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

After two weeks we gave up trying to hail any emergency services or government agencies through second or third parties. If they were out there, they were ignoring us.

Sitting on the roof of the hotel with his radio and a pen and notepad, the radio chatter Renfield captured confirmed that the San Francisco area was a quarantine zone. No one was going in or out of the city. Anyone trying to leave the city by crossing the bay and landing a boat in Marin or the East Bay would be shot on sight as the authorities now assumed that anyone living in the city was a carrier of the disease.

Looking down from the roof, Renfield never saw anything on Montgomery Street aside from the stealthy movements of a stray gray and white cat as it weaved between the abandoned cars.

There wasn’t much news outside the Bay Area beyond rumors.

It was said that Manhattan had been leveled, or cleansed, by nuclear weapons. It was said that grin drives were being undertaken by National Guard units all across the plains and down into Texas. The infected were being rounded up like cattle, corralled into large groups and then sprayed down with gasoline and burned alive, which was considered the most cost-efficient method of dealing with them. It was said that nuclear power plants had melted down in Japan, France, and Southern California. It was said there was no longer a centralized government in the United States. All of this information was second hand. Rumor. Supposition.

No one said anything about exploring treatments or vaccines or immunization.

When the technology that united us across great distances and left us more and more isolated from each other than any other time in human history failed, human contact became an essential once again.

There were groups of survivors like us in Seattle, Cheboygan, Dover and New Bedford, people trapped by geography, by lines of water or fire or soldiers, people trapped in gathering places for grins.

More and more grins were appearing in the city. We had a group of fit young men and women who called themselves the Wrecking Crew. The two teams of five went out on hunts, killing as many grins as they could, and they always returned with the same news. There were more of them out there. They were coming up the peninsula to downtown San Francisco. No one knew why.

Haise never came back. Randall finally admitted, in clipped sentences, that he had accused Haise of being a fraud who was playing at being a cop. They had argued, Randall had taken the gun and fired one shot into the ceiling to scare Haise away.

Benjamin was dating Marisol Morales. Her sister Soledad was sharing a room with a mean looking young man named Ed Mariano, who was the head of the Wrecking Crew.

It took us a while to realize that a man who had joined us was a pimp, trading out the favors of his women for whatever he needed.

One of those women was Rose Lubisch. Rose was only eighteen. She was trying and failing to hide the fact that she was pregnant. We had assumed that Kalife Montagne was her husband. He wasn’t.

When we heard this news I wanted to throw the man out. Jillian told me to wait and see what happened. She was hoping Montagne would change, would help out and pitch in and become part of our little community. She always hoped for the best in people.

Rose rarely spoke, and she followed Montagne around the hotel the same way Clyde followed Randall.

I decided I’d take Jillian’s advice and wait.

Rose was the second woman I failed. The first was Jillian.

“How about I suck your cock?”

“No,” I said. I was holding a clipboard, one hand braced against steel shelving.

A grin had broken into one of the basement storerooms. The Wrecking Crew had found it and killed it. Jillian and I were taking stock of the many supplies that had been gathered and stored in the room. The room was a mess, and the job was dull, but it gave us some time alone, something we had far too little of these days.

Jillian leaned forward and breathed on my neck. It was a thing she had always done and it drove me wild. Her lips might graze my skin when she did that, but for the most part it was her breath, soft and hot and immediate.

“Come on, Louis,” she whispered, her voice as soft as her breath on my neck. “Let me get your motor running, then we can go for a ride.”

The tone of her voice and the look on her face got to me. “Well,” I said, getting as hard as a rock as she gave me her lopsided grin and got down on her knees. “Okay.”

She unzipped my fly, reached into my pants for my cock, and then laughed. I was so hard she couldn’t get me out of my pants, so she loosened my belt and pulled my pants down. I wasn’t wearing any underwear. Underwear was just one more thing to wash, and we had to wash most things by hand since the power went out; the generators were put to more important needs, like heat and light.

“Mmmm,” she said. Her tongue flicked over the head of my cock and I felt that familiar and always-fresh jolt of sexual electricity race across my skin. I nearly dropped the clipboard and grabbed the steel shelf to steady myself.

My left hand slipped in something, and the very last shred of my consciousness that hadn’t been pumped into my prick wondered about the slick substance on my fingers.

I looked down at Jilly, she was right, I wanted to fuck, I wanted to fuck, I wanted to fuck… and I glanced at my hand.

I had a handful of vibrant green snot.

Jilly was taking me into her mouth, working her way along the length of my cock, and that point of contact was now the center of the universe.

Jillian pulled back, stroking my cock and smiling up at me, her smile growing wider, and wider, until it was a horrible rictus.

The smiler sickness was transmitted by body fluids, all fluids, blood, saliva, snot and semen. We didn’t know that at the time, although Dr. Anders was methodically working her way toward that conclusion with the limited resources at hand.

Jilly showed us that we were all at greater risk than we realized. Until then, we had only been concerned about blood, and before Jillian and I went into the storeroom to take inventory, every inch of the space had been checked for blood. When I asked later about the grin that had broken in, the men who had found it and killed it said it had been coughing and sneezing like it had a bad cold, which wasn’t unusual for a grin.

We didn’t know.

We didn’t know then that any liquid medium could sustain the parasites and was as dangerous as a loaded gun. I had a handful of it, which meant there could be more in this space. The snot was only half-congealed; it was almost fresh and most likely came from the grin that had broken into the storeroom.

I was immune, and I had no idea why. Jillian was probably not immune. If I had known one touch of any fluid left behind by the grin could infect her, I would have gotten her out of there.

“No,” I said again. This time the word almost a sob, and the fact that my genitals were right in front of her and were easy targets was the furthest thing from my mind.

“Jilly,” I said.

Her smile had become extreme. I could see her molars and her gums as her lips pulled back in the classic rictus created by the horrific tightening of facial muscles, a clear sign that she had been infected while we had been taking inventory.

I watched everything that was my wife fade from her eyes. Her intelligence, her humor, her deep love, and her immeasurable will. She was gone and a thing was left behind, a hungry thing that was holding on to me, opening its mouth and biting down on my erection, drawing blood, drawing a scream from me.

I was still holding the clipboard. It was one of the old-fashioned metal ones, a steel sheet designed to take a beating. I brought it down on her head. It didn’t hurt her at all, but it startled her enough that she disengaged from my cock and snarled at me.