Ben Hughes: Dominant Species

The familiar sound of chirping crickets was faint enough to sleep through, but Richard’s weary eyes would not close. His mind raced along, assessing the mental damage that was yet to come. Richard could feel his very soul collapsing under the weight of a promise made to quell the fears of a loved one, but never meant to become a reality. It was a pact that he had made with his wife that they would never let the other one be turned into a soulless creature. Richard could feel his stomach knotting up into a hard mass as he reached for his pulse rifle on the floor next to him. Drops of anguish and regret rained down from his cheeks, draining but not emptying his reservoir of pain. His trembling fingers instinctively grasped the cold metal weapon as he lifted it up and turned it on. A faint whining sound replaced the cricket’s stridulations as the induction coil charged. Once the weapon was ready to fire, Richard slowly crept over to his wife’s sleeping bag, careful not to wake her. Then he took a deep breath as he positioned the muzzle a few inches from her temple. A lifetime of memories sent a shiver down his spine as he took one last look at her innocent face before pulling the trigger. A bright green flash lit up the tent, temporarily blinding him as the pungent smell of burnt hair and flesh seeped into his lungs. Richard dropped to his knees the instant his watering eyes confirmed Mikala’s fate.

“Why her?” he cried out in an angry and bitter voice. A moment later his friend Mitch pulled back the flap of the tent and peered in.

“What happened?” Mitch asked as the smoke filled haze wafted out into the darkness.

“I had to do it, she was infected!” Richard cried. Mitch reluctantly entered the tent and knelt down next to Mikala so he could examine her eyes with his flashlight. The powerful light revealed a multitude of faint yellow flecks disseminated across the whites of her eyes.

“Damn it Richard, you should have told me she was infected. I would have taken care of this,” Mitch scolded as he turned off his light and slowly backed away from the corpse, trying not to gag from the odor and appear disrespectful.

“I know…” Richard replied in a distraught voice.

“I don’t care how tough you think you are, we never euthanize our own family members, it’s just too painful,” Mitch added.

“I would prefer to be left alone,” Richard said in a cold and lifeless tone.

“Okay,” Mitch agreed. He hated to leave his best friend alone under such horrific circumstances, but if he needed time to mourn, it was not his place to intrude.

Shortly after Mitch left, Richard set his rifle down, and gently closed his wife’s pale blue eyes. As he sat there beside her in the darkness, all he could think about was the emptiness inside. She was all that he had left, the one thing in his life worth fighting for, and now she was gone. His heart was broken, and the enemy had won.

Richard wiped his eyes and lifted her pale white hand up to his lips, kissing it one last time. Then he slowly zipped up her sleeping bag until it covered her partially charred remains. A blanket of tears rained down onto the tattered bag as he lifted her body off the floor and headed out into the cold night air. As he walked along, a few stark faces peered out from their tents, but the sight of death repelled them. It wasn’t the first time that Richard had made the walk, but it was by far the most painful.

When Richard came to the large raised mound just outside of their encampment, he gently set his wife’s body down on the bare ground. Then he retrieved a badly worn shovel from a nearby grave and started to dig. Once the soil turned to rock, he set the shovel down and cried. The howl of a distant wolf echoed through the darkness, a stark reminder that humans had recently joined the ranks of endangered species. After regaining his composure, Richard gently slid Mikala’s body into the shallow grave and started shoveling the frigid dirt back into the hole. When he was finished, he packed the soil down with his tattered boots to protect her from nighttime scavengers. Then he marked the spot with a makeshift cross and asked God to look after her. What had once been a hearty group of survivors had been cut down to a few dozen. Their efforts to elude the parasitic plague by traveling deep into the Montana wilderness had been in vain. The disease had found them, and it had taken his wife. The one thing he had cared about above all else.

After Richard finished saying a prayer for his wife, he slowly made his way back to camp. He kept telling himself his actions were justified, but he couldn’t help but feel guilty for what he had done. He had killed countless others who were infected, but losing his wife was more than his psyche could bear. All he could think about was ending the nightmare that had become his life. He knew he was suffering a mental breakdown, but that realization did not stop him from retrieving the pulse rifle from his tent and pointing it at his head. Everything that he had fought so hard to preserve and protect had been taken away. All that remained was despair and regret, and Richard squeezed the trigger. His self-damnation was met with a solitary click, as the rifle beeped in alarm. After a sarcastic chuckle, Richard aimed the weapon away from his head so he could examine what had caused the misfire. As he looked it over, he could see all five power bars were glowing brightly, indicating it was fully charged. He ran his finger over the induction coil, but it was securely locked in place and clearly not the cause of the alarm. Richard slowly unscrewed the plasma coupler from the receiver, and as he did so, a small black cricket jumped out onto the floor.

“One in a million”, he muttered under his breath as the little cricket hopped away in search of some other hiding place. Richard shook his head as he screwed the plasma coupler back into place. Then he pointed the barrel of the weapon out of his tent and pulled the trigger. A bright green ball of plasma lit up the night sky, and slowly dissipated high overhead. Richard powered down the rifle and then zipped the tent closed behind him. As he glanced over to the stark corner of the tent where his wife had been resting only an hour before, he wondered if she had somehow prevented him from taking his life, and if so, why? He wasn’t one to believe in supernatural powers, but he didn’t believe in coincidences either. As he tried to rationalize the event, he slowly realized that there wasn’t going to be a logical explanation. He was alive, and for now, he would continue to lead the band of survivors just as he and his wife had done before. Why the others had chosen to follow them, he never understood. Perhaps it was because he told them about his plan to escape the plague by heading into the wilderness with his family, or maybe it was his hard line talk about preserving humanity. Whatever the reason, the survivors looked to him for guidance, and now they were all that was left in his meager life. A clan of miscreants that had put their faith in a broken man.

Richard closed his eyes, and sighed. His respite had eluded him, and now he was left to face the next hurdle. The infection that had taken his wife and countless others was closer than he imagined, and the only escape was to move further north into a colder climate. A simple thing to do with the proper provisions, but most of their supplies were gone. To make matters worse, they only had a few flimsy tents and no tools to construct meaningful shelters. Richard doubted that his band of survivors would make it another year. It just seemed that no matter what they did, there was no way out of their predicament. If they migrated south, they risked further infection or capture. If they moved further north, he feared that the brutal Canadian winter would take its toll in the coming months. With no clear resolution, Richard focused his frustration and hatred on the one man who was directly responsible for their plight, Dr. William Stone. He was a radical, self-righteous pioneer in the field of endocrinological biochemistry, and a man that Richard would never forgive or forget.