Marcus Caine - The Last Words

When I was sure everything was secure I took the Doctor’s keys and got Tim Tom to come with me. We were going to have to find the kitchen, for knives, yes, but also for food. These people were going to have to eat soon.

I also asked the Doctor to get the other patients to find whatever containers they could and go into the rooms to fill them up with water out of the sinks. The unoccupied rooms, of course.

“OK, but we should be good for a while. Wards Island has its own water tower.” He pointed out the window to the east.

“Good, but I can see smoke from fires in… wait, where are we?”

“New York.”

“Oh. Wow. I can see smoke from fires in the city, which means some of the buildings, at least the ones up to code, might have sprinklers going to try to put them out. If anything catches fire here on the island, or sprinklers start going, or a pipe breaks somewhere, it could drain that water tower quicker than you think. And honestly, Doctor, I have no idea how long we will be here.”

It was true, I knew that the shit, as they say, had hit the fan. Still remembered enough to know that. I needed to sit and read and write in my journal so that I don’t forget the situation. But first, weapons and food. I had to get everybody ready for the night, it would probably be a long one.

“OK, Jude, no problem, we’ll get water, but I don’t think…”

“They’ll be hungry soon. We need to get to the food while we can.”

“What do you mean?”

I thought about it. Whatever happened had started yesterday or today. Probably not everyone was affected yet, which meant that there would be more affected tomorrow, and they might make their way to the island. “Things could be even worse tomorrow.”

I wasn’t’ sure where we were going but I knew Joe wanted me with him, and my trusty little club. I decided to call her Carrie, I knew a girl named Carrie once, she was one hell of a ball buster, so I figured the named fit.

Once we got to the kitchen I knew what we were up to. Unfortunately we weren’t the first ones here.

A couple of crazies were eating flour, just straight flour, when we walked in, and they were on us instantly, with crazy powdered ghost faces and wild eyes.

Joe cut one of the kabuki cannibals down and I took out the other with Carrie; blood splattering against the wall and flour poofing off of him and making a cloud where his head had been before it hit the floor. Joe gave me the silent finger, listening for more. And we heard them, screaming from another room to the sound of their fallen… comrades? pack mates?… I don’t know. Not even trying to be quiet we got against the wall on either side of the door and waited and took three more out while they were still looking around like animals, like fucking velociraptors. I looked at them, blood and gore on their mouths, I didn’t want to look in the room they had come from to see what they had been eating.

We listened and didn’t hear any more and Joe motioned me to come on. The freezer and fridge were still going so we grabbed what we could from there first and stuffed it in big industrial garbage bags. Most of it looked like precooked frozen crap, the kind of stuff they feed your kids at school, that we would have to warm up somehow. I couldn’t read the boxes but I’m guessing chicken nuggets and Salisbury steaks and oddly found myself craving them. He pointed at cans of beans and soup and I grabbed all the cans that had pictures of beans and soup on them and put them in my bag.

Then while he was rummaging through a drawer I saw him smile real big, and hold up a shiny silver knife.

That Joe. He grabbed a few more and laid them on a table cloth and wrapped them up carefully the way I used to roll up my wrenches. And then we were off.

I knew the kitchen wasn’t secure enough to cook for now, I could worry about that later, but I figured these Salisbury steaks were precooked and I could just put them in a microwave since we still had electricity, for now, and we can eat the canned stuff later. If the juice last long enough I can secure the kitchen and we can cook up whatever is left in the freezers, but who knows how long the juice will last.

You wouldn’t believe how much these people loved those microwaved Salisbury steaks. I have to admit, they were damned good.

At first, we were all quiet, eating them with our hands, when Tim Tom started talking about how this was the best damn Salisbury steak he’d ever had, oohing and aahing over it and asking for more. Leave it up to Tim Tom to lift the spirits of a bunch of mental patients as the world was ending around them.

Then we heard him, from one of the cells, “um, say, you got any of that for me?”

It was one of the patients. One of the criminally insane patients.

“Say, that smells really good.”

Tim Tom started heading over there with his, I guess he could tell from the tone what he was wanting.

“Whoa, wait a sec,” said Eric. “You’re going to give our food to them?”

Tim didn’t know what he was saying. He just stopped and looked confused when Eric grabbed his arm.

“Eric,” the Doctor said. “We can’t just let him starve in there.”

“What? How much do we have? How long are we gonna be here? He’s not even one of us.”

“But he’s not one of them either. He’s speaking clearly, he’s obviously not affected.”

“But he’s a criminal. What if he’s that guy that chopped up his girlfriend and cooked her in a soup and fed her to homeless people?”

“No, he’s on the fifth floor,” said the voice from the cell.

“Well, what did you do?”

“Eric,” the Doctor stopped him, “let Timothy feed him.”

I have to admit, I didn’t know which way to go, but looking at Tim Tom’s face I spoke up, “Go ahead Tim Tom, give it to him.” Tim Tom understood.

“What the hell Joe? I thought you were a soldier!”

“Do you know how loud he’s going to get if he starts starving to death in there?”

Eric shut up at that, but he wasn’t happy.

“Thanks big guy,” the voice said to Tim Tom as he slid a steak and some bread through the slot in the door, which I guess they feed the dangerous ones through. “Do you happen to have any A1?”

Then he laughed, and it gave me the fucking chills.

Luckily, most of the rooms on the floor were empty so we had a few beds and could make do with the couches too. Maybe I was feeling a little too safe in here, but I let Tim Tom and the Doctor take the first watch while I wrote in my journal and got a little shut eye. They didn’t wake me up for my shift.

I had stayed up all night. Quite frankly I just couldn’t sleep and working all night was not that uncommon to me, I’d always needed less sleep than your average person. But having a problem to solve like this, well, there was simply no way I could sleep. I had to know what was going on, what was causing this. It’s just in my nature.

The computer at the nurses’ station was still working, as was the electricity, for now. The internet was still there too, for who knows how long, so I saved or printed anything and everything I thought might matter, starting with the news reports from the first outbreak, the professor at Oxford.

“Dr. Peter Neworth, a professor of linguistics at Oxford, and an expert on runology. I found numerous articles about him and even scholarly papers by him on various language related subjects. He had an impressive resume to say the least; ancient Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Aramaic, just a few of the ancient languages he had studied and translated into English for scholarly discussion. He’d delved into rituals like the Dionysian Mysteries, Templar writings, and other esoteric areas. But I kept coming back to the runes, feeling like maybe this meant something.”