Summer of the Apocalypse Read online

  As if reading his mind, Teach stepped beside Eric and gazed at the red slime that slid down the crusty rocks into the tiny stream. “The land bleeds,” said Teach.

  Chapter Ten

  MORE PRECIOUS THAN WATER, AND NOT SO THIN

  After five miles of riding his bike down U.S. 6, throwing himself to the gravel shoulder once when a truck rocketed by on the other side of the median heading west, cringing at the sound of a distant shot, too drained and frightened to consider crying, Eric decided to jump the waist-high concrete divider and head south to Littleton on the smaller streets. He crossed the two-lane frontage road into Union Ridge Park, where the grass was uncut but well watered. Sprinklers at the far edge of the park popped up and sprayed long streams. Sun rainbowed in the mist, and the air smelled wet and green. He paused at the swing sets. Their metal seats hung motionless above well-worn grooves in the grass. I used to swing, he thought. Feet in the air, head down. Whoosh. He imagined sitting quietly, hands wrapped around the chains, his feet dragging in the dust, waiting for Dad to give him a push. When his hip began to go numb from the bike leaning against it, he realized he hadn’t moved for minutes. A sound behind him made him start to turn. Then it seemed his head swelled, the ground slipped away—he was falling—and as he fell, he twisted and saw the sky. Slowly, so slowly it seemed, it turned to black.

  Waves marched out of the horizon, green and glassy, building as they got closer. A hundred feet from shore, Eric saw a dark form in the water. A seal? he thought. Dad said there might be seals, but it was a patch of seaweed riding up the solid-looking slope. A frond waved forlornly at the crest, then disappeared as the wave slid in. Seconds later the smooth, cascade leaned too far forward, toppled from the top into foam and noise to rush up the beach, spent at his toes. Sizzling like bacon, the water slid back into the ocean to be swallowed by the next wave.

  He scooted a foot closer to the sea, playing a game with the waves.

  Far away from the beach, in another world, Eric strained against consciousness. His head hurt, and something pulled against his chest, holding him under the arms.

  I’m dreaming I’m three. It’s the San Francisco trip when I was three, and we spent an afternoon on the coast.

  He didn’t want to wake up—the world was bad; awful things waited for him there—he forced himself back to the dream.

  Wind pushed spray into his face. He wiped the salt from his eyes. The next wave spilled itself on the sand, but stopped a yard short. He scrunched closer, and the next wash of water sent him scurrying backwards like a crab. He giggled. We’re playing tag, he thought. The film of water, no thicker than his hand, rushed away from him. Eric jumped up. Sand fell off his calves, and he brushed the back of his overalls. He loved the brass buttons that snapped the shoulder straps on because he could do them himself. Not like his shoelaces; they still gave him trouble. He rushed down the firm sand after the retreating wave. Water wants to play, he thought. I’ll chase it. But the wave retreated too quickly. I’ll catch you. He ran, hands outstretched, reaching, laughing, toward the ocean. Then, the next wave towered above him, and he stopped, his feet rooted to the sand. The dreamer Eric whimpered—he heard himself make the noise out of his dream—it was one he had often. The wave, that huge, unstoppable wave looming up, and panic, like frozen oil filling his head. Oh, Dad, he thought, and in the dream he looked back up the beach and saw his dad, a tiny figure, miles away it seemed.

  “Daddy,” he yelled, and the ocean roared above him. “Daddy!” Nothing could save him; time stopped. He squirmed, and whatever pinched him under the arms squeezed even tighter, and then, in the dream, his dad was there, swooping Eric up and out of harm’s way, the water reaching no higher than Dad’s waist.

  Dad held him high, hands locked under Eric’s armpits, and he laughed with Eric as the wave bubbled and foamed on the sand. Eric reached down and hugged his dad’s head.

  The dreamer Eric thought, I’m alive. I’m alive and safe with my dad.

  I can wake now. The dream is over. Everything is okay.

  He awoke.

  Nothing was okay.

  Eyes closed, he struggled to breathe, but a tight band of pressure constricted his chest. Also, in dull, thudding rhythms, the back of his head throbbed. He tried to touch it, sure he’d find a baseball-sized lump, but his hands were trapped behind his back, and, oddly, he still felt his dad’s strong grip supporting his armpits. He was swaying, as if Dad were carrying him, but he knew he was awake. Finally, Eric forced his eyes open.

  Slowly, the room rotated to his left. Eric felt nauseated, and clamped his eyes shut again. I’m in a basement, he thought. He’d seen a small window high on the wall. No other lights. Open rafters. Cement floor. A dusty water heater and furnace in a corner next to a beat up, wooden door; the edge of a toilet beyond in a darkened room. His inner ear told him he was still moving, so he sneaked another peek. I’m hanging! Below his feet, a tall, backless bar stool lay on its side. He kicked once and started swinging side to side. The rope creaked above him.

  “Stay still,” said a voice behind him. Eric kicked himself around. As he rotated, he saw two other people on stools next to the wall. The closest one, a woman in her mid-twenties, dark hair, said, “I told you to not move. You’ll just get sick.”

  The man sitting beside her did look sick. Eyes shut, face drawn, he sagged against his rope. On the next circuit, Eric saw that their ropes were tied to their necks, not their chests, and their hands were tied behind their backs too. He wondered if the sick man were dead, but the man shifted in his stool without opening his eyes. Two empty nooses hung from the rafters beyond them. An unlit stairwell led upstairs. Beside it, on the wall, hung a Budweiser mirror, and on the other side, a dart board, one of the fancy kinds with levered doors. Light blue or gray paint covered the walls except in the large patches where it had peeled away to the cement. He spun slowly, and when he stopped he faced the wall behind his stool. Duct tape held a Grateful Dead poster to the wall, the poster of a violin-playing skeleton with a long stemmed rose in his teeth.

  “Are you all right?” asked the woman.

  “It’s hard to breathe,” said Eric. Dots swam through his vision. On the other stool, the man coughed weakly.

  The woman said, “Listen close. I’m going to call for help, but we’re in a fix here and probably going to die.” She had a narrow face, fine boned, and her dark hair fell in ringlets to the collar of her blouse. “But we’re not dead yet, so don’t do anything stupid.”

  Her voice was low and hoarse, like she’d bruised her throat, and Eric strained to hear her. She continued, “There are two of them. I know what they want, so they won’t kill us right away, but don’t tick them off. The man, Jared, is the worst, but Meg is dangerous too.” She paused. Eric tried to take a full breath; the pressure was too much.

  “You got that?” she said.

  “Yes,” he gasped.

  She faced the stairwell and yelled, “Hey! We need some help down here!” Except for the wheezy breathing from the man who still hadn’t opened his eyes, Eric heard nothing. The woman shouted again, then the ceiling squeaked, and he heard heavy footsteps. A door opened and light filled the stairwell. Jared was a fifty-year-old slob. Eric guessed he might be five and a half feet tall, but he probably weighed over two-hundred and fifty pounds, most of it in his gut that hung out of the dirty t-shirt and nearly covered his yellowed underwear. Brown hair with streaks of white stuck straight up on the left side of his head, as if he’d slept on it. His breath reeked of alcohol, his pocked complexion was flushed, and his eyes watery. He stretched up and put his hand on Eric’s forehead.

  “Not hot. No fever at all,” Jared said to Meg. He coughed hard, doubling over, then hawked phlegm onto the floor. “I told you so.” He smirked and gave Eric a push that swung him hard enough that his feet hit the wall behind him. Eric clenched his teeth so he wouldn’t scream. The rope bit under his arms and pulled underarm hairs out.

  Meg snorted, stepped forward an
d put the flat of her hand on Eric’s chest, stopping his motion. She was big too, huge, maybe the same weight but a couple of inches taller than Jared, and younger by fifteen or twenty years. Eric’s momentum didn’t jolt her at all. He just stopped. She bent down, picked up the fallen stool and, supporting Eric’s weight with an arm wrapped around his waist, slid it under his butt. The pressure off his chest, Eric almost fell over. She steadied him. He could feel the fever baking out of her. “You gonna stay there?” she said. Her bloodshot eyes looked right in to his from six inches away, and her breath smelled sick, like old cough drops. Underneath that smell came something else, something sad and slippery and rotting. Eric didn’t flinch away, but tried not to inhale too deeply. He looked at her lips, which were incredibly chapped. Cracked scabs covered the corners of her mouth. He nodded, and she stepped back. She was wearing jeans and a red flannel shirt. Eric had never seen such an expanse of flannel before. Neatly combed blonde hair fell to her shoulders from a dead-centered part.

  “I’m gonna change your rope, youngster. Now that you’re awake, I don’t want you thinking about going anywhere.” She stepped behind him. “Jared,” she snapped. He snatched his hand off the dark-haired woman’s thigh and got a club from beside the water heater. It looked like a cut-in-half baseball bat. Duct tape, the same type holding the Grateful Dead poster, wrapped around the end of it. Jared rubbed his hand up and down its length, glaring at Eric as Meg undid the rope, then retied it around his neck. “If you get too rambunctious here, you’ll choke to death. You got that?” She put her hand on Eric’s chest again, tipping his stool backwards. He kicked his feet out to maintain balance. The rope snugged tight, and Meg held him there, feet out, stool tipped, rope cutting off his air for a handful of seconds. He couldn’t swallow. “Yes,” he tried to say, but it came out a gurgle.

  “Good,” she said, and tipped him forward.

  Eric squeezed his eyes shut against the pain in this throat, then opened them. A tear spilled out of each eye, and he brushed his cheeks against his shoulders to wipe them off.

  Jared said, “I’ll check the girl,” and put his hand on her forehead. She grimaced but didn’t pull back. “Not bad.” He caressed her cheek, his hand cupping the side of it. “I don’t think she’s fevered,” he said and moved his hand down her neck and onto her chest. “No sweat.” He chuckled and pushed his fingers inside the top of her blouse. A button popped off and clattered to the floor. Eric stared as Jared worked his way farther down the woman’s chest. Her face was grim, lips bloodless, but her eyes were open and defiant.

  Meg stepped around Eric and slapped the side of Jared’s head with a loud pop. The blow staggered him, and he retreated. “Hey, I didn’t…” he said, and she slapped him again. He seemed to have forgotten the baseball bat he was holding as he tried to protect himself. Meg didn’t say anything. “Wait!” She brought her hand around again, connecting smartly across his mouth. He fell back, saying, “Lay off… lay off,” and knelt in the corner of the room, arms wrapped around his head. She stood over him, palm raised, and held the poise for several seconds.

  Finally, she put her hand down. “Get up,” she said. He looked at her from between his arms, like a clam peeking out. “Get up!” Spittle flew from her mouth.

  Jared pushed away from the wall, stood up, looked at the bat as if he’d just discovered it, and pointed it at Meg’s face. “Bitch.” The vivid imprint of her hand glowed on his left cheek and his ear was bright red. The man on the third stool started sneezing: wheezy, wet expulsions of air that sounded silly and empty in the basement. Eric saw the scene as so unreal that he wanted to scream. Turning to the sick man, the dark-haired woman hissed out a quick, “Shush.”

  “Shoot,” said Jared, tucked the bat under his arm, and felt the man’s forehead. “The guy’s burning up.” He snapped his hand away and shook it, as if the germs might fly off.

  The dark-haired woman said, “It’s just a cold.” She sounded as if she were begging. “He’s fine, really.” Meg sniffed. “I told you he was no good from the start.” She started up the stairs. “We’ll bring the needles down later.” She didn’t close the door when she reached the top. Eric looked up. The floor above creaked so loudly that he could spot her position without trouble. Needles, he thought. What needles?

  Breathing heavily, Jared stood in the center of the room eyeing the woman speculatively. A swollen, fat, sick old man in his underwear, badly in need of a bath, Jared scratched his bare leg. “We’re alone, missy, at least for a second,” he said to the woman and moved toward her. Breath bubbled deep in his lungs, and he smiled through a couple of strangled coughs. She strained backward on the stool, risking her balance. The rope pulled taut.

  From the floor above, Meg’s voice thundered, freezing Jared in mid-reach, “And stay away from the goddamned woman!”

  The other man sneezed again and groaned low in his throat. He seemed to be barely conscious, slumped to the side and letting his noose support part of his weight. Jared leaned toward the dark-haired woman, caught himself, then shook his fist at the ceiling.

  “Fish,” he said. Eric wasn’t sure he’d heard him right. The word seemed… inappropriate. “Fish guts,” Jared said.

  Then, looking at the dark-haired woman’s chest the whole time, as if he could undo the buttons with his eyes, he carefully placed his bare foot on the sick man’s stool and pushed it out from under him. Twenty minutes later, long after the sick man had died, his sneakered feet only a couple of inches off the floor, a strange sound came from upstairs. Eric didn’t pay attention to it at first. He couldn’t take his eyes off the dead man. Thankfully, the man’s face was hidden, but the noose pushed his head to the side, and his shoulders tilted slightly, so one hand dangled free, fingers slightly bent and relaxed-looking. Eric stared at the hand, not thinking about it really, but thinking about the difference between dead and alive. A moment. A little push was all it took. No more strength than to knock over a stool. So he didn’t pay attention to the sound at first, but, eventually, he looked up. From upstairs came a rhythmic pounding and a distinctive squeak. After a few seconds, he placed it—bedsprings— and not long after that, he heard moaning. A soft voice cried over and over again, “Oh, oh, oh.” It was Meg.

  “They’re dying, you know,” said the dark-haired woman.

  Late afternoon light cast a pale square on the wall opposite the window. Eric had been watching it crawl up the wall so he wouldn’t keep staring at the dead man. An hour or so had passed since he’d last heard noise from upstairs, and he’d almost forgotten someone else was in the room with him.

  “It’s the sickness, isn’t it,” he said. “My mom… my mother…” He swallowed hard. “She died.” The woman nodded.

  “You’re not sick at all?” she said. “No cough? No pain swallowing?” Her voice was still hoarse, throaty, but not unpleasant. It sounded weighty, the voice of someone competent.

  “Uh uh.”

  She stood on the stool legs’ crossbars and stretched her back. The rope fell across her chest and pushed her blouse part way open where the top button had popped off. Her bra’s thin white strap was twisted, and Eric wanted to straighten it for her, like when his mom would fix his collar in back if it was sticking up.

  She sat. “I hope one of them comes down soon. I have to pee, and I’m thirsty.” She smiled and looked at Eric. He liked her smile; it seemed unforced, as if she didn’t care that she was tied by her throat to a wooden beam in some profoundly frightening people’s basement. Her eyes were deep and dark.

  “Doesn’t seem right to want both, does it?”

  Eric almost laughed, then he remembered the corpse. “I’ve got to go too,” he said soberly. A few more inches, and the square of light would be at the ceiling. It must be near sunset, Eric decided.

  “It’s getting dark. When will they turn on the lights?” he asked.

  “Hasn’t been any electricity for a week. Either that knock on the head rattled something loose, or you’ve been living i
n a cave.”

  A door shut upstairs. Somebody walked a few steps, then there was silence. They both looked at the ceiling.

  Finally, Eric said, “The second one.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The second one. I’ve been living in a cave. Do you want to yell for them, or shall I?” Now that she mentioned it, he really had to go.

  “I’ll do it,” she said, “but listen. They’re sick, like I said, and scared to death about dying, like everybody else, but most handle it with more dignity. I mean, they accept it. They watched the news, listened to the President, and followed the emergency procedures. And when that didn’t work, and they got sick anyway. They died in their homes.”

  Eric remembered his mom lying on the mattress in the cave, holding Dad’s hand. The woman continued, “Some, of course, panicked. Riots, looting. But most people gave up the ghost sort of peacefully.” She leaned forward, as far as the rope would permit. “These two, though, these two plan on beating it.”

  “How?”

  “They think it’s in the blood. Everybody who catches the disease dies. Zero recovery. Not everyone catches it though. Doctors said some people may never get it, so you’re either dead, dying or safe. Not too many people left either. Lots of quiet houses with dead people in their beds. I drove from Aurora to Northglenn yesterday and went for blocks and blocks without seeing anyone, just houses with their drapes drawn. Then, there are a few homes like this, with the last of the living, but they’re sick. And there’s some, like you and me, not sick yet.”

  “So what do they want to do with us? We might get it eventually.” I might get sick, Eric thought. He hadn’t considered that before. Maybe the whole world will die. He tried to picture his own illness, but he couldn’t do it. He thought, the idea is too ridiculous, and, like she said, we’re not dead yet. She seemed so unafraid that he began to feel better too.

  “Transfusions. Meg was a nurse a long time ago, and she’s got this plan to round up the healthy and take blood from them to keep her and Jared alive. At any rate, they don’t want us dead as long as they believe we’re not sick and their plan might work, so if we cooperate, we might get out of here.” Eric looked at where the rope ran through the pulley in the beam above and continued to a ring bolted in the wall. He couldn’t see anyway, with his hands behind his back, that he had a chance to get loose. If they die or decide to leave us here, he thought, it will be impossible for us to set ourselves free, and if everyone is dead or dying, then we won’t be rescued. The feeling of confidence faded. “What good will that do? If it works, they won’t let us go, and if it doesn’t, we’re stuck.” She smiled again, her teeth bright in the now almost dark room, then said, “And the horse might talk.” Before he could ask what that meant, the door at the top of the stairs opened, and Jared and Meg started down.