New Kings of Tomorrow

by J. M. Clark

  What the hell was going on? Her panic terrified him, and he had a pretty good idea of why. Trevor began walking up the steps, his right foot landing in what looked like vomit, right there on the steps. There was also vomit on the banister. “Oh God,” he said aloud.

  He carefully went on walking up the steps until he made it to Michael’s room, where he could hear Amy mumbling to herself. He couldn’t make out a single word she was saying, and he stepped into the room to get a closer look at what she was doing.

  After three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was not much that Trevor hadn’t seen. From blown-off body parts by way of IEDs, rape, murder, and everything in between. If there was an atrocity that could be imagined by the human brain, he’d likely witnessed it throughout his time in the military. Not a bit of that prepared him for the sight inside of his son’s room. It was a whole new ballgame when the terror resided in the comfort of your home.

  Amy was kneeling over their nine-year-old child in his bed, mumbling and wiping, over and over. She wiped the sweat from his brow and then used the same towel to wipe the vomit from his mouth. With one hand, she pressed an ice pack to his small, still chest. The same wiping and applying over and over. Why does she keep doing that? Both her hands worked automatically like a broken robot, performing the same task repeatedly.

  Trevor noticed all the bedding had been stripped from the mattress and thrown onto the floor. He could smell the sour perfume of vomit in the air; it had soaked into the tan-colored carpet, saturating a small area on the side of the bed nearest the door.

  He could see that Amy had been walking in it with her bare feet and spreading it throughout the room, even where he stood now in the hallway. She was likely the culprit of the vomit all over the steps. Trevor looked across the hallway behind him at Tricia’s closed door. Maybe she is at school.

  Trevor could not bring himself to step closer to the bed, where his wife was doing the same wiping ritual that never ended. He felt helpless and weak. With all the years of military training and real-world experience, he was still rendered absolutely useless when his family needed him most. He was afraid.

  Michael’s face lay hanging off the side of the mattress, mouth protruding open with a slack-jawed look, almost like a fish caught on the hook. Bile leaked from the open end of his mouth, falling onto the mattress. Amy continued mumbling to herself, still not seeing Trevor there, still not noticing her husband. She was in shock, he could see that now.

  There was no rhyme or reason to why she was doing what she was doing. In moments like that, sometimes people needed to feel like they did something when the time came to do something.

  At that moment, Trevor broke out of his paralysis. He went over to grab Amy and pull her out of Michael’s room. Enough was enough; he needed to take control of the situation.

  His hand grasped her elbow and he pulled, but she just turned and looked at him, through him, and spoke incoherently. He couldn’t make out exactly what she was saying, her hand still clutching the vomit-soaked towel and wiping at the air. The other hand, still holding the ice pack for his chest, had given up the fight and was dangling by her side.

  “Amy, c’mon darling, you have to come with me,” Trevor said to his wife, trying to remove her from an inevitable situation. He had seen enough death to know when it was at someone’s doorstep, and he knew that Michael had opened that proverbial door, allowing death to waltz in and make himself at home. It was far too late for their son.

  What should I do? he asked himself. He could save Amy from wiping and poking at her deceased son—even that was something. He had to remove her from the situation. That’s what a good man would do, a good husband and father. He went to grab Amy’s arm again, more forcefully this time, but she looked right at him, abruptly sneezed, and began speaking in a way that was somewhat understandable.

  “Gotta, g-g-gotta clean Mike…Mikey, Mikey up. He has school, has to get to school,” she stuttered.

  “No Amy…darling c’mon, Mikey can’t go to school today. Come with me, please. Let’s go downstairs. We can go pick up Tricia from school. Please, let’s just get out of here.” Tears began welling up in his eyes, not just because of what happened to Michael, but because of the state Amy was in. Michael was gone, but she wasn’t aware of it, wasn’t aware of reality at all.

  “Gotta…g-gotta wake Mikey up. Wake up, Mike.” She went back to wiping at the air with her free hand. Wiping that air clean. The look on her face was not sadness, but more concern. Robotic concern, if a robot could express such a facial expression.

  He tried to jerk her arm to remove her from the room, but she didn’t budge. He tried to pull her a bit harder, and still she didn’t move an inch. She just kept staring at him and repeating herself. He had always heard about this amazing strength a woman could summon when life-or-death situations arose regarding her offspring, but he always thought it was an old wives’ tale. That day in his son’s room, he found out it was actually true. He could not get her to budge from Michael’s bed no matter how hard he pulled.

  Trevor finally let Amy’s arm go and screamed at her. He didn’t know what else to do other than what he would do if he were still in the marines. “Dammit, Amy, we have to go! Let’s go find Tricia. We have to get her from school. And we’ll go get Mikey some help.” Their son was gone and couldn’t be helped, but he tried the lie in a desperate attempt to get his wife away from there.

  Amy’s robotic expression transformed into an almost devilish grin. Sexual, even.

  “Don’t be silly. Tricia is in her room, stayed home sick too, too. She’s still asleep too, won’t wake up.” That’s when she began coughing. Trevor backed away from her. Tears began to fall from his eyes then.

  At that moment it dawned on him. Tricia was in her room, dead as well. Oh my God!

  He left Amy with Michael, and she went back to her job of wiping sweat from his head, then sopping up the puddle of vomit from the bed.

  Trevor took off out of the room, across the hallway, and swung the door to his daughter’s bedroom open.

  Chapter Three

  Juan

  Driving up Thirty-Ninth and Fleming Road, all Juan Morales could think of was his daughter. He knew that she was sick; everyone was sick. He also knew that he and his family needed the money, so even though it hurt that morning to put on his uniform and leave her in the house with a stomachache, for her sake, he had to.

  He and his riding buddy, Eric, were both feeling terrible, popping two Sudafed per hour. The dosage said to take no more than six in a twenty-four-hour period, but he’d gone over that limit at least two hours ago. Add to that ibuprofen and a gang of other meds that he probably shouldn’t be mixing together. They could both lose their jobs if the boss knew they had been popping pills like a couple of college kids, but today was different.

  Juan couldn’t seem to shake the body aches. He was distracted, halfheartedly paying attention to the road as he thought about getting home to his family after this shift. Marie had asked him not to go to work, but besides the obvious paycheck, the truth of the matter was that people needed him this morning. Maybe more than ever. Yesterday was a day like any other, and today the sky was falling. When duty calls…right?

  Some type of crazy flu bug had been running rampant, and people were destroying the phone lines with emergency calls. At this point, many weren’t even able to get through to dispatch. There had been deaths, lots of them in fact, but some managed to make it to the hospital, which was quickly becoming too packed to take any new arrivals.

  Looking at the clock on the dashboard, he noticed that it was 11:30 a.m. He and Eric had already been to at least ten homes throughout the city. Juan took a glance in the rearview mirror; Eric was sitting in the back of the ambulance, talking to his mother on the phone.

  “After this shift, I’m coming right over, Ma, I promise.”

  Eric listened intently to the voice on the other side of the phone as he stared out the window, tapping it with his free hand. Ju
an heard the crinkle of a plastic bag in the back. Eric had been spitting mucus in a small trash receptacle for most of that morning.

  “Not much I can do though. I have a few friends there, but this is an emergency, and I can’t get in contact with anyone there to get you seen any faster.” He paused to listen to her speak, then pounded the window with his fist in anger. “I’m gonna keep trying. You just gotta hold tight, Ma.”

  Juan could see in his peripheral vision that Eric was wiping tears from his eyes. He heard the desperation in his friend’s voice. “You’ve gotta remember that a lot of the nurses and doctors are out sick as well. For the most part, the people that are working this morning have been there since last night. I swear they are going to take care of you. UC is the best hospital in the area. Hell, one of the best in the country.”

  Eric was quiet for a minute while he listened to his mother’s complaints. “Okay, Ma, I hear ya, I do. Me and Juan are super busy trying to help folks out. You know I’ll be up there to see you right after my shift, but I should go…Okay Ma…I love you too…Bye-bye.”

  They drove in silence for the next few minutes, other than the constant coughing and throat clearing and the endless wail of the siren.

  “She deserves better than this,” Eric said suddenly.

  “You’re doing all you can,” Juan said, the words scratching against his sore throat. When you share the small space of an ambulance for three years with someone, you get to know them. Eric’s father walked out on their family when he was a kid, and his mother raised him and his brother all on her own, even worked two jobs to pay for Eric’s EMT classes. Classes that he had struggled to pass. Even after finding out that he had passed, Eric still continued selling marijuana during his first few years as a paramedic.

  “She’s been through enough already.” Eric’s response was punctuated by his loud, hacking cough.

  Juan knew there wasn’t much he could say about that. It was the truth. Eric’s older brother ended up getting arrested for sexual assault when he was seventeen years old and caught a few other charges while doing a two-year bid. It had been five years since then, and he was still locked up. It had to be painful for Eric to not be able to get his mother the care she needed, especially with the things they were hearing about this nasty flu bug.

  Juan felt the same way about his family. They’d been driving around for hours helping others, but were helpless when it came to being there for the ones they loved. Kind of a cruel torture when you think about it. For every person they were able to get to the hospital, that was more time their own family members were suffering with no help.

  Juan focused on the road ahead, trying to ignore the cry of the sirens going off in their ears. He wondered if he’d ever be able to turn them off. They had not driven without the sirens on since they started the ambulance up that morning. There was so much he wanted to say, but with no reference point for comparison, he couldn’t even begin to understand how to start chipping away at the layers.

  Being charged with helping people who couldn’t help themselves when you were going through the same thing was a hard pill to swallow (no pun intended). But someone had to do it.

  Eric chugged a bottle of Robitussin DM, laid down, and placed his hands over his face.

  “We will be at the next home in a few minutes, bro. Try to get some rest until then.” Juan turned onto Winton Road, and in the rearview mirror he saw Eric lift his head.

  “We can’t do this all day, Juan. You do understand that, right?” Eric replied. Juan heard him throw the empty bottle on the floor of the ambulance. “We just can’t.”

  Juan didn’t respond, pretending not to hear him over the sirens. He’d begun to think the same thing himself a few hours ago, but he didn’t want to admit it just yet. Are we even helping anyone? Does this even matter? How serious is this pandemic? Juan opted to go with denial.

  “Stop reading that junk on the internet, you know they hype shit up to get views and stuff, man. It’s never as bad as they make it seem,” Juan said. He could just make out Eric scrolling up and down the screen of his smartphone.

  “I hear ya, but no bullshit bro, this flu thing is everywhere. Like literally every country in the world. I wouldn’t call this click bai—” Eric began coughing up a lung. After spitting more mucus into the receptacle, he said, “You have to take a look at it. The president has given a speech about it and everything.”

  They drove in that contemplative silence for a few more minutes before Juan decided to double down on a second helping of doubt. “I’m thinking it’s gonna be just like that swine flu thing from some years back. It will get a bunch of attention, scare the shit out of people, and boom, it’s gone. Ya know? The flu bug thing is probably being used to distract us from something even worse, like more of our rights being taken away.” Juan rolled down the window to spit an ungodly amount of snot onto the passing road.

  “I hear ya, Juan, I hear ya,” Eric replied.

  Juan picked up his phone from the cup holder to see if his wife or daughter had updated him on anything. Forty-six notifications sprung up on his phone the second he entered the unlock code, and it was all the big boys.

  Headlines from The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Boston Globe were dark—some really dark shit. He had tried to avoid them. Why? he thought to himself. Because reality was only what you experienced.

  It was easier to pretend when you were ignorant to the facts. If you didn’t see it or read it, did it really exist? Of course it did, but you didn’t have to deal with it…at least not at that time. Everyone was guilty of that throughout their lives, some more than others.

  Juan swiped away from the notifications and checked his text messages. Nothing. No texts. He dropped the phone back into the cup holder and took a right on Reading Road.

  Eric lifted his head up from the back of the ambulance once more. “What’s the point? Honestly, like, why are we even doing this?”

  Juan considered his response. Answer honestly, or play the doubt card again? Ignorance card it was. Three strikes, right? Go out swinging, Juan Morales.

  “What’s the point in what, Eric?” Juan was getting pretty annoyed before he had a sneezing fit for what felt like ten minutes straight.

  Eric allowed Juan to finish sneezing about a hundred times in a row, then answered, “You and I both know that the people we can even transport to the hospital won’t be seen. There are not enough nurses or doctors to help them. My mother just told me that the line of people needing help at UC is out the door. Out the fucking door, Juan. I’m not sure about you, but I feel like death. And judging by the amount of shit you keep spitting out the window, you can’t be feeling much better. Let’s be real with ourselves for a second. I take my job as serious as the next professional, but c’mon, man. It’s pointless.” Juan remained silent.

  “People are dying all over the place. I’m sick…you sound like shit up there. Why not take this ambulance back to the hub and go home to our families? News stations are broadcasting that we are in a state of emergency. Why doesn’t that go for you and me? We got families, we matter too, know what I’m saying?”

  Juan picked up his phone again and checked the messages. Seventeen additional news notifications had popped up, but no new messages though. He thought there might be some truth in what Eric was saying. Maybe he should go home and check on his family. “How about we do this last pick-up; we’re almost there. After we drop them off at the hospital, we can ditch this shift and get home to our families. We will deal with the boss tomorrow. It’s not a bad idea, Eric.”

  “Good deal,” Eric responded through a gnarled cough. Juan heard him rustling around on the gurney in the back before settling down. He knew his partner wasn’t doing well at all. Hold on buddy, we are gonna call it quits here soon.

  Juan grabbed his phone once more, avoiding the notifications as he made his way to the phone app to dial his wife’s cell. When she didn’t pick up, he decided to leave her a me
ssage. He thought that perhaps she could still be asleep, but in the back of his mind, he didn’t really believe that.

  “Baby, I’ll be home in about an hour,” he said to her voicemail. “Me and Eric are gonna clock out early today. I know you guys need me there. I feel bad for not being with you both, so I’m coming to you. Be dressed and ready to go to the hospital. UC is a mess, so we’ll go to Mercy West. Kiss Sofia for me and tell her that Daddy is coming home.”

  Juan swiped the screen and laid the phone on the passenger seat before making a left onto Circle Ave. He took his eyes off the road for a second to check on Eric in the back. Even with the siren going, he could hear that Eric’s breathing was becoming harsh back there, his chest rattling like a bird desperately trying to escape a cage.

  * * *

  Martin Powell couldn’t wait for the ambulance another minute. He had to get his family help now. He loaded up the kids and his wife in their large Cadillac Escalade and slid into the driver’s seat. He loved that damn SUV. He never could have afforded a vehicle like that without his wife’s income to help with the purchase. At that moment though, he didn’t care about anything but getting them the help they needed.

  Martin drove sixty-five in a twenty-five with his wife slumped over in the passenger seat. She was comatose and running a temperature of one hundred and five degrees, and he feared that her brain had begun to slow broil from the heat.

  In the back seat, one of their kids was screaming while the other mirrored his mom’s position perfectly. Everyone always told them how beautiful their sons were. The consensus of every middle-aged mom in the grocery store was that they would grow up to be heartbreakers. Mixed-race children were so gorgeous, people would say. But today…today the young boys looked like death warmed over.