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

I worked the handle of the screwdriver up and down and side-to-side, scrambling Isao’s brains as if churning butter. When he was dead, I wiped the screwdriver clean on a fold of his shirt and gave it back to Conaghan.

I heard the children crying now, and heard Renfield saying comforting words as he stepped towards them. He froze when their cries became idiotic grunts, meaningless vocalizations.

Renfield looked over his shoulder, his expression bleak.

Conaghan stepped up and handed each of us a screwdriver as the children got to their feet and took their first unsteady steps toward us. “I can’t do it,” Conaghan said. “Not that. I have… had kids, fuck, I don’t even know if they are alive…”

Renfield killed what was left of the little boy. I put down his sister.

When we were done I went to Jillian. I leaned close to her and realized she was staring at me. At my neck.

“Oh baby,” she said.

I raised a hand, touched my neck and winced. There was a deep scratch there. Isao got me after all, with hands that were at least partially covered in the female grin’s blood and bile.

I moved down the hallway, an equal distance from Renfield and Jillian, and sat down against one wall.

From downstairs I heard a distant shout and a bang that had to be a gunshot.

Jillian looked over her shoulder at the stairs, said, “Jesus Christ,” and then looked back at me.

After a while Randall came up the stairs with Clyde. He stopped beside Jillian and Conaghan and joined them in watching me. I saw he was holding the Glock that Haise had been carrying. I would have asked what the hell had happened downstairs but I had bigger things to worry about.

Renfield had hunkered down at some point, sitting with the others. Now he stood, walked to me, and offered his hand.

“It’s been fifteen minutes,” he said. “Bellemer is either very lucky, or immune. If he was going to show signs of being infected, we’d have seen it already.”

Randall made a gesture and Clyde came close to me, growling as he passed Isao’s body. The dog sniffed me up and down, and then trotted back to Randall, who said, “He’s clean.”

Renfield helped me to my feet and then Jillian was holding me and about to kiss the awful ruin of my face. Renfield shoved her away. “He may be immune, but you may not be. You don’t want to touch any of their blood,” he said, gesturing to the dead grins.

I went into a suite to wash my neck, entering the first open door I saw.

The room was a ruin. The walls were scratched, the curtains torn down. The wall-mounted TV was on the floor. The bedding was shredded, and there were streaks and pools of dried blood everywhere. As I went into the bathroom, which hadn’t faired nearly as bad and dampened the clean edge of a towel to dab at my neck, I realized this was the grin’s room.

She must have been in here since the beginning of the pandemic, somehow making it into the safety of her hotel room and closing the door just before the infection had taken over. Since then she’d just been a hungry, mindless thing, clawing at walls and floor to try to escape and spread the disease at the command of the parasites within. It must have been just a fluke that she finally struck the door latch and managed to pull it open. It must have been a fluke that she hadn’t turned the deadbolt or engaged the security latch. It must have been a fluke that Isao and his children happened to be walking by when she pulled the door open and stepped into the hall.

When I left the room only Jillian was waiting for me. We went to our suite. I crawled into bed and slept. I dreamed that Jillian and I were alone in the city and that it was a deserted paradise. “You make me so happy,” she said, and then she grinned.

Two months passed quickly. The northern hemisphere slowly turned toward winter and the city was a delight as far as the weather was concerned. Fall was always the best time of year in San Francisco, with warm, sunny days and cool nights. There wasn’t much rain, and there weren’t any TV meteorologists around to tell us California was in another drought.

People came to the Palace, lured by Benjamin’s sign. Thanks to Conaghan we got all the generators running, but we didn’t power any exterior lights and made sure interior lights were usually cloaked by curtains, the older generation making jokes about blackout conditions in old war movies.

By September there were over one hundred people in the Palace. A crew had gone from room to room upstairs, popping open doors with pry bars and searching the rooms for surviving grins. They found one alive and killed it, and found two dead. One had apparently died of starvation. One had choked to death trying to eat a luxuriant bath towel. Renfield found that interesting. Benjamin found it hysterical. I thought it was terribly sad.

While it would be nice to admit that every survivor was of equal value, that wasn’t true. Part of me resented every too-old or too-young survivor. We needed strong backs and ready hands and fighters. Instead we just seemed to gather more and more mouths to feed, more people to care for.

I was inexpressibly thankful when Anna Anders showed up at the door one night, hammering on the glass and screaming as a grin with some devastating lower-body injury crawled after her, and others grins came running, lured by her cries.

Anders had to be in her sixties. She was thin and small, with a pale face and graying black hair. She was a veterinarian. Barring any extreme medical emergencies, we now had a doctor in the house.

We held weekly meetings and assigned different duties, even the children in the hotel had jobs to do, and we tried to hold things together. Some people were adapting. Some were utterly useless, unable to adapt to a world that was too far gone.

The power never did come back on, and after a few weeks the water stopped running as well. That was a bitch. Now we had to ration water, and had begun stockpiling our supply by raiding nearby stores for bottles until we realized all the office towers around us were vertical gold mines. On almost every floor of every building we found at least one of those big five gallon bottles in or near a water cooler. Food was less of a problem, for now. There were more than enough packaged foods in nearby shops and offices to sustain us.

We didn’t have many weapons. There were a total of three guns, an indication of just how far anti-firearm legislation and sentiment had gone in the Bay Area before everything fell apart. Most of our weapons were blunt force weapons. Pry bars, axes and baseball bats were the most effective.

At least once a day helicopters passed over the city or hovered over the bay. We tried any number of ways to signal them and thought we had failed.

We had tried contacting any authorities using two-way radios, an emergency radio found in the basement of the Palace and even the police radio Haise had been wearing, as Randall had taken it along with his gun, but we received no responses.

With no power, we had no way of knowing if TV stations were transmitting. we charged only a few smart phone batteries with the hotel emergency generators and used them to monitor the web If the internet was still up and running none of the cell towers were operational or they had been shut down, because we never got any signals.

Local AM and FM radio was just a sea of white noise.

Our only reliable source of information was a radio Renfield had constructed. It was a small unimpressive plastic box. I asked him where the microphone and speaker were and he told me he was a QRPer. He began throwing a lot of jargon at me. Most of it went over my head but what it boiled down to was this; on the roof of the Palace, via relayed messages, he could communicate with anyone, anywhere, given enough time. He was using the CW band and communicating in Morse code. I thought that was a thing of the past, but he told me that before things fell apart there was a growing number of amateur radio enthusiasts who were returning to the roots of radio communication, building very low-power radios and perfecting their performance. The battery-powered clear polycarbonate cube filled with electronic components soldered to a circuit board became known as Renfield’s Box. It was an effective, yet slow means of communication.