by E. E. Giorgi
The glow grew larger, and in the surreal light that burned her retinas she saw something move—stagger, rather—toward her. She came to a halt and held her breath.
Her vision was still patchy, the lights as bright as an overexposed picture, and the rest still as black as night. She squinted, straining her eyes. She’d once heard that people don’t really need glasses and perfect vision is really controlled by the brain. So she willed her eyes to see and the black blob staggering against the orange glow came better in focus: a man, or a shadow, rather, for all she could tell, swaying, as though injured.
“Hey!” Anu yelled. She raised her arms above her head and waved. “Hey! Are you ok?”
The blob froze. Then it started jogging. Then running. She couldn’t make the features. Only shapes. A man, for sure. Broad body built, a beret on the head.
One of the Guardsmen.
Finally, someone to ask for help!
She stepped forward, more details filtering through her retinas, as if her eyes were slowly readjusting to light. The relief of being able to see again was quickly taken away by the terrifying view of the fire looming before her. Flames enveloped the west side of the chemistry building, the metal roof crinkled and warped as if it had been made of toothpicks. The walls groaned and hissed. Then came the blast. The window glass panes shattered in a million fragments. The boom sucked in all sounds and reverberated across the night.
The wave of energy knocked Anu off her feet. She saw the officer fall forward too and then roll down the street, unable to stand up again.
He must be injured.
She shot back up and ran to help him. The man lay on his stomach, whimpering, his uniform shirt soaked in blood. The smell hit her full face, visceral and putrid, as if some kind of infection had taken over the man’s body. How could this man be in such a state?
“Sir? Are you ok?” She kneeled by his side and leaned over him, wanting to help yet not daring to touch him.
She glimpsed the flash of metal one second too late. Barrel pointed too high to hit her, the firearm exploded in her face, the blast thunderous in her ears. She ducked, covered her head and dropped to the ground. A hand clawed around her right ankle and pulled. Anu screamed.
“Get away from me!”
The scream seemed to revive the soldier. He wobbled his head and aimed the gun somewhere past her. That’s when she realized he couldn’t see. Like the first one, the second bullet flew past her as she jerked the opposite direction. She dug her fingers into his wrist, but he wouldn’t let go of her ankle.
He rolled his eyes back and growled, the whites glistening like milk in his ghastly face, and hit her with the butt of the gun. The more she kicked and screamed, the more his blind fury seemed to revive.
A new explosion shattered the walls of the chemistry building, sending burning debris in all directions. The whole structure let out a long groan of defeat and collapsed in on itself. A piece of roof cut through a tree that was miraculously still standing. Decapitated, the burning crown flew inches away from Anu, the heat from the flames blowing in her face as she struggled to get away from the man’s grip.
She heard a click and suddenly the barrel was pressed against her forehead. She froze. The soldier’s smell was revolting. She felt like throwing up yet she didn’t dare move, his body pressed hard against her legs, making it impossible for her to escape.
He can’t see…
She leaned backwards, groping with her left hand toward the blazing branches. She grabbed it, flames lapping at her fingers, and tossed it in the man’s face. He roared in pain and let go of her and the gun. He rolled away and covered his face with his hands, the blaze enveloping him.
In a final instinct for survival, Anu grabbed the gun he’d dropped and ran.
* NINE *
He was drowning in a bottomless, black ocean. Down and down he went, thinking soon he’d start gagging because there’s no air in the ocean, yet the drop never came to an end, nor did his breathing. In fact, not only could he still breathe, but he started thinking that the bottom of the ocean smelled bad. It made his throat itch and burn. As if it were smoking.
Oceans don’t smoke.
A fish swam by. He couldn’t see it, because everything was black, but David felt its presence as it wiggled around him. It came so close to his face he could feel its icy nose pressed to his temple.
Fish don’t have noses.
Yet this strange fish pressed its nose against David’s temple and said, “The blindness has been planned.”
David’s eyes snapped open. At first he thought he was still dreaming. Blips of light flickered before his eyes. The world wasn’t black anymore. He stretched his arms, pressed the heel of his hands against his eyes and then reopened them.
The ceiling. He could actually see the ceiling above him.
The icy nose kept prodding at his temple.
He turned, slowly.
It wasn’t a nose.
He jumped to his feet, adrenaline rushing through his veins.
“What? Have you gone completely out of your mind?”
Anu rose from her crouched position, gun still pointed at his face. She looked ghastly. The right shoulder of her shirt was covered in dried blood. Spatters sprinkled her face, her hair was knotted and disheveled. A dried tear of blood came down from her left ear. Her clothes were torn, poked by twigs and pine needles. Her hands were blistered.
Oh my God, David thought. She is infected, just like I thought. She’s gone mad and now she wants to kill me.
He raised his hand, slowly and spoke in his lowest possible voice. “Anu. Don’t do anything stupid. Please.”
Her face relaxed, her knitted brows came down a notch. She lowered her hand and tossed the gun onto the pillow on the floor. David dove to catch it.
“Shit, Anu, you don’t toss loaded guns like that! They could fire!”
She shrugged and dropped on the floor, hugging her knees. “I don’t even know how to use it. Oh God, what a nightmare!”
David sat on the blankets he’d just jumped out and stared at her. “What the hell happened to you? Are you—are you sick?”
“What? Oh. That. No. Not yet at least. But everybody else out there is. Christine, then the nutty soldier… I thought—I thought everybody had gone crazy. That’s why I pointed the gun at you. I wanted to see if you’d become one of them too.”
David scratched his head, still confused and dazed. At least she didn’t sound completely delusional like infected normally did. “Jeez, Anu. Thanks. You could’ve asked.”
The world started coming back one piece at a time. The darkness was receding. There was a pale light filtering through the open door to the common area—maybe the sun making its shy comeback to the world. The blankets next to his were rolled to the side, the pillow tucked underneath.
Where’s Jeff?
David craned his head and looked through the door, making out the humps of the people sleeping on the floor. Somebody was stirring. A head rose.
“Hey. Hey! I can see. I can see!” he shouted.
Funny how voices were colorless now that light was seeping through again.
A murmur followed, the humps moving, people rising.
“The light is back!”
“Praise the Lord, the light is back!”
“What’s that smell?”
“Something’s burning!”
They all rushed to the windows.
“You guys couldn’t see either?” Anu whispered.
David nodded. “The world went black. Completely black, not even spotty or blurry… just black. Joyce called in at one point. Apparently it was all over the globe. It caused—it caused an apocalypse. Literally. Everything in motion crashed—cars, planes, helicopters. Jeff found a radio station that was still transmitting and the reports made the hairs on our backs stand up. Where—where were you?”
She looked puzzled. “The whole world went blind?”
The thought that she might be infected after all crossed
his mind once more. “Where did you get the gun?” he asked.
She looked down at the firearm now in David’s hand as if trying to recall.
“A soldier attacked me. The chemistry building is burning. I thought the man was there to help out, instead… Why—why aren’t firefighters out there?”
Just then sirens blasted. An engine tore by on the street. People came running out of the common room and down the hallway.
“Fire!” A woman screamed.
David pulled the blankets toward the wall to let them pass. A man stopped to shake his hand. “You must be David. I didn’t know who you were until last night when you came to rescue me from my room. Thank you!”
David nodded, unsure what to reply.
They all ran outside. All, except Anu, who remained curled against the wall.
David walked into the now deserted common area and looked out the windows. The pale orange light filtering through was from the fire. A column of smoke rose from the chemistry building, just one block away. It glowed into the dying night, a pale dawn rimming the profile of the mountains.
Damn it, what the hell’s going on?
At the back of the room, the computer terminals whirred, the LED lights of their sleeping screens blinking in the dim light.
At least there’s still electricity.
He lifted the phone on the conference table, but all he heard was the busy signal.
“Come on,” he said to Anu, back in the hallway. “We need to get out of here. The fire’s too close.”
She lifted her head and she was crying, tears rolling down her face and smearing the mix of dirt, soot and dried blood on her cheeks. “My samples. Is anybody going to save my samples?”
He should’ve been mad at her. At a time like this, with all the lives lost and the ones still in danger, the woman was still thinking about her damn samples. But to see her in this state, wounded and fragile, somehow made all his rage wane. He kneeled down and squeezed her arm. She flinched and yelped. A flap of her shirt came down from her shoulder, revealing purple and bruised skin underneath, two arcs of teeth marking a trail of blood.
“Who did this to you?”
Anu wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “They’re all going insane. I wanted to find a cure so badly, but now the whole world is crashing. It’s just too late.” She sobbed. “Too freaking late. I’d never seen in person what they can do. Only clinical videos. It’s—it’s scary. The strength in their body. If it weren’t that they couldn’t see, they would’ve killed me with their bare hands.”
More sirens blasted in the distance. Voices, the crackling of fire. A chopper swooshing through the sky.
David sighed. “If it’s any consolation, the program you had me write wasn’t working. We would’ve—”
“That’s because I had too little data,” she interjected. “If we could get ahold of the new samples and sequence them—”
“No. It’s not just a matter of data. The program keeps giving me the wrong dates. The simulation runs for hours and then it comes back saying that this virus is only a few years old. You said H7N7 has been around for centuries, so—”
“Wait. What did you just say?”
He swallowed. “According to my simulation, this strain of H7N7 originated in the Nineties, then had a long ‘dormant’ phase and then started mutating like crazy over the past couple of years. There’s something wrong with it. It keeps contradicting what you’ve been telling me about this virus.”
She gaped, as if mesmerized, a sudden idea crossing her mind, her face hung in disbelief, regret, frustration…
I’m just reading too much into this.
Another blast came from the chemistry building, putting a new urgency into his thoughts. “Come on, Anu. We need to get out of here!”
She nodded and wearily got up.
* * *
The sun had come out, an orange disk clouded by thick smoke. The sky looked surreal, painted in tones of red and purple. The air, already deprived of oxygen from the high altitude, was so rare it was hard not to wheeze.
The winds had picked up, blowing the blaze to nearby buildings. Ashes swirled like disoriented butterflies, tapping on windows and blanketing the streets.
Three fire engines had surrounded the chemistry building. The firefighters looked disoriented, they too, probably, just come out of nearly a day of dazing blindness. People were gathering in the street, despite all efforts from the Army Guard officers to keep them away.
“Out of the way!” they kept screaming. “Too dangerous. Please evacuate all buildings and leave the premises!”
“What started the fire?” David shouted. The blaze was so loud he could barely hear his own voice.
“We don’t know,” one of the firefighters replied. “All sorts of bad things happened during the blindness. Somebody was probably inside running some experiment. Maybe it was a burner left unattended, who knows. We don’t even know how many people are still trapped in the building. Not that there’s any chance of finding anyone alive by now.”
A loud pop tore all eyes away from the blaze. The firefighter froze, his eyes bulged and a gaping hole blossomed in the middle of his forehead. A harrowing scream followed. People dropped to the ground, covering their heads. In a flash, David caught a glimpse of a man in uniform walking toward them, gun pointed, eyes bloodshot and delirious.
“Run!” Anu yelled, as they both ducked, bullets whipping past their heads and bouncing off a stop sign behind them.
“Down,” David yelled. “Get down!” They backed away from the street, people screaming and running in all directions.
“They’re infected,” Anu cried. “They’re all infected!”
Gunfire rattled, loud, frightening, as they scrambled for safety from an enemy they couldn’t see or predict.
One more loud pop and then silence, sudden, empty, broken only by the hissing and crackling of the nearby fire. Crouched behind the bumper of one of the emergency vehicles, David craned his head over the hood.
The street in front of the burning chemistry building had turned into carnage. Bodies lay in pools of blood, scattered between the ambulances, the fire engines and the sidewalk, civilians, officers, and firefighters alike. A man had been skewered while fleeing by a sidewall, the trail of his body as he flopped to the ground drawn in red on the white stucco. The officer David had spotted opening fire over the crowd was lying on the ground face down, his smoking gun still clutched in his right hand.
“What the hell happened?” David whispered.
“It’s the virus,” Anu replied, still crouched low behind the vehicle. “They’re all infected. The virus makes them kill one another.”
The blaze had become a surreal background, crawling dangerously closer to the street, every new blast sending sparks and embers raining down on the nearby buildings. Heedless of the danger, as soon as the gunfire stopped, two firefighters left their hoses and came looking for survivors among the bodies. A young officer from the Army Guard emerged from behind one of the fire engines, his gun still drawn, and walked over to check on the armed man he’d shot down. He, too, was wounded, blood was dripping down his left sleeve.
One of the firefighters offered to look at his arm. He shook his head, eyes still fixed on the man he’d taken down, another officer, one of his own. “I had to shoot him,” he mumbled. “I had to. He was going to kill everybody if I didn’t stop him.” And then, as he looked up at the people still crouched in their hiding spots, he called: “You can come out, now,” his voice cracked at the edges like an old wound. “It’s safe, though I don’t know for how much longer.”
From down the street came the growl of an armored vehicle. It wobbled up the street, then stopped inches away from the shooting scene, the glow from the fire glimmering across the windshield.
The door opened. A man came out, older, a captain, judging from the two-barred insignia on his shirt. “The virus is among us,” he said, shouting over the sizzling of the blaze. “My men are infected
. I no longer know who’s opening fire because of the madness and who’s squeezing the trigger to prevent more innocent loss of life.”
People—the few who’d survived the shooting—came out of their hiding spots. A woman crawled from underneath one of the fire engines and ran to one of the bodies, crying. A few more emerged from behind the cars parked along the street. The stench of blood mixed with the acrid reek of burning plastic and metal.
“What should we do, Captain?” a firefighter asked, holding an axe as though he no longer knew what to do with it.
The captain narrowed his eyes, wrinkles lining his tired face. “Everyone, listen up. I'm Captain Giovino, commanding the military police company. Lieutenant Colonel Vigil, the task force commander, is missing. At this time, I am assuming command of all military personnel. For all civilians, as of now, the lab must be completely evacuated. I’m headed over to headquarters so I can coordinate the evacuation with the director herself.”
Anu stepped forward. “We can’t leave! We have to find a cure! We can still stop the insanity!”
“Ma’am,” the captain said, shaking his head. “From now on we should all look at one another as a possible enemy. This officer”—he pointed to the body lying face down on the street—“opened fire on the crowd for no other reason than flu-driven insanity. This is what it has come down to. If you spot this kind of insanity, it doesn’t matter if it’s your mom, sister, brother, or loved one, make it stop no matter what it takes. Survival is no longer for the immune. It’s for the resilient. All lines have been busy and I haven’t been able to get ahold of management since last night. In the meantime, I have only one recommendation for you all: run. Leave this place as soon as possible. Trust no one, not even your loved ones. Kill, if necessary, even the innocent. I never thought I would ever say this in my career, but this is what it has come down to.”
There was a new explosion, the blaze resistant to whatever stuff the firefighters kept pumping at it. The heat was becoming unbearable. The EMTs started running back and forth with their stretchers and shouting at people to step away from the fire.
