Brian Steele - 4POCALYPSE - Four Tales of a Dark Future

The grin was a man with a military buzz cut. He was wearing sneakers, blue jeans and a t-shirt. I assume he had lost part of his right arm, in Iraq or Afghanistan, there’s no way to know now, and he had a prosthetic two-pronged hook held in place by straps over each shoulder.

We first saw him at a distance. He would approach tourists or locals on the east sidewalk, the city-facing bridge walkway, and they would shy away from him. I assumed he was a bum who had strayed from downtown, begging for spare change in the most unlikely place. As he got closer, I got a better look at him and began to feel uneasy.

His skin was discolored; scratched and streaked with blood in some places, nearly gray in others. I didn’t know then that the parasites, now identified as giardia motivus, carried a number of diseases, including one that caused a condition similar to mange. The skin of the infected became inflamed and itched furiously as it died. His hair had fallen out in patches and he had scratched at his scalp until it was raw and red.

There was a thick flow of bright green snot on his lips and chin, another sign of the parasite; his immune system was in overdrive in a futile fight against the smiling sickness.

He was grinning like a lunatic, the symptomatic rictus making him smile so wide it had to have hurt, and he was gnashing his teeth and snapping his jaws as if biting at the air. There was a terrible gaping wound on the side of his throat. Only later would I think back and realize he must have caught the sickness after having been attacked by another grin.

I took Jillian’s arm and turned her around, heading back the way we had come.

She didn’t say anything. Her face was pale. She had seen the man too.

It was then that I recalled stories I had seen online over the weekend, stories about a mystery illness appearing across the country. The stories were on blogs, and were discounted by all of the legitimate news sources which quoted government officials who insisted nothing was wrong and said there was no need for the media to spread unnecessary fear and unrest as they had done in the past with SARs and avian flu.

A woman screamed behind us and we walked faster.

Not fast enough.

We were passing the south tower of the bridge when I heard sneakers slapping the concrete behind me. I turned and saw the man rushing at me and shoved Jillian aside.

He slammed into me so hard he knocked me flat and kept going, stumbling over me. He stopped, shook his head, and turned around just as I was getting to my feet. He rushed at me again. His manic grin was horrifying. He swung his hooked prosthesis at my face and I felt it catch in my cheek and then tear a channel through flesh and muscle from my left ear to the corner of my mouth where it ripped free. I cried out in pain and shoved him away. He lunged at me once more.

I’m no hero. As he threw himself at me I was so frightened I ducked down, wanting to curl into a ball, my back against the bridge railing. He leaped forward as I dropped down out of his way. He went over me, over the railing. And down into the bay.

I got to my feet, feeling light-headed. My shirt was soaked with my own blood and the side of my face was numb.

Jillian was already calling 911 on her mobile. When she saw my face she said, “Oh baby, I can see your teeth.” I reached up to touch my left cheek. She was right. My cheek was gone, the skin and muscle pulled back to expose my teeth and gums on that side. Jillian had blood spatter on her. My blood. Jesus.

“No answer,” she said, unbuttoning her shirt. The barrier between the sidewalk and the nearest traffic lane was harder to climb than the railing that so many suicides went over. Jillian scrambled over it and tried to flag down passing cars. No luck. People saw a bit of blood on her and my ruined face and they floored it.

Jillian came back to the sidewalk and took off her shirt. She was wearing a cute bra. It was powder blue with a tiny lace fringe, and she was filling those cups to the brim. Funny, the things you remember. I was looking at her breasts and thinking how lucky I was to have a woman with a body like that in my life when she folded her shirt into a compress and held it against my face.

“Apply firm pressure,” she said. “You’re bleeding a lot and we have a long walk ahead.” Our car was parked at the south end of the bridge.

As we got closer to the end of the bridge we could hear distant noises, from nearby neighborhoods. Sirens. Screams. Tiny pops that might have been gunshots.

We reached the car. Jillian put me in the back seat. I stretched out as much as I could and put my head down. She started driving. I closed my eyes. It sounded like there was a war going on out there but all I cared about was my torn face, and the pain.

I heard brakes screech and a bang like a hammer hitting sheet metal. My body shifted and the back of my head hit the side of the car.

When I opened my eyes again, it was night.

Jillian was gone.

I got out of the car. My legs were weak and I was shaking.

We had reached the corner of Lombard and Gough, in Cow Hollow, when a cab had t-boned us. There were shards of glass and plastic everywhere. I could hear sirens and saw helicopters hovering over the city to the west and the south.

Home wasn’t far. I started walking.

I have the vaguest memories of pushing through the front door of our building, almost crawling up the stairs, and falling through the door to our condo.

One of the bedroom windows was open and a lovely breeze filled the room. I fell onto the bed. My face was bleeding again. I thought about trying to clean and bandage my wound, trying to call for help, but I drifted away.

The last thing I remember is hearing a fly buzzing over the bed.

It was three days before Jillian found me. The bed was a mess. So was I. My bowels and bladder had let go. My clothes and the sheets were soaked with sweat. I woke up to hear Jillian screaming. She thought I was dead. When I opened my eyes she screamed even louder and began brushing at my face with trembling hands.

I was dehydrated and weak and she had to help me walk to the bathroom. She spent a lot of time delicately wiping my face with a washcloth. I didn’t know what she was doing until I looked down and saw maggots squirming on the floor tiles.

The fly in the bedroom had laid eggs in my wound. The larvae had been eating my putrefying flesh when Jillian arrived.

She eased me into a warm bath and washed me, giving me small sips of bottled water.

The soap stung in my wound, but not as much as I thought it would.

We put two and two together later. Without any medical aid my wound would have become infected. I could have died. The maggots saved my life. They ate away the diseased flesh. I had a hole in my left cheek with the circumference of a beer can, but the edges of the wound were already healing. When I smiled, I showed teeth, bone and muscle all the way to my left ear.

After the accident, Jillian had been taken to the hospital by the cab driver who assumed I was dead. She had been held at the California Pacific Medical Center for observation. Anyone who went to a hospital was held for observation for forty-eight hours. She said Pacific Heights was now a ghost town.

A contagion had spread from coast to coast. The infected became deranged, violent. A telltale sign of the infection was a manic grin as the muscles of the face tightened and contracted. Most of San Francisco had been evacuated by the California Army National Guard, but there were holdouts; Armed soldiers were reluctant to enter the crime-ridden Bayview-Hunters Point area, the Tenderloin and Nob Hill were lost to rampaging infected hordes, and there was some sort of three-way skirmish going on in the parklands of the Presidio between the infected, military and police forces, and an armed band of men and woman calling themselves the Defenders of the Pacific Republic. Elsewhere in the city the authorities had already given up trying to contain and treat the infected and were shooting them on sight.