So much blood. Too much.
All of this, all of these sensations, became more acute as Clint’s own health rapidly deteriorated. What had begun as an annoying tickle in his throat and a distracting gurgle in his stomach had become an unbearable combination of pain unlike anything Clint had previously conceived.
Each barking, fluid-filled cough sent bolts of pain from his chest that electrified his extremities. The coughs then aggravated the discomfort in his digestive system. He’d lost control of his functions too many times to count. He couldn’t believe there was anything left to lose. Yet it would happen again and again.
Alone in his tent, he lay there sweating, bleeding, agonizing. The diffused red light that bathed the space offered Clint the illusion that he was, in fact, in Hell. His fever didn’t help. It was spiking again. He was at once hot and cold. His head throbbed. His mouth, aside from the phlegm and remnant blood, was bone dry.
The waves of heat that rolled through his body felt like the undulating blasts from a furnace or an out-of-control fire. He lay there, his eyes half open and unfocused, imagining he was surrounded by fire. The flames licked at the tent, melting through the man-made fabric. They lapped at his skin, torturing him, scalding him, before devouring him alive.
This was more than his imagination. Clint believed, in his feverish daydream, that he was on fire, that he’d burned like this before. It wasn’t fire though, it was something worse than fire. It was percussive and sudden. It was radiant heat from a blast that leveled everything around him. Then he was cold. He was covered in a gray, flaky ash that fell silently from a sky whose sun was little more than a thumbprint smudge of yellow against a bleak, never-ending cloud that stretched from horizon to horizon.
He shivered. Where was he? Was he dead yet? He couldn’t be. The pain was there. The odors that permeated everything filled his nostrils.
He coughed. His body jerked, convulsing against the explosion of sharp, daggerlike pain that jabbed at him. Clint rolled onto his side and drew his knees up toward his chest. His pulse thumped wildly and he felt it through his body—at his temples, in his neck, against his ribs.
His eyes watered and thick drool escaped his lips. It ran down his cheek and puddled next to him. Every breath was more laborious than the one before. His body sagged and he was reminded of heroin without the high.
There was the heaviness and the dry mouth, the drowsiness and the nausea. It was as if he’d injected it into the vein, had moved past the ten seconds of pleasure and only got the downside.
To his side or behind him, he couldn’t tell which, the loud zip of his tent flap opening caught his attention. Somebody was there. A cough preceded a weak but friendly greeting.
“Hey,” said Filter. “You alive, Clint? You still with me?”
Clint tried to answer him. In his mind he told Filter he was alive. He was in pain. He couldn’t sit up. Breathing was too difficult. He said all of these things, though none of them aloud.
“Oh wow,” Filter said. “It’s ripe in here, man.”
Ripe? What did he mean was ripe? Clint couldn’t define the word. Ripe. It seemed to him, in his stupor, that he was the opposite of ripe. He was past ripe. He’d gone bad. He was past the sell-by date. He’d all but expired.
“Hey,” Filter said, moving closer. He hacked and cleared his throat. “You there, dude?”
Clint’s eyes were open. From the periphery he could see Filter. He could hear him too. His breathing was raspy. Or was it his own breathing? He didn’t know.
“Don’t die on me, man,” said Filter. “Everybody’s dying on me.”
The warmth of Filter’s body next to his registered as Filter’s face came into frame. It filled his field of view, blocking the floor of the tent that stretched out in front of him and ran to its wall. Filter’s breath was rancid.
“Hey,” he said. “Your eyes are open. You’re still with me.”
Filter’s long face stretched into a smile. Blood seeped from between his teeth. He slurped it back into his mouth and winced as he swallowed. “Can you move? If you can, you gotta get outta here.”
Clint moved his eyes to focus on Filter’s. The muscles stretched and burned. His eyes watered. His head throbbed.
“Can you move?” Filter repeated. “They’re coming for us.”
His breath hung in the air at Clint’s nostrils. It was rank with sickness and infection. It was foul. It was familiar. It smelled like the taste coating Clint’s tongue.
“They’re rounding people up,” said Filter. “They’re putting us in camps. They’re taking us to die.”
Clint didn’t need to go anywhere to die. He was going to do it right here. He was going to die on the floor of his tent, bathed in his own ripe filth. Ripe.
“They already got some of us, Clint. They’re coming back though. They’re coming for us. It ain’t good, dude. It’s like the apocalypse or something. It’s like the plague.”
The plague? That made sense. A death blow to what was left of humanity. It was a mercy killing for the countless Californians too poor to sustain themselves. It was a good thing. It was better than being burned alive. It was better than freezing to death. Or was it? Freezing to death might be less painful.
Clint tried swallowing a cough. A spray of blood spewed from his mouth and painted Filter’s face.
Filter cursed aloud, rolling away from Clint, and then coughed himself. He was on his back, frantically wiping the bloody sputum from his face. He was cursing and shouting and coughing. Then he stopped. He lay there on his back, his hands covered in Clint’s blood, and he started laughing. It was a raspy smoker’s laugh. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”
No, thought Clint. It doesn’t. He coughed again. Knives of pain stabbed him in his chest and his back. His heart pounded against his chest and then weakened. His breathing slowed. He tried inhaling. It was like he was sucking air through a clogged straw.
“I mean, seriously, dude,” said Filter, apparently unaware of Clint’s new struggle. “None of it matters. I’m already dead, right? You’re dead too. We’re all dead. This crap is killing us all.”
Clint opened his mouth to suck in a warm, wet breath.
Filter coughed again and then laughed. “They’re out there in their yellow suits,” he said to the tent’s pitched roof. “Acting all gestapo on us. They’re yelling stuff about martial law and habeas corpus. They’re acting all—”
Filter sucked in a wheezy breath and coughed again, cursed, and rolled onto his side, facing Clint. His hands were tucked behind him now, as if cuffed.
“Sorry, man,” he said, his voice weaker. “Sorry. Couldn’t help that. It just…happened. I’m so sorry, man. I know it’s rotten.”
Rotten. That was a much better word than ripe, Clint thought. But he couldn’t smell whatever Filter had unwittingly done. He couldn’t see him. He could barely hear him.
He focused on the lack of air, the building tightness in his chest that accompanied a heavy burn. His vision was gone now. He stared into blackness.
Outside the tent there were sirens growing louder. There was the rumble of trucks. People were yelling now. There were boots. Rifle shots. There was…there was…there was…nothing.
The last of the air escaped Clint’s dirtied lungs, leaked into his windpipe, drained from his mouth and nose, and evaporated into the ether. He thought maybe Filter had said something to him, had implored him not to go. He couldn’t be sure. Clint was dead.
***
Filter saw the life drain from his friend’s eyes. Clint’s body trembled, shuddered, and then went limp. A leaky, high-pitched squeak blew through his open mouth. And that was it. Clint was gone.
Filter barely had time to process it when the tent flap peeled back and a rifle-toting, yellow-suited soldier dipped into the space. He ordered both of them to come out of the tent. If they didn’t, they’d be burned inside it.
Filter rolled onto his knees and told the soldier he was coming out. He tried raising his hands, b
ut couldn’t balance himself. His equilibrium was off, so he dropped onto all fours.
“Both of you,” said the soldier. “I need both of you out here now.”
“He’s dead,” said Filter. “He’s not coming.”
The soldier backed away from the flap. “You alone, then. Now.”
Filter would have told the man he was obeying the command, but he coughed instead. The fit stopped him in his tracks a couple of feet from the flap. His chest burned. His mouth filled with blood.
“Slowly,” said the soldier. “Exit slowly.”
Filter nodded and moved each limb as methodically as he could. His head was throbbing. His mouth was dry. He was hungry and somehow nauseated at the same time. His pants were soiled. He was bloodied. He understood why the soldier wanted him avoiding fast movements.
He finished the short crawl through the flap and emerged into the daylight. It was blinding. Sweat bloomed on his forehead. It drained into his eyes, and he squeezed them closed as large gloved hands grabbed him under his sweaty pits and started dragging him away from the tent.
His feet trailed across the dirt, catching on divots and rocks, as the strong grips carried him with purpose. A blast of heat washed over him, and Filter opened his eyes to find two suited soldiers moving him toward a large truck.
He looked to one side in the direction of the heat. There was a pile of something, a large heap, and it was burning. Flames built around its edges and grew toward the center. They lapped at the air, sucking in the oxygen. Black columns of smoke poured from the mound, and it exploded in flame with a bulge of fire that seemed to bloom from nowhere. Then Filter saw them.
To one side of the pile was a trio of yellow-suited fire-starters holding what looked like flamethrowers. The machines roared with each pulse of burning gas that shot toward the collected debris. Filter recognized there was more than one mound. There were four or five. There were seven. They were macabre hedges, half-moons that throbbed with orange and red flame. Each of them was ruled over by flamethrowing, hazmat-suit-wearing soldiers. They appeared to relish the job as they swept their blades of fire across their targets.
Their backs were arched, their hips thrust forward to carry the weight of the side-mounted cannons. Blast after blast. Burst after burst. The air became acrid. The particulate drifted across what had been the homeless camp. Filter breathed it in with what little breath he could and coughed it out.
He could taste the ash on his tongue, in his throat. He spat it out on the ground in front of him, drool clinging to his chin.
“What are you burning?” he asked. They were getting closer. He couldn’t make out what was in the mounds, the heaps, the piles. Were they tents? Clothes? Human remains? His question was for either or both of his transporters.
“What are you burning?” he repeated. “Who are you burning?”
He looked down through the gap in his armpit. Through the haze of building smoke and the kick of dust from his feet, there was a lone fire-starter standing in front of Clint’s tent. The yellow suit shifted and clutched the flamethrower at the hip, the nozzle extended toward the tent. Flames shot from the nozzle at the red A-frame. The nozzle moved from side to side, dousing the tent in fire. The tent curled and melted before succumbing to the flames.
Filter’s eyes widened. A knot grew in his already ravaged throat. He tried swallowing but couldn’t. He had his answer. They were burning everything and everyone.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked.
He struggled against the tight grip under his arms. He tried eyeing the soldiers behind their masks. He couldn’t see their faces. Not from his angle, not with the building yellow-gray haze of smoke that drifted across the camp in thickening waves.
He tried finding a hold on the ground, getting his feet underneath him. The men lifted him, as if sensing his plan, so he couldn’t stand on his own, tightening their grips. Their push toward the truck was more forceful, more urgent.
They came to a ramp at the back of the large vehicle and stopped there. His eyes stinging from the smoke, Filter narrowed his watery gaze and focused on the inside of the truck’s cargo hold. There were overhead LED lights that glowed white and gave the inside of the hold an antiseptic appearance.
There were others there already, their sallow faces and sunken eyes peering out from the back of the truck. The light gave them ghostly appearances. It washed whatever color might have remained in their faces, in their tired, aching limbs.
Men and women sat on benches that lined each side of the hold from the cab to the tailgate. There was a divider that separated the cab from the hold, with only a small window leading from one to the other. Along the walls, above the benches, were shelves that held large duffel bags and other equipment Filter couldn’t identify.
He surveyed the sick people inside the truck. They slouched, leaned on each other, or sat slumped with their chins to their chests.
The two soldiers stepped forward closer to the truck, and Filter saw that all of them were strapped in at the waist and across their shoulders. Otherwise, he gathered, they’d have fallen over onto one another or the metal floor. A yellow-suited soldier inside the truck was affixing a belt to a woman sitting in the seat closest to the divider on the passenger’s side.
As the soldier yanked on the shoulder straps to insure they were taut, the woman vomited on the yellow suit. Blood, bile, and whatever else was in her stomach splattered the soldier’s face mask, and the soldier stumbled backward, bracing a gloved hand against the opposite wall to regain some sense of balance.
Nobody else in the truck appeared to notice or care about what had happened. The soldier marched from the truck, down the ramp, and around the truck until Filter couldn’t see him or her anymore.
A soldier standing guard at the back of the truck motioned Filter and his escorts up the ramp. The inside of the cargo hold was like a mausoleum of the soon-to-be-dead.
There was moaning. There was whimpering. There was a chorus of hacking coughs that sounded like someone had taken a grater to the occupants’ throats. Filter shuddered as the soldiers led him up a ramp and hoisted him into the back. He dropped to his knees, the bang of them on the floor reverberating through the hot, enclosed space. One of the soldiers who’d carried him helped him to his feet and nudged him toward the last empty space on the driver’s side bench. He was directly opposite the woman who’d vomited moments earlier. It looked as if she wasn’t breathing now. Her lips were blue, her head hung lazily, her eyes were closed, and there was blood leaking from her nose.
Filter thought he recognized her, although in this light, under these conditions, he couldn’t be sure of who anybody was anymore.
“Sit here,” said the soldier through his mask. “Sit up straight.”
Filter tried to comply, but he was out of breath. He wheezed and hunched over, coughing out the latest glob of thick fluids that had collected in his lungs. He winced against the sharp pain. His stomach lurched and constricted. He grabbed at his side, doubled over in the seat.
A soldier gripped him at the shoulders and shoved him back flat against the thinly cushioned wall. Filter considered resisting. He didn’t. He couldn’t. He sat there, his weight resting against the soldier’s force, and let the man strap him into his seat.
He closed his eyes, unwilling to look at the woman he was certain was now dead. To his right he heard the unmistakable sound of metal sliding on metal as the soldiers retracted the ramp into the undercarriage of the truck.
“Good to go,” said one of the soldiers. “Cross-check.”
“Cross-check,” said another. “All good here.”
The doors slammed shut. The grind of a locking mechanism sliding into place echoed in the back of the hold, and the overhead lights turned off. It was dark, the sounds of Filter’s fellow passengers amplified in the enclosed space.
There was the double thump of someone banging on the tailgate, and the truck whined as it lurched forward. Filter’s weak body leaned into the stra
ps, straining the fabric that essentially held him upright.
He wanted so badly to cover his ears as the truck began to rumble. The crunch of rock under the tires, the cacophony of suffering, the retching and gagging of those around him was too much.
Filter lowered his head, his chin touching his chest, the back of his neck stretching. He bounced in his seat lifelessly and tried to disconnect himself from the grotesque reality that surrounded him.
He was thankful that his sense of smell was moderately dulled by the congestion that clogged his sinuses. Otherwise the melting pot of odors in the back of that truck would have forced up whatever was left in his gut. There was nothing there, of course. He hadn’t eaten in two days. But he was certain that full, unadulterated whiffs of the ambient air in the truck would have initiated a wave of dry heaves.
The truck accelerated and the sounds of its large engine and oversized tires spinning on the highway served as noise cancellation for the dying next to him and in front of him. Filter thought about opening his eyes, searching the others for some signs of hope. He resisted.
After what felt like an eternity, the truck slowed. It screeched to a stop and the truck jerked still. There were voices outside, a lot of loud voices. The metal lock slid open and daylight rushed into the cargo hold. The overhead lights illuminated.
Filter craned his sore neck to the right and stared toward the open tailgate. A pair of dark figures were working the ramp; then one of them climbed it and stood at the back of the truck. The figure was large enough that, despite being backlit, Filter knew it was another soldier, or someone in a position of power, in a hazmat suit.
“Holy Mary,” said the figure. It was a woman’s voice, her words muffled behind the hooded mask she wore. “How many of these are already dead?”
“What’s the total headcount?” asked another voice. Filter couldn’t find its source, though he was reasonably certain it belonged to a man.
“Twenty,” said the woman. She was holding a computer tablet.
The Alt Apocalypse (Book 4): Affliction Page 9
