Judgment

by Tom Reinhart

  “There was nothing you could do Adam.”

  “I should have listened to her when she said she couldn’t do it. I shouldn’t have forced her to jump. I should have gotten her down off the roof another way.”

  “You made the best decision you could at the time. Everyone’s life was at stake. You did the very best you could. I don’t know what else we could have done. We all barely made it out of there.” Neither one of us said anything more for several minutes, both of us just staring quietly out the window. In the darkness of the new night, the smoldering building emitted an eerie orange glow that reflected off the clouds above.

  After a while Margie finally broke the silence. “Do you think we’re gonna make it? Is anyone going to survive this?”

  I thought for a while, and then gave her the only answer I had. “I was having a dream this morning, when you woke me up.” She said nothing, but looked at me, waiting.

  “It was weird, like all dreams. I was in central park and it was like none of this was happening inside there. I walked around for a while in peace, almost forgetting about all this. Then I found my father there, sitting on a bench. He’s been dead since I was twenty. He talked to me for a while, before it all went wrong.”

  “What did he say?”

  I paused, breaking the rhythm, taking a long time to answer. After swallowing another bite of Snickers, I answered simply “He told me I would be okay.”

  Margie gently nodded as she turned and stared back out the window. “I hope he’s right.”

  “He usually was. C’mon, let’s get away from the window. We all need some more sleep.”

  Back by the vault Margie gave Steve’s ankle a quick inspection. “It’s still really swollen. Hopefully it will be better in the morning. Why don’t you lie down, I’ll take first watch.”

  “Nah,” I answered, “I’m still a little wound up. You get a couple more hours than you can take over.”

  Margie reluctantly agreed, and after fifteen minutes or so she fell back asleep. A short while later the power grid went down, plunging the entire city into a black abyss. I knew it would happen eventually, and now I could only ponder how screwed we were, and how long we could survive. Every day the world sunk deeper into apocalyptic chaos. I sat for a long time staring into the darkness, listening to the sounds outside. Every so often I would hear maledicted shuffle by on the sidewalk, mumbling to themselves or crying out for help. Too many times I heard the wings of a Judge on the roof above us. Once I heard a man, a survivor, screaming way off in the distance somewhere in the dark as his running came to an end. Ours would end soon too. The wrath of God was closing in on us faster than we could run.

  But through all of that, there was only one sound that haunted me for the rest of the night. I heard a woman calling out my name in the darkness. Jennifer, unable to die despite her fall and now maledicted, wandering the street calling my name. “Adam. Adam please help me. Where are you?”

  I heard her crying, somewhere in the alley just outside the back door. I listened for hours, her crying slowly turning into a strange sort of laughter as her dying brain lost its grip on sanity.

  Chapter 7

  The Hospital

  “And they brought unto him also infants, that

  he would touch them.”

  ~ Luke 18:15

  I awoke the next morning behind the bank teller’s counter, my head down against my knees. Sometime during the night I had fallen asleep to the sounds of the street. Steve was across from me near the vault, wrapping his ankle tightly with strips of cloth. “Morning sunshine,” he said, followed by a coughing fit. He covered his mouth with his hand and tried to stifle his coughs, but it did little good. His lungs were a mess.

  I said nothing, rising to my feet and dusting myself off. Margie was at the front window standing watch. I joined her, noticing the tenement building down the street was still smoldering, as were several bodies in the road. “Sorry I fell asleep.”

  “You needed to. I woke up about four. A couple maledicted were trying the door. I don’t understand what they think they can get from us.”

  “I don’t think they know. They’re all insane. They want to die. They want their pain to end. They want to take out their frustration on the living. I guess I might too.”

  “I wonder what it feels like to feel your body die. To stay conscious through it all, right through to rotting away.”

  In the distance I heard growling and barking, and looking to the right a few buildings away saw a pack of dogs attacking a maledicted. It was a teenage boy, from his appearance and behavior he was definitely already dead. He seemed to be ignoring the dogs as he tried to continue walking along, until they knocked him over, biting and tearing at his limbs.

  “It’s really getting crazy out there,” Margie said,

  “Yeah. I think the maledicted get worse over time. It seems the longer they’ve been dead the more violent they become. They’re as dangerous as Judges now.”

  Margie just nodded, watching the feral dogs tear the boy apart. It seemed to not faze her in the least. We were becoming immune to the nightmare around us. I paused for a moment, not sure if I wanted to say what I was thinking, but it came out before I could stop it. “I heard her last night… Jennifer.”

  Margie nodded again. “Yeah. I did too. She was close by for a long time. Then her voice trailed off as she wandered up the street.”

  “I don’t want to see her out there.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. I think we need to move away from the city. Now that the power is out it will be far too dangerous at night. I can’t see a maledicted two feet in front of me in the dark. There’s no water running anywhere anymore. Any working freezers are off, all the food will rot. We need to find Steve some inhalers and get out of the city. I bet there’s far less Judges out in the rural areas, it’s got to be safer out there. We might even find more survivors. We haven’t seen anyone alive around here in days.”

  I thought about it for a few minutes, while I watched a couple of maledicted stumbling around in the street a half block away.

  She’s right.

  I began to add to her plan as Steve wheezed in the background. “All these cars out there have gas in them. I know we can find plenty with the keys still in them. People were abandoning cars all over the place. We might need a battery, but we can find those anywhere.”

  “You’re not getting a car out of the city. Every street is jammed up. I’m sure the bridges probably are too. There are cars everywhere but they’re no use here. We’ll have to get out on foot. Maybe find a car outside the city when the roads open up better.”

  Right, again.

  “First we need to get him some asthma medicine. Some inhalers or something.”

  “Yeah. How about that hospital, that one we saw the other day, just south of here. We’re going south right?”

  Margie nodded as she was thinking. “South, southwest. I want to hit Staten Island and look for my brother. From there we can cross through Jersey and reach Pennsylvania. Then it’s all countryside as long as we avoid Philly.”

  Steve came hobbling up from the back and stared out the window for a few minutes at the pack of dogs tearing apart the boy in the street. He turned to me and I sensed from his look he was going to talk to me about Jennifer. I looked back and we managed to read each other. I just gave an understanding nod, as did he, and the subject went back to the future plans. “Where are we going next?” he asked. “Are we going to Margie’s brother?”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “But first we’re going to get you some asthma medicine.”

  “The hospital?” he asked as he stared back out the window. Suddenly up the street near the smoldering building several Judges landed in the middle of the road. “Maybe we should wait ‘til its dark. I can’t run too well and those bastards can see us too easy in the daylight.”

  “I wonder if they can see in the dark,” Margie added.

  I thought about it for a minute. “I don’t k
now, maybe. But they sure as hell can see us in the light. I say we go with what we know, and we’ll find out about the dark later. Steve’s right. If we get caught on the street now, he can’t get away fast enough with his ankle the way it is.”

  We all agreed we would leave at dusk and head for the hospital. Once there we would find Steve some inhalers, scavenge any other supplies we could and then head for Staten Island.

  The day seemed to go on forever. We took turns taking naps, while a bizarre parade of Judges and maledicted sporadically appeared outside of the bank throughout the day. We often heard Judges land on the roof, and with maledicted banging on the front door, more than once we thought about locking ourselves in the vault.

  Once the sun began to set, we loaded up our gear and headed out the back door into the alley. All I wanted was to get away from the area without seeing Jennifer. We left just before dark, with still enough light to make it to the hospital before we were on the street in total darkness.

  The hospital was a little further than we had remembered, and dodging maledicted with Steve’s bad ankle made the going slow. Nightfall came quickly, and by the time we were about a block from the hospital we were in the dark. The sounds of the city echoing through the blackness were terrifying. The rambling of the maledicted, calling out to loved ones or just screaming insane nonsense seemed to come from every dark alley. The wings of Judges could be heard flying overhead, often landing on nearby rooftops, unseen in the darkness. Once in a while we could hear people, survivors like us, fighting for their lives. They fought the Judges, the maledicted, and each other. For most, maybe fortunately, their struggle never lasted long.

  Mixed into it all was the low rumbling of a generator at the hospital. From a block away we could see lights inside, the only lights visible anywhere around us, as the generator’s engine echoed loudly off the nearby buildings. We were extremely glad to see the generator running, but assuming it had kicked on the night before when the power grid went down, I had to wonder how much fuel it had left. If we could just find asthma medicine and supplies and get out before the hospital went dark again, we’d be good.

  Hurrying the rest of the way up the road to the hospital, we entered the lobby quickly, eager to get off the street. I had great apprehension though of what we might find inside. A hospital was the place where the sick and dying went and that made it a likely place to find maledicted. Upon first entering, I was relieved to find the lobby deserted. The lighting was dim, as the generator only fed power to some emergency lighting. It was just enough though to see the chaos that must have occurred here.

  The lobby floor was covered in ashes, footprints tracking through it in every direction. Human, angel, or maledicted, I couldn’t tell. We moved forward cautiously towards the reception desk, scanning all around us as we went. Most of the areas were dark, the emergency lighting illuminating generally only the hallway areas. On the wall a little sign for the ER pointed down the corridor to the right, so we headed in that direction.

  The corridors were littered with toppled gurneys and medical equipment. There had been a lot of activity here; a lot of chaos, a lot of death. At first we passed mostly administrative offices. Further down, closer to the ER, we began to pass patient rooms. I could feel my nerves getting on edge as we noticed maledicted in several of the rooms. One or two were still lying in their beds, hooked up to IV drips that had long gone dry. It was as if they didn’t even realize that they had died. They just lay there, collecting dust, waiting for nurses that would never come.

  In one particular dark room we passed, I could see the silhouette of someone standing beside the bed. The hair stood up on my arms as she called out to us, “Doctor…doctor…”, and by the broken sound of her vocal chords I could tell that she too was dead. We tried to move away a little quicker, and looking back I saw her wander from the room into the hallway, dragging the disconnected wires from a heart monitoring machine behind her. She could see us moving away down the corridor, but barely able to walk, she stumbled and fell as she tried to follow us.

  We quickly moved on into the ER, stepping through a carpet of ashes the entire way. The main nurses’ station was buzzing and blinking with a console full of frantic little lights; medical gas alarms, heart monitors and bed call buttons all powered by the generator and screaming out to anyone who would listen that something was wrong. There was no one there to hear the warnings though, except for the piles of ashes where nurses and doctors used to be.

  Searching through each of the little curtained treatment rooms, we were relieved to find all empty, only the dust of the judged lying on the floor in piles. Margie also found an entire drawer full of asthma inhalers, and Steve was quick to become intimate with one while she stuffed the rest into his backpack. We spent several more minutes scrounging around for whatever seemed useful, until Steve called out. “Hey…you hear that?”

  I turned to see him standing close to a stairwell door in the hall, his ear pressed against the door, intently listening to something on the other side. Margie and I froze, listening quietly. All I could hear was the droning of the generator outside. Looking at Steve I simply shrugged my shoulders and mouthed the word “what?”

  Steve waved us both over as he slowly pushed open the stairwell door. Moving closer with the door open, Margie and I both heard it; a baby, crying somewhere upstairs. Margie looked at me wide-eyed, and for a few moments we all just stood there listening. Somewhere up above us a baby was crying furiously, its wails echoing through the empty hall upstairs. Next to the door I noticed the sign on the wall, ‘Maternity 2nd Fl.’.

  “What do we do?” Margie asked, looking directly at me.

  Crap.

  Steve answered before I could. “I don’t want to do anything. We should get out of here. We got what we came for.” As if on cue, he took a big hit off his new inhaler.

  Margie was visibly disturbed, as if some subconscious maternal instinct was pulling at her. “We have to go see. We can’t just leave it. Adam?”

  Crap.

  “Okay. We go see. But then we get the hell out of here.”

  Steve gave me a look of disapproval as Margie started up the steps and we began to follow. The stairwell was very dimly lit, only every other landing having a generator powered light. I noticed that the stairwell also went down into some sort of basement level. It was quite dark in that direction, and I was relieved that at least we were going up and not down. We crept slowly up the stairs, the persistent crying of the infant growing louder with every step. As we neared the second floor landing I could see the hallway door was open, a large pile of ashes scattered beneath it.

  Standing in the doorway Margie peered around the corner into the corridor. Looking both directions into the dimly lit hallway, there was nothing but more ashes and toppled equipment scattered all around. All was quiet except for the endless crying of the baby that now sounded just a short distance away. Slowly we made our way through the corridor, following the direction of the crying around another corner. Past the first room, then a second, and at the third room it was obvious the baby was there.

  From the condition of the room it was clear there had been a struggle. Several dust piles were scattered around, some with footprints in them that then trailed off out the door and down the hallway. A couple of large white feathers lay on the floor near the bed. In the far corner against the wall was a clear bassinette atop a stainless steel cabinet. I could see the movement within it, the baby inside calling out for the comfort of its mother.

  Margie approached the bassinet, clearly not ready for what she saw. I expected to see her crack a smile and reach into the bassinet to pull out an abandoned child. Instead, after pulling aside the blanket that had partially covered the infant, she quickly stepped back in horror. For a brief second she started to reach back in towards the baby, but quickly turned away again.

  “I can’t”.

  Steve stepped towards Margie, his feet kicking up ash as he moved. “What is it?”

 
Margie shook her head. “It isn’t right.”

  Steve looked into the bassinet and just stood staring, as if unable to turn away. “Jesus. It’s dead.”

  Dead, yet crying like any other baby.

  Looking over Steve’s shoulder, I could see it now. The dim fluorescent light over the bed flickered sporadically, making the macabre scene even more horrifying. The baby was ashen grey, speckled with angry spider veins swollen and starved for oxygen trying to push through the skin. Its bloodshot eyes were rolled up halfway into its head. It seemed to be aware of our presence, causing the crying to intensify.

  It squirmed and writhed around in the bassinet, just like a living child does when it needs to feed or has spent too long in a wet diaper. But this child was clearly not alive. It had either been still-born or died from neglect after being left behind. Now it was one of the maledicted, cursed to be a living corpse until its judgment came. Not even innocent children were being spared the wrath of Heaven. Perhaps it’s true then, that we are all born as sinners.

  Margie spoke through tears. “Look at this room. Clearly they were here. Why did the angels just leave him?”