by Alan Ryker
I coughed until I found my breath, finally, after seeming hours caught in an airless vacuum and then a choking cloud, and I started screaming. There was no purpose to it, but there was no purpose to anything, and it poured out of my mouth and it didn’t seem worth the effort to stop it. I was still propped on my hands from having crab-walked halfway across the kitchen on fire, and I fell back and screamed. I screamed nonsense. I screamed curses. I screamed for help.
The pain only increased. I’d wanted to stop burning so badly, but inside that flour coating I still burned.
Someone stepped forward and grabbed at the remains of my shirt, but someone else yanked him back, saying, “Don’t touch him.”
After a few days or weeks, Janet appeared beside me. “What the fuck, Cody? What the fuck?”
“Is it bad?” I asked. “Am I bad?”
“What the fuck?” She held a hand over my cooked torso, either warming it or offering absolution.
With the flames out, the pain didn’t leave me, not by any means. It grew, but it grew in waves. I bobbed on those boiling waves, which somehow had grown so high that they carried me up to explode beneath the nuclear heat of the sun. A storm was rolling in, a storm of insanity, with merciful death blowing behind, only a hope, something to work through the agony in hope of. Each swell carried me higher into pain and madness. Each trough fell less. It was a rolling crescendo of torment, raking through my flesh with multi-hooked claws, lines of fishing-hook clusters being dragged through my veins. Each peal of pain felt like a magnified version of pulling at a hangnail that doesn’t rip off, but rips deeper and deeper, taking the first layer, then all the skin, then the meat beneath, until by the elbow the flap has hit bone.
At the peak of each wave, I felt blackness at the edges. I knew what it was. Not just unconsciousness, but death. It blew this storm in, but it hung back, refusing to take me.
I begged it to take me. I begged it to close in, to swallow me up, to drop me into a merciful, cool balm from which I would never emerge. Each time I felt life grow loose around the edges, and yet the wave would ebb and I knew that I’d survived. I grew angry, angry that I was still conscious, that I was still alive and still burning, somehow still burning, my skin growing tighter and tighter and still sizzling, cooking my blood and sending it back through my veins to tear at my core.
If the darkness wouldn’t come for me, then I would go to it. I slammed my head back on the rock-hard tile floor. Again. Again.
“No,” I heard. “No, Cody.” But I didn’t listen until hands caught me, a lap settled between my skull and the floor. When my vision cleared in the one eye I could still see out of, I looked up at Janet.
And another wave of pain hit, and I screamed. I screamed nonsense. I screamed for death. I screamed for help. My brain spun in my skull, looking for some escape from the unbearable and finding none, trapped in a sphere of bone stuck to a melting hunk of charred meat.
Janet finally spoke. Time had grown soft. Less than a second ago I’d been banging my head against the floor.
She said, “Cody, don’t.”
Her voice pulsed, the waveform falling apart, time so loose.
“Help me, please.”
Hours passed. Hours of unbearable agony. They stretched into days. Lifetimes. Then the doors to the dining room banged open and in rushed EMTs.
They talked so slowly that their words dissolved into grumbling nonsense, the sounds of hundreds of bombs exploding in the distance, of rumbling landslides. They aimed these sounds at me, buffeted me with them.
I wanted to kill them. I wanted the world to ignite again, to burn away everything until only ash surrounded me, piles of whispering, crinkling ash that I could poke with my blackened bones until they collapsed with the same “Shush” you use to silence a child.
If they couldn’t help me, I wanted them to burn.
They sat a stretcher beside me, rolled me onto my side to slide it beneath me. I looked down at my flour coating, watched it slip away, saw a wet glisten, didn’t understand, then did.
My polyester shirt had melted to my flesh, joined it almost completely. It didn’t slide away. My skin did. It flopped aside, big crispy flaps like a piece of chicken barbecued too long, the skin blackening, growing tight, curling away, revealing the juicy insides. Beneath, some glistening melted fat ran, the rest coated me, cooked white as tallow.
When the cool air hit it…Imagine sucking ice cold water over a cavity, then leaving it there, the electricity leaping through your nerves, jerking you like a marionette. Imagine that and you’ll be close to me saying, “Fuck you, asshole, you have no goddamn idea.”
They rushed me outside. The world pulsed around me, expanding and contracting to match my heart beat. Why was nothing solid? Why was reality so malleable, except the one aspect I wanted to change: the diamond-hard pain?
In the ambulance they hooked me to fluids, they wrapped me in a burn blanket, but they did nothing for the pain, no matter how I begged or cursed. They jammed a contraption down my throat instead, what I was later told was a laryngoscope, checking to see if I’d breathed enough smoke that my throat would swell shut. They spoke to each other, not to me, but I understood that my mouth was burned, but my throat looked fine.
Before they strapped an oxygen mask over my face, I pleaded one more time for them to knock me out. I couldn’t take the torment. It was breaking me, had broken me, and yet there was no end. I’d tapped out, begged uncle, but it was relentless.
“We’re barely keeping you out of shock. Sorry, but you’re not getting any painkillers until the doctors decide you can handle them.”
Once again I imagined burning the world. The agony was beyond comprehension, and I couldn’t believe the fire wasn’t in me somewhere, tearing through my veins. If it would only come out, ignite the ambulance, set off the oxygen tanks, leave us a fireball blazing down the highway. But it would do no good. They would all die and I would crawl out of the smoldering wreckage, leaving a trail of charred flesh behind me, the asphalt below my red-hot carcass turning to tar, coating me, igniting, always burning, always fucking burning forever, and never, ever dying.
* * *
They rolled me into the Emergency room, and it seemed that everyone was waiting for me. I tried to lift my head, but it felt so heavy. Then I saw my hand. It looked like it was in a Mickey Mouse glove. Just looking at it brought it into my awareness and it throbbed, seeming to inflate as if someone had jammed the dull needle of a bike pump into it.
“What’s wrong with my hand?”
The doctors ignored me, but a black woman with a kind face and a Jamaican accent said, “Edema. The plasma is leaking out of your blood and into the surrounding tissue. Don’t worry, we’ll get it under control.”
My words had come out strange. My lips wouldn’t meet. I touched them and before someone pulled my hand down to my side I found that my mouth had swollen into a sex-doll O of surprise.
“Can you put me under?” I asked the Jamaican angel of mercy.
“Your blood pressure is too low.”
Staring back up at the ceiling, I said, “Fuck you.”
They’d taken my burn blanket away to poke and prod at me, and I shivered. For all the flame running beneath my skin I felt like I was freezing to death. They rolled me beneath what I swear to God were heat lamps like you’d find at a fast food restaurant, and I shivered and watched them sweat as they continued to poke and prod at me.
“His blood pressure is up. We’re out of shock zone.”
“How much fluid are you putting in him? He’s inflating.”
“As much as we have to in order to keep his heart beating. His blood was turning to sludge.”
Someone finally spoke to me. “Nighty-night, buddy. We’ll take good care of you.”
I watched the man inject something into my drip, and in my thoughts I pledged eternal love for this kind soul.
Numbness, unbelievable, blessed numbness washed over me. My body disappeared, and a warm blanket wr
apped itself around my brain. The last thing I heard was, “His family is coming.”
2
I dropped into a blackness into which I eventually gained awareness again. I don’t know how long I lay there before that happened. The world may have rotated around and under me while I was out, and resettled at my point of origin. That made sense. I crawled out of reality through a hole into the blackness. The world continued to spin, and the hole became lost to me until the rotation eventually brought it back and I crawled out of the blackness.
When I did, the world had changed. Everyone was gone. Everything was gray. I had emerged back on my rolling stretcher, feeling no discomfort at that moment. I stalled for as long as I could, occupying myself with the strangeness of a perfectly still emergency ward. No running staff, no worrying families, no screaming children, no bleeding patients. The TVs that hung in the corners were silent, their screens gray with a thick layer of dust, the couches that faced them no longer making sense.
I distracted myself with these things for as long as I could, and then I looked down at myself. A thick crust covered my torso. It would have been black if black existed in the world. Instead, it was a dark gray.
Touching my stomach gingerly, I expected an explosion of agony. I felt the heat deep inside. I felt pressure, something that could perhaps become pain but wasn’t yet. I pressed harder at the crust, feeling it crackle beneath my hand but still feeling no pain. I scraped at the crust, and it peeled away, and I winced, but it felt good. I scraped and scraped. Somehow, I’d hidden in the center of the Earth long enough that I’d healed.
What I found was that I hadn’t only healed; I’d transformed. I uncovered a chitinous shell. When I’d scraped nearly my entire stomach down to it, I stopped. I didn’t want to see any more.
Then I looked at my hands. On my left, a fine, gray, ashy powder covered my fingertips, pressed beneath the nails in dense, dark slivers. My right fingertips, however, had fallen away, peeled back in their scrabble at my stomach. My fingers crumbled like those snakes that grow from black pellets when you set them alight on the Fourth of July. I remembered clustering the pellets when I was a child, not satisfied with one spitting, hissing ash snake. I wanted a bunch, and they tangled and twisted, growing together and apart again, these pillars of dense ash.
My right hand looked just like that. I grabbed the stump of an ash finger with the good fingers of my left hand. It crumbled until it neared the base, where it became hard and black. Charcoal. I pealed this back, too, having somehow forgotten that it was my hand I was destroying. The char crackled and squeaked as I snapped each finger back. But it still encased my palm. So I smacked my hand against the metal rail of my stretcher.
Once. It held.
Twice. It cracked.
Three times. The fissures grew.
Four times. The charcoal crumbled away, and out of the ash emerged a multi-hinged pincer of dark gray chitin.
I screamed. It’s one thing to see your body covered in armor. It’s another to find the delicate structure of your hand devolved.
The scream itself brought me out of my terror, as it carried for only several feet then died.
I shouted, “Hello?” and the same thing happened. No echo, and no returning voices.
As I began to move, despite having just casually peeled my fingers off without the slightest sting, I still expected pain. But there was nothing except a heat deep in my core, as if a cinder still burned at the center of ash, ready to ignite if it found fuel. Me, I was all used up. I bore the spark, but I no longer owned it.
I stood and went for the ER admissions desk. Past the dusty counter, in chairs and on the ground were vaguely human-shaped piles of cold ash. One lay toppled on a copy machine, the torso lying on the glass, the legs collapsed on the ground.
Everyone had burned, a long time ago.
I started down a hallway. Somehow, I knew where I was going. I pressed an elevator button and waited for a moment before seeing that nothing was lit and no elevator would be coming. So I took the stairs up to the fourth floor. The burn unit.
There, in the beds, I found something that terrified me. There, the ashes weren’t cold. There, the people still burned. They looked like logs left in the fire for hours, black char split by glowing red fissures, the occasional flame spitting out, then falling back. Somehow, their beds didn’t burn.
Piles of ash that I assumed had once been nurses and family members surrounded the beds, still retaining some of their human shape, collapsed prostrate in worship to whatever god to whom they offered these eternally immolating sacrifices.
I looked at their split husks, and then at my dull gray stomach. I looked at the red glow that spilled from their fissures, and felt the heat deep within me. Was I looking at my future?
I ran. Unable to feel my legs beneath me, I floated down the stairs, through the lobby and out a revolving door, but then slowed to a plod, then a dead halt.
The city stood silent and gray, and its calmness, its graveyard quiet, its resignation filled me, became me.
Cars sat motionless in the street, the drivers slumped against their steering wheels, their crumbling ashen heads spilling onto their dashes or out open windows. The world had burned. It must have gone quickly, an inescapable firestorm of such fury that it sucked up the bonds between atoms instantly, spitting them out as flame and leaving behind the spent carbon nearly undisturbed, leaving the world a fragile sculpture, a snapshot of the final moment.
I wandered the streets for I don’t know how long. Forever, it seemed. I had no aim or desire. I was one of the burned, and the passions of life couldn’t catch hold of the cold, lifeless stuff I was made of.
The city seemed the same as I remembered it. On foot, I entered the Burnout, a part of town I’d never dared to even drive through. Urban decay. But even rotten flesh burns.
Let me explain the Burnout. Bad neighborhoods spread out, and the people on the edges flee the coming tide, leaving the area to crime. But eventually a bad neighborhood grows so large that even the lowest can no longer inhabit the center. Service people won’t venture that far in. Police and ambulances wouldn’t respond even if there were phone service to call for help. The wounded area dies, goes necrotic at the center, and then the gangrene spreads, too.
But even rotten flesh burns, and the firestorm cleansed it all, burning away filthy, messy life, leaving only sterile ash and empty buildings.
In the ambulance, I’d felt death as a storm, approaching but never arriving. Maybe it had arrived. Maybe, after I’d crawled into the darkness, it had torn through the world, and not finding me, taken everyone else.
On corners where—if absolutely forced to drive past—I’d have avoided eye contact with drug-dealers and prostitutes, I strolled leisurely by piles of ash. The air was so still that a person leaning against a building stood intact, like a cigarette smoked so fast it has no time to droop. I tapped it and it crumbled to the ground with a shhhh and a final whump, and I felt surprisingly guilty for taking this lifeless thing’s last remnant of humanity, leaving him a featureless pile.
I noticed a trend in my wanderings, a circling, day after day (though there was no day, there was no night, there was only gray). I’d imagined myself moving randomly, but then I felt a pattern, and I felt a tug, and when I looked closely, I found a snake’s coils wrapped around the area, walling me in.
My heart leapt in my chest at this evidence of another intelligence in a world I’d thought completely dead. I navigated the streets, trying to find my way back, trying to find a way out. Had I been caught in this constriction since the hospital?
Running, careening, spinning through the streets, I fought the pull of the maze, but whenever I thought I’d found my way out, I’d find instead that I’d worked my way deeper, my struggling allowing the constrictor’s coils to tighten, never to loosen, only tighten with every fractional inch given.
I sat down in the middle of the street, paralyzed by fear. Somehow I knew that every step I took, in
whatever direction, brought me closer to the snake’s maw. Only stillness didn’t worsen my situation. I found a patch of street where the buildings had all crumbled, where when I lay back I could see nothing but gray sky above me. I melted into the gray. Being gray myself, it was easy.
And then my first fissure emerged.
I felt a pulling in my guts and ignored it, but it grew and grew, the “skin” of my stomach stretching tighter until something finally gave. I sat up after who-knows-how-many weeks and looked down to find a split as wide as a finger and long as my palm, and out of it spilled red light.
My time in the darkness hadn’t thrown death off, only delayed him.
I stood and ran.
By the time I caught myself, by the time I became aware of the immediate danger and squinted my eyes to search for the snake’s coils, I’d come to a dark, looming building. I’m not sure what it was, but despite the fact that it was crumbling it had an air of authority. It’s wide, brick wings seemed to want to gather me in.
And when I looked around, I found the serpentine body funneling me toward the entrance.
I stood frozen, but it was too late. All around me the coils twitched with agitated awareness. The creature in the building knew I’d come near.
How long it must have waited for me, the last living thing on Earth. What patience it must have had.
Its patience broke. The twitching became thrashing, and I was knocked to the ground and looped in cool, pebbly reptilian flesh. I rolled across the street toward the crumbling brick monolith which contained the last living thing in a dead world. But life feeds on life, and whatever lurked inside hungered, and it dragged me across pavement, across asphalt. I gripped at the ground with my good left hand and found no purchase at all. Instinctively, I slapped my ruined right hand against the road.
The hard, pincer-like claw dug in. The multi-jointed protrusions forced themselves deeper and deeper into the macadam, and I dragged myself forward, out of the crushing coils and away from the predator.
