by Noah Mann
“I need my script.”
The man staggered from the working newsroom to the anchor desk and tipped against it, single piece of white paper in one hand, the other grasping at the edge with fingers that were near skeletal. He leaned forward, face over the desk, more light angling upon him now, revealing his harsh features, skull chiseled down to thin skin draped upon bone. He was unrecognizable.
Except for the eyes.
“Jim,” I said, and let my hand drift to the screen and lay upon the face of the veteran newsman.
“Thank you,” Jim Winters began, swallowing dryly. “Thank you for joining us. In today’s news...”
He hesitated, lost, eyes glancing down at the blank sheet of paper in his hand, an anger building, setting the blue in them afire as his gaze shifted, looking past the camera.
“Dammit, Mark! Why is the script not on the prompter?!”
The question, sharp and loud, was accompanied by a trickle of white froth at the corner of Jim’s mouth, the bubbles soon turning pink, then red. A thin, dark trickle of blood dribbled from his nose and over his lips.
“Dammit!” he swore again, spitting the blood draining over and from his mouth, hand that held the paper bunching it into a fist that he slammed down upon the desk. “We need to be professional! People are counting on us!”
I drew my hand back from the sickening image on the screen as Jim Winters looked again into the camera.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for the difficulties we are experiencing. We will endeavor to...to...”
He quieted, his gaze drifting upward, to the darkness looming above.
“We need more light,” Jim said. “More light and...”
Then he said no more. The fist he’d planted on the desktop opened, letting the paper slip out. He straightened with effort, standing behind the desk, running a hand over the few strands of hair that remained atop his head, grooming a memory. His body turned unsteadily, back to the camera, and he made his way back into the working newsroom, shadows swallowing him as he appeared to sit at a desk and let his head come to rest upon it.
I scooted away across the floor until my back was against the couch, watching for hours, past the time the sun disappeared in the west, my eyes tuned to the distant, dim studio, trying to seize on any movement. There was none. Not at nine o’clock. Not at midnight. And not at half past one in the morning when, once again, the Denver station went to static.
After a few minutes I turned the television off, muting the slight glow it had spread about the room around me. Night flooded in through the windows, dark and full. Out there, somewhere, I wanted to believe that there was hope. The hope that Neil had told me had to exist.
But I no longer thought that possible. The blight had wiped the world nearly clean of our kind, and we were fully capable of finishing what it couldn’t. Hope was an illusion. Once it had been real. But no more.
I turned away from the television and faced the fire.
Stay alive...
Stay alive...
Neil’s admonition haunted me as the fire spat embers.
Stay alive...
“I can’t,” I said, swollen and stiff jaw barely letting the two words out. “I can’t.”
Beyond that near certainty, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
As fall settled in, and the world remained grey, devoid of any brilliance nature had once allowed to soften the death that came with the season, I felt my energy and my body accelerate toward an end. I was ready to go, quietly, my flesh and spirit nearing the moment when they would begin to fade. The time to let the blight finally claim me was almost at hand.
Fate, though, crept forward on its own line of time, serving its own agenda. It was not done with me.
Forty One
I stared at death through the front window.
The pines stood like splintered matchsticks, poking from the dead brown earth. Where once stood a lush forest creeping toward green slopes and rocky peaks there now was a graveyard of mighty woods. My house, my safe place, was surrounded by a grey, silent end, that inevitability creeping closer to my own situation.
Eating had become torture, what I could get down coming up more often than not. Some infection, I suspected, had settled it. A parting gift from Major James Layton and the bullet of his that had found me. I’d exhausted my supply of antibiotics to keep any ill effects of the injury at bay. Now, I was at its mercy.
The last chirp of a bird or stomp of a rutting moose had long since faded. I hadn’t seen a single living thing above ground since the random attack by a starving grizzly. Just the earthworms were left, I suspected, safe and waiting beneath those who had, somehow, stayed alive. And how appropriate was that? We all went back to worm food eventually.
Beep.
My head angled slowly toward the alarm panel. As long as the sun shined my security system would trundle on, giving false warnings. A branch falling and tripping a motion detector. A glint of reflected sunlight confusing a thermal sensor. Perhaps what I’d built here to alert for intrusions would offer up its beeps and buzzes in some manner of truncated perpetuity. Perhaps.
But I would not be here to notice. Or to care.
“If a tree falls in a forest,” I muttered and tried to focus in on the alarm panel from across the great room. A fire roared in the hearth, no fear of marking my presence quelling the desire for heat anymore. I’d weighed myself that morning. The number that stared up at me from the old scale was a terrible truth. A hundred and seven pounds.
I’d topped out at one ninety the day the red signal had come.
Blankets wrapped me as I huddled near the blaze. Fall hinted hard at winter. Another winter. I couldn’t shake the chill, light as it was. It seemed colder this year. Maybe it was, but I knew it was likely that my deteriorating physical state was responsible for the heightened discomfort. As it was for my fading eyesight. Straining to see across the room, I could hardly make out the boundaries of the rectangular alarm panel, even less so whichever specific warning had been tripped. It would reset in a minute, I knew. The sensor would realize that a fallen limb from one of the withered trees was responsible, the offending length of desiccated wood lying motionless on the ground. Moving no further through my secure perimeter.
Beep.
I turned back to the fire, staring into its shifting yellows and swirling oranges. On the hearth before it a charred pot rested. In it I’d cooked yesterday’s meal, a mixture of rice and potato flakes. Calories, pure and simple. Taste didn’t register anymore, and that which did was muted by the pain that registered in my wounded jaw with every small swallow. The joy that food once held, the pleasure, had long since left me, every morsel I consumed a reminder of what had brought me to this state of being. What had brought the world to its knees. Brought mankind to its end.
Beep.
Again I looked to the alarm panel, a small rectangular light pulsing, off and on, clear to red. The sensor had not reset, some electronic glitch preventing the alert from quieting.
Unless it wasn’t a glitch.
Beep.
I planted my hands on the arms of the chair and pressed myself out of the seat, rising unsteadily, blankets shedding from my shoulders and mounding at my feet. A step took me just past the chair and I grabbed onto the edge of the mantle for support, logs spitting embers in the hearth as I passed. Another few steps brought me to the back of the couch. I gripped it with both hands like a railing and drew nearer to the alarm panel, still beeping, light flashing, close enough to see that it was an outer sensor that had tripped. One just inside my property line not near the driveway, but further into what had once been the deepest of woodlands, beyond the pond and stream, where the hills began to step toward mountains.
Beep. Beep.
A second alarm sounded, light flashing with it, nearer my house now. Closing in on me.
“I’m not checking out,” I muttered to the empty space and grabbed Del’s rifle where it leaned against the wall, nearly stumbling as I too
k control of the weapon. My friend’s weapon. “Not walking into the fire. No way.”
My thoughts tumbled about in a hazy waking state, recollections mixed with intention. The past with the here and now. Rendered images of a woman’s suicide filtered through my tenuous consciousness. A pyre of flame, and me striding into it. Consumed.
Beep.
They were closer still.
“Distance is your friend,” I said, borrowing my friend’s tactical mantra.
The door lay just a few steps away. It twisted and warped in the grip of my mind’s eye. What hold I had on the real was slipping. If I was going to confront the intruders, if I was going to make a stand, make a last stand, it had to be now.
I pushed off the wall with my free hand and aimed my body at the door. It tipped that way, feet shuffling to keep up as gravity pulled my upper half forward and down. Only the heft of the door absorbing the faint weight of what I’d become stopped me from toppling to the floor.
Another beep sounded behind. I cared no more where they were coming from, only that they were coming, and only that I would be waiting, ready, eager to see some end come. Hopefully to them before me.
I shifted to the right and planted myself against the wall, reaching to the door. With a breath and a guttural grunt I jerked it open. The cold inside was eclipsed by what washed in, whipping around me. With effort I brought Del’s rifle up and worked the bolt, chambering a round as I stumbled forward, foot catching on the threshold, my body collapsing onto the porch’s old floor boards. The impact punched the breath from me and left me gasping as I clawed my way toward the front steps.
The rifle bucked in my grip, just one hand holding it, finger squeezing the trigger as I lay atop the weapon. It thudded against my chest, then settled, and I rolled slightly off it to cycle the bolt again as I caught my breath.
“I’m ready for you,” I tried to shout, but a voice hardly raised was all I could muster, the warning surely lost in the wind. “I’m taking you with me.”
I fired again, not even bothering to aim. Little chance that I could have if I’d wanted to. My vision had degraded, through fatigue, malnourishment, or some internal malady, to the point that objects at any distance beyond a few yards seemed to be drifting beyond some gauzy veil.
“Keep coming,” I challenged the intruder as I worked the bolt, and readied still another round.
Through the mental fog filling my head I wondered, though, why there was no return fire coming my way. No wood was splitting from the impacts of near misses. I had not been struck. There was no sharp report of shots cracking in the woods.
“Come on!” I yelled, the sound carrying this time, another shot following to punctuate my words.
But there was no assault in reply. No sound at all. Until...
Fletch...
The memory came from nowhere, Neil calling to me. Maybe I was already dead, I thought, in the place where my friend had been since succumbing in the early days of the world’s slide toward the abyss.
Fletch...
Why he was calling to me I didn’t know. I wanted to see him. To feel his presence again, even if only in some ethereal plane where souls gathered.
It’s me...
I wanted to call out to my friend, but did not know how. In this other place, was I to just use my voice? Would he hear it?
“Stop shooting!”
The directive shook me from all consideration that I had transitioned to a place beyond this life. Those were actual words. Real words. Shouted at me. By...
No. It couldn’t be. I was imagining it. Maybe the words had not been real. Maybe they were just part of my fading consciousness. Because that couldn’t be...
“Neil?” I asked, as loud as I could. “Neil?”
“Yes!”
The answer came. From Neil. But was it him? How could it be him? This was some sick hallucination, I began to think, married atop a reality crashing toward me. Someone out there wanted to kill me. Someone out there had breached my perimeter. It was not my friend. It was not Neil. My mind was playing tricks.
“No!”
I fired off another round, screaming as I did.
“Fletch, stop it! It’s me!”
“It’s not Neil! It can’t be!”
I cycled the bolt again, but had exhausted the rounds in the internal magazine. It was empty. My mind seemed to ignore this point of certainty and I made some attempt to aim, rolling to line up my right eye behind the scope. The world beyond the glassy circle shifted like some funhouse mimic of what lay beyond.
“I’ll kill you!” I threatened, and silence followed. My finger rested on the trigger. Waiting through five seconds, then ten seconds of thick, anxious quiet.
“Fletch!” the voice called out finally, then added, “Life’s tough!”
Life’s tough...
The voice out there had said that. I heard it. With my ears. It was not conjured by my mind.
Life’s tough...
“You remember, Fletch! You have to remember!”
Life’s tough...
“Be tougher,” I mostly whispered to myself, then drew a great breath and shouted for all I was worth, right side of my face afire with pain. “Be tougher!” I pushed the rifle aside and grabbed at the porch railing above, trying to pull myself up, but only managing to get to my knees, hunched forward, like a worn warrior bent in prayer. “Neil!”
I tipped sideways, just above the steps, my head thudding off the cold wood, eyes fluttering open and closed, trying to seize upon the image of someone rushing toward me.
More than one someone.
“Neil...” I said, the word, the name, slipping out like some last gasp.
“Fletch! Fletch!”
It was him. It was Neil. Somehow, in some impossible way, my friend was here. And he was not alone.
“Fletch,” he said almost softly as he reached me. “Shit.”
Neil slipped an arm under my neck and lifted my head from the cold wood of the porch, cradling me. Beyond him I saw two more shapes. Hovering above. People. Women. One older, one younger. Mother and daughter? Were they real? Was he?
“You’re alive?” I asked, and my friend nodded.
“So are you,” Neil said.
I chuckled lightly, then my eyes closed, and I drifted off, toward dreams or death I had no idea.
Forty Two
“You’re back,” Neil said as my eyes opened and found him standing over me.
I was in my bed, in my refuge, the iron stove hissing hot, snow falling beyond the window.
“Neil...how...”
He eased himself to the edge of my bed and took my hand in his, squeezing hard to let me know I was really, actually alive.
“Plenty of time to hear my story,” he said.
“Someone’s awake.”
It was the woman I’d seen with Neil as they came to me on the porch. I didn’t see the girl, the child, now, and I wondered if that part of my hazy encounter had been a dream.
“Fletch, this is Grace,” Neil said. “Grace, my friend Fletch. Eric. Eric Fletcher.”
“I’ll choose among your suggestions,” Grace said, and knelt next to the bed, putting a hand to my cheek, her gentle touch muted by something—bandaging. “You’re doing better, Eric.”
I reached up and felt that side of my face. The sloppy bandage job I’d done after being shot by Layton had been replaced by something that felt somewhat competently done.
“Grace is a nurse,” Neil told me. “She did the best she could with your ugly face.”
“It wasn’t too bad,” Grace told me as she lifted an edge of the gauze to examine the wound. “You had some infection setting in, but we caught that before it turned septic. I stitched up the entry and exit wounds. You lost a molar, but mostly you’re lucky that whoever shot you was off in their aim.”
“Layton,” I said, and Neil looked to Grace, both puzzling at the singular word I offered. “He shot me.”
Neil nodded, some anger clear now on hi
s face.
“I assume you gave better than you got,” he said.
“Much,” I replied. “How long have I been...”
Pain sizzled across the right side of my jaw, cutting off my question.
“You were out for two days,” Neil told me. “Long enough for Grace to do her best work on you.”
I looked between them, and then to the doorway, the hall empty beyond.
“When you came, I thought I saw a girl.”
“My daughter,” Grace said. “Krista. She’s staring at the snow out the front window.”
The trickle of data about me, Neil, Grace, her daughter, set my head to spinning, some hint of that externally obvious. Neil smiled at me.
“Don’t sweat everything that’s happening,” he said. “We’ve gotta start getting food into you. Gotta get you stronger.”
“I’m low on food,” I managed to say.
“We came supplied,” Neil said.
I wondered what the story was with Neil and Grace. They seemed infinitely comfortable with each other, yet I hadn’t noticed even a slight expression of affection. No hand on his shoulder. No telling smile toward her. Maybe they had just met on the road, heading my way. Travelers of convenience. Or necessity. Safety in numbers.
“You’re going to get better,” Neil assured me. “You’ll be ready.”
“Ready?” I asked, my voice strained, hardly a dry whisper coming out. “For what?”
“To head west.”
The voice was small and perfect. Grace turned toward it, her body shifting so that I could see Krista standing in the doorway, looking right at me with bright, hopeful surety.
“That’s right,” Neil said, looking to Grace now. “Right?”
Her face tightened, the smile that remained seeming strained now.
“Right?” Neil sought confirmation again.
Grace nodded, more acceptance than concurrence in the gesture.
“What’s to the west?” I asked.
“Eagle One,” Krista said from the doorway.
Eagle One...
Del had zeroed in on the signal he’d heard as coming from the west. I looked to Neil, the certainty about him pierced somewhat, if only by a degree. As if the journey that lay ahead was beyond necessary.
