After the Bite

by Lovato, David

  “I-I have something important I need to tell you,” I say. “I mean, we have something to tell you.” I look into the nachos, and reach for one as I collect my thoughts.

  “Kevin, what is it?”

  “It’s hard for me to say this…” I look down, and my eyes burn because of a few tears. Paul nudges me again, but there’s a smile on his face.

  “What’s wrong, Kevin? Is this about your doctor’s visit? Please tell me you’re all right.”

  “No, no. I’m fine. Like I said, Dad. Healthy as a horse, it’s just that…”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I’m…” I look at Paul. He’s slumped over a bit, and very quiet. He must be feeling a little ashamed, and who could blame him? I feel the same way, but I shouldn’t. It should not be this difficult. I should have already told my father about this.

  I put my hand on Paul’s shoulder and push him back a little. He sort of flops backward, his head moves back. It’s almost like he he’s in some drunken trance.

  “Paul? Paul, what’s wrong?” I feel my heart speed up. He’s been fine all this time, and all day, so what’s going on?

  “What’s wrong with him?” my father asks. Then Paul’s eyes close, and he leans forward. My heart stops as I hold on to him. He’s completely unresponsive.

  “Paul! Paul, what the—Call 911!” I find myself shouting to my father. He quickly does so, as I cling close to Paul.

  People nearby are staring, and then I hear a scream from the non-smoking section and turn to look. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Paul blink, and he turns his head to me. A small smile spreads across my face, and then I look at my father, who has just begun to speak to someone.

  “What happened?” he says.

  “It’s okay, Paul’s fine.” I see Paul jerk toward me. He clamps his jaws down on my arm. I scream, fighting against him. While this is going on, a woman runs frantically from her husband. She trips on the step into the smoking section and falls to the ground with a thud. The man begins to devour her. This is just fifteen feet away from me. I grunt and pull away from Paul, and my father is now up. He grabs hold of Paul’s torso and pulls very hard.

  I feel Paul’s teeth release, leaving a decent-sized gash on my forearm. It bleeds slowly. I sit here, frozen, crying. I wonder what has happened. I feel helpless. My father takes a plate from a nearby table and bashes it against Paul’s head. This stuns Paul, and my father looks to me. I’m still in shock, but that seems to bring me out of it. I look to my father.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!” He rushes to me, grabbing a pile of napkins, and we dash out of the restaurant. He gives me the napkins and I use them to staunch the blood. It’s not a busy night, so there isn’t much congestion, thankfully. I run as quickly as I can, holding the napkin on my arm as tightly as I can. It’s not bleeding very bad, but I feel safer clamping down on the bite. When we get in the car, we lock the doors and remain quiet. My father leans over to look at the wound.

  “Let me see it, Kevin,” he says. His eyes are filled with fear. I lift up the bloodied napkin and reveal the torn flesh and exposed muscle. I’m losing blood at about the same rate as before. It’s not a terrible wound, but I feel a little uneasy. I never really liked blood.

  “We should probably get to the hospital.” I feel a little funny as I sit here, focused on the pain. Not the pain from the wound, but what had overcome Paul. What the fuck is this? He wasn’t the only one, either. People are still fleeing through the restaurant’s doors.

  “Let’s flip on the news and figure out what’s going on.” My father turns on the car and pulls out of the parking lot. The default station is normally an alternative station, but there’s no music playing. Instead the DJ is speaking.

  “Make sure you have plenty of food and water, wherever you decide to take refuge… what?” The DJ’s voice sounds far away now, but I can still make out what he is saying. “Are you okay, Andy? Andy?” There’s a crashing sound, and another voice screams. “Fuck! Shit, people! Listen now! Don’t let these fuckers bite you! You get bitten, you become one of them! Avoid them at all costs!” The microphone sounds as if it’s knocked out of its stand, and then there’s silence, and my blood runs cold. I look at my father, and am surprised to see him looking at me too.

  “Look out!” I scream when I catch a glimpse of another car about to collide with us. My father swerves and takes out a mailbox. There are a few letters in it that scatter. Splintered wood and the twisted box scatter across the windshield and then fall to the cement.

  “That was close,” I hear my father mutter.

  “We need to talk,” I mumble, not even loud enough for him to hear. We pull up into the driveway of his house, and he helps me as we rush inside.

  I sit in the kitchen on one of the wooden stools at the island. I’m slouching, my arms splayed out on the counter. My father sits across from me. He looks into my eyes, worried. He wants to say something, I can tell, but he asks something instead.

  “What was it you were going to tell me before?”

  “It’s really important, but I don’t know how to say it.”

  “What is it? Whatever it is, just tell me. I’ll deal with it.”

  “Dad?” I say quietly. I feel a wave of sadness mixed with fear, and this strange feeling that has been strengthening in me since Paul bit me.

  “Yes?”

  “Dad, I’m gay.” I see, even in this situation, my father’s heart break. That’s how it seems. His eyes drop to the countertop. I feel my own heart grow very heavy, but he looks back up and smiles.

  “That’s it? That’s all? I accept that, Kevin. I know it took a lot of courage to tell me, but that’s not important right now. Well, it is, but…” He stands up and walks around to me with open arms. “I love you, Son. I always have, and I always will.” He hugs me, and at first I don’t know how to respond, but then I hug him back. We stand here, in this embrace, and I feel that strange feeling. It grows more intense. More intense, more, more…

  My arms fall limp, and I open my mouth and press my face into my father’s neck.

  “Kevin?” He backs away and nearly trips over the stool I’d been sitting in. I look at him. All I feel is the need to go after my father. All I feel is the need to feed, and nothing else. No more worries. I just need to feed, and I start shambling toward him. He runs for the door and hops in his car. I see him drive away with sad, fearful tears running down his cheeks. I don’t see him or that car ever again.

  Alone Up There

  I was already sick of the sunrises and sunsets.

  I wish I had a better reason for it, something deep and complex; like they kept me from sleeping at night, or that I had no one to share them with. But the simple truth was that we saw them over a dozen times every day, and I had gotten sick of them.

  They were beautiful from space, but after a while I started to tune them out. The shades over the windows kept them from disturbing my sleep, and thoughts of my wife back home kept me from being alone. It came down, as so many things in our work did, to a matter of plain old numbers.

  The sun didn’t rise when I woke up on the 20th. I woke up to the radio playing one of my favorite songs, courtesy of Mission Control. I unzipped my sleeping bag and moved out of it and into the Tranquility Module.

  I made my way to the breakfast table. There were three people already in the room, and all of them were sitting on the ceiling.

  “All right, guys,” I said. “I’m not going to get any more disoriented than you are. Have a little faith in your captain.”

  The three of them laughed. The prank wasn’t too clever; in space there are no directions, but that didn’t stop the others from occasionally walking on a ceiling or wall to try to throw somebody off. It never worked, but for some reason it never got old, either.

  “Hey, Captain! Catch!”

  A small, red bubble of fruit juice was blown from the end of a straw and gently floated toward me. It gracefully made its way over the table, where I caught
it with my mouth. The familiar faint cherry taste reached my tongue; the juice floated around inside my mouth for a moment, and then I swallowed.

  “Thanks, Yamanaka,” I said.

  Jun Yamanaka was one of the current permanent residents of the International Space Station. He was part of the Japanese space program, but his English was perfect. He was my friend.

  The other two currently at the table (or making their way to the table from the ceiling) were our visitors. They were scheduled to leave the next day, and I both dreaded it and couldn’t wait. They were fine men, great company, but their departure meant shifting back to our regular sleep schedules, a solid four hours off of the guest’s mission time. Once we got back into the swing of it, it’d feel more normal, but it would take some getting used to.

  “I don’t know about you,” one of the guests, a man named Mick Howard said, “but I can’t wait to get back home.”

  “I miss gravity,” said the other guest, Alex Graham.

  “Say hello to terra firma for me,” I said. The three of them laughed. Jokesters to the end, all three of them.

  I am Captain Trent Hampton, NASA astronaut, one of the leading researchers aboard the station. And I was scheduled to remain for another year. As such, I was a bit envious of the two visitors shipping out the next day, but at the same time I was not ungrateful.

  When I grew up, kids wanted to be astronauts. Half of my kindergarten class must’ve raised their hands when asked who wanted to go into space someday, but the great majority of them would eventually grow out of it.

  Not me.

  Space stuck with me my whole life. I remember watching on a small, black-and-white TV, maybe five years old, as the Apollo 13 scenario unfolded before the nation’s eyes. My dad, who had been in the Air Force during World War II and later went on to work at NASA, took the whole family out for ice cream when the crew returned safely to Earth. One day he brought me home Jim Lovell’s autograph, something I proceeded to bring to show-and-tell for the rest of my elementary school career, long after the rest of the kids stopped caring about space.

  Most of those kids were now grown up and sitting behind desks. I was floating miles above the earth, that beautiful blue-green orb I spent so much time staring at.

  “Uh-oh, here comes trouble,” Yamanaka said. The three of them laughed. My good friend Geoff Loxley of the European Space Agency floated into the room.

  “You blokes are just jealous that you don’t know how to party,” Loxley said.

  “What, ‘tea and crumpets?’” Yamanaka said in a mock British accent.

  “Rubbish,” Loxley said. “When we get back home, drinks are on whoever downs the least.”

  “I’ll take you up on that,” I said.

  “G’day, Cap’n,” Loxley said. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

  “I think you have some chemistry tests to get done,” I said. Loxley grimaced. “And we say goodbye to our guests tomorrow.”

  “Aye,” Loxley said, turning to Graham and Howard, “remember me to the Earth ladies. It’s been so long, they must’ve forgotten me by now.”

  “Lox, how could anyone forget you?” I said. Loxley smiled.

  “Well, when I find the cure for cancer in space, they’ll remember.”

  “You’ll need to put a lot more hours in the biology lab for that,” I replied. It was an ongoing joke we had; despite being our scientist and not our biologist, Loxley was always going on about finding the cure for cancer in space. Said if it was possible on Earth, we’d have found it by now. He was joking, of course. Loxley was a brilliant man. I half-believed that if anybody found the cure for cancer in my lifetime, it’d be him.

  “Excuse me,” a thick Russian accent broke in, followed by a thick Russian man, “am I late?”

  “Did we wake you?” Yamanaka asked.

  “No,” Sacha Borislav replied. “Are our guests leaving today?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “Forgive me, I must have my days mixed up.”

  “Don’t worry, Sacha,” Howard said, “you’ll be rid of us soon enough.”

  “Ha!” Sacha said. “My only regret is that things will be too quiet around here.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Boris,” I said. “Yamanaka has enough mouth for the eight of us.”

  “Where are the other two, anyway?”

  “Eva is on the treadmill,” Sacha said. “She prefers to exercise before she eats. You Americans have it backward.”

  “And I assume Tom is still sleeping?” Loxley said.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it,” I replied.

  Eva Lutrova of the Russian Federal Space Agency and Dr. Tom Michaels of NASA rounded out our six-man permanent crew. After Howard and Graham left, things would get a lot quieter, but it was our life. We performed various tests, exercised a good two hours a day minimum, and spent our free time thinking of our families, among other things.

  For the most part, we were alone, up here.

  After eating, I ran on the treadmill for a while, and then oversaw some test work. When nighttime came I returned to my sleeping rack, adorned with pictures of my wife, Halley, and listened to music. Eventually, I went to sleep.

  ****

  When I woke up, I knew something had gone wrong.

  It was almost like intuition. Before I was even fully awake, before my brain had processed anything at all, I just knew that something was not right. And then I realized what it was: silence.

  The radio wasn’t playing anything.

  I almost laughed at how silly I’d been. Everything was fine, I’d simply woken up early. I checked my watch, and it was nearly an hour and half past our usual waking time. The fear set back in.

  I made my way to the Unity node, and nobody was there. I wondered if I was the first person awake. I didn’t want to wake anyone; that wasn’t how we operated. At the same time, something seemed wrong. I decided to head for the radio and see if I could contact Mission Control.

  “Mission Control, this is Captain Trent Hampton on board the International Space Station, do you copy?”

  The radio made no sound, not even the click of static breaking in.

  “Mission Control, come in,” I said. Still nothing.

  “It’s not working for you, either,” Sacha said, entering the room from behind me. It was more of a statement than a question.

  “Did something hit our receivers?” I asked.

  “Not likely,” Sacha replied. “Surely we’d have felt it. Besides, it’s not just the radio. Our GPS systems are all offline.”

  I looked at the various monitors before me. Nothing seemed to be working. There was power, but no signal.

  “Sacha,” I said, “where the hell are we?”

  “I don’t know,” Sacha said. “But I fear we are alone up here, now.”

  I looked through the window toward the earth, and for once, had no idea what to do.

  “We need to wake the others,” Sacha said. I nodded.

  We made our way to the Zvezda module, and to Eva’s sleeping rack. Sacha knocked on the white, padded wall. A few seconds later, it opened.

  “What’s going on?” Eva asked.

  “Good question,” Sacha said. “We don’t have any reception. No radios, no satellites.”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I said.

  “Okay,” Eva said. “Let’s go get the others. We’ll work on a plan after that.”

  We made our way to Tranquility, to the other sleeping racks. We weren’t usually given any reason to wake each other, but this was no usual circumstance. Alex’s rack was the first one we came to.

  “If we don’t get contact back up soon, we have ways of getting back to the surface,” Eva was saying as we floated into the cramped, white space around Alex’s sleeping rack.

  “Let’s worry about a plan later,” I said. I didn’t even want to begin thinking of ballistic re-entry.

  I raised my fist to knock on Alex’s door, but before I could the do
or knocked back, from the inside. If we could’ve, I’m sure we all would’ve jumped backward, but the lack of gravity made that impossible.

  “Alex, are you in there?” I said. “You need to get up, something’s gone wrong.”

  There was no reply. All was still.

  “Mr. Graham?” Sacha said.

  The door was pounded on again, and then nothing.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Eva said. “Just open the door.”

  I opened the door, and inside, Alex was awake. He was staring straight at us. Only something seemed wrong, somehow.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  Alex groaned, and then reached for me. Only, he missed. He flailed around weightlessly, scrambling his arms and legs and head around, trying to get to me but entirely unable to figure out how to move.

  “What the hell is wrong with him?” Sacha said.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “We need to restrain him.”

  Sacha reached forward, and Alex gnashed his teeth at the oncoming hands. Sacha retreated. Alex tried, but couldn’t seem to follow.

  The noise must’ve woken a few of the others, because Tom and Loxley soon emerged from their racks.

  “What the bloody hell’s going on?” Loxley said.

  “Something’s wrong!” Eva said.

  Alex finally figured out how to leave. He placed his feet against the back wall of the sleeping rack and pushed. He began to emerge from his rack, teeth gnashing as he came toward me, but he stopped dead after moving a few inches. He was still fastened to the wall of his rack by his harness. He was pulled backward, and he hit the frame of the rack, then tried again, but didn’t get any farther.

  “You can say that again,” Tom said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. He’s acting like a wild animal!”

  “What’s the racket?” Yamanaka asked as he joined us.