Dark Advent

by Brian Hodge

  Larry broke down and started to weep. Couldn’t keep his head thrust into the sand anymore, Jason thought. Welcome to the real world. It’s not exactly the same place you left, but it’s sure not boring.

  “It’s everywhere, isn’t it?” Larry croaked, transfixed by the rapidly changing screen. Billings, Montana. Seattle…

  Jason stared over Larry’s shoulder at the screen. It was like watching the fall of a line of dominos in that green glow. And how many lives went with each domino?

  I bet in a month or so this town will be a memory, Kelly had said. He hadn’t been far off. Get out of town. Get off in the country.

  Maybe that wasn’t a bad idea at all. Because now, more than ever, it was finally time to start living on instinct.

  3

  Erika Jennings was still two months away from meeting Jason Hart, but she was already gaining a remarkable empathy for the turmoil he’d undergone the previous summer. For she, too, had become the sole survivor of her family.

  The auto accident a month ago had put her in the hospital for nearly two weeks, with a concussion and several broken ribs and a sprained knee and wrist topped off by a wealth of cuts and scrapes. She’d floated in and out of a fevered delirium for the first couple days, alternately babbling about a burning, windswept highway and then as if she were rotting from the inside out. It was the latter which struck home with the nurses. By this time, the other rooms were rapidly filling up with people doing very nearly just that. An incoming tide without an end in sight, dizzy and sweating and swelling and hacking blood into little pans. And in the midst of it, untouched by it, Erika rambled on like some uncannily accurate prophetess from a Greek tragedy.

  “What’s going on around here?” she later asked a day nurse who had come to deliver pills. Curious and fearing the worst, yes she was, but Erika was also hopeful for a little conversation. Her mom and dad and Cal had ceased their near-continuous bedside vigil once she looked as though she would pull through with flying, though bruised, colors. And her roommate, an octogenarian with a broken hip, slept a lot, unless Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous came on TV. “It sounds like Grand Central Station out there.”

  The question lanced through the nurse’s facade. She recovered almost instantaneously, but not before Erika saw the flicker of discomfort. “Nothing to concern yourself with,” she said brightly, a plastic smile fixed in place. “Now take your medicine like a good girl.”

  “Please don’t patronize me,” Erika said. She held her water in one hand and tiny pill-cup in the other, making no move to empty either into her mouth. “Sometimes it keeps me awake at night.”

  “It’s a busy time for us, that’s all,” evaded the nurse. “We have our up periods and down periods just like anybody.”

  “Oh. Right.” Erika resigned herself to popping the pills, knowing that trying to get a straight answer would be like beating her head against the wall. And her head had taken enough beatings lately. Her right cheek and eye socket were especially colorful, with lovely pastel reds and purples.

  The nurse moved on to old, old Mrs. Geiselman in the next bed, and Erika grimaced as she leaned back into her pillows. It had been days since she’d been able to wash her hair, and her scalp felt as if it were crawling. Ugh.

  I want to run, she thought. I want to swim. I want to do anything but sit in this damn bed.

  With precious little to do but think.

  But since it was all she had, Erika tried piecing things together on her own, no thanks to the nurse who neatly sidestepped her questions. Twirling an oily lock of hair around her finger, she tried to pinpoint the night she’d first been hit with the notion that St. Louis was in for something rough. A Tuesday night, it had been, June…twenty-third? Followed by the movie, Vincent Price and his entourage of partying fools playing host to the Red Death. She felt a morbid urge to see some of the newly arrived patients, their outer symptoms. Although she knew what she’d likely find…purplish blotches massing on face and arms.

  “A plague,” she said quietly to herself.

  Think…it was two-and-a-half weeks later. Was that enough time for an epidemic to snowball into full force?

  Hell yes. She’d nearly overlooked one huge contributing factor. St. Louis was just days out of their biggest Veiled Prophet Fair yet. Hundreds of thousands of people jammed onto the riverfront, sweating and laughing and eating and drinking together. Throw one Typhoid Mary into the midst of that and you’d have infections occurring in a geometric progression that would make even Mexico’s birth rate look tame by comparison.

  As she lowered her bed so she was reclining, Erika realized that for once she wasn’t crying over whatever lay ahead. But the prospective body count seemed too distant, like the cold statistics of the Ethiopian famine had seemed two or three years back, before they started showing the pictures to bring it all home.

  Don’t I care anymore? she asked herself. Or are there just too many emotional calluses built up?

  And of the two, she then thought, which is worse?

  * *

  Early evening brought Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, during which Mrs. Geiselman roused and went rapt with attention. When it ended, she dropped off into softly muttering sleep again, leaving Erika to decide the fate of the local news. Erika left it on for company.

  Five minutes in, they showed her a face out of a waking nightmare. A face to match a name that had all of St. Louis talking.

  “…grand jury hearing today for Travis Lane,” the anchorwoman was saying over the footage of a swarm of people outside the Municipal Courts Building. “Travis Lane is facing five charges of first-degree murder in one of the city’s most notorious multiple homicides, the burning deaths of five neighbors in their home…”

  Erika’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of the man. She had, of course, heard the name, read accounts of the atrocity he’d committed. But this was the first time she’d gotten a real look at his face, alive with motion.

  She wished she hadn’t. Because the feeling it brought on was the last thing she needed. Not here, not now…

  She had spent the bulk of her life as a too-sensitive girl. Someone who, by virtue of the fact that she could sometimes tap into events present and future, could also look into a face and occasionally get very clear vibes about what lay ahead of them. Not specific events, nothing that distinct. No, it was more in the manner of generalities, tendencies, trends. And such an aura of violence lingered around Travis Lane.

  Erika knew she was going to lose her dinner. The only thing at issue was whether she should get it over with now, or wait until she’d had a little more time to contemplate that hateful face.

  Because as bad as it was to sit there and look at him and know what he’d done, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he hadn’t even begun to touch her life yet.

  * *

  Maybe she had had emotional calluses, as she’d wondered about a couple days ago. Not anymore, though. They’d all been ripped away by the news from her mom and Cal that Frank Jennings had come down with a strong dose of whatever was going around.

  Finally this was real, no more dream stuff that pertained to someone else. This was her life getting the shit stomped out of it now. Just as the pictures of those babies with starvation-swollen bellies had done for Africa a few years back, this news had brought it all home in living color.

  And after Frank died, it was like a high, massive wall had collapsed atop her, leaving room for nothing else. No light, no air, no rest.

  She fell apart.

  She was out of the hospital when Cal followed three days later. She was back in the real world again, and as bleak as it sometimes had looked before her spill in the car had taken her away for a while, she’d had a paradise then and hadn’t even known it. Dad. Cal. She’d never be happy again. Never smile, never laugh at stupid things, just because it felt good. This all-encompassing ache would
live with her forever, a parasite eating away at her mind until she escaped in a few hours of sleep each night, and the first thing to look forward to each morning. Forever was a long time, but if pain had anything, it had staying power.

  The only thing that pulled her back into functioning reality again was the fact that her mother needed her now. As a nurse.

  “Please let me take you to the hospital, Mom,” she said, sitting by the bed in a chair dragged in from the kitchen. “Please.”

  “I’ll be fine here,” she whispered back, then swallowed with difficulty. Her complexion looked so pale, nearly translucent. But here and there lingered blotchy traces of sickly color.

  Erika held her mother’s sticklike fingers with her own. Wiped away a pair of tears with her free hand. “Mom, I don’t wanna lose you too, not after…after…”

  Gloria’s eyes roved about at random. “Don’t you worry. I’ll be juuust fiiine.” She gave a parody of a smile then, crazed and burning with the heat of fever.

  She never changes, Erika thought. It doesn’t matter what it is, if she doesn’t want to face it, she won’t.

  Erika gently swabbed a damp cloth over her mother’s forehead. Gloria closed her eyes; it improved the smile tremendously.

  But then, wasn’t she being just as skilled as her mom in the denial of all things dark and terrible? This bionic plague, as she’d heard it called, wasn’t anything that could be taken care of in a hospital. So why her insistence on getting Gloria there anyway?

  So I won’t feel as guilty when Mom finally goes? How’s that for selfish?

  Erika took a deep, shaky breath. If there was one thing she now felt she had to accomplish, it was to see that her mother’s last days were as comfortable as possible.

  * *

  The rest of that first day wasn’t too bad. The second day was rougher, but manageable.

  The third day was hell.

  Gloria lingered in a delirium more than she left it. She raved, she swore, she accused Erika of trying to kill her. She clawed her cheeks until blood welled up in the ragged furrows. She retched red phlegm into a plastic pail that Erika held in trembling hands. Gloria’s later conversation was peppered with references to people who weren’t there, although Erika was familiar with some of the names. She’d heard them now and again over the years. Her mother was carrying on conversations with childhood friends.

  And after day became night and night became dawn, after Erika and her mother had sweated and wept and wrestled their way into the next day and only one was left to tell the tale, Erika could feel only a numb sense of relief. She looked dully at her mom, now lying motionless on the bed. Her hand still clutched over her heart as she had done moments before dying, and her face was a fright-mask that served as a mute testament to the past three days. There was no final illusion of peace here, not on this face.

  Erika wearily wished for another chance at the last twenty-two years. No, not that many. It wouldn’t take that long to rework the unbreached chasm that had so often separated them. Maybe the last eight would do. Go back to the time it became apparent that something had touched Erika and made her different, and try to get that something to touch her mother as well…instill within her the capacity to understand it. Or at least accept it, instead of treating it like a bastard child.

  “It’s a shame this didn’t happen in a movie,” Erika said to Gloria, whose ravaged features were becoming more blatant in the strengthening dawn. “We would’ve worked it all out in time. You? You would’ve said you were sorry for all the times you shut me out. And me, I would’ve said it was all right, and forgiven you.”

  Too bad.

  Erika pushed her limp, oily hair behind her ears. “I forgive you anyway.”

  * *

  Sometime in the afternoon Erika wandered outside and found herself at the pond a few blocks away. Sunlight glimmered off the rippling water as she sat by its edge, still in the same clothing she’d worn for the past three days. She smelled awful, and knew it. But didn’t care.

  The water beckoned. What would it feel like to wade in, deeper, deeper, letting it slip over her waist, her shoulders, her head? Sealing over with only a soft burst of bubbles to mark her presence? Come on in, the water’s fine.

  I could do it, too, she thought. If I wanted to.

  She stayed until the sun went down behind her, watching her shadow stretch out over the water, reminiscent of a pirate’s plank.

  I could do it if I wanted to.

  But not now.

  Instead, she went home, feet scuffing wearily on the ground, then the sidewalks. She passed a house where people were emptying everything into a giant U-Haul truck. A couch had hung up in the doorway and was giving them fits.

  Ahead, abandoned toys sat in yards as grass grew around and over them. She thought of pictures she’d seen of planes that had crashed into the jungle, interwoven with vines and now a permanent part of the landscape.

  A car missing a rear wheel sat in a driveway, still precariously perched on a bumper jack. Hadn’t she seen it like that a week ago, coming home from the hospital?

  Nearing home now. And up ahead, a big green army truck sat in the street, so big it nearly dwarfed all the figures in white that flocked around it. They brought bags to the truck and heaved them into the back, as if to appease it.

  Erika stumbled, caught herself before falling face-first into the sidewalk, staggered ahead. Someone was leaving her house, she saw then. Bearing a package for the insatiable truck.

  “No,” Erika murmured.

  I don’t want to go on the truck, her mother was saying.

  They carried her onward like just another limp sack of potatoes.

  “MOM!” Erika screamed. “LEAVE HER ALONE, YOU ASSHOLES!”

  She ran, arms and legs flailing because she barely had the coordination left to control them, and reached a half-dozen of the ghouls in white as they tossed her mother into the truck. She aimed a wild fist at the nearest one. He easily slipped it, and before she could try again, one of them had her from behind. When they spoke to her, their voices sounded metallic. She tilted her head back, strained at their arms, screamed.

  Then she looked into the faceplate of the one before her. Behind the Plexiglas his eyes were red, runny. Miserable. He looked as though he were about to say something. And then he sneezed, thick blood spurting across the inside as if fired from a gun. He staggered backward, then the other men grabbed him and held firm.

  And Erika froze, suddenly defused. She wobbled a couple of jerky sideways steps into her yard and collapsed onto her backside. Watching as the men and their glorified dead-cart rolled away, out of sight.

  * *

  The next week passed with both terrifying speed and agonizing slowness. Erika watched lots of TV, not caring what was on, and when all the stations signed off for the day, she played movies on the VCR. She gorged when she wasn’t hungry; starved even when she was. She spent one stretch of thirty-six hours doing little more than sleeping. And when at last she awoke and knew that she wouldn’t be sleeping again anytime soon, she finally thought she was emerging from her heart’s coma.

  Erika looked at herself in the full-length mirror in her bedroom. The sight alone was enough to make her want to cry, but she wouldn’t allow it. It was the tenth day for those clothes, even her panties. And she’d thought her hair looked bad in the hospital.

  “Hi gorgeous,” she said to that horrendous reflection staring back. “No more flaking out, okay? No matter what.”

  Then she took the longest shower of her life. She cried during most of it, but for the first time she felt they were healing tears, a runoff of all the poisons that had pooled within her. She was getting cleaned up again, inside as well as out.

  A big salad for dinner. Then some serious thinking. At the kitchen table, she scribbled random thoughts on a notepad.

  Shortages, she wo
ndered. Undoubtedly. Food. Gasoline. Clothing? She had enough to last a while. But, she then realized, if a lot of people had died, the demand for everything would be dropping.

  What about electricity? The power was still on, but not like before. Sometimes it dimmed, browned out, flickered, and once it was gone it might never come back on. At least that was something she had no control over. Stockpiling batteries could do only so much good. Cross that bridge when we come to it.

  Noise…the neighborhood had been abnormally still the past days. So when there came the sound of breaking glass, then braying laughter and the squealing of tires, she heard them as plainly as if they’d come from the next room. Erika dropped her pencil and walked into the living room to peer out the window at the street outside.

  A car sat across the street and down a house, a car that didn’t belong: old, grimy, rust-eaten. Its driver was repeatedly slamming the transmission from forward to reverse, back and forth, in little screeching bursts. Three other guys were attacking the house, firing bricks through the windows. The Wilders’ house. Their son Chad had been Cal’s age. The two of them had hung around together some, gone to concerts as they’d gotten older.

  Erika pressed her fingertips against the window as she watched the three boys disappear into the house. Moments later they dragged a screaming Chad back out with them. When he struggled, they beat him for it.

  I should do something, I should, but there’s four of them and one of me and I don’t want to die.

  Who were they, anyhow? Enemies from school? Chad had been an extremely smart kid, maybe just the slightest bit effeminate. Seemed as if guys like that attracted enemies for all the wrong reasons.

  Erika pounded a clenched fist against her thigh as they took a long stretch of rope and bound Chad’s ankles and arms. They pulled him screaming and twisting across his lawn, off the curb and into the street…and then tied the other end to their back bumper. Laughing, they all jumped into the car, the engine revving.