“What’s wrong?”
“Everything’s really weird right now. Something’s not right.”
“Do you remember how you got away?”
Tito shook his head, feeling the lump on the back of his neck. It was much bigger now. He would have been alarmed had not the drink stolen that emotion from him. He then turned to Gloria. It started to come back to him.
The statue had let him go and he collapsed on the ground in a fetal position. The cartel members did not approach him but a woman did. In his state of bewilderment he vaguely recognized her face. She cradled his head on her lap and said consoling words in Spanish, moving the hair back from his forehead which she kissed. He then knew it was Gloria and smiled up at her. That’s when the drug runners approached, helping Gloria with the young man, carrying him to her car where they placed him in the backseat with his clothes.
“I feel really bad!” Tito said, standing from his barstool.
The bartender watched from far away but did not approach.
“You were there!” Tito yelled, pointing at Gloria as he clutched at the back of his neck with his other hand. “What did you do to me? It’s moving!”
Indeed, underneath the rise of flesh at the back of his neck there was movement, a squishing sound, a thrust of weight.
“Oh god! Gloria, what did you do to me!” His legs gave out from under him and he collapsed.
Gloria then looked to the other men sitting at the bar and said, “He’s going to hurt it.”
“No,” the acne-scarred leader said. “He won’t.”
Tito looked at the cartel members. Where did they come from? He shook his head. The drug in his drink was kicking into overtime. He tried to stand but collapsed again.
“Hermanito,” the acne-scarred leader said, “you’re a fool. You know what December 28th is? It is our fool’s day. And you, hermanito, are the biggest of fools. You didn’t believe them when they said not to come to my country, didn’t believe me when I told you about Gonzalo, and didn’t believe me when I said he gave us the gift of invisibility. But he is old now, hermanito.”
Tito felt his eyes grow heavy, his limbs relax. The cartel members lit up cigarettes and ordered drinks. Gloria said her two dogs back home were probably missing her.
TITO AWOKE ON THE ranch as dawn streaked the eastern ridge with red and yellow clouds. He saw the muscular man bent over him, holding Tito’s head up several inches off the ground. Tito felt an extreme pain in his neck. He cried out and could not understand why his body would not move. He realized that he was in the field where his friends had been murdered. He looked for the statue but could not locate it. Then he realized it had been taken down. A stone pedestal remained on which the object had rested.
Tito screamed as his neck seemed to have been torn open. His eyes moved to his wrists which he saw were tied to what looked like tent pegs at either side of him. He looked down and saw his legs were tied in the same fashion. The muscular man said something to someone. He sounded content. There were people behind Tito but he couldn’t see them. They began to give applause.
The muscular man rose and Tito’s head fell backwards, blood gushing from the back of his neck. Tito could now see the people behind him. It was the cartel. They were all dressed in suits, their hair carefully combed. Gloria was there as well, wearing a white dress. She had fixed her hair so that it fell in curls over her shoulders. The muscular man laughed. He cradled something in his arms. Tito realized that it had come from his neck. The muscular man held it up for all to see, a small wooden child with the head of a goat. The muscular man pulled a large dagger from his belt and knelt close to Tito, plunging the blade deep into Tito’s chest while Tito saw the lifeless wooden child with the goat’s head lick its lips in anticipation.
Tito smiled. A tear ran down his face. He felt strangely proud as the sight faded from his mind and as his head tilted glassy-eyed to the side. It was his after all. It was new to the world, to be fed by a world of fools. And it was his.
THREE, TWO, ONE
by Nate Southard
JANUARY 1ST, LAST YEAR, 1:14 AM
Just made it home and got the door shut and barricaded. Whole lot of close calls on the way back, but I had my eyes open. Amazing how easy things can be when you’re one of the few who knows what’s going on.
Pretty loud out there right now, but I think it’s going to get a whole lot louder. Way it sounds this second, it could still be people partying. Well, maybe half. There’s plenty of screams. It’s a weird smash of noise, all of it just pushing together into this strange bunch of chaos. Makes me wonder how it’s all going to go, if it really will get louder or if this is the worst of it. Maybe it’ll start to ease off soon. What if Manhattan’s a ghost town by noon? I don’t think it could happen that fast, but what do I know? We didn’t exactly get a chance to rehearse this. It’s the night, yeah?
Exciting days.
Walking through Times Square before midnight…well, it erased any doubts I had, right? It was like a zoo. Even smelled like one. All those people crammed up against each other. They’re slapping hands and laughing, kissing. I walked past one couple kissing in the middle of the throng. He had his hand down the front of her pants, and his entire arm was working. The woman moaned into his mouth as she worked her hips against his hand. I looked around to see if anybody else had noticed this disgusting scene, and the only other man who had was laughing, cheering them on while he snapped a picture. Probably wanted to join in the fun.
So I moved through the crowd, acting like I was enjoying myself when I really just wanted to throw up. Part of it was disgust, yeah, but a lot of it was excitement. Everything had built to that moment, the new year—The Last Year—only a minute or so away. I even put on one of those pairs of cheap, ridiculous party glasses, the kind with the plastic bent into the shapes of stars. They hid my eyes, which was good, and they took attention away from the surgical mask I was wearing. I’d drawn a smiley face on it, so the few people that did seem to notice only pointed and laughed. Whenever they did that, I gave them a nod and shot them a thumbs up. They never even noticed the test tube in my other hand or The Complex falling out of it and sifting away on the soft breeze.
I dumped my last dose as the crowd started counting down from ten. The ball was dropping, and everybody was hopping up and down so that the crowd was throbbing around me. I got excited. Trailing the tube behind me, I smiled behind my mask, and I wanted to laugh. If I hadn’t been so scared of ruining my mask, I would have.
The crowd was chanting, “Three, Two,” as I shook out the last of the powder. I tossed away the tube as the crowd screamed, “One!” Then, I pushed my way out of there as the crowd burst into that New Year’s song that everybody sings. Maybe it would have been fun to stick around and watch things happen, but I agreed to document. That means I had to hurry my behind out of there and get home.
On my way back to the apartment, I heard more than saw the change starting. There was one woman tearing at her face with a broken bottle. She just stood there at the mouth of an alley, bent at the waist and crouching a bit on her knees as she worked and worked. Not once did I hear her cry out. It wasn’t until I made it another block that I heard the first screams, a man who could still form enough words to tell people to get off him. By the time I got within two blocks of home, the screams were springing up from every direction, some of them hard to distinguish from party noise and some impossible to mistake.
As I walked up the apartment steps, I heard a man grunting, a sound like stone colliding with stone ringing with each utterance. I don’t know what he was doing, but I think I can imagine. Maybe I should have gone and checked. I am supposed to be documenting, after all. Thing is, I don’t think I was ready to handle it. Dropping The Complex still had me all jittery.
Yeah. So, there’s the big reveal. Here I am, one of the few who was chosen to stay behind and document for future generations (if there are any), and I was too scared to do it. Why lie about it? I was scared. Not
the best start, but I think I can do better.
I need some water. Back in a bit.
JANUARY 1ST, LAST YEAR, 2:04 AM
NEWS REPORTS ARE REALLY coming in now. Not surprising, considering there were already camera crews in the city. What gets me is that reports are already coming in from pretty much everywhere. Just watched a story on riots in a small Indiana town just across the state border from Cincinnati. I wonder if somebody got infected in the city and then went home and spread it, or if it’s some kind of sympathetic riot. That would be an interesting twist, all right, and I don’t think it’s one anybody saw coming. I’ll have to keep an eye on this…
JANUARY 1ST, 4:37 AM
IF THERE WERE DOUBTS before, they’re gone now. The news is showing coverage all the time now, calling it the New Year’s Riots. Ridiculous (I’m not supposed to editorialize, but I’m human). What I can hear from my place on the fifth floor is louder than any riot I’ve ever imagined. Screams and pounding and gunfire, roaring engines and the crackling of fires.
Hmm. I wonder if it will be the fire that gets me. That would be terrible. Not the dying part. That’s something I’ve been ready for this entire time. The record, though. Right now, I’m putting everything on the hard drive and printing copies up for binding. If and when the power goes out (because some things were kind of up in the air, as far as I can tell), I’ll need to switch over to pen and paper. What good’s the record if a fire sweeps through and destroys it, though? What’s more important, remaining passive or protecting the record?
If I knew who any of the other recorders were, I’d call and ask them. How stupid is that? At the end of the day, it’s just idiotic. Here I am, almost four hours into mankind’s last year on this planet, and I’m worrying about making phone calls. I promise you the switchboards are jammed up from here to San Diego.
Speaking of which, the West Coast should have started their last year by now. No coverage of it yet, but they’ve only had a little more than ninety minutes to relay.
Something just exploded! It was about half a block away. I checked out the window (part of my preparations involved boarding up the windows, but I left viewing ports like any good witness) and saw this van burning, just a big ball of flame. That was something I expected. The two people nearby weren’t.
One of them was on fire, but she either didn’t know or didn’t care. I think it was a woman, but it was hard to tell from a distance. She kept throwing fists at the other one, who appeared to be a man who was scared out of his mind. He kept trying to turn away, and she just kept hitting him. When he finally did get his back to her, she jumped on it, and then they were both on fire. She rode him to the ground and looked to be slamming his head against the street. I watched her do that for almost a minute, the man bucking beneath her, and then they both just collapsed to the pavement and lay there, burning.
Fascinating.
JANUARY 1ST, 10:14 AM
CAN’T BELIEVE I MANAGED to squeeze in a little sleep. I guess the fact that there’s not a lot of light coming in the windows makes it easier. When I woke up, there wasn’t a lot of screaming going on, but there was quite a bit of gunfire. I peeked out a few of my ports, and I saw a single military Humvee cruising the street below. There was blood smeared along the sides, and one of the doors was missing. I couldn’t get a good enough look to see if there was actual military sitting inside or somebody who’d jacked it, though. I wonder which is the case.
There’s a lot of smoke in the city this morning. A gray haze kind of hangs around everything. Through the cameras I placed on the roof, I can see at least seven columns of thick, black smoke rising out of the city. There’s at least one fire burning about five blocks west of here. I’ll have to go up to the roof later and see if I can get a better look at the rest of the area. Probably some interesting things to see. Maybe after I grab a bite. I’ll have to be careful. Never know how much of the building might be infected.
JANUARY 1ST, 11:56 AM
SOMEBODY JUST JUMPED FROM a window above me. Don’t know which floor, and I didn’t even hear them fall. Just the impact on the pavement. By the time I could get to the ports and look, two others had come out of the woodwork and were stomping on what was left of the body. They’re gone now, and the body is just a red smear on the pavement. When the two (they have to be infected) ran off, they’re pants were soaked up to the knee, covered in filth and blood. They’d probably spent close to five minutes just stomping on that corpse. I know I should have timed it for history’s sake, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. That could happen to me. Most likely, it will. Surgical masks aren’t going to stop it forever, right?
Well, that’s a sobering thought. Do I have any booze left?
JANUARY 1ST, 4:17 PM
HERE WE ARE, THREE minutes until four-twenty, and I don’t have even a single bud. How’s that for failing to plan ahead?
The news networks are still going strong. I guess they warranted some kind of guard or something. Local stations are a bit spotty, though. While the CBS affiliate is still going strong, Fox and NBC are out. ABC has gone guerilla. There’s no anchor behind a desk. Instead, there are about half a dozen terrified people huddled in some kind of control room. A woman I don’t recognize, not pretty enough to be on-air talent, keeps reading updates from an iPhone. Her hands are shaking, and her face is dirty enough that I can see the tracks her tears have cut down her cheeks.
Every few seconds, something bangs nice and loud. I’m guessing it’s somebody trying to get into their room, because everybody jumps whenever it happens. Even the camera does a little up and down.
A part of me wants to laugh. It was people like this who got us into this mess, all the bullshit media putting out more noise than signal, never telling us how things really are. That’s one of the reasons we decided to make this The Last Year. Everybody needed to know things had turned awful. They needed their eyes opened.
The camera has turned to stare at a bald man wearing glasses. He looks old, maybe in his sixties. He’s shaking like he’s cold, and when he talks the first thing he says is, “I’m sorry. I can’t do it anymore.” Then, he starts sobbing. It’s those big, body-wracking sobs you had when you were a kid. He spends a few seconds trying to say something else, but the first syllable keeps getting stuck in his throat. The woman who was reading the report tries to pat his shoulder, but he shoves her away, shouting. There are more shouts, a bunch of those bangs, and the camera starts moving around like its operator is panicking or searching for something. Images whip past the camera so fast I have to close my eyes to keep from getting sick (great observer, I know), and then there’s a scream and the camera whips back to the crying man.
He’s not crying anymore, or if he is he’s past the point of caring. A metal ballpoint pin juts from his throat, and he’s pushing it in deeper. Blood gouts from around the object, staining the others in the room. The woman’s screaming like some kind of hysterical basket case, now. Some of the others try to subdue the bleeding man, but he pushes them back. The camera backs against the wall. Trying to find a clear shot, I guess. It stays put until the man finally slumps to the floor and dies. Then, everybody else stands around crying for awhile while the banging gets quieter and then finally goes away.
I watch every second even though I know it’s all disgusting. If the world wasn’t ending, these people would probably have their own reality show by Friday. Lock them in a room, leave them a pen, and see who makes it out alive.
We did the right thing. I’m sure of it.
Hmm… CBS is gone now. That didn’t take long at all.
JANUARY 2ND, 12:32 AM
THERE’S SOMEBODY IN THE hallway. It’s quiet now, but I know somebody was out there at least a minute ago. They were banging on the door, trying to get in. Lot of racket. Enough to wake me up, and I even took a sleeping pill beforehand.
A part of me wants to think it’s just somebody who’s either infected or running from infected slamming into random doors, trying to find a place to
hide or a body to kill. I didn’t have any lights on, no radio or TV. Thing is, I haven’t heard a sound since I woke up. If it was random, they would have continued down the hall, right? Maybe I’m imagining things, or maybe the sound was out of a dream. No. That’s not right, either. This is…
There it was again!
Seriously, I am not making this up. Why the hell would I? Four loud, pounding hits against my apartment door. I looked through the peekhole, but the hallway’s empty, at least in front of my door. Shit, this doesn’t make sense. It’s been a day. Less than! Way too early for cabin fever to be setting in.
JANUARY 2ND, 1:07 AM
PROBABLY A DUMB MOVE, but I had to leave the apartment and check things out. I was supposed to go out sooner or later and see how The Last Year is progressing, so it wasn’t like I could stay shut in. Things are different when I know there’s somebody out there and nearby, though.
So I went up and down the hall, and then I went up one floor and down one floor to do the same thing. Before I left the apartment, I grabbed a butcher knife. Not a bad little weapon if it comes down to it. I didn’t see anybody, though. At least not anybody who was still alive. The stairway between four and five looked like a slaughter house and smelled about the same. The bottom of my shoes are still tacky with drying blood. I think I counted five bodies scattered around the stairs. It was hard to tell, because not all of them were in one piece. One of them—a woman with hair that I think used to be blonde—was strung out from one landing to the next, bits and pieces ripped and stretched and held together by the tiniest morsels of tendon or intestine or skin. There was a smile on her face, so I know she was infected. I still don’t know who designed The Complex, but I read the info on it, and it’s dangerous stuff. Feelings of euphoria mixed with intense rage and paranoia. Who would have come up with something like that? If I didn’t know better, I’d say our government had done it. Sounds like the kind of sick weapon those bastards would love.
A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous Page 25
