The Alt Apocalypse (Book 4): Affliction

by Abrahams, Tom

Danny’s breathing was rapid and shallow. He was forcing himself to weather the searing pain that exploded from his palm as Francis shifted the wire and wiggled to free the jagged blade embedded underneath the skin.

  It tore further and Danny cried out in pain. When he grabbed his freed, deeply wounded hand and bent over at his waist, Maggie lunged at Francis.

  Her sudden attack knocked Danny to the side, and he almost fell over in his cumbersome hazmat suit. He steadied himself to see the dog had Francis’s pant leg in her mouth. She was shaking it like a chew toy, snarling, her head whipping from side to side.

  Still on the other side of the fence, Smith was looking for an opening to fire his leveled weapon, but Francis was between him and the dog, squealing in terror while trying to wiggle loose.

  His balance regained, Danny ignored the waves of pain in his hand and wrist and turned toward the road. He shouted for Maggie and bolted.

  Sweat rolled from his forehead into his eyes, stinging them. Danny couldn’t do anything about it. His neck and back were soaked with perspiration. His feet were beginning to slip inside the soles of the boots from the moisture that collected there after it rolled down his legs.

  He heard a series of pops behind him. Gunshots. More shouting. He didn’t stop or turn around. He kept running in the suit. Maggie was even with him now, galloping beside him, her tongue hanging from the side of what Danny was sure was a wide smile.

  “Run!” he told her in between heaving, raspy breaths. “Run, girl!”

  His hand throbbed, but he held it up in front of him, trying to lessen the flow of blood. His hand and lower arm were painted with it. He had work to do.

  His heels were blistered. They rubbed and slid up and down against the interior heel of the boots. Every high step picked at raw, bleeding flesh that surfaced from under the peeling top layer.

  His chest was heavy. His lungs burned. His muscles were thick with acid. He was running out of steam. He swung right and then left again to find Maggie five yards ahead of him.

  She jumped over a waist-high barrier, the kind that had the alternating orange and white stripes meant to deter people without really providing any security. Once she’d cleared the hurdle, she slowed and looked back expectantly at Danny.

  He had no concept of where she was heading. So focused on escaping the men who were likely steps from tackling him, he’d lost track of his wider surroundings. Then he saw it, obscured by the tents and Danny’s tunnel vision. Only a couple of hundred yards ahead was the beach. They were on a street, barricaded on either side to block it from neighborhood access, and as far as he could tell, their path was clear. Maggie had led him to one of the major thoroughfares running east and west to and from the beach.

  Danny didn’t stop to read street signs. He didn’t know which road he was traveling. He did feel the asphalt under his feet now. Only now did he glance back. The soldiers weren’t chasing them. They’d given up. Danny sighed with relief.

  They reached the end of the street where it met one running parallel to the beach beyond. They slipped around a final barrier and pounded their way onto the sand. Danny’s heavy boots sank into the soft, dry surface. His calves burned.

  Up and ahead and to the left was a public bathroom, a squat concrete and tile building planted squarely on the beach near a collection of bike racks and a single winding path that ran along the edge of the beach and through a series of craftily planted palm trees. They trudged the short distance to the bathroom, and Danny led Maggie inside the one closest to them.

  It was darker inside the bathroom, lit only by the ambient light shining through the opaque panes of glass that lined the walls beneath the roof. It was a dingy light that gave the dank space an abandoned aura, like nobody had used the space in decades.

  With one good hand, Danny managed to maneuver the hood from his head. He sucked in the surprisingly humid air, decorated with the foul scent of ammonia, and threw the hood to the floor. Then he stepped to a sink and pressed the button that started a temporary flow of water. It spat air before offering an uneven flow. He clenched his jaw, cradled his trembling, injured hand in the good one, and placed it under the spurt. The air-temperature water felt good at first. Then it stung. It burned. It elicited a throb Danny thought he could actually see. He gritted his teeth and sucked in more of the fetid air through his nose.

  Maggie wandered over to a toilet and started drinking from it. The slurp and lap of water drew Danny’s attention for an instant, and he considered telling her not to drink from a public toilet. But if his dry mouth was any indication of how parched she might be, there was no point. Nasty water was better than no water, and her gut was made of steel. Anything that could devour cat poop like it was Tootsie Rolls and not get sick could probably handle some toilet water.

  The sink’s flow sputtered and stopped, and Danny punched the button again. The water spat from the faucet with a hiss and gurgle. The new stream began washing away some of the blood on his palm, revealing the deep, ragged tear in the center of his hand. It ran from the base of his thumb and across the meat of his palm. It was two inches across but not a straight line. Suturing it wouldn’t be an easy task. No matter what he did to close it, he’d have a scar. He hoped he didn’t have significant nerve damage.

  As the water washed away the old blood, a new spring of it oozed from the cut. He had to stop the bleeding. That was imperative.

  Holding his bad hand up and away from him, he managed to wiggle free of the suit. It took him a good ten minutes to remove it completely. Then he slid out of his drenched undershirt and wrung it free of excess sweat.

  Maggie was sitting near him now. She’d apparently had her fill of gray water. She panted softly as she sat on her haunches. Danny stood barefoot on the crumpled Tychem suit. He was wearing only his underwear.

  He washed his hand and arm one last time before taking his T-shirt and twisting it into a modified cotton rope. Then he wrapped it around his palm and half knotted it at the back of his hand. It was too much fabric for the job, but he didn’t have the strength or desire to tear the shirt into strips.

  It wasn’t sterile, and he was at a pretty significant risk for infection, but there wasn’t anything else he could do, at least not in the beach bathroom. It was time to move.

  “I know I’m in my underwear, Maggie. I’m aware. I don’t have a choice. And frankly, Mags, I don’t think anybody is going to care.”

  She blinked at him and stopped panting.

  “Stop judging me,” he said.

  After he splashed some water onto his face and neck and slurped some into his mouth, he motioned for the exit. Maggie stood, wagged her tail, and followed.

  Together they marched back onto the beach. Maggie stayed at his side as Danny trudged barefoot through the soft sand. Each step took a tremendous amount of effort. Although he wasn’t sure exactly where he was, he was headed for Santa Monica. He figured he couldn’t be more than a few miles from the diner. There was a first aid kit there. There might be food. They were in a clean zone. So he was hopeful. As long as he could avoid the Cal Guard, they’d be okay. He kept telling himself that as they walked closer to the surf and the wet, compacted sand. It made the walk easier. Nothing was easy, but this walk on the shore, with the surf tickling his feet and raw heels, was as close to it as he was going to get.

  CHAPTER 16

  DAY 22

  San Francisco, California

  “There’s no answer,” said Derek. “What does that mean?”

  He was sitting at his desk, holding his satellite phone away from his ear, listening to the warbled ring of a dialed number that nobody was answering.

  “It means they’re dead,” said Chang. “Like everybody else.”

  “It’s the OASIS. Derek’s tone was ripe with disbelief, denial, or both. “How can they be dead? They’re underground in a bunker. They’re isolated.”

  Chang was sitting opposite Derek. He rapped the desk with his knuckles and stood. Slowly, he moved around the desk
and walked toward the large windows overlooking the streets below. As he approached, he saw the particulate dancing in the air outside the high-rise. Flecks of ash spiraled along the currents of air that blew amongst the buildings as it washed ashore from the bay. He dipped his hands into his pockets and walked deliberately across the expansive space. When he spoke, he didn’t turn to face his boss.

  “When we last spoke,” he said, “they told us that half of them were already gone. The other half was infected. Even Victor was gone. What did you expect, Derek? Are you living in a fantasy land where people magically survive incurable diseases?”

  Derek spun his chair around to face Chang’s back. The physician was at the glass, his hands deep in his lab coat and his shoulders hunched forward.

  “My wife is dead,” said Chang. “My son, Bobby, too. Your wife is probably dead. When was the last time she texted you?” Chang eyed the streets below. He waited a moment and glanced at Derek over his shoulder. “Four days? Five?”

  “Five,” Derek replied.

  “It’s no surprise they’re all dead,” said Chang. “This one is the worst yet. It had all the signs of being the one we couldn’t wrap our heads around. If this is the one, if this is the apocalypse that befalls us, we’re done for.”

  Derek got up from his seat and marched toward Chang. He stopped far enough away from the window that he didn’t have to see anything beyond the smoky skies directly outside his office. He didn’t want to see. He folded his arms across his chest. “It is a fantasyland, you know,” he said matter-of-factly. “That’s exactly what it is. We’re living in fantasyland.”

  “Is it that?” asked Chang. “Or is it something else? I wouldn’t call this a fantasy. In my mind, fantasies aren’t made of ash and smoke. They don’t involve so much sadness, so much loss. They certainly don’t end with everyone choking on their own saliva, their organs shutting down, and their lives ending with such misery.”

  Derek shrugged in partial agreement. Fantasies, from his perspective, weren’t always happy. There wasn’t always a happily ever after. “You know those old Grimm fairy tales?” he asked without awaiting a response. “They didn’t end well. People died. Kids were put in ovens. Wolves ate grandmothers.”

  “Those weren’t fantasies,” said Chang. “They were morality tales. There’s a difference.”

  “Is there?” Derek countered. “They were somebody’s fantasy, even if they were morbid warnings about how to behave in the world. How is that different from what we’re doing here?”

  Derek stepped closer to the window, keeping his chin up. Flecks of ash skittered past the window. Some of them stuck to the damp panes of glass.

  Chang pivoted toward Derek. His hands were still in his lab coat pockets, straining the white collar against the back of his neck. He raised a judgmental eyebrow and bit his lower lip before sighing and offering his rebuttal. He nodded toward the window, referencing the scene below that Derek refused to see. “Is that your fantasy, Derek? Have any of these iterations been fantasies of yours? If so, then I’ll tender my resignation. If this is fantastical to you, then I’ve had the wrong idea about Interllayar’s purpose, about our purpose.”

  Derek took a step back. “No,” he said, “that’s not what I mean. You know that’s not what I mean, Robert.”

  Chang withdrew his hands from his pockets and folded his arms across his chest. “What do you mean, then, Derek?” He punctuated his boss’s name in a distasteful tone that forced Derek to wince.

  “I mean,” Derek said, taking a step forward, “none of this seems real. It’s all straight out of a bedtime story. One iteration after the next is a cautionary tale. None of them provide the answers we seek. No matter how much we search for that happy ending, we can’t find it.”

  Chang’s hard, dubious expression softened as if he finally understood the metaphorical comparison between their project and a collection of early nineteenth-century stories not nearly as sanitized as their twentieth-century iterations.

  “We’ve only just begun,” he counseled. “For all of the failures, for all of the pain, it only takes one success. That’s all we need, Derek.” Chang held up his index finger. “We need one. That’s all. And we have limitless time to find it.”

  Derek’s eyes dropped from Chang’s to the floor. He studied the veins in the travertine, following the waves of cream and brown. Each large tile of porous stone was its own story, its own collection of patterns that ended at its corners. But somehow, when looked at in context, with all of its surrounding pieces of stone, it blended. They all blended to create a contiguous, seamless expanse.

  “Limitless,” he muttered, looking up again. He caught Chang’s wizened gaze, taking note of the deep crow’s-feet that framed his dark eyes. “I don’t think we have limitless time. Eventually, we’ll run out.”

  Chang’s eyebrows arched toward his hairline and he frowned. He shrugged and stuffed his hands back into his coat pockets. Without saying anything, he turned back to the window and looked down.

  Derek took another step toward the window, taking note of the gray skies. He hadn’t seen the sun in days. Or was it weeks? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the golden light reflecting off the glass of the buildings across from his own. He searched his memory, but it wouldn’t come. What clawed its way to the surface instead was his last conversation with his wife.

  “I’m scared,” she’d told him. Her voice had warbled over the satellite connection, and he couldn’t be sure if it was the transmission or her fear that created the vibrato.

  “I understand,” he’d replied, offering little comfort. “I’m sorry I can’t be there with you.”

  She coughed. It was a wet, raspy cough that bordered on a sharp hack. He pulled the phone away from his ear at the overmodulated barks.

  “I’m bleeding, Derek. And my stomach hurts so badly. I can’t even stand anymore. I think I’m dying.”

  “You’re not dying,” he said while typing on his laptop keyboard. He knew she was, but what was he going to say?

  “I am,” she whimpered before another coughing fit interrupted the conversation. “I know I am. And I’m here alone. Can’t you come be with me? Can’t you, please? I don’t want to be here alone.”

  “I wish I could,” he said. But he didn’t wish that. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her; he did. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to comfort her; he couldn’t. He couldn’t watch her die.

  She coughed again through her tears and asked him if he remembered the day they’d met. He’d told her he had. She asked him about their wedding day. He told her how beautiful she was, would always be. He assured her that if he could be with her, he’d have been at her side all along. He told her again and again how much he loved her.

  She cried and rasped and coughed and gagged. Her words dissolved into slurred babble, masked by the unsettling sounds coming from her body.

  She really had been dying. She did die. Before they’d hung up the phone, a call Derek had been reluctant to take but was then remorseful for not having said more, done more, she was gone. He’d recognized the death rattle from her lungs and had heard the phone hit the bamboo floors of their home at the same time her body had slumped.

  He’d been thankful the video chat service had failed. He couldn’t have borne seeing for real what his mind’s eye had conjured.

  He stepped toward the window, standing next to a man who’d also lost everything. Both of them had suffered again and again, every bit as much as those beyond the protection of Interllayar Holdings’ glass tower.

  “You can’t look, can you?” said Chang. “You don’t want to see what’s left.”

  Derek’s eyes were closed. He was conscious of the slow, measured breaths he took of the filtered cool air that circulated through the office.

  Despite intermittent power and a lack of infrastructure support, the building’s emergency systems had maintained the atmosphere throughout the tower. None of the creature comforts and none of the critical labo
ratory systems were compromised.

  “I’ve seen this before,” said Derek. “Every iteration brings with it the denouement.”

  “I think you’re misusing the term.”

  Derek opened one eye to spy Chang staring back. The doctor had a sly grin on his face. It was one of superiority that Derek had seen countless times before. It was why he liked the man. Despite everything that had failed, despite their inability to achieve the core of their mission, despite what Derek was certain was carnage below and all around them, Robert Chang was correcting his use of language.

  As much as Derek admired Chang’s ability to disconnect from the emotional toll of their job and chat about the mundane, it also worried him. How many times would they experience the end of the world? How many times would they see their loved ones die? How many times would they subject innocents to the horrors of apocalypses large and small?

  He corrected himself in his own mind. He wasn’t subjecting anyone to these iterations. He wasn’t responsible. Chang wasn’t either. They were merely observers. They were there to witness, catalogue, and learn. But what had they learned?

  The questions piled upon one another as he stood there, averting his eyes from what would greet him on the streets below. The one that kept pinging his brain was the most worrisome of all.

  Had they become numb to the death and destruction? Were they like news reporters who callously knocked on the doors of grieving families? Were they the seasoned cops who saw criminals as perps and their victims as complainants? Had they lost their humanity?

  Derek didn’t want to believe that. How could they find the solution if they couldn’t maintain their compassion for others? A heaviness weighed on his chest.

  He sucked in a deeper breath of the filtered air, filling his lungs, and let out a ragged breath. It was too much to consider right now. He couldn’t. That was, for the moment, proof that while humanity was losing another round, he had maintained his. He couldn’t be sure about Chang. Still, he played Chang’s game.