Immortality (23 page)

From across the room, Artie studied Suzy’s posture and face. She didn’t notice him. Over the past few hours, she’d called everyone they knew. Dozens of tries were required before each call broke through the logjam of other people doing the same thing. Artie knew the world was coming undone. He saw the signs everywhere, even in Suzy’s eyes. He wanted to protect her but there was nothing he could do. He could tell by the look on her face that she was in shock. Normally he could have expected at least one recital of a rule-for-life from the mental book she carried in her head. All she’d done for the last four hours was stare at that television and sip whisky from a coffee cup that was long empty of its original brew.

Artie sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulder. She curled into him so completely that it was almost a total collapse of will. There was a pizza sitting on the coffee table that no one had touched. The pizza had long ago grown hard like a giant scab of cheese. Suzy had picked their dinner up on her way home from work when the world had still been sane.

A faint pop echoed down the street. The sound was quickly followed by several more in rapid succession. Artie knew those sounds all too well. They were sounds that had awakened him many nights when he was a child. The gangs were out conducting their business of fear. He kissed Suzy on her cheek and got up.

In the bedroom, Artie dragged a metal footlocker from a back closet. The locker was a heavy steel model, Army surplus, with a Master Lock dangling on the front. He turned the combination lock and opened a doorway into his past. He rummaged through the artifacts of a lost youth. In the bottom under some clothing was a handgun wrapped in oil rags. It was a stainless steel Smith and Wesson .357 magnum. He opened a box of ammo and loaded six rounds. The bullets were huge at an inch and a half long. Each round could hit a man with enough force to blow off entire pieces of human anatomy.

The gun fit Artie’s hand like an old memory and relaxed his nerves better than any drug. He turned it over inspecting both sides, looking more at its shine than for signs of wear. His eyes wandered back to the footlocker. He set the revolver down on the carpet and bored deeper into his past. He removed a double-edged knife from the trunk and laid it on the floor beside the gun. He stared at the engraving on the blade, a dragon with a fiery tail.

An hour later, a circle of objects surrounded him on the floor. Along with the knife and gun were a set of throwing-stars, a Tae Kwan Do black belt, and a photo of him and his buddies Kelo and Tony. Kelo was gone now and Tony was in jail. Old memories were boiling up to the surface, heated dangerously by the flames of a burning city.

By the time Artie was sixteen, he’d spent half his life on the streets and the other half studying Tae Kwan Do with an uncle who was raising him and trying to show him there were alternatives to the gangs. Artie had earned a black belt and had been well on his way to a first stripe. He was very good at martial arts and had proved it to himself many times by sending members of rival gangs to intensive care; one of them, due to a bad fall, hadn’t left the hospital alive.

A few months after his first and only murder, a gang war had exploded on the streets like a tank of gasoline going up in the night. The war had started on neutral party ground under an expanse of train track in Queens and ended as one of the deadliest gang wars of New York urban legend. There had been over forty soldiers on each side along with girlfriends and kids. Artie’s side, the Dragons, had been lightly armed and expecting a good time. The Warlocks had come with ice chests full of guns. Many Dragons had been left to die drowning in their own blood that night. The next day Artie had bought his first gun. The open hand of his uncle’s Tae Kwan Do didn’t go far enough on the streets of a modern city.

Three weeks later to the day, the cops busted Artie. He spent a year in juvi-jail for mayhem and a concealed weapons charge. Jail had taught him the hard way. The path he was on was a dead end – and the end would be an early grave. He started thinking about his future for the first time. He remembered what his uncle had tried to jam into his thick skull for so many years. When the courts finally put him back on the streets, he had a high school diploma earned in jail, a clean record, and was enrolled in City College. He never looked back. He worked nights and weekends. Toward the end of law school, there had been no need to work so hard because of Suzy’s help; but he had kept up the ninety-hour weeks just the same. Six years after getting out of juvenile hall, he passed the New York City bar exam. It had been a sad and happy day. His uncle had died a few months too soon to see him walk that final mile. The only solace was that the old man had known that Artie’s future would be a solid one. Fourteen years earlier, Artie had lost his father and mother. Both had been killed during a robbery of a neighborhood store. Rumors were that someone from a local gang had done the shooting. Suzy was the only family he had now, and his protectiveness of her was a fire that burned with searing heat.

The television’s shifting images were reflected on the glass coffee table. Artie was back with Suzy on the couch. The Smith and Wesson was within reach under a cushion by his side. The New Jersey kill zone was being covered on every channel. At first there had been only reports with no video; then came the direct feed. Television defined life; nothing was real anymore until it was shown on that screen.

Artie looked at Suzy. Shadows from the television moved across her face. She glanced at him, then back to the screen. Her eyes were ringed with tears. Her nails dug painfully into his thigh. He should have made her stop, but somehow the pain felt right. He should be hurting when he saw pictures like this. CNN had revised the body count to over thirty thousand.

Artie wondered how they got those numbers. His mind was moving down several different paths at once. If this had been a normal night, he would be conducting a round-table, talking with kids from the outreach program. He tried so hard to make sure they didn’t repeat the mistakes he’d made. They were just a bunch of teenage boys and girls. One of his kids had called an hour ago. Lyle had been a fourteen-year-old on his way to full membership in the most American of institutions, the Crypts. Artie felt good knowing he’d pulled one kid from that pit of death. Lyle had actually called to see if he and Suzy were okay. It was difficult to imagine a tough kid like Lyle placing that call. Artie wondered how many of his kids were on the streets right now taking advantage of a one-time fire sale. He wondered how many wouldn’t make it through the night.

A gust of heat and wind rattled the windows. Artie could see from his seat that a building across the street was going up in flames. He got up to look out the window. Suzy started to panic. She grabbed him and pulled him back to her. The window glass glowed with a yellow light as bright as the sun.

“Don’t look out the windows,” she cried. “The world’s dying out there. I won’t let you die with it. Promise me you won’t do anything crazy. Promise me!”

New Jersey had been suspended in four days of grief. The sky brought rain several times, but nothing could wash away what had happened. There was too much loss, too much grief, to ever recover what had been before.

Ralph was staring up at Sarah with expectant eyes. It was obvious he knew something exciting was about to happen. Sarah wondered if she was doing the smart thing. A week ago she’d never doubted her control over where she was heading. She was the strategist piloting a course from one accomplishment to the next. Now, life was a collection of things that were just happening to her, things she didn’t understand. The loss of control left her feeling panicked for hours on end. She knelt down and tied a bandanna around Ralph’s neck. He tried to lick her ear but ended up with nothing but air. He looked handsome in his new neckwear.

Sarah absentmindedly touched her side. The damaged ribs were fine. The pain was gone, the bruise was gone. She was glad the injury had healed, but it was odd that it had cleared up in just four days. She wondered if the plague had anything to with abnormal healing. Maybe the disease killed some people and helped others? She knew this kind of thinking was only survivor’s guilt, but still it was odd how quickly she’d healed.

The television was playing in the next room. A tired-sounding reporter was relaying the latest statistics. Statewide, one out of every fifty was dead; but in the towns heaviest hit, less than one percent had survived. The litany eventually segued into a list of notable violent crimes that had occurred in the last twenty-four hours. The list was very long. Sarah tried not to listen, tried not to think of what people were doing to each other – wasn’t this plague enough? The darker side was coming though. Last night, the sound of an automatic rifle going off had awakened her from a dreamless sleep. At first, she thought the sound was someone hammering nails, but then her mind had cleared. It was time to leave.

Sarah pulled the compression sack tightly around the sleeping bag and then inserted it into her backpack. The pack was a professional model. The frame had a torsion-link harness designed for carrying heavy loads without loss of balance. This was the same equipment used by elite military troops. Sarah had grown up on trips through the woods. She felt more comfortable in the middle of a forest than on her own couch. She filled the remainder of the compartments with food and water for her and Ralph. She knew the pack was heavy, probably ninety pounds, but it would be lighter in a few days if she couldn’t find replacement food. She tested it on her back. Her legs felt the strain, but right now she only had to carry it the two miles to her car. She hoped to make it out of New Jersey without resorting to more foot power than that.

The National Guard had been given the assignment of clearing wreckage from neighborhood road. According to news reports, the task was daunting. Sarah had seen no sign of cleanup on her street or any of the streets she’d explored. She hoped the highways were in more passable condition. She’d tried to get information on road conditions, but had failed. Nothing up-to-date was available from government agencies. Even the news now seemed to be covering the story from a distance. The constant outages of television and radio only made it worse. With all the modern equipment at their disposal, it seemed insane that none of the networks were reliably on the air. The only things Sarah knew for certain came from civil defense messages repeated every fifteen minutes instead of commercials. There was a dusk to dawn curfew and the National Guard had orders to shoot looters on sight. All police were ordered to report in. She had started to call, but intuition had left her fingers hovering over the number pad.

The kitchen table was cluttered with what she was leaving behind. Sarah took a long last look at a photograph of her and Kenny and then shifted her eyes to a photo of her family. She had packed no pictures, no letters, nothing to remind her of what had been. She was leaving forever. She was certain that everyone she loved was dead. The phones had started working the day after the plague had struck. She had tried every number in her book. No one had answered, which was not a surprise. Somehow she’d known they were all gone. She’d touched each name with her fingers before calling. They’d all felt cold and empty.

The sounds of a car coming down the street leaked into the kitchen. Sarah’s heart leapt. She turned to the window. For an insane and glorious second, the car was Kenny’s. At any moment he would come through the backdoor. The sound of tires faded. Sarah fought against the icy void lodged in her chest. If Kenny was alive, he’d have been here by now and she wouldn’t be feeling this emptiness, this absence of connection. She looked at the door and imagined herself taking that first step across the threshold. That would be it, final admission that Kenny was gone. She wiped tears from her eyes with a sleeve, and then with her hands, when the tears refused to stop.

Sarah felt alone and began sobbing. She slid from the chair to the floor. Legs of the kitchen table and chairs in front of her were like bars to a prison. She thought about her family. Her chest was rising and falling in huge gasps of air. Yesterday she’d walked the fifteen miles to their home in Mount Freedom. Their house had been quiet. The porch door had been moving in a breeze. She’d gone inside and found the place looted. Everything of value had been stripped from the home; even some of the furniture was gone. Every cushion and mattress and pillow had been split open. Stuffing had lain across the floor like the entrails of a violated life.

Out in the backyard, she’d found one of her mother’s dresses trampled in the dirt. The garden was ransacked. Clumps of uprooted plants were scattered about like wounded people. Against a growing pressure of emotions, she’d walked back to her father’s tool shed. The beat-up wooden door seemed as imposing as gates leading down into hell. She’d known what was inside. She could swear that there had been visual flashes, premonitions of what had been waiting for her beyond that door. Later trying to explain it away, she decided she must have been so traumatized that her memories had become scrambled.

Someone had dragged the bodies of her loved ones from the house. They had been dumped nude, one on top of the other like so many broken dolls. Sarah had spent the remainder of that day and a good part of the night digging respectable graves. Unable to go back inside the house, she’d slept on the porch for a few hours and walked home at first light. Through it all, Ralph had stayed close and made no sounds.

During the long hours walking home, Sarah had relived the burial again and again. She saw the dirt falling from the tip of her shovel onto her father’s face and knew it was an image she’d keep until death took her mind. The words she had spoken over the grave kept repeating; they were words she’d heard somewhere else but couldn’t remember where.

“It’s not a man that is covered with soil, but a seed. As a man, he affected other people’s lives and will live on through his touch on their souls and their children’s souls in an ever expanding tree of life.”