Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
“Tiffany!’ I scream, gripping the teeth of the bear trap and pulling against them with a futile effort. Suddenly I can see her coffin being lowered into the earth and my eyes are burning with hatred, burning with rage. I have to be strong. I have to be brave. I have to keep going. The girls need me.
I can see them standing, faceless, in front of Lexi’s dorm hall in Florida, grinning under the bright sun in front of an ermine lawn. They’re waving at me, but I can’t see them. Why can’t I see them? I try to remember their voices, their fond farewell when I left them last year together after Val moved into the dorms. I try to remember her voice on the phone over a month ago. I try to remember what it sounds like, but I have nothing. I’m alone.
Remember the stories of the coyotes chewing off their own arms to save themselves from traps? I do. I do remember those stories. I look at my arm, blood-soaked except for the pale patches of skin that are visible still. I look to the machete in my right hand and I know what needs to be done. I feel nauseous. My eyes are blurring, fading in and out of focus. Oh God, I’m going to do this and I’m going to miss. Oh well, I tell myself. I’m a dead man anyway.
Slowly, everything swirls into darkness.
My eyes open. I’m getting tired of that being a genuine surprise to me. Blinking once, I feel the pain of blinding white light filling my eyes. My body is numb. I don’t know how I’m alive, but I’m still here. I blink away the pain in my eyes and realize how cold I am. Everything is swirling and swimming in my head and all of it is beyond my control. I try to lift my head, but bile rises in my throat with each attempt. I feel the light burning my eyes, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. I blink several more times, trying to see if the fog will clear, but nothing happens.
“You’re an idiot, you know,” a voice says out of the light. Suddenly I notice that the light is shifting. There’s someone there. A dark silhouette leaning over me. I blink again and realize that I’m indoors. I look at the light and see now that it’s coming from a flashlight strapped to some sort of metal arm above me. My flashlight. I smile, basking in the warmth of the light, even if I can’t feel it. I feel something cold and wet touching my chest. It’s now that I realize I’m shirtless. “The dust and ash is leaching into your skin, making its way to your bloodstream. It’s poisoning you.”
“What?” I mutter.
“The toxins are in the dust,” the voice answers. I can hear it better now. It’s a woman speaking to me. “That’s how it spread outside the Quarantine Zones. There were thousands of people who got caught in dust storms. It affects your brain, targeting the cortex. Slowly it starts to make you mad, make you do crazy things. It starts with a twitch. Have you been twitching?”
“No,” I blink again, trying to remember. “I don’t think so.”
“Good,” the woman says with a lightness to her voice. “Wouldn’t want to put you out of your misery.”
I think about the Zombies. That explains why there are so many of them. They’re not just berserk cannibals roaming around and hunting for the flesh of the living. They truly were insane. They were feeding on the living because that was what they saw as food. I suddenly feel very sorry for them. It’s sort of a wave of sadness. I figured that they were cannibals driven mad by something like Kuru, sort of a product of their sins. But if they’re just people caught in the dust, I feel sick. Could the world get any worse? Suddenly, I think about the storm in Sterling Heights. I had walked for nearly an entire day in a storm. Did that mean I was susceptible to the brain damage? The woman could clearly sense that there was something on my mind.
“You okay?” she asks, grabbing for something beyond my view.
“I was in a storm,” I say. “Back a few weeks ago. I spent an entire day in it.”
“Were you covered?” she asks me.
“Mostly, not the top of my head,” I answer.
I feel her soft, gentle hands pat me on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” she sort of laughs as she says it to me, as if I’m a child worrying about getting the flu. I try to look at her, but moving is just so difficult, too much work. The light is blinding me. Am I dying? Suddenly there’s a hand, wreathed in light, floating before me with a blue pill in it. “Here, I need you to take this,” she puts the pill on my lips. Before I can ask her, she anticipates what I’m going to ask her. “It’s going to dilate your blood vessels, so that your pressure decreases. I need you to start clotting.”
“Why?” I ask, as I swallow the pill just as she commands.
I can feel the dry pill slowly making its way down my throat. She puts a bottle to my lips and squeezes it so that a flood of cold water fills my dry mouth, washing the pill down. I almost gag on the water, but I trust whoever it is giving me this. I have no choice. There’s nothing I can do. Slowly I’m beginning to remember the pain in my left arm, the bear trap, and the stranger whose head I obliterated.
“Here’s another one,” she says, sticking another pill on my lips. “It’s a tranquilizer.”
“Why?” I ask, parting my lips and feeling the pill drop down onto my tongue. I’m answered by the water bottle being put to my lips, and another shot of cold water fills my mouth.
“Because this is going to hurt,” she says.
I feel her put something hard between my teeth as I grunt, asking her for clarity. I feel something cold against my arm, almost as if it’s sharp. Something on my left arm squeezes tighter and I realize that I’m tied down to something. Something is wrapped around my left arm just above the elbow. I can’t feel my left hand. I fight and grunt against the gag that has been forced into my mouth. Shaking my body, there’s literally nothing I can do. Panic floods my mind as I feel something digging into me, pressure filling my numb limb. There’s some sort of sound that I can hear that makes me want to throw up. I’ve heard it before. It’s familiar, almost. It sounds like something is sawing through a branch or something. Slowly I see the fog part and the reality of what’s happening sinks in.
She’s sawing off my arm.
I lay my head back against the table. I’m not sure if she’s a cannibal or if she’s trying to save my life, but I’m at her mercy. Slowly I close my eyes and listen as she takes my arm away, my body slipping back into the shock that it’s come to know too well. Maybe it’s the tranquilizer, but I’m feeling tired, so very tired. My eyelids are heavy and when they close, it’s harder for me to open them. I close them one more time and listen as she continues working, until sleep and darkness take me.
-End
Book Two
Life. I open my eyes to the hazy world around me and contemplate the gravity of the word with a heavy heart. I’m still alive. I’m not supposed to still be alive. I blink and look up with uncertainty at the light glaring down on me. Maybe I’m not alive. Maybe I am dead after all. I blink again and stare into the light sitting in the darkness. Everything is different now. Everything had changed. Do I want to still be alive?
I blink once more and see Val’s face flash before I open my eyes and see the light again. She’s smiling, the great wide, emotional smile that filled my heart with warmth and light every time I saw it. I blink again and this time it’s Lexi with her sweet, soft smile. It was the eyes that made Lexi’s smile so potent. She had her mother’s eyes. They were the eyes of someone who knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it. Those eyes had haunted me after Tiffany had died, but that was long ago. So much had happened since then. The entire world had died. I had lost my girls. I had lost everything.
Perhaps death isn’t what we make it out to be. Over the past year, everything that humanity has ever known about society, government, hell, even civilization; was brought to its knees with one loud, earth-shattering bang. As the world we knew toppled over and dissolved around us, we watched life itself extinguish its flame and turn into nothing but pale wisps of coiling smoke. We had reached for the stars and realized how truly far away from the heavens we were. Salvation had been our destruction. From the elixir of life, we were poisoned. Now, all that was left was death.
I remember the news reports. ‘Miracle fertilizer discovered’. It had promised so much to us and we had been so eager to gobble the lies up. They told us that they could save the planet—that everything we had destroyed could return to us in ten years. The Amazon and all the other rainforests that we’d lost could blossom and return as healthy as they had ever been. We had all longed for that future. Those optimists had also promised us that world hunger was going to be an extinct story that we would imprison on the pages of history books. So we spread the fertilizer across the planet in euphoric hope that we had finally crossed the horizon once and for all. Plenty. The cornucopia of the gods. It was ours at last.
But then the cold reality of what we had done sank in. First it was the Amazon that started withering and dying, then the bread basket of America, and then India. While we still had the taste of victory upon our lips, the shadow of death eclipsed our future. Before we knew what was happening, harvested feed and produce had been shipped all across the planet, from Europe to Africa. Everyone had been tainted with the fertilizer that unleashed an agricultural plague to end all plagues across the planet. I had watched on the news as they showed us the devastation. They showed us the quarantines and the evacuations. There were the food strikes, the hunger and fear that drove average citizens into hostile frenzies. They took up arms and marched on those who attempted to establish order among the growing chaos. War erupted on a nearly global scale. Every country in the world felt the ripples of collapse all around them and where civilization once stood, anarchy now reigned supreme.
Those who weren’t interested in controlling what food remained, sought only to flee to those few, precious places yet unaffected by the plague. They tried to escape to islands and mountain tops. But wherever civilization tried to take root, there were those disinterested in the old ways of life. War and fire ravaged those places and the world slipped helplessly, kicking and screaming into the void of death.
We all lost everything in the collapse of the world we once knew. I had been in Michigan, expecting that someone would rise up, someone would take control. I had sat behind my desk and given my lectures, watching my classes deteriorate and dwindle until only a few terrified souls remained, hoping to gain some sort of safety from their dedication to routine. When the time came and the riots reached the University of Michigan, I had called my daughters and told them that I loved them and that I would be coming for them when the time permitted. I fled to my cabin out on Lake Huron. Now, I know that it was a mistake. I know that seeking sanctuary in seclusion had been the wrong move and I am bitterly resolved to never allow myself to be so distracted and misguided again.
That’s how I got here. I took to the road. I made it as far as I could before I was robbed of my Jeep and supplies, and forced to head into Detroit on foot. I saw the ravaged landscape, the ruins of war that have forever marked the planet. I witnessed with my own eyes the power fire has over the land now, as Detroit burned to the ground. I saw what humanity has devolved into. I fought off the packs of ravenous, flesh-hungry cannibals who have taken to the streets, hunting in packs as they track the enduring scavengers in search of a new tomorrow. I also saw those who hunt the living with cold, merciless brutality, reveling in it as if it was a hunt. But I had seen others. I had seen those who sought to save the planet, those idealists and dreamers who grasped onto humanity and ingenuity all the way to the end. I remember Dayton and the outskirts of Cincinnati. I remember the alleyway with the cans. I remember the bear trap. I remember my arm. I remember killing him.
But I don’t remember escaping. I open my eyes once more and look up at the light, focusing on it, trying to see what it is. If I am dead, then why have I not passed on? What was God—or whatever divine being still cruelly lingered—waiting for? No, I blink and look at the light. I am still alive. Focusing on the light even harder, I realize that it’s an LED light. In fact, it’s
my
LED light. It’s taped to something that is hanging over me in the darkness. I move my arm, trying to break free and escape, but I’m stuck. At first, I fear that I am paralyzed. I fear that something must have happened to me in all of the commotion of my arm. I have to get out of here. I can’t be paralyzed. I have to get to Florida.
“Hold on, girls.” I grind my teeth together and try to move, but it feels like something is holding me down. I struggle to the point of exhaustion before I realize that I’m tied down. I’m tied into what looks like a dentist chair.
The ropes aren’t mine. I used the last of my rope to tie a cannibal to a tree and left him for dead out in the dead forests. I don’t know what happened to him and I don’t care. The only thing that concerns me is that I’m bound to a dentist chair in someone else’s rope. I push and I try my hardest to reach for the ropes, to feel them. Trying to grasp the rope, I figure that I can try to stretch them or slide them down my wrists some way. I don’t know what I’m doing. I just have to get out of here. Whoever did this knew what they were doing. I look at my right hand gripping to no avail. And then I remember.
The bear trap. My paralyzed fingers. My ruined arm.
My eyes dart to my left arm and see for myself the wrapped stump, and horror fills me like a bolt of lightning right to my heart. My breathing turns quick and shallow as my eyes widen and the air feels dry and cold against them. I can feel it. I can feel my hand. I can feel it gripping and flexing, but there’s nothing there. Halfway down my forearm, there is nothing. There is nothing but a white bandage that is wrapping my arm all the way up to my elbow with blood soaked all the way through. I stare without words. I let out a sharp, quick scream at first. More of a shout, to be honest. It escapes without consideration, without thought. It’s rushing up from the primitive, terrified part of my brain that is computing what’s happened here. The rest of my brain is still processing the sight. I don’t understand. Only that small fraction of my mind understands. I’m just staring with disbelief and denial swirling and dancing through my head.
I scream again and the reality hits me like a semi crashing through the front of my glass house. I’m fucked. That’s the reality here. That’s the fucking semi-truck. I’m fucked beyond belief. There’s no hope for a one-armed guy out here in the world. How am I supposed to shoot a rifle? How am I supposed to defend myself? How am I supposed to tie my fucking shoes? I scream again. This time it’s long and deep and filled with all the horror and regret and paralytic fear that I contain. I don’t know who took my arm, but they might be near and I don’t give a shit. I scream as loud and as long as I want before tears start to run down my cheeks and my throat is raw and bloody so there’s nothing left but the sobs. Who did this? Why would they do this?
Where is it? What did they do with it? I think that there still might be a chance to reattach it if I can find it, depending on how long I’ve been here. If I can stitch it back on and wrap it in something hard like a cast, the tissue and the bones might heal back together. I might be able to salvage my hand. Fuck, I’ll take a paralyzed hand over no hand at all. I look around me at the darkness, realizing that I’m completely tucked away in some sort of surgical area. Curtains surround me, blocking me out from the rest of the world.
My God, what if they ate it? The thought scuttles into my mind and demands all of my attention. The fear stings my worries and drops it flat into the abyss of my mind so that the fear is all that remains for me to dwell upon. I think back to all the flesh-eaters that I’d seen on the road. No. It couldn’t have been one of the shambling, gaunt horrors that roam the world now. It had to have been one of the survivors that still knows what they’re doing. It had to have been one of the hunters. Maybe they saw me passing out in the alleyway and thought that I might be an easy target. Maybe they figured that they could keep me alive and use me as some sort of living buffet. I look around with paranoid, terror-stricken eyes at the curtains. I’m afraid that there are demons behind them, waiting to cut off another part of me and start consuming me. What if they’re just a footstep away and they want something else? Maybe they want a foot this time, or maybe my ass? No. God, no. I have to get out of here.
How am I going to get to Florida? The thought returns without mercy or care for anything else that I might be experiencing. It breaks me without a moment’s hesitation. I’m not going to get to Florida. I’m going to get an infection and I’m going to die. Even if by some miracle I survive the inevitable infection that will undoubtedly turn to gangrene, how am I supposed to survive in the wasteland of America? The shambling hordes of mindless killers are waiting for me beyond this curtain. I’m done for. There’s nothing left for me in this world. I close my eyes and see their faces.
“Tiffany, I’m so sorry,” I sob uncontrollably, my body shaking and shivering. “Lexi, Val, I’ve failed you. I’ve failed you. Please forgive me.”
Movement. I can hear it and feel it in the air like a great ebb of oxygen rushing out of the room I’m in. The curtains slowly shift and then the loud bang, followed by things being rearranged and set in some particular order. Whatever is happening out there, they couldn’t care less about what I’m doing here inside this room of curtains. It’s come. This is the moment where they fling back the curtains and bring the machete down on me in several, painful chops before ending me. Or maybe they’ll drag the blade slowly across my throat, prolonging the suffering.
“Good God, that was a loud one,” a woman says as the curtain is pulled back in one whirling, rapid jerk, and light floods into my little den. I try to crane my neck to see her, but there’s nothing I can see. There’s a wall of glass sending sunlight through the darkness and illuminating her back, leaving her as nothing more than a shadow before me. “Last time you just cried a lot,” the woman said. “The other times you were really out of it. You just sort of muttered a lot.”
“Let me out of here!” I shout at her. “Let me out of here or so help me, I will end you.”
“Really? How exactly?” she teases with a giggle. I want to wrap my one good hand around her throat and slam it into her neck. I’ll teach her to laugh.
“Fuck you!” I scream at her.
“Guy, settle down,” she says, not joking any longer. “Calm down or you’ll tear the bandage.”
“Where is it?” I demand, not giving her any thought. “What did you do with my hand? Where is it?”
“I got rid of it,” she answers. “You’ve been out for days now. I think you’re on the mend, but you’re not out of the woods just yet.”
I’m silent. I’m not sure what to make of that. Did she not eat my hand? Is she not a cannibal? I’m not sure what to make of this. I have seen and been hunted by cannibals all along the way of my journey. It only made sense that she should be one, but why would she throw away my hand? She did take it after all. I try to remember what she means by other times. I don’t remember waking up any other times. I don’t remember anything other than opening my eyes a few moments ago. Before that, I just remember the alley and the blood and the pain.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“Who’s asking?” she fires back.
“I am,” I answer.
“Yeah, I got that,” she replies with annoyance in her voice. “Listen, buddy, I know you’ve just lost a hand and that tends to give anyone a stick up their ass, but could you please, maybe for a moment, just lay off. I’m getting third degree burns every time you open your mouth.”
“Sorry,” I answer.
“When I found you, I was too late,” she says calmly, working at something beyond my view. “You’d smashed some guy’s head into mush with a bear trap clamped down on your arm. The guy was a fucking animal, whoever set that up. Anyway, you weren’t going to make it, but you almost got the tourniquet on. I finished what you started and went searching for something to stabilize you. That’s when I found this place.”
“What is this place?” I interrupt. I’m still suspicious. Terror is the underlying current to my pounding heart. I’m not sure what to say to her. I’m just hoping that she’s not lying to me.