Ben Bedard - The World Without Flags

Randy turns toward me. His face is no longer marked with careless laughter. His green eyes flash. He wipes his mouth of spit and vomit and strides toward me. “You had to poke around,” he tells me darkly.

I stumble back as he lunges toward me. I try to raise my arm to protect myself, but the last thing I see is Randy’s arm swinging wildly toward me and a brief, beautiful flake of the morning sky as I tumble into darkness.

I can’t see properly, like I’m walking through fog or smoke or that I have a thin cloth stretched tight over my eyes. I feel myself walking. One step after another. But it’s not like me. It’s me, but it’s like I’m riding in myself, like I’m watching things happen from a distance. To each side of me are people walking. I look up and it’s my father, a big, burly, hulk of a man. On the other side is my mother, beautiful, thin, delicate with long flowing hair. The world around us is on fire.

I see my father then, his round face, his deeply caring eyes. He takes my face in his hands. “You’ll be okay, Birdie. Do you understand?”

Then he begins to twitch. He closes his eyes and when he opens them, worms begin to writhe out of them, curling in the air, reaching for me. I can’t move. They come closer and closer.

“You’re going to be fine,” my father says as the worms begin to tap at my face as if searching.

Somewhere my mother is singing.

I wake up choking. I roll over and sit up. My hands and feet are tied so tightly that they’re numb. I take deep breaths, trying to rid myself of the nightmare.

“She’s awake,” I hear. It’s a voice I recognize and my blood chills.

“I told you she was tough,” answers Randy.

“Still it was unwise to risk striking her so forcefully.” The both of them are behind me, and I struggle to turn around to face them. When I get turned around, I almost wish I hadn’t.

Sitting next to a crackling fire is Randy, smiling at me, revealing his long donkey teeth. Next to him, sitting on a log is Doctor Bragg. He isn’t smiling. He has a long, jagged red scar on his forehead where he was knocked unconscious with the glass jar. It’s angry and red, not entirely healed. His dark, empty eyes are looking at me, but I can’t read that emptiness. Worst even than that is what they have tied up near them. It’s Squint, now entirely claimed by the Worm. His eyes are writhing white clumps of worms. His jaw is crudely sewn shut with barbed wire. The wire enters beneath his chin, through his jaw, and emerges just beneath his nose before the two ends are twisted around each other. Dark ooze drips from this wreckage down his shirt. The two nostril holes where his nose used to be have little metal cones shoved into them. I look away as quick as I can.

“Oh yeah,” Randy laughs. “He’s gruesome, ain’t he?” He laughs again.

“Crude,” Doctor Bragg says unhappily.

“I ain’t having him bite me,” Randy snaps at him. “I told you that.”

“And I informed you ,” explains Doctor Bragg with exaggerated patience, “that he is harmless.” He sighs. “You’ve reduced his useful lifespan by half.”

“You’ll have plenty to work with,” Randy says, smiling toward me. “Trust me.”

“You don’t seem to understand,” the Doctor continues. “She is a different specimen. I haven’t had nearly enough subjects of African heritage. I have to infect her differently. She won’t be of any use to me afterwards. Not like him.”

“There’ll be others,” Randy says, still smiling at me. “Lots of others.”

Doctor Bragg looks at me with his long face. For a moment, I see a shock of sadness, like a kind of horror cross his face. But then it’s gone, leaving nothingness in its wake. “No doubt.”

Looking at Randy, a sudden thought fills me, and although I didn’t want to say a thing, I blurt out, “Did you poison Cairo too?”

Randy looks over to me, his green eyes shining in the firelight. “You were supposed to be there to see the whole thing. By this time,” he tells me, “that town is burning its dead.”

“They’re useless to me burned,” says the Doctor unhappily.

I ignore him, seething with anger, and concentrate on Randy. “But why?” the sound comes to me like a hurt cry. I want to sound tougher than that. “You were our friend!”

Randy scoffs. “Yeah, the Vandal is everyone’s friend when he’s got something. When he has something they want. But when he doesn’t, oh, that’s a different story then.” He turns toward the fire. “There ain’t friends anymore.”

“I don’t understand,” I whimper, tears coming to my eyes. “I don’t understand why you’d do this.” Tears fall from my eyes, even though it’s the last thing I want to show the traitor.

“You don’t have to understand,” Randy tells me. “It’s just how it is. Like the rest of this world.”

Suddenly the Doctor lurches toward me with a needle in his hands.

“NO!” I shout, trying to move away from him.

“I’m not listening to this all night,” the Doctor says, jabbing a needle in my leg.

Almost immediately, I feel my muscles turn to water.

Darkness begins to leak into my vision and I feel myself fall to the side.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I hear Randy say as if from very far away.

“I did,” answers the Doctor. “Yes, I did. You would tell her everything.”

Their speech melts into night and even though I feel them speaking, like a vibration in my bones, I don’t understand a word. I am aware of nothing but the burning light of the moon and a feeling somehow of barbed wire.

A blink later, it seems, I wake up alone in a familiar room, in a familiar metal chair. I’m back in the warehouse I escaped only days before. It seems for a moment that I never left, that Eric is in his cell, and that I never made it to Cairo at all. All that is different is that my head pulses with pain like it’s being struck by a shovel. But the feeling of familiarity ebbs away, and my fear tells me this is new and it’s going to be worse. I was lucky before. This time, there’s no hope of escape.

In front of me, in the place of the aluminum surgical table, Squint is standing, naked, his eyes dripping white worms that fall and writhe at his feet. When I try to move, pain shoots up from my wrists and ankles, as if they are burning. Looking down, I see that my wrists are bloody from the ropes that bind me. I hear the generator running and the hum of the bright lights above me. Otherwise there is only my own scared, uneven breathing, and the booming pain in my head.

I try to do what Eric told me all those times to do. Think, he told me. But any coherent thought is ripped to shreds by the painful boom boom booming in my skull. I squeeze my eyes shut, hoping that the darkness will give me some relief, but instead it makes me feel sick. I open my eyes but I feel nauseated and I have to fight to keep from vomiting. I don’t know how long this struggle continues. The pain in my head is so intense, it distorts time. Has it been an hour? A moment? I don’t know, can’t understand anything. Finally I feel the wave of nausea pass over me and recede.

“Oh thank you,” I hear myself breathe. It seems so pathetic that I have to repeat it. “Oh thank you.” I don’t know who I’m thanking. I’m just so relieved. The headache and the nausea together were unbearable, but with the dizziness gone, it seems like something I can endure. “Thank you,” I repeat a third time. Suddenly I remember Lucia in the cabin. I remember how we trembled, how we shivered, how fear gripped us like the winter’s cold around us. So long ago, that first winter. I never think of it. Never. Hardly ever think of her. She holds me and tells me to breathe. “Breathe deeply,” she tells me. I feel her hand in my hair. I feel her hold me close. Lucia.