by Bolz, Stefan
She felt the sickness come on and opened the car door. When she climbed outside and knelt on the ground, feeling the cold grass under her hands and knees, part of her wanted to crawl under a tree somewhere and pretend nothing had happened.
She heard a broken string of words, a left-over echoing fragment of a sentence. It came from up top, across the street and up the incline. She didn’t know what it said. It was French.
At that moment, she made her second mistake of the day. Maybe because she heard the footsteps coming down the hill and through the underbrush — two sets of footsteps — she didn’t think she could make it back into the car and drive away in time. Instead, she crawled past the hedge and toward where she thought the house was. The grass changed to pavement and soon she hit the corner of the house.
She’d hoped that the car would shield her from being seen and the men would be too busy navigating the hill, that they wouldn’t look in her direction. At that moment she recognized her mistake. Fear gripped her. Before, she’d been caught off guard by her attackers and didn’t have time for fear. Now it crawled up inside her like a snake coiling around its prey.
She went along the side of the house toward the back. She didn’t know how many bullets she had left in the magazine. A few. Two. Maybe three. At the back corner, she hit a fence. She didn’t even try to find the gate latch. She climbed over it and landed half on top of two garbage cans. One was open and her leg went three quarters of the way into it before it fell over.
She knew she was making far too much noise. She held her arms in front of her and low to the ground to get at least a little warning of what was coming next.
A garden chair. A round table. Another garden chair. This one was lying on the ground. She stubbed her toe on something hard and unyielding. There was a metal door. Her parent’s house had a similar one in the back yard. Bilco door. She found the latch, opened one side and climbed down the stairs. She closed the hatch behind her.
The door into the basement stood open. Thank God. She entered, slowly making her way through the room. She took the gun out of the holster and stretched out her other arm to get an idea where she was going. Instinctively, she felt that she should hide in the darkest part of the basement. Maybe behind the furnace or under the oil tank, but she knew that wouldn’t work. In order for her to survive this, she knew she had to stop moving right now. She had to turn and face the open door. She had to wait until there was movement, hopefully a green shadow in the dark to show her that someone was there.
She stopped and turned around. The concrete floor felt cool under her bare feet. She lifted the gun with both hands and pointed it at the spot where she thought she’d just come from. Her arms shook so much she had to lower them again. She could always lift them back up, she thought. The fear Kasey felt was unbearable. All she could hear was her own breath echoing through the silence. She knew they must’ve seen the car by now, probably even saw her climb the fence. There was no way out for her from down here, even in the best of circumstances.
Sometimes when she was younger, and throughout the years when she woke up at night, covered in sweat, burning up from a fever that had no cause, she’d go down into the basement and stand on the concrete floor. Maybe that was why she remembered the dream now. This was the basement from her dream. There was a low tunnel and the rough surface of the rock she walked on, piercing the soles of her feet like needles.
When she reached the top, at the end of a steep incline, she found herself in the center of a massive cave. The surface of it was glowing lava. Up ahead, a piece of black rock jutted out of the red liquid. Its top lay in fog so thick it was impossible to penetrate with the eyes. This was where she’d always woken up in her dream.
Now, standing on the concrete floor with the memory flooding her mind, she saw something there that she hadn’t seen before. Below her feet lay a piece of rock. It was black and razor sharp and slightly bigger than a baseball. I need to throw it, she thought. She lifted it up. It was lighter than she thought it would be.
She aimed at the jutting rock. It was roughly one hundred and thirty feet away. She watched the rock fly through the air when, halfway across, it seemed to stop. At the same time, like waves extending outward from a single pebble falling into a still lake, the air in front of her rippled. And for one moment, she saw something through the fog. A long, scaled tail, razor sharp blades on its tip, the color an iridescent white. Wings moved inside the fog, massive yet utterly graceful, their feathers the same iridescent color.
When her consciousness bridged the gap to that which sat upon the rock across from her, its power overwhelmed her. She had no defenses. Like so many of the sand castles Kasey had built when she was young that were swept away by the surf and rising tide. The other’s consciousness filled her mind completely. It was vast and limitless, and she suddenly had no idea where she ended and the other began.
Once again in the basement, Kasey sank to her knees, weakened by the sudden loss of balance when the contact was severed. She heard the Bilco door opening and footsteps coming down the stairs. Part of a semi-circular blade was visible as a green shadow. It came closer fast. Kasey lifted the gun and pulled the trigger. Once. Twice. Something fell. She pulled the trigger again but it only clicked. Empty.
Someone grabbed her by the throat, pushed her across the room and slammed her into the wall.
“Tu vas venir avec moi!”
She didn’t think. She let go of the gun. Her right thumb pushed tight against her fist and she hit her attacker’s face. He screamed in pain as her thumbnail penetrated the cornea of his eye. She pushed him back and at the same time kicked him in the groin.
She found the gun on the floor and was moving past him when he grabbed her ankle. She screamed as she turned toward him and hit his face with the gun’s butt. She felt his nose break and didn’t stop hitting him until he lay motionless. She crawled over the concrete floor toward the door, climbed over the body of the other one and up the stairs. When she shut the Bilco door, dizziness took her. Before she lost consciousness, she saw the shimmer of a star in the sky.
It didn’t register at first. When Kasey opened her eyes, the distant dots in the sky had no correlation to anything out of the ordinary. But when she lifted her hands, she could see them. Dizzy still, she got up. Her feet and legs were visible against the dark grass.
I can see! She thought.
The stars shone like glimpses of hope through the dark night. The greenish vision from before lingered a few moments longer and then dissipated. What was left was the heat in her chest and abdomen.
In her estimation, it must have been close to midnight. Despite the late hour, and if everyone was affected by the blindness in the same way, she was sure that within the next thirty minutes, chaos would break out in the streets. As if there wasn’t enough chaos already. But the blindness had laid a merciful veil over what had occurred. The deaths, the injured, the ones left behind. Even though the last fourteen hours were horrific, not only for her but most likely for of all the people on the island, Kasey felt that the worst was yet to come. The aftermath would yield the highest impact on everyone. A different kind of horror.
She reached the Jeep and drove it backward into the street. The fuel gauge showed a half tank. So far, so good. From here, it was only a few more miles to the industrial park. When she had decided to try to save Jack, she had not given any thought to a plan of action. “Get there” was all there was. And “stay alive.” As she drove down the road, passing one abandoned car after the other, the Jeep’s headlights cutting into the night, she heard the first helicopter. When she looked up, she saw not one but three of them. They must have come out of the Suffolk County National Guard Airport, most likely flying to the location of the train accident in Lindenhurst.
From where she was, she couldn’t see the fires, couldn’t see more than a soft glow on the horizon. She didn’t know of the 737 from Kennedy Airport that had been on its way to Atlanta when the blindness hit that crashed into
Connetquot State Park. Because nobody was there to stop the fire, half of the park was ablaze, threatening the nearby communities. But other than the smoke that filled the air east of the crash site, people had no warning that their homes were about to catch fire.
Kasey would later find out that hers and her mother’s apartment, together with half her block, had burned to the ground that night. A gas line had broken when a tractor-trailer drove straight into a construction site. Many fires were caused by people who, in their initial panic, tried to light candles, only to realize that they couldn’t see even when they were lit.
Kasey had barely begun to comprehend the severity of it all. And as she slowly drove down the road, trying to come up with a plan to save Jack, an image came to her. She had not thought of it since yesterday morning; had banned it from her memory. But as it forced itself into her mind, without regard to her, she could not escape the horror it brought with it, the pestilence that festered, and the hopelessness that lay like a dark blanket on her soul.
She saw the red ship in her mind’s eye, felt its chilling presence and knew, at that moment, what it was that had driven the dolphins out of the water and onto shore. They came to warn us, she thought. And they came to die because it was better than staying in the place where evil had come into this world to herald the end of all things.
Sunday, 0:50 a.m. to 02:48 a.m.
She heard the sirens when she hit Deer Park Avenue. At Wendy’s, a little further north, a fire truck passed her at high speed, its lights flashing through the night. There was something eerie about it. Maybe because it was the only emergency vehicle around. No ambulance followed it. No police car chased it to the scene.
The gas station to her right lay in complete darkness. The power was out. There were a few cars parked in front and two SUV’s stood next to the pumps. They were empty, abandoned the previous day. She parked the Jeep behind the building next to the dumpster. Locking it didn’t seem to make much of a difference with no windshield but she did it anyway. She didn’t want to part with the gun and put on the hooded sweatshirt from the backpack to hide it. Jack had put it in there. The memory of him and the thought of how much time had passed made her heart hurt. She thought she’d take five minutes to get something to eat and drink, use the bathroom and be on her way.
The front door was locked.
“Anybody in there? Hello!” She banged against the glass several times. “Hello! Anybody there?” She walked along the windows to catch a better glimpse inside. It was dark. She banged against the window again. Nothing. Just as she was about to move away from the glass, she saw the weak beam of a flashlight.
“I need to use the restroom. I could also use some water! Hello?”
Whoever was in there was probably scared to death. When she turned, a face appeared close to the glass. It startled her at first but then she saw that it was a kid about her age, maybe a bit older. He looked like he was from India. He was wearing glasses and stared at her in utter shock.
“Can I use your bathroom quick?” she said.
He stared at her some more.
“I won’t rob you!” was the only thing she could think of to say. “I just need some water and maybe a few power bars. I’ve got money.” Kasey took a ten dollar bill out of her shorts pocket.
At first, he just stared. But after a while, he went over to the door and opened it. Kasey slipped inside and he locked it again.
"I need to use your restroom.”
He nodded and pointed toward the back.
“Can you… come with me? I can’t see anything,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. He was visibly shaken up.
“I’m Kasey.”
“Aarika,” he replied.
“Aarika. Nice name. What does it mean?”
They reached a door. The beam of the flashlight illuminated the word Private on it.
“Can I… have the flashlight?” Kasey asked.
Aarika looked at it as if it was his only possession.
“I won’t take it, I promise.”
He gave it to her.
“Thanks.”
Once inside, she went into the stall.
“Why haven’t you left the building?” she asked.
“I was waiting,” he answered from the other side of the door.
“Waiting for what?” She removed a few of the small stones that had embedded themselves into the skin of her elbows and knees.
“For my boss. I work days. I don’t like nights. I hate working nights. My boss likes to be here at night.”
“You’ve been waiting here since yesterday?”
There was no answer. She went to the sink and washed her hands and face. “You still there?”
“My shift ended at 3 p.m. but I couldn’t see, so I waited.”
“Everyone went blind.”
“Pardon?”
“I said, everyone went blind.” She opened the door. Aarika stood there just as she had left him.
“Here. Thank you!” She handed him the flashlight. “Do you have water? I could also use some peroxide. And maybe a power bar—”
The loud banging against the glass doors echoed through the space.
“Open up!” someone yelled outside in a shrieking voice.
More banging. Aarika looked at Kasey as if to ask her what to do.
“I know someone’s in there! I saw your flashlight. Open up!”
The banging got more intense. “Freaking immigrants!”
It stopped.
“Maybe he left,” Kasey whispered. Aarika nodded.
The glass of the front door shattered. Kasey pulled the startled Aarika behind a large rack of potato chips.
“I’ll call the police,” Aarika whispered.
“There’s no service.”
“I have a landline.”
Aarika moved quietly along the frozen food aisle toward the register. Kasey could see his silhouette against the glass doors.
I hate the dark!
The beam of a flashlight caught the kid and he froze.
“I knew you were in here, Bindi!”
Kasey didn’t see the guy, only the beam of his flashlight. His speech was slurry.
“I need batteries!”
“We have batteries.”
“Good, good, put them in here!”
The guy handed Aarika a duffel bag.
“Put the cash in there too. And whatever you got, Marlboro, Camel, just pack it in there. And I need allergy medication.”
“Register does not open.”
“Register does not open,” the guy copied Aarika’s accent. “The Hell!”
He pushed Aarika against the freezer, held him by the collar of his shirt.
“You think I’m stupid? Huh? You wanna die? You wanna freaking die? Gimme the cash and the batteries you little shit!” his voice cracked at the end of the sentence.
“Okay. Okay. I give you batteries but register does not open without power.”
Kasey’s throat was dry. She could feel the heat rising in her chest. Her hand found the grip of Officer Carpenter’s gun.
“Stop messing with me!” the guy shrieked. He pulled Aarika toward the register.
Kasey moved a few steps forward. She raised the gun and pointed it at the guy while moving toward him.
“You can have everything,” Aarika said. “Take what you want.”
Kasey could hear the fear in his voice.
“Take what you want,” the guy mocked him. “First you take all the jobs and then you whine about it.”
“I don’t whine. Would you like to work in gas station?”
“Fuck no!”
Aarika had filled the bag with packs of cigarettes and now moved to the stand with the batteries.
“Hurry up! Now open the register.”
“I cannot.”
As the guy moved around the counter and toward Aarika, he saw Kasey. She was a few feet away, her gun pointed at him. His expression was one of utter disbelief.
“Go,”
she said.
The guy looked from her to Aarika and back to her.
“Go!”
“Okay. Okay! I’m leaving!” He moved toward the shattered door.
“Your bag,” Aarika said. “You forgot your bag.”
Kasey noticed that the guy was dressed in a business suit. His pants were dirty and ripped and he was only wearing one shoe. His almost bald head was red. The knife in his hand looked more like a souvenir than anything. His hands shook.
“Shit!” the guy exclaimed.
“You curse much,” Aarika said quietly. “Not good for you.”
“You from around here?” Kasey asked.
He nodded. He seemed to have lost all his anger. He began to wipe his eyes. Kasey and Aarika exchanged a glance.
“Why don’t you… sit down for a minute,” Kasey said.
The guy nodded and sat down on a stack of beer cases. By now he was crying.
“Would you like a cold one?” Aarika said, and he opened a beer can and handed it to him.
The guy drank half of the can in one fell swoop.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Aarika replied.
“Sorry I called you a Bindi.”
“Don’t mention it. Where’s your other shoe?”
“What?”
“Your shoe. Your other shoe is missing.”
He took another long sip from the can.
“I was… driving… to the airport this morning. My wife. Megan. I was picking her up. She travels a lot, you know. She got a great job in DC but she’s got a lot of… responsibility now and she’s got to travel… all over and she was coming home yesterday morning. But then I couldn’t see anything anymore. From one moment to the next it went pitch black. I was just about to pass the exit to Bay Shore Road and I guess I drove in there. I think I crashed into a tree, I can’t remember. I woke up and tried to call her but I couldn’t get through. I started walking… I hope she’s okay. I hope she’s okay.”
