Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  When the bombs started, we were locked in our sleeping quarters. The Ruling Class wanted us out of the way, so they could be safely escorted out of the city. I don’t know if any of them even made it because the bombs kept coming. I felt them through my whole body. They shook the whole building, over and over. When they finally stopped, I thought it was over. But then the buzzing started. So loud and unreal. I kept thinking it was going to stop too, but it didn’t.

  This guy, a comrade of mine, Charlie, was coherent enough to lead a group of us onto the street. With gestures and signs through our deaf, buzzing ears, he got a group of us out. He had to drag me down. He must’ve thought I was crazy already, but I was so scared, even then, to go onto the street without a permit.

  Once I got there though, I knew none of that mattered anymore. The day was bright and hot, and the street was full of all sorts of people. People of every class, every color, were scattered in every direction. It was pure chaos. There were a few guards still trying to get us lower classes in order, but it was futile. Everyone was hurting and crazy, even the guards. I remember just looking at everybody in the bright sunlight, their mouths uncovered and gaping open in screams I couldn’t hear.

  The clouds started to roll in after a day or so. I have no idea how much time it was. I know there was a night when I pressed my cheek to a cold brick wall and tried to sleep, but my head ached too badly. I opened my eyes to another relentless, hot day and got shoved back into the sun drenched street by throngs of panicking people fighting for shade.

  Charlie held fast to my sleeve, and we managed to stay together. We lost the others somewhere in the crowd. One by one, they were lost in the hot current of arms and heads. We stayed near buildings looking for shelter, always looking for shelter, and hurting.

  I was so happy when the clouds rolled in. They brought a cool, amazing wind. I smelt rain coming and through all my pain, I almost laughed. I almost felt good.

  Everyone started to come out into the street to wait for the rain. The world paused and everyone seemed to hold their collective breath, waiting to be relieved. Thinking it was over.

  When the first drop burned me, I was stunned. Then they came faster and faster, and they were burning hotter than fire. I think I screamed. Everyone scattered. People started pushing and panicking all over again. Everyone’s face was red with rain-burned bloody skin, and the screams got so loud I felt them even if I couldn’t hear them. They vibrated through me. I remember pushing at someone, and seeing the back of my hands, both raw and red with blood and burned skin. They didn’t hurt until I saw them. Then they burned like they had been torn inside out.

  Charlie pulled me under an awning. I don’t know what I would’ve done without Charlie. I managed to push myself against a rail so I didn’t get shoved back out. People were running all over, breaking windows, and trying to get inside, trying to get in anywhere. I just stood there gripping the railing.

  Then this one guy bumped against me on the other side of that railing. He was a Ruling Class guy, but he wasn’t running like everyone else. He just walked, almost slow. He dragged his feet like they were dead. His arms too, were limp at his sides, and he let the rain hit him. He didn’t flinch or move out of its way. I squinted to better see him. He had black, burn marks across gray suited shoulders, and open, bloody wounds across his white face. His eyes were bright, almost glowing, but not alive at all. The rain had torn at the lids and corners, and the skin was just melting away. But he just kept walking like that, and looked at me like he didn’t even see me.

  He reached out his dead-like hand in front of him, and I moved away, not wanting him to touch me. Charlie pulled at my shoulder and tugged me backwards. Someone had broken the windows behind us and everyone started climbing into the building there. I let myself be dragged backwards. That Ruling Class guy just pushed into the railing like he didn’t even see it, like he could keep going but it stopped him. And he just looked at it, at me, like he didn’t see anything at all.

  I didn’t know what to think, or what happened to him, I just stumbled into the dark and away. My head and body ached, my hands burned, and the buzzing, always the buzzing.

  It didn’t stop for another day or so. I have no idea how much time it was. I know a large group of us managed to get into the dark places of that building. We found corners to sit and rest, and we stayed there. We didn’t dare go outside, not for a long time.

  Monstro

  Junot Díaz

  At first, Negroes thought it funny. A disease that could make a Haitian blacker? It was the joke of the year. Everybody in our sector accusing everybody else of having it. You couldn’t display a blemish or catch some sun on the street without the jokes starting. Someone would point to a spot on your arm and say, Diablo, haitiano, que te pasó?

  La Negrura they called it.

  The Darkness.

  These days everybody wants to know what you were doing when the world came to an end. Fools make up all sorts of vainglorious self-serving plep—but me, I tell the truth.

  I was chasing a girl.

  I was one of the idiots who didn’t heed any of the initial reports, who got caught way out there. What can I tell you? My head just wasn’t into any mysterious disease—not with my mom sick and all. Not with Mysty.

  Motherfuckers used to say culo would be the end of us. Well, for me it really was.

  In the beginning the doctor types couldn’t wrap their brains around it, either.

  The infection showed up on a small boy in the relocation camps outside Port-au-Prince, in the hottest March in recorded history. The index case was only four years old, and by the time his uncle brought him in his arm looked like an enormous black pustule, so huge it had turned the boy into an appendage of the arm. In the glypts he looked terrified.

  Within a month, a couple of thousand more infections were reported. Didn’t rip through the pobla like the dengues or the poxes. More of a slow leprous spread. A black mold-fungus-blast that came on like a splotch and then gradually started taking you over, tunnelling right through you—though as it turned out it wasn’t a mold-fungus-blast at all. It was something else. Something new.

  Everybody blamed the heat. Blamed the Calientazo. Shit, a hundred straight days over 105 degrees F in our region alone, the planet cooking like a chimi and down to its last five trees—something berserk was bound to happen. All sorts of bizarre outbreaks already in play: diseases no one had names for, zoonotics by the pound. This one didn’t cause too much panic because it seemed to hit only the sickest of the sick, viktims who had nine kinds of ill already in them. You literally had to be falling to pieces for it to grab you.

  It almost always started epidermically and then worked its way up and in. Most of the infected were immobile within a few months, the worst comatose by six. Strangest thing, though: once infected, few viktims died outright; they just seemed to linger on and on. Coral reefs might have been adios on the ocean floor, but they were alive and well on the arms and backs and heads of the infected. Black rotting rugose masses fruiting out of bodies. The medicos formed a ninety-nation consortium, flooded one another with papers and hypotheses, ran every test they could afford, but not even the military enhancers could crack it.

  In the early months, there was a big make do, because it was so strange and because no one could identify the route of transmission—that got the bigheads more worked up than the disease itself. There seemed to be no logic to it— spouses in constant contact didn’t catch the Negrura, but some unconnected fool on the other side of the camp did. A huge rah-rah, but when the experts determined that it wasn’t communicable in the standard ways, and that normal immune systems appeared to be at no kind of risk, the renminbi and the attention and the savvy went elsewhere. And since it was just poor Haitian types getting fucked up—no real margin in that. Once the initial bulla died down, only a couple of underfunded teams stayed on. As for the infected, all the medicos could do was try to keep them nourished and hydrated—and, more important, prevent t
hem from growing together.

  That was a serious issue. The blast seemed to have a boner for fusion, respected no kind of boundaries. I remember the first time I saw it on the Whorl. Alex was, like, Mira esta vaina. Almost delighted. A shaky glypt of a pair of naked trembling Haitian brothers sharing a single stained cot, knotted together by horrible mold, their heads slurred into one. About the nastiest thing you ever saw. Mysty saw it and looked away and eventually I did, too.

  My tíos were, like, Someone needs to drop a bomb on those people, and even though I was one of the pro-Haitian domos, at the time I was thinking it might have been a mercy.

  I was actually on the Island when it happened. Front-row fucking seat. How lucky was that?

  They call those of us who made it through “time witnesses.” I can think of a couple of better terms.

  I’d come down to the D.R. because my mother had got super sick. The year before, she’d been bitten by a rupture virus that tore through half her organs before the doctors got savvy to it. No chance she was going to be taken care of back North. Not with what the cheapest nurses charged. So she rented out the Brooklyn house to a bunch of Mexos, took that loot, and came home.

  Better that way. Say what you want, but family on the Island was still more reliable for heavy shit, like, say, dying, than family in the North. Medicine was cheaper, too, with the flying territory in Haina, its Chinese factories pumping out pharma like it was romo, growing organ sheets by the mile, and, for somebody as sick as my mother, with only rental income to live off, being there was what made sense.

  I was supposed to be helping out, but really I didn’t do na for her. My tía Livia had it all under control and if you want the truth I didn’t feel comfortable hanging around the house with Mom all sick. The vieja could barely get up to piss, looked like a stick version of herself. Hard to see that. If I stayed an hour with her it was a lot.

  What an asshole, right? What a shallow motherfucker.

  But I was nineteen—and what is nineteen, if not for shallow? In any case my mother didn’t want me around, either. It made her sad to see me so uncomfortable. And what could I do for her besides wring my hands? She had Livia, she had her nurse, she had the muchacha who cooked and cleaned. I was only in the way.

  Maybe I’m just saying this to cover my failing as a son.

  Maybe I’m saying this because of what happened.

  Maybe.

  Go, have fun with your friends, she said behind her breathing mask.

  Didn’t have to tell me twice.

  Fact is, I wouldn’t have come to the Island that summer if I’d been able to nab a job or an internship, but the droughts that year and the General Economic Collapse meant that nobody was nabbing shit. Even the Sovereign kids were ending up home with their parents. So with the house being rented out from under me and nowhere else to go, not even a girlfriend to mooch off, I figured, Fuck it: might as well spend the hots on the Island. Take in some of that ole-time climate change. Get to know the patria again.

  For six, seven months it was just a horrible Haitian disease—who fucking cared, right? A couple of hundred new infections each month in the camps and around Port-au-Prince, pocket change, really, nowhere near what KRIMEA was doing to the Russian hinterlands. For a while it was nothing, nothing at all … and then some real eerie plep started happening.

  Doctors began reporting a curious change in the behavior of infected patients: they wanted to be together, in close proximity, all the time. They no longer tolerated being separated from other infected, started coming together in the main quarantine zone, just outside Champs de Mars, the largest of the relocation camps. All the viktims seemed to succumb to this ingathering compulsion. Some went because they claimed they felt “safer” in the quarantine zone; others just picked up and left without a word to anyone, trekked halfway across the country as though following a homing beacon. Once viktims got it in their heads to go, no dissuading them. Left family, friends, children behind. Walked out on wedding days, on swell business. Once they were in the zone, nothing could get them to leave. When authorities tried to distribute the infected viktims across a number of centers, they either wouldn’t go or made their way quickly back to the main zone.

  One doctor from Martinique, his curiosity piqued, isolated an elderly viktim from the other infected and took her to a holding bay some distance outside the main quarantine zone. Within twenty-four hours, this frail septuagenarian had torn off her heavy restraints, broken through a mesh security window, and crawled halfway back to the quarantine zone before she was recovered.

  Same doctor performed a second experiment: helicoptered two infected men to a hospital ship offshore. As soon as they were removed from the quarantine zone they went batshit, trying everything they could to break free, to return. No sedative or entreaty proved effective, and after four days of battering themselves relentlessly against the doors of their holding cells the men loosed a last high-pitched shriek and died within minutes of each other.

  Stranger shit was in the offing: eight months into the epidemic, all infected viktims, even the healthiest, abruptly stopped communicating. Just went silent. Nothing abnormal in their bloodwork or in their scans. They just stopped talking—friends, family, doctors, it didn’t matter. No stimuli of any form could get them to speak. Watched everything and everyone, clearly understood commands and information—but refused to say anything.

  Anything human, that is.

  Shortly after the Silence, the phenomenon that became known as the Chorus began. The entire infected population simultaneously let out a bizarre shriek— two, three times a day. Starting together, ending together.

  Talk about unnerving. Even patients who’d had their faces chewed off by the blast joined in—the vibrations rising out of the excrescence itself. Even the patients who were comatose. Never lasted more than twenty, thirty seconds—eerie siren shit. No uninfected could stand to hear it, but uninfected kids seemed to be the most unsettled. After a week of that wailing, the majority of kids had fled the areas around the quarantine zone, moved to other camps. That should have alerted someone, but who paid attention to camp kids?

  Brain scans performed during the outbursts actually detected minute fluctuations in the infected patients’ biomagnetic signals, but unfortunately for just about everybody on the planet these anomalies were not pursued. There seemed to be more immediate problems. There were widespread rumors that the infected were devils, even reports of relatives attempting to set their infected family members on fire.

  In my sector, my mom and my tía were about the only people paying attention to any of it; everybody else was obsessing over what was happening with KRIMEA. Mom and Tía Livia felt bad for our poor west-coast neighbors. They were churchy like that. When I came back from my outings I’d say, fooling, How are los explotao? And my mother would say, It’s not funny, hijo. She’s right, Aunt Livia said. That could be us next and then you won’t be joking.

  So what was I doing, if not helping my mom or watching the apocalypse creep in? Like I told you: I was chasing a girl. And I was running around the Island with this hijo de mami y papi I knew from Brown. Living prince because of him, basically.

  Classy, right? My mater stuck in Darkness, with the mosquitoes fifty to a finger and the heat like the inside of a tailpipe, and there I was privando en rico inside the Dome, where the bafflers held the scorch to a breezy 82 degrees F. and one mosquito a night was considered an invasion.

  I hadn’t actually planned on rolling with Alex that summer—it wasn’t like we were close friends or anything. We ran in totally different circles back at Brown, him prince, me prole, but we were both from the same little Island that no one else in the world cared about, and that counted for something, even in those days. On top of that we were both art types, which in our world of hypercapitalism was like having a serious mental disorder. He was already making dough on his photography and I was attracting no one to my writing. But he had always told me, Hit me up the next time you come down. So
before I flew in I glypted him, figuring he wasn’t going to respond, and he glypted right back.

  What’s going on, charlatan, cuando vamos a janguiar? And that’s basically all we did until the End: janguiar.

  I knew nobody in the D.R. outside of my crazy cousins, and they didn’t like to do anything but watch the fights, play dominos, and fuck. Which is fine for maybe a week—but for three months? No, hombre. I wasn’t that Island. For Alex did me a solid by putting me on. More than a solid: saved my ass full. Dude scooped me up from the airport in his father’s burner, looking so fit it made me want to drop and do twenty on the spot. Welcome to the country of las maravillas, he said with a snort, waving his hand at all the thousands of non-treaty motos on the road, the banners for the next election punching you in the face everywhere. Took me over to the rooftop apartment his dad had given him in the rebuilt Zona Colonial. The joint was a meta-glass palace that overlooked the Drowned Sectors, full of his photographs and all the bric-a-brac he had collected for props, with an outdoor deck as large as an aircraft carrier.

  You live here? I said, and he shrugged lazily: Until Papi decides to sell the building.

  One of those moments when you realize exactly how rich some of the kids you go to school with are. Without even thinking about it, he glypted me a six-month V.I.P. pass for the Dome, which cost about a year’s tuition. Just in case, he said. He’d been on-Island since before the semester ended. A month here and I’m already aplatanao, he complained. I think I’m losing the ability to read.

  We drank some more spike, and some of his too-cool-for-school Dome friends came over, slim, tall, and wealthy, every one doing double takes when they saw the size of me and heard my Dark accent, but Alex introduced me as his Brown classmate. A genius, he said, and that made it a little better. What do you do? they asked and I told them I was trying to be a journalist. Which for that set was like saying I wanted to molest animals. I quickly became part of the furniture, one of Alex’s least interesting fotos. Don’t you love my friends, Alex said. Son tan amable.