Original; Ashes--Ashes--
Title: Ashes--Ashes--
Author: nieded
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~5,000
Notes: Written for my creative writing workshop. DVD commentary and bonus material at the end.
Summary: They had transformed humans into a virus.
Ashes-Ashes-
I fumbled with the photo frame, ripping the backing off to reach the picture underneath. I discarded the frame, sparing one look at my girlfriend Christine, her round face and brown hair. She wore a cheery expression in her graduation cap and gown, a look of relief. I pressed the picture between the pages of my father’s favorite book The Odyssey and shoved it to the bottom of my bag.
“Morris! Forget the toothbrush,” I heard Tony yell. They danced around each other in the bathroom. Tony grabbed bandages, antiseptic-anything he thought might be useful. Often a little cruel and rowdy, he was still a boy scout and son of a military major through and through. Morris, on the other hand, spent half a minute debating over whether deodorant or toothpaste was more important and if he could spare leaving his treasured Rivers Cuomo poster behind that he bought when he was sixteen.
The squad cars and busses were ready to leave any minute, ready to escort uninfected people past the quarantine checkpoint. Anyone who wanted to leave had to be ready by seven, and it was quarter-to already. Those left behind chose to take their chances. I had most everything packed. Each individual was allowed one bag. I filled mine with two day’s worth of clothes, a photograph of Christine, a jackknife, my laptop, cell and wallet. I figured everything else could be replaced once I got through quarantine. Most of my real possessions were still in California with my mom. Tony grabbed similar items as I did, and Morris tried to pack his entire room into his duffel.
I rushed into the living room of our four bedroom apartment. “Let’s go!” I hollered. I heard Tony and Morris stomp down the hall, Morris struggling to balance his duffel while putting on a hoodie inside out.
“Chester, we can’t go yet,” he said, catching his foot on the carpet. “Darrel’s not here.”
Tony grabbed the back of Morris’ hood, clamping a rough hand down on his shoulder in attempt to still his movements while sorting out his sweatshirt. “Darrel better get his ass in gear,” he barked. “The squad arrives in ten minutes, and it won’t wait for him.”
“Has anyone called him?”
“I did,” I answered, checking my phone for messages. “Twice. He hasn’t called back.”
“Shit,” Tony cursed. “Well, I’m not going to be the one to tell his mother he was infected by zombies.”
Morris batted his sweatshirt until he was released from Tony’s grip. “They’re not zombies,” he muttered. “It’s a virus that triggers seventy-five percent of the brain to shut down and rewrites it to fulfill the virus’ objective, which is to infect other targets.”
“Does it matter what it does?”
“Understanding is the first step to curing it, Tony,” Morris responded huffily.
“What matters is that we aren’t the ones who will be curing it but how it works,” I said. “We’re just the ones who are running away from it. If Darrel doesn’t show up in two minutes, then we have to go.” We shared a quick furtive glance between the three of us before Tony nodded and grunted, shrugging his yellow hair from his face.
Darrel made up the fourth person in our group of friends, and we all shared a dingy apartment together just twenty minutes walking from the Seattle University campus. We came from all over the States: me from sunny California, Morris from Montana, and Tony from Maryland. Darrel had lived in Washington State all of his life. When the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in correlation with the Seattle University Office of Institutional Research-the knobs that caused the so-called ‘virus breakthrough’ to happen -gave twenty-four hours notice for an emergency evacuation, Darrel left to call on friends and family.
The CDC divided Seattle into zones for a staggered evacuation that depended on the zone’s closeness to the outbreak of the virus. This meant the first wave included the campus. Residents had two options, either check in at Vancouver, the evacuation destination, or stay in Seattle and check in with the authorities here, but every unaccounted person was to be labeled infected and dispatched accordingly on site.
If Darrel did not arrive in the next ten minutes, he would be forced to find his own way to the Vancouver checkpoint or remain in the high risk area.
“I’ll call him again,” I offered.
“If he hasn’t answered before, he won’t answer now,” Tony said. “Something’s happened.”
Morris, still fighting with his sweatshirt, frowned. “His phone could have died. He might be here any minute. You know how he is.”
I looked out the window, craning to see a crowd of about fifty people walking down 45th Street towards the pick-up location. “Even Darrel wouldn’t be late for something like thi-”
The entrance door to our apartment swung open, cutting me off mid-sentence. Darrel stumbled in, bleary-eyed and disoriented, his shirt half-undone and dark shadows under his eyes. He looked perhaps if he had spent the better part of the past day on ecstasy or crying furiously. Morris’ shoulders visibly slumped in relief at the sight of him.
“Jesus. Where the hell have you been?” he shouted frantically, belying is previous optimism. He moved to hug him-or hit him-but Tony grabbed both of his shoulders and pulled him back. “Wha-”
“Wait,” he commanded. He looked at Darrel. “Stay over there. Where have you been?”
“What the hell, Tony? We have to go.” I glanced furtively between them and Darrel. “The busses are going to be here any minute. Darrel, go pack your bag quick-”
“No, don’t move,” Tony snapped, cutting me off. He had one hand tight on Morris’ shoulder to hold him back, the other stretched out to keep Darrel from moving any closer. Darrel aborted his steps ungracefully, blinking once before coming to a halt. Only half of his mouth opened, and he could not shape words, only a low moan.
Morris jerked backwards and over Tony’s shoes as if the sound of Darrel’s voice tangibly shoved him back. “Jesus,” he breathed. “He’s twitching.”
I studied Darrel’s face briefly. The left corner of his mouth drooped slightly as if he had suffered from a stroke. His shoulder twitched involuntarily. His eyes shifted back and forth. “What does that mean?” I asked. Together, the three of us slowly began to retreat to the other side of the room.
“It’s like… a hypnic jerk. It happens when the body starts to fall asleep and the muscles relax. The brain believes the body is falling through air and it tries to correct itself by contracting.”
“He’s not asleep,” I pointed out.
Tony pushed Morris behind him and maneuvered himself until he was in front of me too. “He’s brain dead, idiot,” he hissed. Slowly he tracked his movements across the open floor until he reached the kitchen island. I followed him, as did Darrel’s distant eyes. Tony groped blindly for the knife block. “I can kill him, right?”
Darrel took a dragging step forward.
“Yes. I think,” said Morris, shuffling sideways until he too was behind Tony. We both grabbed knives of our own. “Technically he’s still alive. It’s just the virus has taken control of his functions and shut down his higher thought processes.”
Tony grunted. “Yes, fine, but how do I kill him? Do I have to stab his brains or something?”
My palms slipped on the handle of my knife. It was small, just a paring knife. Tony had grabbed the massive blade and held it with his palm facing upward, ready to jab it into Darrel’s stomach, so certain that Darrel was long gone. Distantly, I think I knew that this was true. Even twenty-four hours before, he had been talkative, promising to be back in the morning with a manful slap on Morris’ back just to watch him stumble. It was hard to reconcile the differences between that man and the shell that stood before us with hunted, faded eyes-but still harder to kill him.
“Whatever you do,” Morris whispered, holding his knife haphazardly, “don’t get any blood on you.” I shuddered.
Tony took a steadying breath, but Darrel’s body must have read that as a cue, and in an instant he moved from stillness to action, launching himself forward. His fingers snagged on Tony’s shirt, yanking him forward, and at the same time the knife. The blade sunk into his stomach, but he didn’t even flinch. He grabbed Tony’s wrists in a crushing grip as Tony tried to twist free, hauling one foot forward to brace himself against Darrel’s chest.
“Ah, fuck! Do something! Get him the fuck off of me!”
I dropped my knife and grabbed the kitchen stool, smashing its legs down across Darrel’s arms to break his grip. On the second swing, I brought it over his head, knocking him unconscious. I stumbled with the force of the blow, dropping the stool as my shoes slipped on the blood.
We stood in silence panting. Tony cradled his left hand where the stool had bruised him, and I leaned against the kitchen island. Morris crept closer to inspect the body.
“Hey,” he said, pushing us back. “Get away from the blood.”
We skittered backwards and Morris tiptoed around the pool oozing from Darrel’s stomach where the knife still protruded. He peered over the body, taking note of its irregular, stuttering breaths. With the sleeve of his sweatshirt, he tilted the head back to expose the throat and methodically sliced it open. “Shit,” he breathed, as more blood streamed from its throat.
He took off the sweatshirt and then pointed at Tony’s hands and shirt, also stained. “You gotta strip,” he said, pulling him around the counter and into the kitchen. He rummaged through the cupboards for our sparse dishrags, running it under the tap with warm water and soap. “Jesus, you have it all over you. Did it get in your eyes?”
“No,” Tony answered, unblinking.
“Did it get in your mouth? Your nose?”
“No.”
“What about you, Chester? Are you clean?” Morris asked, beginning to wipe down Tony’s hands efficiently but thoroughly. For once Tony allowed someone else take over, his eyes shifting around the room to look at anything but the corpse.
I shook my head. I stood frozen at the foot of the body unable to move. Darrel’s eyes stared off into the distance, his jaw slack and disconnected from his skull from the blow from the stool. But it wasn’t really Darrel. I knew that. It just looked like Darrel. Darrel had been dead already.
We fell into a silence and listened as the busses down the road roared to life and drove away.
----
I sit in quarantine with my backpack at my feet in a long line of about one hundred people waiting to be processed and released. I hold open The Odyssey to the page with Christine’s picture tucked inside. She told me on the phone that the footage of Seattle’s destruction is everywhere on the news. She has CNN playing twenty-four hours. She puts it on mute when she sleeps and brushes her lips against the frame of my senior photo in the morning when she wakes up and again at night before going to bed. She says she’s been praying for me.
I see the footage from a television they have set up in the hallway. Now that we have been cleared to leave and been briefed on what we are allowed to say and not to say, they’ve relaxed our restrictions from the outside world. They show inside the labs of the research institute, blurry shapes of men trying to alter viral genetics from view point of the security cameras. The researches wanted to magnify viral processes to a larger scale in order to better study how it works. What they wound up with were mice that embodied the virus, attacked or mated out of season in the name of spreading infection.
They say that the first infected human was a PhD student who had been bitten by a mouse. His name was Felix Walter. He raped a faculty member and then as his body began to deteriorate, he knocked a coworker unconscious and slit his wrists into his mouth in a last ditch attempt to infect another host. They say it takes approximately four hours for symptoms to show but that a person will be contagious within ninety minutes of contracting the virus. By the time they realized what had occurred, it had spread outside the bounds of the facility. They had transformed humans into a supervirus.
A weary looking woman in wrinkled jeans and a sweatshirt begins passing out forms for us to fill out before our release. The other people I share the corridor with clumsily pass the pages along without looking at each other. I read the first page of questions:
4.) How many infected persons have you been in contact with outside of quarantine location: Vancouver?
5.) How many infected persons have you been in contact with inside quarantine location: Vancouver?
6.) How did you arrive at quarantine location: Vancouver? (circle one)
a. Federal supervised evacuation
b. Other (please explain below)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
My fingers clench so tightly around the paper that the edges tear.
----
We huddled around Darrel’s body, wary of the congealing pool of blood that seeped slowly closer and closer to our shoes. It was like a crime scene. We were all victims. We were all guilty. Tony broke the tension by swearing under his breath before stalking towards the bathroom. “I’m taking a fucking shower,” he hissed before slamming the door shut.
Morris and I stared after him. It was easier to do so than stare at the corpse of the friend we murdered. In silent agreement we stumbled after him and huddled outside the bathroom instead, took comfort in the familiar sound of the shower spray. If I pressed close enough to the door, I could almost imagine feeling the heat from the steam.
“We missed the busses,” I said. Morris did not answer. “We’ll have to find another way there, maybe walk to another pick-up point.”
Morris shook his head. “We can’t. They’ll only take people from that zone. We won’t be listed.”
The closest pick-up point was probably a forty-five minute walk away where Darrel’s family lived. I knew we would not go even if we could.
“We’ll have to drive there,” he reasoned. “It’s only a two and a half hour drive to Vancouver, and they’ve routed all Seattle evacuees to drive separately onto Interstate 5. We won’t even need passports, and we can check in there without worrying about being unaccounted for.” The shower turned off; the sound of the curtain rustling as it was yanked back drifted through the door.
“We don’t even have a car, Morris. We should call the police. We should call the CDC.”
“No, we should get the fuck out of here,” Tony interjected from inside the bathroom. He swung open the door and jabbed a dripping finger into my chest. “The entire city of Seattle is evacuating to four different major cities. We’re in a pandemic. We’ve been fucking quarantined. It won’t surprise anyone that we witnessed an infected person and especially not the CDC. They’ll pin roses on our lapels for slitting his throat.”
Morris looked skyward and took a steadying breath. “Anthony’s right. They won’t care. Darrel’s just another number to them, and we need to make sure we’re safe.” He paused. “And for Christ’s sake, Anthony, wrap a towel around it.”
I huffed and pushed Tony back inside the bathroom, closing the door. Inside, he grunted and we heard a series of bottles and something glass scatter across the floor in anger. I dug the heels of my palms into my eyes and listened as Morris nervously picked at the wall plaster and breathed heavily through his nose.
I waited until the slamming from the bathroom halted, and I feared looking inside to see what sort of damage had been done. Still, I knew then that we would not be returning to this place again, not with Darrel’s body laying twenty feet from us, his bodily fluids and disease and history soaking into the carpet.
“The busses were really our only chance. None of us have cars. Anyone we could borrow a vehicle from has most likely left already. How the hell do we get on Interstate 5 without a car?” I asked, panicking.
Morris shuffled uneasily, staring at his shoes. Tony finally reemerged from the bathroom with a towel, and I peeked behind him and saw most of the medicine cabinet’s contents strewn across the floor.
“Why not just hotwire a car?” he asked. He seemed a great deal calmer, as if hijacking a vehicle were the easiest chore possible and didn’t go against his moral scruples. “After all, we do have good ol’ Morrie here.”
Morris grimaced when Tony’s hand slapped heartily against his back. “I, uh, may have stolen a car or two. Before. Long time ago. And-” he said, as if it made it better, “we could probably find a car that has an extra pair of keys tucked on the inside of the hood?”
The expression on Tony’s face bordered manic, his upper lip curling slightly. “Well, that settles things, doesn’t it?”
I stared at them blankly and Tony pushed passed me to put on fresh clothes.
The streets outside were deserted. The entire campus had emptied out and anyone remaining probably had more sense than we did to stay inside. After witnessing Darrel, the symptoms of the infected seemed fairly obvious to us and we looked out for any vacant faces lurking around corners. We stuck close and Tony brandished a five-iron club menacingly, sometimes pacing ahead of us while I took up the rear in our trio.
We walked two blocks down 45th Street to the University Plaza Hotel where campus residents parked their cars to get on the evacuating busses. I wanted to question where the hell Morris had learned to bust into cars but held my tongue. He was the type of freak that felt guilty about missing just one lecture, let alone stealing a fucking car. Instead I watched his brittle-looking fingers feel around the hood until the latch gave way, his eyes staring upward at a clouding sky intently as he worked by touch. He rigged the hoods and checked the underbelly of sixteen cars for spare keys before hitting the jackpot on some well-kept looking Buick.
He flipped through the registration after climbing into the passenger seat to find the car belonged to a Dr. Richard Pruitt, who, by my estimation, was probably an old professor trapped in his own high minded head-a head that recalled on the good old days when pandemic viruses did not exist and young college students did not have to resort to stealing cars to get out alive. Only that sort of person would leave spare keys taped the inside of his hood let alone drive an old fart kind of car. Tony immediately scrambled for the driver’s seat and chucked his backpack at my head when I clambered into the back.
“Just hit Interstate 5 and follow it through. We could get to Vancouver in less than three hours,” Morris said.
We sat in silence for a moment, staring out at the deserted city. “Stop being babies,” Tony scoffed, but it was hardly audible and he stared at his hands on the steering wheel when he said it.
Finally he started the ignition. The car hummed to life in a quiet, old-person kind of way. The adrenaline began to leave me, leave my hands shaking, and I pressed my forehead to the cool glass window to watch storm clouds gather above us. Tony flipped through radio stations-only two more waves of evacuations left-sixty-four cases reported, all dead-could the virus have already spread outside Seattle? Sources say likely-Morris switched it off, the sound of his breath hitching in tight little gasps filling the silence. I fell asleep from exhaustion.
----
I think now that I fell asleep in fear that I would go crazy thinking about it, thinking about how the world might fall in on itself and that somehow we would meet our comeuppance. Sleep was an easy respite but it was only temporary. I haven’t slept restfully since.
10.) How many affected persons have you had contact with?
None, I think, or else I would not have passed the physical examination.
Then I think: We are all affected. We are all sick.
----
I woke with a start to the sound of rain slamming against the car windows. The quality of rain was not the persistent drizzle of Northern Washington, but a full onslaught. It slammed against the metal roof and echoed mutedly in the dark vehicle. I realized I was alone in the back seat. Tony’s sunglasses and cell phone rested on the dashboard; Morris’ sweatshirt sprawled over the passenger seat. Perhaps they had gone for a piss and would come back miserable from the unexpected downpour.
I listened to the steady thrum of rain. In the closed off car the windows were so blurred that I could not see a foot outside, and I felt safe in the isolated space for the first time.
The rain pounded so loudly that I did not hear Morris approach until his hands slammed against the glass, the heat of his skin fogging up the window so that his face was a frantic, messy blur. I jerked backwards, stunned at his sudden appearance, and l scrambled to the other side of the seat haphazardly as he tumbled in. The rain dripped off his face, the planes of his jagged, rail-thin face. He reached out and his ice-cold fingers convulsively clutched at my wrists, my knees, my shirt.
“Chester-Chester-Chester-” he chanted. “Jesus. Jesus fuck. Anthony. Anthony, he’s-he’s-he’s-he-”
I grabbed Morris’ arms and shook his shoulders. “What? Morris, what happened? Where are we? Where’s Tony?” It was useless. Morris’ panicking dissolved into hyperventilation, sobs that wracked his young, stupid looking face. His fingers continued twisting into the shoulders of my shirt, and I had to pry them off of me. “Hey! Hey!”
I had never been one for offering comfort, not to say that any of us were experts at it. I imagined Tony would have slapped him upside the head and Darrel would have cracked out the drinks. Instead, we were crammed together in a stolen vehicle so tiny that Morris’ knees could not fit behind the passenger seat while he slobbered his incomprehensible terror into the headrest.
“He-I didn’t know-I didn’t know-so I-Jesus-Jesus-Jesus-” Jesus. It was this thing that Morris did that pissed off Tony if he said it enough times - a habit that could not be helped. Tony, raised on good protestant morals, had been taught all his life to put his hands in God, especially on the field of war where his future laid if he wanted to follow his father’s militaristic footsteps. For the first eighteen years of his life, he woke up at 0600 hours to the sound of a bugle and the national anthem in a series of bases and academies. It was like Morris to flip his world upside down by being the most inefficient, incompetent, blasphemous person he had ever met while still managing to wheedle under his skin, planting himself there until life somehow seemed less complete without Morris right there spitting in his ear and breaking our beer mugs and chanting “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
Morris finally pulled me out into the rain because as he swallowed all his words. We stumbled through the heavy onslaught, and in ten seconds, I went from being completely dry to drenched. Morris’ crushing grip on my wrist was the only thing that allowed me to follow him. Even two feet ahead of me, the back of his head and dark hair melded with the bleak landscape, making him nearly invisible.
My shoe slipped and dug into the saturated mud, catapulting Morris and I forward onto something hard and warm. My fingers grappled with hair, skin. “Morris?” I hollered into the rain. “Morris-is that you?”
It was, in fact, not Morris, and I discovered this when Morris’ hands yanked me upwards and away from the body.
“Don’t touch him!” he shouted. “There might be blood. Did you touch his head?”
I had no idea Morris was so strong that he could hoist me upwards. I shook my head, twisting in the mud to gather my bearings. The outline of Tony’s body was a blurry shadow that made me doubt I was even looking at a body and not some log or boulder instead.
Morris repeated, “Don’t touch him. You’ll get infected.”
When I leaned forward closer to the body, I realized that it was Tony. His eyes peered upwards absently into the thundering sky and his lips were parted just enough to reveal the crooked teeth inside. His yellow hair fanned against the ground. I kicked the corpse and it rolled to reveal the back of his head.
“Oh fucking hell,” I cursed, scrambling backwards. I knocked into Morris and we both toppled back into the mud. “What the hell did you do?” Tony’s skull looked as if it had been bashed in. Gray matter pooled over the mud and the blood steeped over the dirt with the rain. I swallowed back a terrified scream that bubbled forth when I veered forward and vomited over Morris’ shoes.
The downpour made the body and the soil and our feet all disconnected from one another. I kept screaming, “What happened-what happened-what happened-” into the windstorm. The body stayed still where I kicked it. Morris could only sputter incomprehensible gibberish, shaking his head furiously as he tried to pull me further from the body.
Tony-who showed off to college girls his capability to hit any target accurately with an air rifle-Tony-who retaliated against all of Morris’ stupidity by wiping clean the entire porn collection from his laptop and then pasting “Fairy Princess” in big fucking glittering letters on the ass of all of his briefs-Tony-whose name Morris continued to chant along with “Oh my god. Oh my god,” and then “I’m sorry. I’m so-orry” between violent hiccups-was dead.
I vomited twice more before I was dragged back to the car. I lost one of my Nikes to the swelling mud slides, and our jeans and arms were painted brown. I opened the door and sat on the seat where I buried my face in my shaking hands. Morris stood hollowly outside but seemed to steel himself as he looked at me a little desperately and resolutely. Eventually he reached in, tucked my legs under the steering wheel and opened the passenger door. Under the seat he found the keys and chucked them into my lap.
“You need to go,” he said. “Anthony-he-I-” He glimpsed back at the body. “Do you have your jackknife still?”
I stared at him dumbly before fishing it from my pocket on automatic.
“You’re only an hour from the checkpoint. You need to go,” he said, taking it from my hands.
“But-”
“I can’t go with you.” He reached over and started the ignition. When he pulled away, he left a muddy handprint on the seat. “It’ll be all right,” he said. “It’ll-it’ll be all right.” He backed out of the car and slammed the door shut.
I sat for a long time in the isolation of the Buick, peering out the window as the engine ran, looking for Morris’ shadow as he walked away. I imagined I could see the outline of Tony’s body through the rain and the glass and the wetness in my eyes. I saw Darrel’s ghost beside them. They watched me drive away.
----
Christine flies up to meet me. I stand around outside of the Vancouver International Airport with a stack of papers that declare I am uncontaminated, that I am free to pass back into the United States without a passport, and that upon my arrival to Riverside, California, I am to have my mental health assessed immediately and all rehabilitation paid for by the great American institution that is our government. The sun is out. I am not ready to go home.
When she arrives, I ignore her attempt at comfort. Her small hands and round face had less than a week before been appealing and longed for. Her delicateness I thought was an asset and not a hindrance. I know better now that she would cave to any persuasion, not have the strength to run under an attack. At least she does not make me talk about it.
She looks at me, squeezes my hand hesitantly as if I were a small and easily frightened child. When I do not flinch, she slowly reaches to wrap around me, pressing her face into my solar plexus so her hair brushes against my mouth and nose. After being exposed to blood, brain matter, mud, and a series of sterile astringent-smelling rooms, the faint floral scent from her shampoo makes my head spin. She cannot fathom what I have seen. She does not know that I arrived separately from the mass evacuation to the Vancouver checkpoint.
I am not ready to go home, I tell her. She takes my hand and I crawl into her tiny, suffocating car, and we drive around in circles on sunny roads in pursuit of a hotel. I look at her delicate hands, how they gracefully clutch the steering wheel with care but ease. I study her pulse point. When we arrive to the Travelodge, she leaves me in the car and comes back out with keys. She maneuvers my arm so it wraps around her shoulder like boyfriends do in movie theatres or comrades do in war, and she cradles my hand against her chest as she leads me into the building, into the elevator, into our rooms. Onto the bed.
If I were a virus, I think, the desire to spread from person to person would be more than just about survival, that is: if the virus embodied the human. People have been doing it for years, connecting and swearing oaths through blood bonds, through sex, through the sacred act of spilling our guts as if we were spilling our souls. There is a reason why Darrel’s body returned to our apartment. And I think, though I will never be certain, there was a reason why Tony called Morris out into the rain while I slept fitfully in the backseat-why they left so quietly and Morris followed, deceived, so willingly.
It is the same reason why I accept Christine’s embrace, her small arms wrapping around my head, pulling me into the crevice of her throat where it is hot and intimate, where I can press my teeth against her pulse. She runs her hands under my shirt and over my ribs, and I think: this is it-this is it.
That night she leaves the bathroom light on and falls asleep on her back. I rummage through her suitcase until I find what I am looking for and then crawl over the covers, loving her so much that the three years we have been together, the distance we have spent apart, hasn’t been enough. I cover my hand over her nose, so large that it could cradle her entire face, and watch as her mouth falls open. I can see the wet gleam inside her mouth and press my wrist over her tongue while thinking of all the oaths I might swear to her that will never amount to the vast explosion I feel inside. There is nothing I can give her now; there are no planes where we can be level anymore now that we have been apart for so long and reunited by something so gruesome. She would never understand why I’m doing this, and it is the only thing I can do to show how much I love her.
This, I think as I dig the point of her jackknife into my wrist, this must be enough-
end.
NOTES:
1. One day I said to Sam, "I am tired of reading stories about high school break ups." Helpful as always, Sam said, "ZOMBIES." And then it evolved from there.
2. This story was supposed to be considerably longer, but due to the constraints of the assignment, I had to keep it down to ~5,000 words. Let me tell you, this had me in a panic for awhile. The first scene alone is 2,000 words. This semester has been the semester of experimenting in alternate universes. I had a lot of fun writing this, but I couldn't get half of what I wanted in. Really, this was supposed to be a story about Morris, but he took an ensemble role for the sake of keeping this down.
3. The playlist:
1. Afterhours -- "There's Many Ways"
I know--I know what your love is.
Love's a disease;
I just want to get out of it.
2. Death Cab for Cutie -- "405"
I took the 405 and drilled a stake down into your center,
And stated that it's never ever been better than this.
3. Chris Garneau -- "Between the Bars" (Eliott Smith cover)
Drink up one more time and I'll make you mine.
I'll keep you apart, deep in my heart.
4. Death Cab for Cutie -- "I Will Possess Your Heart"
There are days when outside your window, I see my reflection as I slowly pass,
and I long for this mirrored perspective when we'll be lovers, lovers at last.
4. Since this story was originally supposed to be about Morris, I wrote a character sketch for Morris ahead of time. Yes, okay, I totally based him on Merlin, so you be quiet. DO NOT JUDGE ME. This is pre-apocalypse:
Morris Harold Emerson had large ears like satellite dishes that protruded from either side of his head. The only thing that could cover them was his thick, black mop of hair. Even then, if the wind blew the right direction or he slept in a funny way, the elephant ears would be revealed. In all of his twenty years of life, he had hated the way he looked, but more so people’s reactions to his appearance. Tony, his best mate, really was the only person to get away with calling him Dumbo, Fly-Away or Hey, Hey DirectTV, but even then it took Morris immense will power to keep from hitting him over the head.
Even if he did hit Tony - which he might have done once or twice - it wouldn’t have made a difference. Morris was tall at 6’1”, but also slight, weighing in only at 140 pounds. His cheekbones despite consuming inconceivable amounts of food. The knobs of his spine were visible through his mathlete t-shirts. When Tony wasn’t ragging on his ears, he called him Ballerina Legs or Fiddlesticks and slipped pamphlets for anorexia in his pillowcase as a joke. Any attempt to beat his rugby-rousing friend resulted in his face being pummeled into the mattress, and if there was anything Morris hated more than the name-calling, it was the roughhousing his roommates partook in as regularly as clockwork.
They both attended Seattle University, but Morris originally came from Montana. Big Sky, where he could drive as fast as he desired and couldn’t see his neighbor’s house from his own because it was seven miles away. They lived almost directly between Roundup and Judith Gap, two towns almost forty-five miles apart in the center of Montana. Because of his quiet childhood, he took to reading and watching a lot of movies. It was only natural that when he arrived in college, he would gravitate toward the theatre too. Though he never acted, he volunteered with set building and dressing and make-up, and spent Friday nights in the audience, one hand clutching onto his program and the other slapped over Tony’s blathering mouth until he began insisting Tony stopped coming along all together.
What Morris really wanted to do was be a doctor, and he declared his major in biology for his undergraduate degree. When he wasn’t wrists-deep in set paint, he was in the labs or library, pouring over Gray’s Anatomy and taking apart the human model he brought home from his lab to the apartment. Tony named the mannequin Morrie to disturb him, and then detached the spleen and ran off with it. Morris found it after ripping apart Tony’s room a week later under his mattress with a note attached reading, “Congratulations! You’re a princess!”
Guy Richards, Morris’ uncle, was a doctor who practiced in Brookline, Massachusetts. He drove a hybrid car and lived in the same house he and Morris’ mother grew up in. He was the one who sent Morris the game Operation! at the tender age of seven that started this medical obsession, and helped him fill out his college applications when Morris’ mother, Honey, had to work eight hours in a leather shoe factory and didn't have the time or knowledge to assist him. Though he always loved and encouraged Morris, he also despaired of him.
“What did you do to your mother this time?” he would ask over the phone when Morris was a child.
Morris would try to cover the mouthpiece of the phone to hide from his uncle his mother’s wailing. “I - uh - nothing. Really. I may have set the kitchen on fire. Again.”
“Your ears are like drains,” Guy would scold. “They’re so big all your brains fell out.”
If Morris could get through the next two years of college, he would like to fly back out to the Eastern Seaboard for med school, perhaps live with his hippie uncle and drive his hybrid car through Boston. He could graduate and work at the same hospital, or take his chances out in New York in a dingy flat just off Broadway, stumbling off of twelve hour shifts and straight into the theatre to devour O’Neill and Beckett and Wilde - the closest thing he might get to his Irish roots.
Lying prostrate on his twin-sized bed - Morris’ arms dangling off of either side of the mattress - Tony stomped in to snap him from his daydream. “Hey Howdy Doody, let’s go. I got rugby in twenty-minutes.”
“Nrrrgh,” Morris grumbled, twisting off the mattress and onto the floor just as Tony tried to tackle him. It was a half-hearted attempt at best. He felt hands latch onto his ankle, dragging him out into the hallway. A red smear from carpet burn streaked from his cheekbone to his jaw. Tony hooked his arms under Morris’ armpits, hauling him upwards, and for a moment Morris allowed himself to revel in the thing he never allowed himself to dwell on: the hot hands pulling him along down the hallway, Tony’s laughter. If he was honest - which he rarely ever was - Morris resisted just a little until Tony turned around to face him, scold him, and then laugh.
“I’m going to be late! The game starts in - like - an hour!”
Somewhere from downstairs, they could hear their other two roommates laughing, Darrel and Chester. Summer was almost upon them. As Tony let go and raced down the steps, Morris was left in limbo between that fantasy world and the lie he found himself living daily.
5. Feedback is greatly appreciated! I hope to either revise this project or my other submission for my final grade.
Author: nieded
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~5,000
Notes: Written for my creative writing workshop. DVD commentary and bonus material at the end.
Summary: They had transformed humans into a virus.
Ashes-Ashes-
I fumbled with the photo frame, ripping the backing off to reach the picture underneath. I discarded the frame, sparing one look at my girlfriend Christine, her round face and brown hair. She wore a cheery expression in her graduation cap and gown, a look of relief. I pressed the picture between the pages of my father’s favorite book The Odyssey and shoved it to the bottom of my bag.
“Morris! Forget the toothbrush,” I heard Tony yell. They danced around each other in the bathroom. Tony grabbed bandages, antiseptic-anything he thought might be useful. Often a little cruel and rowdy, he was still a boy scout and son of a military major through and through. Morris, on the other hand, spent half a minute debating over whether deodorant or toothpaste was more important and if he could spare leaving his treasured Rivers Cuomo poster behind that he bought when he was sixteen.
The squad cars and busses were ready to leave any minute, ready to escort uninfected people past the quarantine checkpoint. Anyone who wanted to leave had to be ready by seven, and it was quarter-to already. Those left behind chose to take their chances. I had most everything packed. Each individual was allowed one bag. I filled mine with two day’s worth of clothes, a photograph of Christine, a jackknife, my laptop, cell and wallet. I figured everything else could be replaced once I got through quarantine. Most of my real possessions were still in California with my mom. Tony grabbed similar items as I did, and Morris tried to pack his entire room into his duffel.
I rushed into the living room of our four bedroom apartment. “Let’s go!” I hollered. I heard Tony and Morris stomp down the hall, Morris struggling to balance his duffel while putting on a hoodie inside out.
“Chester, we can’t go yet,” he said, catching his foot on the carpet. “Darrel’s not here.”
Tony grabbed the back of Morris’ hood, clamping a rough hand down on his shoulder in attempt to still his movements while sorting out his sweatshirt. “Darrel better get his ass in gear,” he barked. “The squad arrives in ten minutes, and it won’t wait for him.”
“Has anyone called him?”
“I did,” I answered, checking my phone for messages. “Twice. He hasn’t called back.”
“Shit,” Tony cursed. “Well, I’m not going to be the one to tell his mother he was infected by zombies.”
Morris batted his sweatshirt until he was released from Tony’s grip. “They’re not zombies,” he muttered. “It’s a virus that triggers seventy-five percent of the brain to shut down and rewrites it to fulfill the virus’ objective, which is to infect other targets.”
“Does it matter what it does?”
“Understanding is the first step to curing it, Tony,” Morris responded huffily.
“What matters is that we aren’t the ones who will be curing it but how it works,” I said. “We’re just the ones who are running away from it. If Darrel doesn’t show up in two minutes, then we have to go.” We shared a quick furtive glance between the three of us before Tony nodded and grunted, shrugging his yellow hair from his face.
Darrel made up the fourth person in our group of friends, and we all shared a dingy apartment together just twenty minutes walking from the Seattle University campus. We came from all over the States: me from sunny California, Morris from Montana, and Tony from Maryland. Darrel had lived in Washington State all of his life. When the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in correlation with the Seattle University Office of Institutional Research-the knobs that caused the so-called ‘virus breakthrough’ to happen -gave twenty-four hours notice for an emergency evacuation, Darrel left to call on friends and family.
The CDC divided Seattle into zones for a staggered evacuation that depended on the zone’s closeness to the outbreak of the virus. This meant the first wave included the campus. Residents had two options, either check in at Vancouver, the evacuation destination, or stay in Seattle and check in with the authorities here, but every unaccounted person was to be labeled infected and dispatched accordingly on site.
If Darrel did not arrive in the next ten minutes, he would be forced to find his own way to the Vancouver checkpoint or remain in the high risk area.
“I’ll call him again,” I offered.
“If he hasn’t answered before, he won’t answer now,” Tony said. “Something’s happened.”
Morris, still fighting with his sweatshirt, frowned. “His phone could have died. He might be here any minute. You know how he is.”
I looked out the window, craning to see a crowd of about fifty people walking down 45th Street towards the pick-up location. “Even Darrel wouldn’t be late for something like thi-”
The entrance door to our apartment swung open, cutting me off mid-sentence. Darrel stumbled in, bleary-eyed and disoriented, his shirt half-undone and dark shadows under his eyes. He looked perhaps if he had spent the better part of the past day on ecstasy or crying furiously. Morris’ shoulders visibly slumped in relief at the sight of him.
“Jesus. Where the hell have you been?” he shouted frantically, belying is previous optimism. He moved to hug him-or hit him-but Tony grabbed both of his shoulders and pulled him back. “Wha-”
“Wait,” he commanded. He looked at Darrel. “Stay over there. Where have you been?”
“What the hell, Tony? We have to go.” I glanced furtively between them and Darrel. “The busses are going to be here any minute. Darrel, go pack your bag quick-”
“No, don’t move,” Tony snapped, cutting me off. He had one hand tight on Morris’ shoulder to hold him back, the other stretched out to keep Darrel from moving any closer. Darrel aborted his steps ungracefully, blinking once before coming to a halt. Only half of his mouth opened, and he could not shape words, only a low moan.
Morris jerked backwards and over Tony’s shoes as if the sound of Darrel’s voice tangibly shoved him back. “Jesus,” he breathed. “He’s twitching.”
I studied Darrel’s face briefly. The left corner of his mouth drooped slightly as if he had suffered from a stroke. His shoulder twitched involuntarily. His eyes shifted back and forth. “What does that mean?” I asked. Together, the three of us slowly began to retreat to the other side of the room.
“It’s like… a hypnic jerk. It happens when the body starts to fall asleep and the muscles relax. The brain believes the body is falling through air and it tries to correct itself by contracting.”
“He’s not asleep,” I pointed out.
Tony pushed Morris behind him and maneuvered himself until he was in front of me too. “He’s brain dead, idiot,” he hissed. Slowly he tracked his movements across the open floor until he reached the kitchen island. I followed him, as did Darrel’s distant eyes. Tony groped blindly for the knife block. “I can kill him, right?”
Darrel took a dragging step forward.
“Yes. I think,” said Morris, shuffling sideways until he too was behind Tony. We both grabbed knives of our own. “Technically he’s still alive. It’s just the virus has taken control of his functions and shut down his higher thought processes.”
Tony grunted. “Yes, fine, but how do I kill him? Do I have to stab his brains or something?”
My palms slipped on the handle of my knife. It was small, just a paring knife. Tony had grabbed the massive blade and held it with his palm facing upward, ready to jab it into Darrel’s stomach, so certain that Darrel was long gone. Distantly, I think I knew that this was true. Even twenty-four hours before, he had been talkative, promising to be back in the morning with a manful slap on Morris’ back just to watch him stumble. It was hard to reconcile the differences between that man and the shell that stood before us with hunted, faded eyes-but still harder to kill him.
“Whatever you do,” Morris whispered, holding his knife haphazardly, “don’t get any blood on you.” I shuddered.
Tony took a steadying breath, but Darrel’s body must have read that as a cue, and in an instant he moved from stillness to action, launching himself forward. His fingers snagged on Tony’s shirt, yanking him forward, and at the same time the knife. The blade sunk into his stomach, but he didn’t even flinch. He grabbed Tony’s wrists in a crushing grip as Tony tried to twist free, hauling one foot forward to brace himself against Darrel’s chest.
“Ah, fuck! Do something! Get him the fuck off of me!”
I dropped my knife and grabbed the kitchen stool, smashing its legs down across Darrel’s arms to break his grip. On the second swing, I brought it over his head, knocking him unconscious. I stumbled with the force of the blow, dropping the stool as my shoes slipped on the blood.
We stood in silence panting. Tony cradled his left hand where the stool had bruised him, and I leaned against the kitchen island. Morris crept closer to inspect the body.
“Hey,” he said, pushing us back. “Get away from the blood.”
We skittered backwards and Morris tiptoed around the pool oozing from Darrel’s stomach where the knife still protruded. He peered over the body, taking note of its irregular, stuttering breaths. With the sleeve of his sweatshirt, he tilted the head back to expose the throat and methodically sliced it open. “Shit,” he breathed, as more blood streamed from its throat.
He took off the sweatshirt and then pointed at Tony’s hands and shirt, also stained. “You gotta strip,” he said, pulling him around the counter and into the kitchen. He rummaged through the cupboards for our sparse dishrags, running it under the tap with warm water and soap. “Jesus, you have it all over you. Did it get in your eyes?”
“No,” Tony answered, unblinking.
“Did it get in your mouth? Your nose?”
“No.”
“What about you, Chester? Are you clean?” Morris asked, beginning to wipe down Tony’s hands efficiently but thoroughly. For once Tony allowed someone else take over, his eyes shifting around the room to look at anything but the corpse.
I shook my head. I stood frozen at the foot of the body unable to move. Darrel’s eyes stared off into the distance, his jaw slack and disconnected from his skull from the blow from the stool. But it wasn’t really Darrel. I knew that. It just looked like Darrel. Darrel had been dead already.
We fell into a silence and listened as the busses down the road roared to life and drove away.
----
I sit in quarantine with my backpack at my feet in a long line of about one hundred people waiting to be processed and released. I hold open The Odyssey to the page with Christine’s picture tucked inside. She told me on the phone that the footage of Seattle’s destruction is everywhere on the news. She has CNN playing twenty-four hours. She puts it on mute when she sleeps and brushes her lips against the frame of my senior photo in the morning when she wakes up and again at night before going to bed. She says she’s been praying for me.
I see the footage from a television they have set up in the hallway. Now that we have been cleared to leave and been briefed on what we are allowed to say and not to say, they’ve relaxed our restrictions from the outside world. They show inside the labs of the research institute, blurry shapes of men trying to alter viral genetics from view point of the security cameras. The researches wanted to magnify viral processes to a larger scale in order to better study how it works. What they wound up with were mice that embodied the virus, attacked or mated out of season in the name of spreading infection.
They say that the first infected human was a PhD student who had been bitten by a mouse. His name was Felix Walter. He raped a faculty member and then as his body began to deteriorate, he knocked a coworker unconscious and slit his wrists into his mouth in a last ditch attempt to infect another host. They say it takes approximately four hours for symptoms to show but that a person will be contagious within ninety minutes of contracting the virus. By the time they realized what had occurred, it had spread outside the bounds of the facility. They had transformed humans into a supervirus.
A weary looking woman in wrinkled jeans and a sweatshirt begins passing out forms for us to fill out before our release. The other people I share the corridor with clumsily pass the pages along without looking at each other. I read the first page of questions:
4.) How many infected persons have you been in contact with outside of quarantine location: Vancouver?
5.) How many infected persons have you been in contact with inside quarantine location: Vancouver?
6.) How did you arrive at quarantine location: Vancouver? (circle one)
a. Federal supervised evacuation
b. Other (please explain below)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
My fingers clench so tightly around the paper that the edges tear.
----
We huddled around Darrel’s body, wary of the congealing pool of blood that seeped slowly closer and closer to our shoes. It was like a crime scene. We were all victims. We were all guilty. Tony broke the tension by swearing under his breath before stalking towards the bathroom. “I’m taking a fucking shower,” he hissed before slamming the door shut.
Morris and I stared after him. It was easier to do so than stare at the corpse of the friend we murdered. In silent agreement we stumbled after him and huddled outside the bathroom instead, took comfort in the familiar sound of the shower spray. If I pressed close enough to the door, I could almost imagine feeling the heat from the steam.
“We missed the busses,” I said. Morris did not answer. “We’ll have to find another way there, maybe walk to another pick-up point.”
Morris shook his head. “We can’t. They’ll only take people from that zone. We won’t be listed.”
The closest pick-up point was probably a forty-five minute walk away where Darrel’s family lived. I knew we would not go even if we could.
“We’ll have to drive there,” he reasoned. “It’s only a two and a half hour drive to Vancouver, and they’ve routed all Seattle evacuees to drive separately onto Interstate 5. We won’t even need passports, and we can check in there without worrying about being unaccounted for.” The shower turned off; the sound of the curtain rustling as it was yanked back drifted through the door.
“We don’t even have a car, Morris. We should call the police. We should call the CDC.”
“No, we should get the fuck out of here,” Tony interjected from inside the bathroom. He swung open the door and jabbed a dripping finger into my chest. “The entire city of Seattle is evacuating to four different major cities. We’re in a pandemic. We’ve been fucking quarantined. It won’t surprise anyone that we witnessed an infected person and especially not the CDC. They’ll pin roses on our lapels for slitting his throat.”
Morris looked skyward and took a steadying breath. “Anthony’s right. They won’t care. Darrel’s just another number to them, and we need to make sure we’re safe.” He paused. “And for Christ’s sake, Anthony, wrap a towel around it.”
I huffed and pushed Tony back inside the bathroom, closing the door. Inside, he grunted and we heard a series of bottles and something glass scatter across the floor in anger. I dug the heels of my palms into my eyes and listened as Morris nervously picked at the wall plaster and breathed heavily through his nose.
I waited until the slamming from the bathroom halted, and I feared looking inside to see what sort of damage had been done. Still, I knew then that we would not be returning to this place again, not with Darrel’s body laying twenty feet from us, his bodily fluids and disease and history soaking into the carpet.
“The busses were really our only chance. None of us have cars. Anyone we could borrow a vehicle from has most likely left already. How the hell do we get on Interstate 5 without a car?” I asked, panicking.
Morris shuffled uneasily, staring at his shoes. Tony finally reemerged from the bathroom with a towel, and I peeked behind him and saw most of the medicine cabinet’s contents strewn across the floor.
“Why not just hotwire a car?” he asked. He seemed a great deal calmer, as if hijacking a vehicle were the easiest chore possible and didn’t go against his moral scruples. “After all, we do have good ol’ Morrie here.”
Morris grimaced when Tony’s hand slapped heartily against his back. “I, uh, may have stolen a car or two. Before. Long time ago. And-” he said, as if it made it better, “we could probably find a car that has an extra pair of keys tucked on the inside of the hood?”
The expression on Tony’s face bordered manic, his upper lip curling slightly. “Well, that settles things, doesn’t it?”
I stared at them blankly and Tony pushed passed me to put on fresh clothes.
The streets outside were deserted. The entire campus had emptied out and anyone remaining probably had more sense than we did to stay inside. After witnessing Darrel, the symptoms of the infected seemed fairly obvious to us and we looked out for any vacant faces lurking around corners. We stuck close and Tony brandished a five-iron club menacingly, sometimes pacing ahead of us while I took up the rear in our trio.
We walked two blocks down 45th Street to the University Plaza Hotel where campus residents parked their cars to get on the evacuating busses. I wanted to question where the hell Morris had learned to bust into cars but held my tongue. He was the type of freak that felt guilty about missing just one lecture, let alone stealing a fucking car. Instead I watched his brittle-looking fingers feel around the hood until the latch gave way, his eyes staring upward at a clouding sky intently as he worked by touch. He rigged the hoods and checked the underbelly of sixteen cars for spare keys before hitting the jackpot on some well-kept looking Buick.
He flipped through the registration after climbing into the passenger seat to find the car belonged to a Dr. Richard Pruitt, who, by my estimation, was probably an old professor trapped in his own high minded head-a head that recalled on the good old days when pandemic viruses did not exist and young college students did not have to resort to stealing cars to get out alive. Only that sort of person would leave spare keys taped the inside of his hood let alone drive an old fart kind of car. Tony immediately scrambled for the driver’s seat and chucked his backpack at my head when I clambered into the back.
“Just hit Interstate 5 and follow it through. We could get to Vancouver in less than three hours,” Morris said.
We sat in silence for a moment, staring out at the deserted city. “Stop being babies,” Tony scoffed, but it was hardly audible and he stared at his hands on the steering wheel when he said it.
Finally he started the ignition. The car hummed to life in a quiet, old-person kind of way. The adrenaline began to leave me, leave my hands shaking, and I pressed my forehead to the cool glass window to watch storm clouds gather above us. Tony flipped through radio stations-only two more waves of evacuations left-sixty-four cases reported, all dead-could the virus have already spread outside Seattle? Sources say likely-Morris switched it off, the sound of his breath hitching in tight little gasps filling the silence. I fell asleep from exhaustion.
----
I think now that I fell asleep in fear that I would go crazy thinking about it, thinking about how the world might fall in on itself and that somehow we would meet our comeuppance. Sleep was an easy respite but it was only temporary. I haven’t slept restfully since.
10.) How many affected persons have you had contact with?
None, I think, or else I would not have passed the physical examination.
Then I think: We are all affected. We are all sick.
----
I woke with a start to the sound of rain slamming against the car windows. The quality of rain was not the persistent drizzle of Northern Washington, but a full onslaught. It slammed against the metal roof and echoed mutedly in the dark vehicle. I realized I was alone in the back seat. Tony’s sunglasses and cell phone rested on the dashboard; Morris’ sweatshirt sprawled over the passenger seat. Perhaps they had gone for a piss and would come back miserable from the unexpected downpour.
I listened to the steady thrum of rain. In the closed off car the windows were so blurred that I could not see a foot outside, and I felt safe in the isolated space for the first time.
The rain pounded so loudly that I did not hear Morris approach until his hands slammed against the glass, the heat of his skin fogging up the window so that his face was a frantic, messy blur. I jerked backwards, stunned at his sudden appearance, and l scrambled to the other side of the seat haphazardly as he tumbled in. The rain dripped off his face, the planes of his jagged, rail-thin face. He reached out and his ice-cold fingers convulsively clutched at my wrists, my knees, my shirt.
“Chester-Chester-Chester-” he chanted. “Jesus. Jesus fuck. Anthony. Anthony, he’s-he’s-he’s-he-”
I grabbed Morris’ arms and shook his shoulders. “What? Morris, what happened? Where are we? Where’s Tony?” It was useless. Morris’ panicking dissolved into hyperventilation, sobs that wracked his young, stupid looking face. His fingers continued twisting into the shoulders of my shirt, and I had to pry them off of me. “Hey! Hey!”
I had never been one for offering comfort, not to say that any of us were experts at it. I imagined Tony would have slapped him upside the head and Darrel would have cracked out the drinks. Instead, we were crammed together in a stolen vehicle so tiny that Morris’ knees could not fit behind the passenger seat while he slobbered his incomprehensible terror into the headrest.
“He-I didn’t know-I didn’t know-so I-Jesus-Jesus-Jesus-” Jesus. It was this thing that Morris did that pissed off Tony if he said it enough times - a habit that could not be helped. Tony, raised on good protestant morals, had been taught all his life to put his hands in God, especially on the field of war where his future laid if he wanted to follow his father’s militaristic footsteps. For the first eighteen years of his life, he woke up at 0600 hours to the sound of a bugle and the national anthem in a series of bases and academies. It was like Morris to flip his world upside down by being the most inefficient, incompetent, blasphemous person he had ever met while still managing to wheedle under his skin, planting himself there until life somehow seemed less complete without Morris right there spitting in his ear and breaking our beer mugs and chanting “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
Morris finally pulled me out into the rain because as he swallowed all his words. We stumbled through the heavy onslaught, and in ten seconds, I went from being completely dry to drenched. Morris’ crushing grip on my wrist was the only thing that allowed me to follow him. Even two feet ahead of me, the back of his head and dark hair melded with the bleak landscape, making him nearly invisible.
My shoe slipped and dug into the saturated mud, catapulting Morris and I forward onto something hard and warm. My fingers grappled with hair, skin. “Morris?” I hollered into the rain. “Morris-is that you?”
It was, in fact, not Morris, and I discovered this when Morris’ hands yanked me upwards and away from the body.
“Don’t touch him!” he shouted. “There might be blood. Did you touch his head?”
I had no idea Morris was so strong that he could hoist me upwards. I shook my head, twisting in the mud to gather my bearings. The outline of Tony’s body was a blurry shadow that made me doubt I was even looking at a body and not some log or boulder instead.
Morris repeated, “Don’t touch him. You’ll get infected.”
When I leaned forward closer to the body, I realized that it was Tony. His eyes peered upwards absently into the thundering sky and his lips were parted just enough to reveal the crooked teeth inside. His yellow hair fanned against the ground. I kicked the corpse and it rolled to reveal the back of his head.
“Oh fucking hell,” I cursed, scrambling backwards. I knocked into Morris and we both toppled back into the mud. “What the hell did you do?” Tony’s skull looked as if it had been bashed in. Gray matter pooled over the mud and the blood steeped over the dirt with the rain. I swallowed back a terrified scream that bubbled forth when I veered forward and vomited over Morris’ shoes.
The downpour made the body and the soil and our feet all disconnected from one another. I kept screaming, “What happened-what happened-what happened-” into the windstorm. The body stayed still where I kicked it. Morris could only sputter incomprehensible gibberish, shaking his head furiously as he tried to pull me further from the body.
Tony-who showed off to college girls his capability to hit any target accurately with an air rifle-Tony-who retaliated against all of Morris’ stupidity by wiping clean the entire porn collection from his laptop and then pasting “Fairy Princess” in big fucking glittering letters on the ass of all of his briefs-Tony-whose name Morris continued to chant along with “Oh my god. Oh my god,” and then “I’m sorry. I’m so-orry” between violent hiccups-was dead.
I vomited twice more before I was dragged back to the car. I lost one of my Nikes to the swelling mud slides, and our jeans and arms were painted brown. I opened the door and sat on the seat where I buried my face in my shaking hands. Morris stood hollowly outside but seemed to steel himself as he looked at me a little desperately and resolutely. Eventually he reached in, tucked my legs under the steering wheel and opened the passenger door. Under the seat he found the keys and chucked them into my lap.
“You need to go,” he said. “Anthony-he-I-” He glimpsed back at the body. “Do you have your jackknife still?”
I stared at him dumbly before fishing it from my pocket on automatic.
“You’re only an hour from the checkpoint. You need to go,” he said, taking it from my hands.
“But-”
“I can’t go with you.” He reached over and started the ignition. When he pulled away, he left a muddy handprint on the seat. “It’ll be all right,” he said. “It’ll-it’ll be all right.” He backed out of the car and slammed the door shut.
I sat for a long time in the isolation of the Buick, peering out the window as the engine ran, looking for Morris’ shadow as he walked away. I imagined I could see the outline of Tony’s body through the rain and the glass and the wetness in my eyes. I saw Darrel’s ghost beside them. They watched me drive away.
----
Christine flies up to meet me. I stand around outside of the Vancouver International Airport with a stack of papers that declare I am uncontaminated, that I am free to pass back into the United States without a passport, and that upon my arrival to Riverside, California, I am to have my mental health assessed immediately and all rehabilitation paid for by the great American institution that is our government. The sun is out. I am not ready to go home.
When she arrives, I ignore her attempt at comfort. Her small hands and round face had less than a week before been appealing and longed for. Her delicateness I thought was an asset and not a hindrance. I know better now that she would cave to any persuasion, not have the strength to run under an attack. At least she does not make me talk about it.
She looks at me, squeezes my hand hesitantly as if I were a small and easily frightened child. When I do not flinch, she slowly reaches to wrap around me, pressing her face into my solar plexus so her hair brushes against my mouth and nose. After being exposed to blood, brain matter, mud, and a series of sterile astringent-smelling rooms, the faint floral scent from her shampoo makes my head spin. She cannot fathom what I have seen. She does not know that I arrived separately from the mass evacuation to the Vancouver checkpoint.
I am not ready to go home, I tell her. She takes my hand and I crawl into her tiny, suffocating car, and we drive around in circles on sunny roads in pursuit of a hotel. I look at her delicate hands, how they gracefully clutch the steering wheel with care but ease. I study her pulse point. When we arrive to the Travelodge, she leaves me in the car and comes back out with keys. She maneuvers my arm so it wraps around her shoulder like boyfriends do in movie theatres or comrades do in war, and she cradles my hand against her chest as she leads me into the building, into the elevator, into our rooms. Onto the bed.
If I were a virus, I think, the desire to spread from person to person would be more than just about survival, that is: if the virus embodied the human. People have been doing it for years, connecting and swearing oaths through blood bonds, through sex, through the sacred act of spilling our guts as if we were spilling our souls. There is a reason why Darrel’s body returned to our apartment. And I think, though I will never be certain, there was a reason why Tony called Morris out into the rain while I slept fitfully in the backseat-why they left so quietly and Morris followed, deceived, so willingly.
It is the same reason why I accept Christine’s embrace, her small arms wrapping around my head, pulling me into the crevice of her throat where it is hot and intimate, where I can press my teeth against her pulse. She runs her hands under my shirt and over my ribs, and I think: this is it-this is it.
That night she leaves the bathroom light on and falls asleep on her back. I rummage through her suitcase until I find what I am looking for and then crawl over the covers, loving her so much that the three years we have been together, the distance we have spent apart, hasn’t been enough. I cover my hand over her nose, so large that it could cradle her entire face, and watch as her mouth falls open. I can see the wet gleam inside her mouth and press my wrist over her tongue while thinking of all the oaths I might swear to her that will never amount to the vast explosion I feel inside. There is nothing I can give her now; there are no planes where we can be level anymore now that we have been apart for so long and reunited by something so gruesome. She would never understand why I’m doing this, and it is the only thing I can do to show how much I love her.
This, I think as I dig the point of her jackknife into my wrist, this must be enough-
end.
NOTES:
1. One day I said to Sam, "I am tired of reading stories about high school break ups." Helpful as always, Sam said, "ZOMBIES." And then it evolved from there.
2. This story was supposed to be considerably longer, but due to the constraints of the assignment, I had to keep it down to ~5,000 words. Let me tell you, this had me in a panic for awhile. The first scene alone is 2,000 words. This semester has been the semester of experimenting in alternate universes. I had a lot of fun writing this, but I couldn't get half of what I wanted in. Really, this was supposed to be a story about Morris, but he took an ensemble role for the sake of keeping this down.
3. The playlist:
1. Afterhours -- "There's Many Ways"
I know--I know what your love is.
Love's a disease;
I just want to get out of it.
2. Death Cab for Cutie -- "405"
I took the 405 and drilled a stake down into your center,
And stated that it's never ever been better than this.
3. Chris Garneau -- "Between the Bars" (Eliott Smith cover)
Drink up one more time and I'll make you mine.
I'll keep you apart, deep in my heart.
4. Death Cab for Cutie -- "I Will Possess Your Heart"
There are days when outside your window, I see my reflection as I slowly pass,
and I long for this mirrored perspective when we'll be lovers, lovers at last.
4. Since this story was originally supposed to be about Morris, I wrote a character sketch for Morris ahead of time. Yes, okay, I totally based him on Merlin, so you be quiet. DO NOT JUDGE ME. This is pre-apocalypse:
Morris Harold Emerson had large ears like satellite dishes that protruded from either side of his head. The only thing that could cover them was his thick, black mop of hair. Even then, if the wind blew the right direction or he slept in a funny way, the elephant ears would be revealed. In all of his twenty years of life, he had hated the way he looked, but more so people’s reactions to his appearance. Tony, his best mate, really was the only person to get away with calling him Dumbo, Fly-Away or Hey, Hey DirectTV, but even then it took Morris immense will power to keep from hitting him over the head.
Even if he did hit Tony - which he might have done once or twice - it wouldn’t have made a difference. Morris was tall at 6’1”, but also slight, weighing in only at 140 pounds. His cheekbones despite consuming inconceivable amounts of food. The knobs of his spine were visible through his mathlete t-shirts. When Tony wasn’t ragging on his ears, he called him Ballerina Legs or Fiddlesticks and slipped pamphlets for anorexia in his pillowcase as a joke. Any attempt to beat his rugby-rousing friend resulted in his face being pummeled into the mattress, and if there was anything Morris hated more than the name-calling, it was the roughhousing his roommates partook in as regularly as clockwork.
They both attended Seattle University, but Morris originally came from Montana. Big Sky, where he could drive as fast as he desired and couldn’t see his neighbor’s house from his own because it was seven miles away. They lived almost directly between Roundup and Judith Gap, two towns almost forty-five miles apart in the center of Montana. Because of his quiet childhood, he took to reading and watching a lot of movies. It was only natural that when he arrived in college, he would gravitate toward the theatre too. Though he never acted, he volunteered with set building and dressing and make-up, and spent Friday nights in the audience, one hand clutching onto his program and the other slapped over Tony’s blathering mouth until he began insisting Tony stopped coming along all together.
What Morris really wanted to do was be a doctor, and he declared his major in biology for his undergraduate degree. When he wasn’t wrists-deep in set paint, he was in the labs or library, pouring over Gray’s Anatomy and taking apart the human model he brought home from his lab to the apartment. Tony named the mannequin Morrie to disturb him, and then detached the spleen and ran off with it. Morris found it after ripping apart Tony’s room a week later under his mattress with a note attached reading, “Congratulations! You’re a princess!”
Guy Richards, Morris’ uncle, was a doctor who practiced in Brookline, Massachusetts. He drove a hybrid car and lived in the same house he and Morris’ mother grew up in. He was the one who sent Morris the game Operation! at the tender age of seven that started this medical obsession, and helped him fill out his college applications when Morris’ mother, Honey, had to work eight hours in a leather shoe factory and didn't have the time or knowledge to assist him. Though he always loved and encouraged Morris, he also despaired of him.
“What did you do to your mother this time?” he would ask over the phone when Morris was a child.
Morris would try to cover the mouthpiece of the phone to hide from his uncle his mother’s wailing. “I - uh - nothing. Really. I may have set the kitchen on fire. Again.”
“Your ears are like drains,” Guy would scold. “They’re so big all your brains fell out.”
If Morris could get through the next two years of college, he would like to fly back out to the Eastern Seaboard for med school, perhaps live with his hippie uncle and drive his hybrid car through Boston. He could graduate and work at the same hospital, or take his chances out in New York in a dingy flat just off Broadway, stumbling off of twelve hour shifts and straight into the theatre to devour O’Neill and Beckett and Wilde - the closest thing he might get to his Irish roots.
Lying prostrate on his twin-sized bed - Morris’ arms dangling off of either side of the mattress - Tony stomped in to snap him from his daydream. “Hey Howdy Doody, let’s go. I got rugby in twenty-minutes.”
“Nrrrgh,” Morris grumbled, twisting off the mattress and onto the floor just as Tony tried to tackle him. It was a half-hearted attempt at best. He felt hands latch onto his ankle, dragging him out into the hallway. A red smear from carpet burn streaked from his cheekbone to his jaw. Tony hooked his arms under Morris’ armpits, hauling him upwards, and for a moment Morris allowed himself to revel in the thing he never allowed himself to dwell on: the hot hands pulling him along down the hallway, Tony’s laughter. If he was honest - which he rarely ever was - Morris resisted just a little until Tony turned around to face him, scold him, and then laugh.
“I’m going to be late! The game starts in - like - an hour!”
Somewhere from downstairs, they could hear their other two roommates laughing, Darrel and Chester. Summer was almost upon them. As Tony let go and raced down the steps, Morris was left in limbo between that fantasy world and the lie he found himself living daily.
5. Feedback is greatly appreciated! I hope to either revise this project or my other submission for my final grade.