Affliction

by Daniels, Dottie

  I stood there listening in support because I believed that everything Graham said now was true. It was almost too much to deal with and I tried my best to not think about Darin’s life as I knew it because it wouldn’t help anyone right now, especially April, if I said anything. I didn’t want to just start working on April’s bloody wounds without her permission so I took her contemplative silence as a sign that maybe she understood Graham’s point and was thinking about the scenario from a different perspective now.

  “May I take a look at your shoulder, April?” I said in my kindest tone after minute or so.

  April was going to say something but she didn’t get a chance. She wasn’t yelling when she started so I figured my request might’ve been granted. The sound of the shotgun along with all of the commotion and her high-pitched yelling must’ve attracted a few visitors, the ones I saw earlier I presume because there was a scraping sound on the front door. It would’ve seemed normal except that it was lazier, as if the fists were dragging against the screen door after they hit it. They were pretty strong knocks too. I figure if the door wasn’t locked they might have succeeded in opening it from force alone. We all must’ve heard it at the exact same moment because we stopped everything to listen further. Graham and I both cautiously walked to where we could see the front door. From where I stood I saw our suspicions verified as the door vibrated from the outside force.

  Graham whispered quietly for us to stay put as he crept slowly toward the front windows, to take a look. The house had new flooring so they hardly made a sound as he walked. The blinds in the living room window were still closed shut so he opened one ever so slightly, and after a few seconds let it back down slowly. Walking both quickly and carefully, he waited to get close enough to tell me how many there were because it was obvious by the look on his face exactly who it was already.

  “There are three of them,” he whispered to me, loud enough for April to hear.

  “The loud noise must’ve drawn them in. What should we do?” I asked.

  “If we stay quiet, maybe they’ll leave,” Graham responded.

  “Why don’t you just shoot them like you shot Darin?” April said in a loud, sarcastic tone.

  My patience was running short with her now. If I weren’t a decent person I could see myself actually dragging her outside for them to feed on but of course that would only solve one minor problem. It would probably just make things worse by attracting more of them because I’m thinking even then she wouldn’t shut up until they ate the last of her vocal cords. April was red with anger and I knew she would do nothing to help us now, especially with her fate already sealed. I wouldn’t even address her outrage but Graham looked at her with disgust. He chose to engage her this time, and I felt it was good enough to be from both of us.

  “April, all these years I have known you, you have never been anything but childish and self-absorbed. You will never understand why we do anything because our actions since this morning are beyond you and your scope of thinking. I’m not even sure you’ll understand by the time you die today. You think everyone else should just lie down and die with you since you lost the chance to save your crummy little life when it was arguably worth saving. The nicest thing you can do from now on is to keep your mouth closed.”

  Graham said all of this to her without even raising his voice beyond a loud whisper. By the time he finished I almost felt bad for her, except for all the nasty things she’d said to me today. The sad truth is she’s a young girl dying right in front of us and although the mechanism behind her exact cause of death was not in plain sight for me to see, I imagined the virus causing the skin around her bite to bruise. She was probably developing a fever. Symptomatically, I now saw her as someone who needed to be treated and she deserved the same dignity as everyone else on their last days. Graham’s words must’ve struck a nerve in her because her eyes and cheeks turned red and tears began to fall. She was absolutely silent now. It wasn’t hard to see the grief and pain consume her. In such few words Graham told her exactly why after all of these years he’d never pursued his best friend’s sister, and though I was far from defending her, I could sympathize with her heartbreak.

  I wasn’t sure now what to say or do, except listen to the endless attempts by the dead to come through the front door; all of this deserved a moment of contemplation. The screen door just shook and rattled as they mustered on in their efforts. Who knows for how long they would be there before the doorframe finally gave way or they got smart and simply broke through one of the many windows the house had? Graham ran his fingers across his forehead in critical thought before he vocalized our options.

  “I think it’ll help if we create a distraction. If I can get outside and down the street I could divert them in another direction.”

  “You can’t go outside to them! You’d be handing yourself right over. You don’t know how many others could be nearby, Graham,” I argued. The three he saw could only be the beginning.

  Graham started walking over toward the side of the house closest to the middle of the block. I followed behind him out of curiosity. The window he looked out of was a partially stained glass window that had beautiful blue and green edging around the center of a smaller square of clear regular glass. Through it he was able to look at the house next door and then up toward its roof.

  “I may be able to get over without being on the ground level. Chad’s room is closer to the next house and I think I could get on to their roof from his window. I only need to be loud enough to draw them away.”

  “I don’t know about that,” was all I could answer as I shook my head.

  He was talking about jumping onto a roof whereas I was hoping for something that required a little less skill and didn’t include a twenty-five-foot drop. I started to suggest something but got immediately distracted as there was now a noise coming from the back door. Graham and I both ran and right before he could tell April to get out from the kitchen it was clear that she was the one responsible for the noise. The back door was open now. April was gone. Neither of us could see which direction she went aside from going through the back yard where the gate was left open. Graham stepped onto the back porch and looked in both directions.

  “I can’t tell which way she ran,” he said as he exhaled in frustration.

  “Maybe she thinks she’ll do better out there than in here. I don’t know if I blame her.”

  “I can’t say which is better but I know I don’t want to be one of those things,” he replied.

  Graham reluctantly closed the door, locked it and double-checked its durability, pushing on it and jiggling the knob. He looked out of the window for any sign of April for a moment before giving up and going to retrieve another box of bullets for his shotgun in one of the closets. I turned my own attention to the front door, taking a second to see if I could hear any of the same noises we heard earlier with the dead ones trying to get in through the front door. Fortunately, I heard nothing so I took my chances. Walking slowly down the short hallway and across the living room, I paid close attention to the windows for any shadows to indicate whether or not they were still lingering on the porch. Once I got close enough, I leaned forward to peek through and to my surprise, I saw no one. I quickly checked in both directions and said barely above a whisper, “I think they’ve left,” to Graham who was now in the other hallway with his own backpack out.

  Unfortunately, I was wrong because one of the dead ones must’ve been further to the side from the view I had through the space of the tiny blind. One of them must have saw the blind move aside from my cautious efforts because without more than a second worth of effort, the window next to mine suddenly broke under the outside force. It gave me little time to react as the dead man fell inward and onto the living room floor. I screamed as loud as my vocal cords would allow as I saw Graham dart back into the kitchen. I was hoping he’d come back with the shotgun that hadn’t let us down yet. There must’ve been at least two more whose hands and arms I could see now
attempting to follow the dead man who was now in Graham’s living room and coming after me.

  Where the hell was my bat I needed it?

  I managed to grab the first object I knew might do some damage, which at the moment was going to have to be an empty vase that sat on a bookshelf within arm’s reach. In that same moment the dead man that had fallen in was now back on his feet and right in my face. I grabbed the vase and swung it around as quickly and with as much force as I could, connecting with the side of his pale, bruised face. The vase shattered, but the man only stumbled sideways a few feet, failing to feel pain. What might’ve cost me my life was that as he stumbled, he grabbed my left arm, pulling me forward with him into the line of fire. I knew this because I heard the loud blast and unwillingly fell to the floor with the dead man’s fingers still clenching on to my jacket and sleeves.

  I heard Graham yell my name as my left shoulder now stung beyond belief. I fell onto the floor feeling the warm moisture that could only have come from my own blood flowing outward. To make matters worse, the dead man was not permanently down yet either because he crawled right over to me. For the third and final time, I assumed I would experience personally the same shock and pain that prevented the others, including April, from moving to save their own lives. I wormed and squealed hoping something would happen to prevent me from being attacked but I knew both the opportunity itself and my life were running short. I used my unwounded, free arm to try and stop the man but I knew with the blood loss my decreasing strength would be no match.

  Where the hell was Graham?

  Adding to my pain and suffering, the dead man, who smelled of the same familiar clay and rotted meat odor like the man from my apartment, crawled over to me and with his body partially covering mine, he took a bite out of my left forearm as I struggled to block him from attacking more vital areas like my neck or ripping my organs out like I witnessed earlier. I screamed again in absolute horror. His teeth were normal but I’d never been bitten by another person. Nevertheless, it hurt all the same. It might as well have been a dog or a shark because he now had at least a few inches of my forearm flesh in his mouth. The attack came to an abrupt end as he too was forced to stop suddenly when another loud blast and a bullet ripped into the upper portion of the dead man’s head causing him to collapse, the upper part of his body now on mine. Now dealing with the pain in my shoulder and the blood that was now freely flowing from both wounds, I let out a loud gasp and looked to my left side in time to see a large black boot worn by a man uniformed in black SWAT gear. His face was partially covered but he had narrow blue eyes, or at least they were squinting at me. He held onto a long semi-automatic weapon which he lowered just as he pulled the dead man off of me and knelt down to survey my situation.

  “The doc’s not gonna like this,” he said in a simplistic tone.

  “Is it her?” another voice from the kitchen asked.

  “Yeah, we got her. Radio the base, tell them we’re done here and will be back with an ETA of about an hour and a half,” the blue-eyed man replied, his eyes never leaving mine.

  I heard someone mention something about the loss of blood and getting me loaded up; I didn’t know what they were referring to. Exactly where could I be going in this mess? No one identified himself as being police or anything else official. I knew most of the medics and officers in the area by name or face, but as of now everyone was unfamiliar. I did hear Graham’s voice behind me, possibly outside in the backyard now and he was not happy or quiet about our rescue, if this was one. His unsuccessful attempt to find out just who our unknown rescuers were of course was also on my mind but was not my top concern as I lay on the floor bleeding out and trying to maintain consciousness.

  I tried to move as I heard Graham get escorted further away. I heard several more gunshots come from the front porch before someone mentioned the urgency of returning back to base before this location becomes another “hot zone.” Just as I tried to roll over on my own, another hand landed on my chest, pushing me downward.

  “Seanna, lie still,” the blue-eyed man spoke again.

  I felt his hand hold the top of my head perhaps in an attempt to comfort me. There was overwhelming discomfort, so I unsuccessfully tried to move my head again. Of course there was nothing more I could do.

  “Which one of you shot me?” I asked faintly, because I was losing my strength against the pain.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t your boyfriend?” Blue Eyes responded.

  “I know it wasn’t. It feels like a single bullet,” I answered him slowly, taking deep breaths. I closed my eyes.

  “Smart girl. Someone here owes Miss Burges an apology,” he said as he spoke up for the others to hear.

  A few seconds later, the blue-eyed man stepped back and I felt myself being moved, involuntarily onto what was a portable stretcher from how the thick canvas mesh felt against my back. I reacted as they applied pressure to both of the wounds in an attempt to stop the blood loss. I closed my eyes and felt myself being carried through the back into the kitchen and out the back door, down the porch stairs. Several more shots were fired from outside as I could hear a flurry of movement around me. The two people who carried me––a man and a woman––were not armed as they whisked me through Graham’s backyard. From my view, there were four or five armored vehicles. The one in the middle was converted from a passenger van that I was being loaded into. The other vehicles were identical and were a cross between a Hummer and one of those Brinks trucks and looked as if they meant business. I heard the ETA of ninety minutes being repeated into a radio in the background and Graham’s voice once again, which this time forced a little more of a reaction out of me.

  “Wouldn’t make more sense for me to ride with her?” Graham questioned.

  “Mr. Randall, please, you are both going to the same place. She needs care right now. This way to the other vehicle,” another voice said.

  “She needs me too!” Graham argued to no avail.

  The argument was cut off by a question from the blue-eyed man, asking about the confirmed dead man upstairs. Graham verified that it was one of the residents of the house and his friend by name. Before I could hear any more of the conversation, the doors of the vehicle I was in were closed and I was secured to my stretcher with straps. I fought hard to stay awake as the two who carried me in now took vital signs and addressed my shoulder and my forearm in the exact same manner that I would as if I were on duty instead. The back door of the vehicle opened once again as the blue-eyed man joined us. He closed the door and told the driver to let the others know that we could move now and within seconds I felt the vehicle shift into gear from its idle. The sound of the diesel engine was not unfamiliar as we moved forward. I began to get a little anxious as the blue-eyed man took off his helmet and skullcap that hid much of his identity. In addition to his blue eyes he had sandy-blond hair that was graying ever so slightly at the temples. I blinked a few times to stay focused in an effort to try and remember every little detail: the creases at the sides of his mouth, the shape of his nose, any little thing because I knew I was not worthy of the attention for this kind of rescue operation. Maybe the mayor deserved it, perhaps a councilman even, but not me, Seanna Burges of Allentown, Pennsylvania.

  “Eighty-six over sixty-two with a GSW to the left scapula and bite to her left mid forearm,” the man checking my vitals said.

  “I know. Start her on the antibiotic with the morphine,” Blue Eyes said.

  I couldn’t help the physiological response I gave because I was out of it. The last words I heard were, “Hurry this up, I think she’s going into shock.” I figured I was pretty much finished from the moment I was shot and the dead man sunk his teeth into my arm. Now I wouldn’t have a clue as to where I was going or the ability to even ask. I slipped further down into darkness as the blue-eyed man leaned down and simply said, “Take it easy, Seanna.”

  Chapter Four

  The sun was so bright and the temperatures were nearing one hundred on this d
ay in late July, 1993, and my mother Ivy insisted on throwing my seventh birthday party today. I always wondered why she was so enthusiastic about them until she told me that as a child she always had to celebrate her birthdays with her sister Sandra. She explained to me that ever since she was a little girl she hoped that when she was older and had girls of her own they would always have parties individually so they could each be unique and have whatever theme they wanted. I had a handful of friends in school so my mother took it upon herself to invite the neighbors and their children along. She had gone overboard with the decorations, which made no sense to me because no one really ever paid attention to them, at least not that I noticed. She always went with pink and yellow and a little bit of purple in some variation with my parties and today was no different. I sat in the living room of our home in suburban Philadelphia, waiting for the guests to arrive wearing my jean skirt, yellow short-sleeve top and yellow sandals hoping for only a small turnout. I insisted on doing my own hair that day and opted to do two long ponytails because I saved my allowance of five dollars and used it to buy some multi-colored hair clips and barrettes at the store. With my lopsided ponytails, I sat for what seemed like a long time waiting on the guests to show up and finally, they did. With the bright sun and heat, people trailed in as my mother glided into the living room and front entryway every time the doorbell rang. She was always so excited to see people and remembered every detail of their lives. I would just smile and stare and watch their interactions.

  My father Jackson Sr. was usually a contented man but today on my birthday he seemed a bit distracted. A few times when my mother would talk to him it took him a bit longer to respond. It wasn’t because he didn’t know how to answer, he was very smart and attentive; it just seemed as if he wasn’t listening. I even teased him by asking once, “Daddy, how old am I?” and again it took him a long while to answer. Only after I pressed him he answered quickly and got up to use the phone in his office space––the den as we called it when he was not using it for his engineering-related work. I remember looking into his office as he talked on the phone during an intense debate with the other person on the line. I wasn’t used to him talking in such a tone so of course I paid attention until he saw me and closed the door. Once the guests began to arrive he came out of the office but I knew that something was bothering him because of the way he acted for the rest of the night. My mother’s mood that day never wavered, as she was always capable of entertaining her guests, no matter the circumstances.