, yet she followed it like Theseus followed the thread out of the labyrinth, slowly climbing up the hill until her feet stepped on a hard and flat surface again.
The sidewalk. Finally.
She exhaled a sigh of relief and tried to orient herself.
The genomic building was to her right, the road slightly curving to the left, and merging into a roundabout. And the glow…
Oh no.
If she was right about her position, the glow was hovering right above the chemistry building. The structure contained so many hazardous substances that if they caught fire the whole lab could blow up in a matter of seconds.
Damn, why isn’t anyone doing anything? Where is everybody?
Did they all evacuate?
One block down was the administrative building, where they had been quarantined yesterday.
There’ve got be people in there. They can’t be all gone.
Contrary to her better instincts she started walking along the sidewalk and toward the fire, the one and only thing she could see right now guiding her through the darkness. Another burst followed and this time she caught more details, the trunk of a tree splitting in two as it groaned and collapsed to the ground in a cloud of sparks and flying embers. The smoke made her eyes and throat burn. She searched with her hands for poles, walls, barricades, things she remembered along the way. Most of the time she’d find them where she’d least expect them to be. Other times she’d miss the reference she was looking for, making her wonder if she even was where she thought she was.
As a kid, she’d played that game many times. She’d shut her eyes on her way home from school and imagine all the things along the way. The purple house with the yellow slide in the back yard. The stop sign. The pole with the lost kitty flyer that had been there for months and nobody could tell her if they ever found the kitty. The old VW always parked at the same corner, always in front of the same house.
She’d cheat from time to time and look down at the tips of her shoes to make sure she wasn’t about to trip into anything. The town was small and traffic was occasional in the neighborhood where she grew up. Once a bike bell rang at her for a good five seconds. She’d laughed at that.
But the thing she remembered most vividly was getting to the end of her imagined path thinking she’d reached her house, opening her eyes, and finding herself in a completely different spot. Sometimes she overshot, and ended up at the playground, one block farther down the street. Other times, she was a couple of houses short. And every time that first feeling of being disoriented and then the surprise of discovering where she really was put a big smile on her face.
She wondered about that now, of where she could possibly be as opposed to where she thought she should be. It wasn’t funny, now. It was scary.
A gust of wind almost knocked her off her feet. The fire hissed, the flames higher now. Her eyes welled up, itching from the smoke, yet she kept them open, clinging to the light she could finally see. The orange column of smoke rose higher, outlining the silhouette of the building—definitely the chemistry building, she thought, recognizing the boxy shape.
