Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

The jumpsuits of the youth were blue and seemed to be fashioned of wool ticking. These inspectors lacked even the discipline necessary to tyrannize anyone, to cause paralysis and fear, and it seemed that soon they would drift away from their posts into the hills and sit down in the grass and collapse.

The great effort of eager amateurs was everywhere. There were none of us who were not amateurs now. The experts had been demoted. The experts were wrong. The experts had perished. Or perhaps the experts had simply been misnamed all along.

It must have been Woodleigh where I was waved to the side after my car was searched.

I pulled over near a standing coffin, but no one approached. I waited as other cars were waved through. Blue sedans swept past, passengers hidden behind viral masks.

The man who finally approached had a small face that rode too high on his head. He beckoned down my window and reached in for me. With his thumb he probed under my arm, burrowing into a spot that was suddenly raw. He directed a penlight into my eyes, studied my face, positioned it in different angles. I returned calm expressions to him and did not spoil the encounter with speech. He, too, was silent, and if there was any noise it was only my own breathing.

Before I was waved through, he handed me a sheet of paper embossed with a crazed freckling of Braille. He placed my hand over the sheet, running my fingers along the bumps, which felt like Claire’s skin. He passed my fingers back and forth over the Braille message and I could only smile at him and shrug. If this was reading, it was the kind that left me cold. Had I read it? I couldn’t be sure. I had no reaction, but that could be true of other things I read. Perhaps that was the intent of such a message and I had read it correctly. With a sneer he snatched the paper from me and walked off.

I drove on, passing a stretch of small, wooden prisons dug into the hillside, marked by symbols too strange to read. I must have been near one of the Dunkirks, at the broken radial that once linked them in a breezeway leading down to the sea.

Outside of Palmyra a tent hung from a tree. A crowd of people had formed, lined up to get inside. What did these people want outside of a tent? A field of fresh-dug holes spread out behind the tent, mounds of dirt in cemetery formation, ready to be shoveled back in when the holes were filled. Graves so soon, I thought.

Humps of earth reared up in meadows, not just hills and natural elevations, but architecturally engineered redoubts. Mounds and swells and bunkers, as if air was bubbling up from underground, creating shelters under skins of soil. Every manner of door was cut into these dwellings. Wood, glass, fencing, cloth. Some were free of any visible means of entry, the sealed homes of people who did not mean to come out again.

No exit left the freeway to reach these shelters. If people roamed out there, they were too perfectly camouflaged against the landscape. The sun was abstracted on the horizon, merely a placeholder. I kept the threat of it on my driver’s side periphery, figuring at this pace I’d land at my destination right after nightfall.

When there were no houses and the road was free of cars, I stopped and climbed into the long grass of the embankment, stretched my body. Beneath a canopy of trees I gave in to what seemed to need to come out of me, pouring so much hard sound from my person I thought it would not stop and I would never get my breath back.

I wept out all my air. I wept a little bit of something darker. I wept until my voice grew hoarse, then failed, and I kept weeping until I fell to the grass, finished.

My chest felt like it would break. I clutched the grass so hard that my hands, each finger, felt broken. My face was too tight on me. I wanted to cut it off.

If indeed I was only crying, it was like no crying I had ever done before.

In a world where speech was lethal, I could not share with anyone what happened when Claire collapsed in the grass and I failed to help her.

I would never be able to lie out loud about what happened the day I left my wife and daughter behind, driving north alone.

At least I had that one, small thing all to myself. My shame would be safely contained inside what was left of me. Barring some miracle, I’d never be able to tell this story. It could die with me. Very soon, I hoped, it would.

Back in the car, night seemed impossibly far off. I was ready for darkness. I knew that difficult thoughts and feelings awaited me, but still they had yet to arrive. I wanted to be more tired, to have some better reason to find a turnout and shelter my car until morning. But I couldn’t stop now.

When the sun went down, slipping behind the hills, the road thinned into a single lane and started to climb.

On a bird-strewn incline I came upon women pulling a cart up a footpath. The tarp thrown over their cart so clearly covered the bulges of people. They were fooling no one. I pressed the gas pedal to the floor, but the incline was so great I could hardly pull ahead of them, so we climbed in parallel up the southern ledge that ringed the city of Rochester.

At the summit the trees grew rumpled and dense, as if they had been forced to mature under dark glass. Cars on the road below moved in orderly lanes into a single checkpoint, a wooden low-rise with well-dressed guards. In this traffic streamed a caravan of red busses, windows blacked out. The lights of Rochester were only mildly brighter than the darkness, small pale stains oiling the air. If you stared into the light, it retreated until the whole city seemed covered in dark grease.

I pointed my car down the hill and headed into town.

In the Forsythe parking lot I fell from my car and crawled over hot asphalt, circling an endless fleet of red busses, looking for an entrance to the building.

Forsythe was not a government structure with its typical transparent woods, or one of those low, glass laboratory compounds where clear smoke worked like a lens, sharpening the air over the roof. Forsythe was, instead, just a high school, a research lab embedded within the old educational structure that still had the mascot carved in its face. A game cat whose teeth jutted out from the facade. The name of the school was covered now in a swipe of rust.

Some men were waiting at my open car when I realized I had crawled full circle, gone nowhere. They fell on me softly, lifted me into the air as if they’d throw me into the sky and discard me.

Someone grabbed my keys and the taillights of my car squirreled through the nighttime air, then disappeared around a building.

There went everything I owned.

My helper spoke through a plastic mouth fitted over his face, but what he said was so foreign and airless that I cannot here transcribe it.

The message traveled so fast into me that I felt torn open. The phrase, whatever it meant, was like an act of sudden surgery, the kind that cuts the rotted thing from your body, leaving you empty, healed, exquisitely released from pain. That’s all I remember.

I woke inside a light-scorched hallway. A salted object filled my mouth. Someone shoved it deeper, his fist jammed into my face, as if he was trying to hide his whole arm in my body. I breathed through my nose and tried to keep up, but my mouth was too full with the gag of salt.

My escorts held me close and I let their bodies guide me. We moved from hallways to small rooms, waited at doors, then passed through tight corridors until we mounted a steep, narrow staircase and came up on the floor where I would be staying.

I tried to keep my sense of direction throughout this interior maneuvering, but the compass I conjured in my mind had only a single direction, the needle in a palsy over a symbol I didn’t recognize.