“Mmmm,” she said. Her tongue flicked over the head of my cock and I felt that familiar and always-fresh jolt of sexual electricity race across my skin. I nearly dropped the clipboard and grabbed the steel shelf to steady myself.
My left hand slipped in something, and the very last shred of my consciousness that hadn’t been pumped into my prick wondered about the slick substance on my fingers.
I looked down at Jilly, she was right, I wanted to fuck, I wanted to fuck, I wanted to fuck . . . and I glanced at my hand.
I had a handful of vibrant green snot.
* * * * *
I saw my first grin on the Golden Gate Bridge. How picturesque. Jillian and I had been living in Pacific Heights for 15 years when the outbreak happened. While people were dying in other parts of America and the world at large, my wife and I were taking a Sunday stroll. We’ll never know why the government kept things under wraps for so long. They didn’t get first responders like Jillian involved until there were confirmed outbreaks of the smiler sickness from coast to coast, and by then it was far too late to do anything.
We had taken Friday off, meaning Jillian stayed home from the office and I stayed away from the laptop and my stories. The plan was to enjoy a three-day staycation, a short vacation at home. We didn’t even leave the house until Sunday morning. We ordered in pizza and Chinese food, and watched old movies and bullshit reality TV. She didn’t see or hear any breaking news. Bad shit was part of Jillian’s job, and being on vacation, she wanted to avoid any news. Besides, she had her Blackberry. If anything did happen, the office could reach her. I peeked at the headlines on Google News from time to time, but it was all the same old stuff. We made love, too. Not as much as we did when we were younger, but enough. I’m not telling you that so you’ll think I’m some kind of stud who was banging his wife at every opportunity. I’m mentioning it because it was the last time things were ever the way they were.
While we were enjoying each other’s company, the smiler sickness had come to San Francisco. It spread fast, by grin attacks—primary transmission, accidental contact with body fluids—secondary transmission, and by flies—tertiary transmission. I’ll say more about that later. By the time Jillian and I drove out to the bridge for our late morning walk, the city basking under a summer sun was doomed. We had no idea. Our walk must have taken place during a lull in the violence that is so much a part of the smiler sickness. To us, everything seemed normal.
Jillian loved the bridge. It was a long walk from one side to the other and back again, but the ocean air was always bracing and the views of the Pacific on one side and San Francisco, the bay and Marin County on the other were incredible when they weren’t completely obscured by the fog.
The grin was a man with a military buzz cut. He was wearing sneakers, blue jeans and a t-shirt. I assume he had lost part of his right arm, in Iraq or Afghanistan, there’s no way to know now, and he had a prosthetic two-pronged hook held in place by straps over each shoulder.
We first saw him at a distance. He would approach tourists or locals on the east sidewalk, the city-facing bridge walkway, and they would shy away from him. I assumed he was a bum who had strayed from downtown, begging for spare change in the most unlikely place. As he got closer, I got a better look at him and began to feel uneasy.
His skin was discolored; scratched and streaked with blood in some places, nearly gray in others. I didn’t know then that the parasites, now identified as giardia motivus, carried a number of diseases, including one that caused a condition similar to mange. The skin of the infected became inflamed and itched furiously as it died. His hair had fallen out in patches and he had scratched at his scalp until it was raw and red.
There was a thick flow of bright green snot on his lips and chin, another sign of the parasite; his immune system was in overdrive in a futile fight against the smiling sickness.
He was grinning like a lunatic, the symptomatic rictus making him smile so wide it had to have hurt, and he was gnashing his teeth and snapping his jaws as if biting at the air. There was a terrible gaping wound on the side of his throat. Only later would I think back and realize he must have caught the sickness after having been attacked by another grin.
I took Jillian’s arm and turned her around, heading back the way we had come.
She didn’t say anything. Her face was pale. She had seen the man too.
It was then that I recalled stories I had seen online over the weekend, stories about a mystery illness appearing across the country. The stories were on blogs, and were discounted by all of the legitimate news sources which quoted government officials who insisted nothing was wrong and said there was no need for the media to spread unnecessary fear and unrest as they had done in the past with SARs and avian flu.
A woman screamed behind us and we walked faster.
Not fast enough.
We were passing the south tower of the bridge when I heard sneakers slapping the concrete behind me. I turned and saw the man rushing at me and shoved Jillian aside.
He slammed into me so hard he knocked me flat and kept going, stumbling over me. He stopped, shook his head, and turned around just as I was getting to my feet. He rushed at me again. His manic grin was horrifying. He swung his hooked prosthesis at my face and I felt it catch in my cheek and then tear a channel through flesh and muscle from my left ear to the corner of my mouth where it ripped free. I cried out in pain and shoved him away. He lunged at me once more.
I’m no hero. As he threw himself at me I was so frightened I ducked down, wanting to curl into a ball, my back against the bridge railing. He leaped forward as I dropped down out of his way. He went over me, over the railing. And down into the bay.
I got to my feet, feeling light-headed. My shirt was soaked with my own blood and the side of my face was numb.
Jillian was already calling 911 on her mobile. When she saw my face she said, “Oh baby, I can see your teeth.” I reached up to touch my left cheek. She was right. My cheek was gone, the skin and muscle pulled back to expose my teeth and gums on that side. Jillian had blood spatter on her. My blood. Jesus.
“No answer,” she said, unbuttoning her shirt. The barrier between the sidewalk and the nearest traffic lane was harder to climb than the railing that so many suicides went over. Jillian scrambled over it and tried to flag down passing cars. No luck. People saw a bit of blood on her and my ruined face and they floored it.
Jillian came back to the sidewalk and took off her shirt. She was wearing a cute bra. It was powder blue with a tiny lace fringe, and she was filling those cups to the brim. Funny, the things you remember. I was looking at her breasts and thinking how lucky I was to have a woman with a body like that in my life when she folded her shirt into a compress and held it against my face.
“Apply firm pressure,” she said. “You’re bleeding a lot and we have a long walk ahead.” Our car was parked at the south end of the bridge.
As we got closer to the end of the bridge we could hear distant noises, from nearby neighborhoods. Sirens. Screams. Tiny pops that might have been gunshots.
We reached the car. Jillian put me in the back seat. I stretched out as much as I could and put my head down. She started driving. I closed my eyes. It sounded like there was a war going on out there but all I cared about was my torn face, and the pain.
I heard brakes screech and a bang like a hammer hitting sheet metal. My body shifted and the back of my head hit the side of the car.
When I opened my eyes again, it was night.
Jillian was gone.
I got out of the car. My legs were weak and I was shaking.
We had reached the corner of Lombard and Gough, in Cow Hollow, when a cab had t-boned us. There were shards of glass and plastic everywhere. I could hear sirens and saw helicopters hovering over the city to the west and the south.
Home wasn’t far. I started walking.
I have the vaguest memories of pushing through the front door of our building, almost crawling up the stairs
, and falling through the door to our condo.
One of the bedroom windows was open and a lovely breeze filled the room. I fell onto the bed. My face was bleeding again. I thought about trying to clean and bandage my wound, trying to call for help, but I drifted away.
The last thing I remember is hearing a fly buzzing over the bed.
* * * * *
It was three days before Jillian found me. The bed was a mess. So was I. My bowels and bladder had let go. My clothes and the sheets were soaked with sweat. I woke up to hear Jillian screaming. She thought I was dead. When I opened my eyes she screamed even louder and began brushing at my face with trembling hands.
I was dehydrated and weak and she had to help me walk to the bathroom. She spent a lot of time delicately wiping my face with a washcloth. I didn’t know what she was doing until I looked down and saw maggots squirming on the floor tiles.
The fly in the bedroom had laid eggs in my wound. The larvae had been eating my putrefying flesh when Jillian arrived.
She eased me into a warm bath and washed me, giving me small sips of bottled water.
The soap stung in my wound, but not as much as I thought it would.
We put two and two together later. Without any medical aid my wound would have become infected. I could have died. The maggots saved my life. They ate away the diseased flesh. I had a hole in my left cheek with the circumference of a beer can, but the edges of the wound were already healing. When I smiled, I showed teeth, bone and muscle all the way to my left ear.
After the accident, Jillian had been taken to the hospital by the cab driver who assumed I was dead. She had been held at the California Pacific Medical Center for observation. Anyone who went to a hospital was held for observation for forty-eight hours. She said Pacific Heights was now a ghost town.
A contagion had spread from coast to coast. The infected became deranged, violent. A telltale sign of the infection was a manic grin as the muscles of the face tightened and contracted. Most of San Francisco had been evacuated by the California Army National Guard, but there were holdouts; Armed soldiers were reluctant to enter the crime-ridden Bayview-Hunters Point area, the Tenderloin and Nob Hill were lost to rampaging infected hordes, and there was some sort of three-way skirmish going on in the parklands of the Presidio between the infected, military and police forces, and an armed band of men and woman calling themselves the Defenders of the Pacific Republic. Elsewhere in the city the authorities had already given up trying to contain and treat the infected and were shooting them on sight.
The smiling infected, already being referred to as grins or happyfaces, were hard to put down. They were highly resistant to pain and could only be killed with a headshot that destroyed the brain, or multiple wounds that caused a massive bleed-out. This of course heightened the hysteria. Talk of zombies could not be quelled by any public servants, including the President, who had pleaded for calm and civil order until televisions were showing nothing but local emergency broadcast updates.
By the time I was able to leave our building, four days after Jillian found me and almost a week since the infection reached California, there was nowhere to go. The power was out, and so was our cable service. Our internet was out as well; we got both services from Comcast. There wasn’t much on the radio. Two very faint broadcasts that must have come from pirate radio stations told us to either embrace the infected and work with them toward a common understanding, or to shoot the grinning plague-bearers, fuckin chinks, looting niggers, peace-loving faggots, fascist cops, chickenshit Mexicans, and all the goddamned Democrats. Someone was still broadcasting from the KCBS studios on Battery Street.
The peninsula that is San Francisco and San Mateo counties is like the fist on the end of an arm thrust out from the California coast and pointing due north. The arm is San Mateo County. The fist is the city and county of San Francisco. On either side of the narrowest part of the peninsula, the wrist, so to speak, are the city of Pacifica on the Pacific Ocean, and San Francisco International Airport on San Francisco Bay. We learned from KCBS that there were fires burning from Pacifica to SFO, a wall of fire ten miles long.
The Golden Gate Bridge was on fire as well. We saw that when we went up on the roof of our building. I couldn’t tell what was burning, the bridge was steel and concrete, but we could see the flames and lots of thick smoke as if the bridge had been piled high with old tires that had been set alight. Beyond that we could see a swath of dark clouds rolling in from the sea and obscuring the stars. The Bay Bridge had been barricaded by the Navy and civilian engineers. Rumor was that the city was going to be carpet-bombed to wipe out the infection when it was realized that geography could help contain the spread of the disease, so the fires were started. The grins couldn’t or wouldn’t swim, and they sure as hell couldn’t walk through fire. They were trapped in the city.
And we were trapped with them.
The frightened young man at KCBS told listeners to, “Get out of the city any way you can. The armed forces are pulling out, and when they are gone, anyone who has survived is on their own. Get out now. As long as the army is here, they are here to help. And whatever you do, don’t smile.”
We decided to walk downtown, to the heart of the city. If there was anyone in authority they would have to be there. A lot of businesses had a lot of money invested in property there; surely that would be worth protecting. And we would be right along the route of retreating soldiers and fleeing civilians heading for the bay and any boats still crossing the water.
We waited until night, hoping it would be safer, each of us carrying a backpack with a few things, a transistor radio, clothes and some food. For the first time in my life I wished I had a gun. Instead, Jillian carried a baseball bat, and I wore a sword off of one hip, in a cheap leather scabbard. I felt ridiculous.
I bought the sword in college because I was young and stupid and thought it was a cool thing to have, and through the years it stayed hidden in boxes of junk in the back of one closet after another. It looked like a Roman gladius. The blade was two feet long, the hilt was old wood, and there was no crossguard. It had been over one hundred and fifty years old when I bought it. There were chips and pits in the blade, and the maker had stamped his mark in the steel, a rose.
When I pulled the sword out of the closet I first considered strapping it to my back. I’d seen that kind of thing in movies, where guys did an over-the-shoulder draw of a weapon, a sword or a shotgun. I quickly realized that unless I had arms like an orangutan, that kind of draw could be clumsy and time-consuming. I didn’t want to accidentally slice off an ear before beginning a fight for survival.
We reached Van Ness Avenue, which was filled with abandoned cars and buses. Even if we could find a car we couldn’t drive it anywhere; all the main streets were blocked with empty vehicles. If there were any bike messengers left in the city they were now the kings of the road. We walked to Sacramento Street, and then up the hill to Mason Street, where we saw flames in the windows of the stately old Fairmont Hotel.
There was fog over the bay, and no lights on the Bay Bridge. What we could see of downtown was dark. To the east and west we could hear gunshots. We started down the hill, passing a cable car lying on one side at Powell. A big canvas-covered truck was coming up the hill. The truck was painted Army green. Jillian took a blue bandana out of her pack and told me to wear it over my mouth and nose, bandit style. When I asked her why, she said, “If any soldiers see you from the wrong side they might shoot you on sight.” Being a dumbass, I hadn’t even considered that. She put one on as well, a pink one.
The truck roared past us. Someone in the back of the truck was shrieking, hidden from us by canvas flaps.
A red flare silently rose up and over the bay, a pinpoint of ruby light.
The power was out all over the city, but we saw the flicker of flashlights and candles in a few apartment windows. We listened to the radio as we walked down the hill, but there were no more broadcasts.
We had to squeeze past a
near solid line of cars at Sacramento and Stockton. The cars were abandoned, but some had their headlights on.
A slender teenage girl darted from the black hole of the Stockton Tunnel and ran toward us. Her hair was blonde and it danced behind her. Her grin was so wide it looked as if her lips had been surgically removed. There was a cunning hunger in her eyes. She was wearing a t-shirt and denim shorts and sneakers. I couldn’t move. I saw that she was a threat, but I also saw how young she was, how pretty she had been. She was just a kid.
Jillian stepped between us and swung the bat. The girl let out a clotted cry as the lower part of her face was shattered. Jillian swung again and the girl’s jawbone spun into the air like a meat boomerang. Jilly swung the bat a final time, up and over, bringing it down on the girl’s head. There was a horrible, horrible wet crunch and the girl fell on her side. Blood that was too dark and too thick oozed like molasses from her crushed skull.
“You need to stay sharp, honey,” Jillian said. “That smile means it’s no longer a person. It’s just a thing that needs to be put down.”
We continued down Sacramento Street, passing a group of thirty or forty people heading away from downtown. They thought we were crazy going in that direction.
Some people said the infection had come from China. Chinatown was being burned to the ground; we could see that as we passed Waverly Place. Smoke filled the air. Firelight bounced off of the smoke and illuminated the street. Someone shouted, “Chink roast!” and let out a high-pitched laugh.
Some said that the infection was just reaching the Far East. Most European capitals were in flames, according to an older black man leading a young girl and boy up the hill. “This disease is eating the world,” he said. He told us he was taking his grandchildren to Grace Cathedral. Glide Memorial was their church, but it had filled quickly with sick and injured people and had been burned down by the Army.
4POCALYPSE - Four Tales Of A Dark Future Page 21
