Boldt Words & Images: The First of Many

Fiction?

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this short story appeared on Moristotle & Co. on August 29, 2015. The author has revised it for our world four and a half years later.]

Overhead, bullets whistled past me in the cold dark amid the falling drizzle. Some shells made a complaining, metallic clank as they struck the side of the overturned dumpster I had scrambled into. I was trying to dodge the first barrage that had made the street a sudden killing zone. In the process, I smashed my head on a large hook that protruded out of the side of the damned thing. Doing my best to ignore the stinging pain, I cautiously ran my hand up the side of my face, hoping for the best and dreading the worst. Moisture. Not the wet of the rain, but a thicker substance. Blood? I licked my probing fingers, and the warn, salty, iron taste on my tongue confirmed my fears.
    Damn! I silently cursed to the darkness and the flying shells. My temporary home smelled like shit and sour urine. The holes in my crummy shoes began soaking up the dank water, causing my feet to become freezing cold as my calves and thighs started shivering uncontrollably, I thought, This is a fine mess. If the bullets don’t kill me, the cold soon will.
    I looked around the edge of my metal hiding place. The sound of a police APC cruiser’s siren cranked on, tore through the night, and gradually subsided in the distance. Several others ran swiftly by in the rubble-strewn street. They wore the swathed head scarves and fringed jackets of the Pikes Gang. They were the ones who had probably drawn police attention to this deserted industrial wasteland. I was relieved that the gunfire seemed to have nothing to do with my presence. A dull pop instantly followed by a bright bursting spray of blood was caught in the glare of the remaining streetlight. One of the Pikes dropped as if invisible strings had been cut. What did I care? Not one of ours. As suddenly as it had begun, the gunfire ceased. For a long time nothing and no one moved. The rebel lay like a deserted rag doll under the now failing, sputtering streetlight. Dropped by the last bullet. Too fucking bad.

My name is Frederic Doyle, formerly of Evanston, Illinois, and my life has not always been like this. I have pretty much lived a charmed life. Even the market, I knew when to get in and when to get out. I don’t know if it was in my stars or what, but at last year’s Big Three-O party I figured I had made it. Even now I suppose I should consider myself fortunate. It’s amazing how one acclimates to even the most horrid circumstances. One day you’re sickened at the sight of blood when your cook accidentally slices herself cutting carrots and the next you are crawling over corpses thankful just to be alive and to be allowed to escape from one hell into another.

It seemed like only yesterday. The pandemic they had predicted hit like a freight train. In less than six months, the country was in total lockdown, immobilized. Those who weren’t dead or sick were taking care of the stricken. Commerce halted. The fragile bonds that tethered the uncivilized impulses were loosed and torn away completely. Those lucky enough to survive, if you can call it lucky, were forced to kill and loot just last-from-one stolen meal to the next.
    I counted myself among the dubious lucky. A lot of the earliest victims were able to fight off the plague due more to chance than anything else. I was among the first of many who were fortunate enough to have endured the worst of my symptoms in a well-stocked hospital with a diminishing but adequate staff. It seemed that some who contracted the virus during its earliest stages and survived had developed and immunity to it and its rapidly mutating offspring. Ironically, my wife, Bonnie, and my two beautiful young children, Mark and Ali, were to succumb to the new, lethal mutated strain barely a week after I had endured my worst. Needless to say, I was too overcome with soul-crushing grief to care about anything, least of all my one survival.
    “Fred!”
    Desperately I looked around. The pain at my temple had spread, causing my whole head to throb. The rain was now falling like someone had opened a huge dam in the sky.
    “Where? Where?” I shouted at the darkness. Lightning – or was it a mortar round? – silhouetted the skyline. Before it faded, I could just make out the familiar form of Bernie Worm, my second in command, frantically gesturing from the cave of a punched-out warehouse wall. I sloshed through the mud and garbage and was pulled into the dry interior.

My best friend, Dr. Bernard Werner – later our gang nicknamed him Bernie the Worm – was an epidemiologist whose family had migrated to the North Shore of Chicago from Austria in the nineties. A lean, vigorous, fifty-year-old bachelor with seemingly unlimited energy, Bernie was my next-door neighbor. I was a more sedate, family man, short, a little on the chubby side, restive, introverted in my personal life, and a book worm. In spite of our being mirror opposites in every way – he was a survivalist, a physical fitness buff, and a gun nut – we got on famously. Bernie had also survived the pandemic due to having received a dose of the vaccine that was being sold by his survivalist contacts on the black market. It was the same stuff they were secretly distributing to police personnel and the Blackwater paramilitaries who were charged with maintaining order.
    Bernie helped me get myself together after the death of my family. By working in consort, we were able to recruit twelve rag-tag survivors and two police deserters into our own well-stocked survival club. Our compound was the old Sphinx Moving and Storage building on North Clark Street. At the entrance, over the doors, were decorations with faux Egyptian hieroglyphics and a cartouche encircling the ironic words, “Your Possessions Preserved Eternally.” We called ourselves the Sphinx Gang.

“You don’t look too good, Fred,” Bernie said. “I wish I could give you something more for the pain. It’ll be hard to keep that wound from becoming infected under these conditions. We used the last of our antibiotics on Zeke yesterday, and we lost Chucky and Fist in a futile raid on that pharmaceutical supply house to get more morphine.” Bernie’s stubbly face hovered over mine. His look was grim.
    “I’m just so cold,” I moaned. The pain on the side of my head had subsided to a dull, drumming throb, soon to be replaced by my shortness of breath.
    “Am I going to make it?” I wheezed.
    “Don’t worry, neighbor. The doctor is in.” His grim look did not change.
    “If you pull the sheet up a bit it might make me a little warmer.”
    I was surprised that, when he began pulling up my cover, he didn’t stop at my chin but proceeded as if he were about to cover my whole face. I tried to raise my hands to tell him to knock off the joke, I wasn’t ready to kick the bucket. Not just yet. Not without a fight.

As the foul sheet began to cover my face, it gradually lost every stain and any sign of blood, discoloration, or filth. It even smelled as if it had been freshly starched and laundered. I moved my lips to speak, to complain about the antiseptic bright fluorescent light someone had suddenly switched on. And with the light, the drone of my respirator could be heard whining away. All that emerged from me was a gurgling, rattling sound.
    “He’s gone, Bonnie,” Dr. Werner said. “You’d better take the kids home where it’s safe. There’s no certainty when this will peak or how many it will take before things subside. Poor Fred may just be among the first of many.”

Copyright © 2015, 2020 by Bob Boldt