“Get away from me!” she snapped, terrified by his presence. “I didn’t do anything so don’t you dare touch me you fascist!” The woman scurried to her feet and ran away, leaving her laundry behind on the ground.
The officer could have arrested the woman for her insolence. Instead, his expression sunk. He looked stung by her reaction. He lowered his hand and walked away.
Nearby onlookers crawled out of their tents and quickly rummaged through the woman’s scattered laundry. As the police officer walked past Jerri, she noticed that the glint of kindness in his eyes had dimmed. With time she was sure it'd be gone completely. Yet another apathetic soul would be born.
Jerri made her way through the alleyway and finally arrived at the medical barrack. The medical barrack sat near the housing dorms. Despite the vast number of people inside the camp, not many people made use of the medical facilities. Most people who were admitted died. Staph infections and malpractice were rampant. It was hard to find a quality doctor after the viral outbreak wiped out most of the population. As a result, FEMA gave the doctor title out a little too liberally.
Old advertisements for Acexa were plastered outside on the building. Jerri found that moronic given Acexa’s side-effects. The salvation that Acexa promised cost countless lives. People thought that the vaccine would protect them from the initial outbreak.
The government’s attempt at a vaccine, Acexa, did its intended job admirably for a few days… but then something changed. A mutation. It started turning the hosts into cannibalistic ghouls, reanimated husks of their former selves. By the time what remained of the government tried to recall the drug from the market, it was too late; Acexa had been distributed everywhere. Even after society was destroyed, millions of crates of unused Acexa remain, somewhere, sitting in desolated hospitals and abandoned Red Cross shelters.
Jerri closed her eyes and looked away. Acexa saved her parents from PT-12, but that salvation came with a heavier price. Even after a year, the scars were too fresh and she didn’t want to cry. It was never smart to show weakness in the camp.
She pressed the button next to the medical sally port and the door slid open.
“Attention. Please stand in the center with your arms above your head. Do not move during the decontamination process.” Jerri stood with her arms folded across her chest.
The red light flashed.
The shower head made a noise but nothing came out of it.
“You are now clear to exit the sally port. Let your skin air dry. Thank you for your cooperation.”
Jerri gripped her stomach and acted like she was in agony, ready to put on a show for the medical staff.
The light flashed green and the opposite door opened. Jerri groaned in pain and stepped inside, expecting to get greeted by a receptionist who would make her fill out a bunch of silly forms. Instead, Jerri found herself standing alone in a cramped freezing lobby. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke. A single abandoned desk sat against the wall. The lights were dim and the ceiling tiles were badly water damaged. A large moldy poster hung above the desk:
A door sat on each side of the unmanned desk. One door led into the dark recesses of the patient wing and the other led into the administrative hall.
“Hello, is anybody working here?” Jerri called out, still gripping her stomach.
The only sound that greeted her was the sound of water dripping somewhere in the ceiling. Since she had no need for theatrics, Jerri stopped feigning her illness and walked towards the administrative hall. She pushed opened the door and stared down the hall in disbelief.
Most of the overhead lights were dark and the rest flickered as they struggled to maintain their duty. The tiled ceiling was sagging, moldy, and was dripping. Muddy water had collected in large puddles along the floor and peeled away the wallpaper from the walls. The offices that lined the hall were abandoned and their contents had been picked clean; even the brass nameplates had been pried off of the office doors.
As Jerri walked down the hallway, sloshing through the polluted puddles, she spotted a door that read ‘Staff Lounge’.
She knocked on the door. “Is anybody in there?” she called. After no response, she opened the door and stepped into the dark room. As soon as she entered, the room’s automated lights powered on and sent hundreds of roaches scattering into the room’s dark crevasses. Garbage was piled up in the corners. A sofa with exposed springs sat pushed against the wall, littered with magazines from the old world. A grime encrusted microwave sat in the room’s kitchenette above a sink stacked high with filthy dishes.
Jerri backed out of the room with her hands covering her mouth, stifling a gag. If she had any food in her stomach she surely would have vomited. Every fiber of her being wanted to turn and run out of the building but her devotion to her friend prevented her from doing so. Krystal was her closest friend in the camp and she refused to leave without even trying to help. In the new world, a simple sinus infection or other complications from something like the flu could be deadly. She needed to at least find some antibiotics for Krystal.
Jerri kept walking down the hall until she came to a door adorned with the Homeland Security logo. The sign on the door read ‘Medical Surplus’. It had a small window in the center and was locked by a biometric hand scanner.
If she wanted to get inside she’d have to break the lock. Jerri walked to the window and looked inside. Her expression sunk in horror at the sight. The room was barren with the exception of a box of bandages. She had no idea that the medical situation was so dire.
She backed away from the door and walked back to the lobby, shaking her head.
A sense of despair settled in on her as she headed towards the sally port. An idea struck her.
She stopped and turned towards the patient wing door.
It was a long shot, but it was her only hope of procuring some supplies for her friend. Jerri cautiously opened the patient wing door. The stench of defecation, mildew, and stale air immediately wafted against her face and made her throw her hands over her nose and mouth.
The patient wing consisted of a wide hallway with hospital beds lining the walls. The water-rotted ceiling had collapsed in most places and all of the medical monitoring equipment was gone. Most of the overhead lights were dead and the nurses’ station in the center of the hall was abandoned. The hospital beds were stripped bare and the few that weren’t stripped had withering corpses on them covered in flies. Some of the bodies weakly moved when she opened the door and looked at her with pleading eyes but most of the bodies lay motionless and were already firmly fastened in death’s icy clutch.
At the end of the hall, Jerri spotted a man in nursing scrubs huddled near the edge of one of the beds holding a needle. He slipped the syringe into his arm and gasped with pleasure, nodding to himself.
“…hello?” Jerri called out. Her hand slowly slid into her pocket and grabbed hold of the switchblade. The man startled and quickly dropped the needle. He stood and turned towards her, almost stumbling backwards in his self-medicated stupor.
“Now, just stay calm,” the man stammered. A string of saliva hung from his lower lip, and he held his twitching hands out towards Jerri, palms facing her. “This isn’t what it looks like, I swear…”
Jerri’s eyes trailed down to the needle on the floor and the small vial of morphine on the bed. Multiple empty vials were scattered across the floor. The idiot probably exhausted most of the camp’s supply on his addiction.
A look of revulsion washed over Jerri’s face.
Drug abuse was a crime punishable by death in the camp. “Just… let me explain,” the man said as she stepped towards her. Jerri turned and ran.
She darted through the lobby to the exit.
The sally port’s steel door was sealed shut.
She pressed the button to open the door, terrified.
“Stand by,” a crackled metallic male voice announced overhead, “Hydraulic depressurization in progress. One moment please.”
Th
e sally port door made a grinding noise and hissed. The man in the nursing scrubs emerged from the patient wing and ran towards Jerri, almost tripping over his own feet. “Just stop and let me explain!” the man shouted.
“Depressurization is complete. Thank you for your patience.” The sally port door slid open.
“Leave me alone!” she shouted.
She tried to run inside the sally port but the man grabbed her shirt and tried to pull her back.
Jerri drew her switchblade and spun around, screaming. She flicked the blade open mid-air and swept it across the man’s face. The man let out an anguished cry and let her go. He clutched his gashed left cheek as blood ran out from between his fingers. She stumbled into the sally port and quickly pressed the red button. “You fucking bitch! I’ll kill you!” he cried. Just as he reached out for her, the door slid shut and narrowly missed crushing his hand. He pounded against the door with his closed fists, screaming.
“Attention. Please stand in the center with your arms above your head. Do not move during the decontamination process.” Jerri stood in the middle of the sally port, shaking, tears running down her face. Her heart felt like it was going to beat out though her ribcage.
The shower head made a noise but nothing came out.
Jerri quickly wiped away her tears, wiped the blood off of her switchblade, and concealed her weapon. She took a deep breath and put on a false sense of composure.
It was not good to show weakness in the camp.
“You are now clear to exit the sally port. Let your skin air dry. Thank you for your cooperation.”
Jerri hastily dried her face and calmly walked back towards her dorm.
Hard as she tried, she couldn’t stop her hands from trembling.
6
On her way back to her dorm she walked past four FEMA officers holding animal snares. They looked tired and vastly outnumbered by the sea of haggard pedestrians milling past them. A few people hidden in the crowd shouted obscenities at the officers.
The public was outraged over the disappearance of the dogs and cats but didn’t complain when there was meat served in the chow hall. Three of the officers kept their faces stern as they scanned the area for animals, but the fourth officer clearly looked hurt by the insults; naturally the jeers became directed mostly toward the officer they hurt the most.
People, Jerri noticed, always seemed able to sense and hone in on the vulnerable ones. It depressed her to see what the camp had become. When things first started, the camp operated orderly and everyone worked together to protect the community from their common enemy. Now that the infection was gone, the Acexa reanimates stayed away from the camps and kept near the big cities, and marauder sightings became less common the community started to pick itself apart.
Jerri was embarrassed at what society had been reduced to. After walking for miles through a maze of tents and trash underneath the desert sun, she finally arrived at her dorm and pressed the red button to enter.
The sally port door made an awful grinding noise and started to vibrate.
“Sta-an-an-an-an. Hydraulic depressu– [STATIC]One moment pl–” While Jerri waited, she glanced uncomfortably down the alleyway, expecting to see the man she had just cut emerged out from in-between the tents.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” a man said behind her. Jerri startled but quickly recognized the voice. She turned towards a heavy-set man sitting in one of the tents erected by her building. He wore a tattered t-shirt, checkered golf pants, and a grungy red scarf that covered half of his face from the blistering sun. He had an awful stench.
“Hey Ted,” she said with a fake smile.
He wasn’t buying it.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, coughing.
Jerri shook her head.
“Nothing,” she said.
Jerri’s hand was shaking and her coat had some of the nurse’s blood on it. She stared at one of the archaic signs hung next to the sally port, waiting for what felt like forever.
Ted laughed. “One of these days those Nazis are going to get you for keeping that blade and cutting people,” he said as he pointed at the blood droplets on her hand.
She felt embarrassed and exposed. She quickly wiped her hand off on her jacket, thankful that the apathetic police officers she walked past didn’t notice it.
“Only if you snitch,” she snapped. She didn’t like the fact that he knew about her weapon but he was the one who sold it to her in the first place after all.
If you wanted something illegal inside the camp, Ted was the man to see. Ted shook his head adamantly.
“No way, no how,” he said. “Old Teddy isn’t a snitch.” Jerri nodded.
“I’m glad that your time inside taught you something,” she said. Ted grinned and his golden tooth glistened in the sunlight.
“I’m the most loyal con there ever was. Things fell apart, I broke out, and then I ran right into another prison,” he said gesturing to his surroundings. “I still can’t get over that!”
Jerri smiled. When he wasn’t drunk, Ted had a way about him that lightened her mood. She wasn’t sure if he really did escape from a prison, but she knew he loved to tell his story to anybody who had time to listen.
“They’re a bunch of buffoons,” he said. “The people in here, I mean. They’re pretending that everything will be okay.” “Why do you say that?” Jerri asked, blinking.
“There ain’t a helicopter coming today. It’ll be the same as last week and the week before that and the week before that. We’re cut off,” he said matter-of-factly.
Jerri frowned. Ted wasn’t usually the pessimistic type. “They’re coming,” she said.
“If you say so. Hell, it doesn’t matter if they don’t feed me,” he continued, ignoring her statement, “I have enough to last me for a while.” Ted slapped his portly stomach and chuckled.
“You’re a drunken old fool, Teddy,” she said with a grin. “They’re coming.”
She looked around his tent and noticed that Teddy’s scrawny German Shepard was missing.
“Where’s Bo?” she asked, pointing towards the dog’s empty food dish.
“Motherfuckers,” Teddy muttered, shaking his head. He lost his smile. “They took him from me last night. They said he was a stray.” Teddy’s eyes reddened as he shook his head, staring at the ground. “But I thought he was registered,” Jerri said.
Teddy spat in the sand.
“He was registered… I tried to show them his papers and all I got in return was this,” he explained as he lifted his shirt up and revealed large purple bruises all along the side of his chest. A large tattoo of dragon wrapped around a sword hid underneath the bruises, memories of a time long ago. “I got a lot of beatings from cops when I was growing up… and this one was one of the worst.”
Jerri cringed and looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said. There was something false about her apology however. She knew where the meat in the mess hall was coming from and she knew why the police were constantly hunting down feral animals and placing traps; she wasn’t stupid. She just couldn’t price the life of an animal above the life of a human and it made her feel like a desperate scoundrel. Like everybody else, she tried not to think about it and ignored the facts that glared her in the face every morning.
Teddy lowered his shirt and looked up at her, wiping the tears out of his eyes with his dirty sleeve.
“Those motherfuckers took my best friend,” he said, staring at her. “So stay out of trouble. Old Teddy doesn’t want to lose you too.” The sally port door opened.
“You won’t,” she said.
“Depressurization is complete. Thank you for– [STATIC]”
Jerri stepped inside. It reeked of smoke and burnt hair inside. She pressed the button and held her breath as she expected the normal plume of smoke to shoot out of the shower head.
The door slammed shut behind her.
“Atte– Please stand in – above y– [STATIC]Do not m– the decontaminat–”
> The walls made a loud grinding noise, louder than she ever heard before.
The shower spat out sparks and then a plume of smoke. Jerri was badly startled by the sparks and then started coughing on the thick black smoke. The sparks were something new.
“You are now c–clear–clearclearclearclearclear–”
The second door opened and Jerri stumbled into the dorm, still coughing. A woman in her thirties with a horrible sunburn stood in the hall, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. She looked at Jerri and took a long drag, exhaling her smoke up towards the non-operational smoke detector in the ceiling.
“That thing is on its last leg,” the woman said, cackling. “Been getting worse all day. Won’t be long till we can walk in and out as we please just like building three.”
Jerri didn’t say anything, kept her eyes fixed forward, and walked past the woman. She made it a point not to talk to strangers unless she couldn’t help it. Strangers always wanted something.
“You got any spare rations, baby?” the woman asked. “Or smokes? I’d fuckin’ chop my own dad’s balls off for a pack of decent smokes.”
Jerri didn’t make eye contact and kept walking forward. The camp was full of predators.
“Bitch,” the woman called out.
As Jerri walked away the woman took another drag and narrowed her eyes, watching her as she retreated down the hall. Jerri got to her room, opened the door, and walked inside with her eyes shut. Once she was safely inside her room, she collapsed on her cot and started sobbing without making any noise. Her sobs were deep gut wrenching sobs that stole the air out of her chest and made her stomach heave. Her whole body shook.
She cupped her face with her hands and tried to control herself. Her lungs took deep angry breaths, making her whole body jar. She was tired of offering fake smiles and empty laughs. She was tired of being afraid of everyone all the time. She was tired of feeling helpless and hiding behind a knife. She was tired of feeling useless; she couldn’t even help her friend. She was tired of existing just to exist…
Desolation Page 3
