Flare (4 page)

“We have to get to the hospital,” said Heather after a moment. “Something could happen and we could get stuck in the sunrise.”

Ash nodded, because she was right. It was beautiful, but there was a lot that could push them over the edge towards death.

I got lucky more than once,
and it won’t happen again.

/***/

Ash and Heather found the body of the man that had screamed earlier in the day, and he was unrecognizable, but intact. Heather explained to Ash that though the flare was deadly, once it killed its victims it didn’t eviscerate their bodies, but rather dried them up to a point and then kept them there. This man didn’t smell, and there were no creatures around to attack his corpse. Ash felt that the man would stay like this forever, dead and unrecognizable but whole and intact, a burnt embalming of his old self.

The man was in a vehicle with a car cover nearby, a cover that Ash assumed would have protected the man from the flare. Ash deduced that the man had gotten in the car and then somehow put the cloth on afterwards. A gust of wind must have blown part of the cover off, and that would have been enough to end him.

It was too difficult to drape the car cover over the vehicle like this
.
He should have somehow covered the inside of the car, and he would have been protected against the wind.

Ash ripped a snippet of the car cover and placed it in front of the glowing moon. Three specks of light poked through, leading Ash to believe that this man wouldn’t have survived even if the car cover had stayed, and that he must have been desperate to venture out with such a bad plan.

This man went outdoors unprepared and died for it
, thought Ash.
But whatever the case he’s gone now and there’s nothing that we can do for him, and nothing that we can gain from him either.

Ash was ready to move on but Heather held him back and told him to be quiet. After a moment of silence he heard it: a faint
tap tap tapping
from the trunk of the car. Heather gave him a look of worry, and Ash had no recourse but to nod and open the car’s back lid.
There’s danger all around
,
but these taps are too faint to be a threat. Whatever’s in the trunk is dying, or near dead.

Ash opened it up to find a child, whimpering and barely alive, also burnt beyond repair. Heather put her hand to her mouth in sympathy, and Ash had to look away. He felt a lump in his throat and went numb with shock. He closed his eyes, wishing the world would disappear, and if not that, wishing that he could go back to sleep, anything to make what he had just seen
not real
in some way. He took another moment to himself and then opened his ears, still looking away. He heard the whimpering, faint and low, but still that of a child in pain.

This kid is burnt like Dr. Shaw.
But this is a child and it’s different. There’s nothing we can do and we can’t help him either, but it’s still different.

Heather had snapped into action and was performing a quick medical evaluation of the child, which she told Ash was a boy, barely alive and not entirely conscious. Heather took the car cover nearby and laid it flat on the ground. She and Ash gently took the kid out of the trunk and laid him on the cloth. The boy’s skin was sticky like Dr. Shaw’s had been, and it had fused to the bottom of the trunk. His skin peeled off as they pulled him out
,
and when they put him on the blanket he stuck to that too.

Heather gave the boy a medical test while Ash withdrew and analyzed the car. He held the car’s back lid up and saw that there was a hole between the two back seats that led to the trunk. The car wasn’t functional, just a burnt-out shell, but it might have been strong enough to protect them if the car’s cover had been better. Ash deduced that they had stayed in the vehicle, the wind had blown a piece of cloth off, they had panicked and the boy had escaped to the trunk. The uncle or father might have practiced that move with the boy:
If anything goes wrong, crawl into the trunk. Do it blindfolded three times just so you know the moves by instinct. You’ll be safe in the trunk.

If the uncle or father had told the boy this, he would have been wrong. Ash pushed the trunk up and angled himself so that it covered the moon, and once again he saw specks of light, bigger and more plentiful than the light through the car cover. The boy may have escaped the main blast of the light, but he escaped only to be cooked slowly in the trunk, trying desperately to avoid the holes of light that kept burning him, hour after hour.

After ten minutes, Heather motioned Ash away to talk about the boy, just in case he could hear them. Ash thought the boy couldn’t hear anything, but didn’t question her.

“He’s worse off than Julius,” said Heather.

“Right. But there’s nothing we can do?” asked Ash, knowing the answer but having nothing else to say.

“No …”

“We can’t leave him here,” said Ash.

“I know.”

“And we can’t …”

“What?” asked Heather.

“Nothing.”

Ash didn’t want to complete his sentence, so he thought it instead:
and we can’t yet bury him, either.

/***/

They decided to take the kid to the hospital, and the trip was messy. They wrapped him in the cloth and Ash put him over his shoulder, carrying him as if he were a sack of dirt. They walked their bikes, and at first Ash could take his own bike because the kid was so light. He started to squirm with an occasional spasm, and Ash eventually gave Heather his bicycle and she walked both while Ash held the boy against his shoulder like an infant.

The boy seized and Ash dropped him twice, the first time catching him midair and the second time letting him drop to the ground with a horrifying
thud
. The dirt wrapped over his gelled skin and wouldn’t come off cleanly. Heather told Ash to leave the child as is, and Ash took the bikes while Heather took the child, whispering gentle words into the boy’s ear while she walked. She anticipated his next seizure and gently put him and the blanket on the ground, and the kid shook it out while they waited. He stopped seizing and she picked him up again, and they continued their journey to the hospital.

This is worse than our time with Dr. Shaw, but we have no choice but to move forward. Heather doesn’t have what it takes to quash a broken life out of existence, and neither do I. We can’t do something like that, even if it’s the right thing to do.

/***/

They got to Heather’s small hospital an hour later and saw a hundred dead bodies on the front lawn, maybe more. Some were on gurneys, and most were spread out haphazardly on the ground, face up or face down as if they had been poured out of a giant bucket. All of them were dead, not a quivering limb among them, and every single one of them had been mummified by the sun.

Heather had seen this before so she walked through the rubble without commenting, taking the boy through a door and then turning on her flashlight and gently descending a set of stairs into darkness. She found a free gurney and placed the boy on it and asked Ash to point his flashlight forward. They moved through the dark halls like spelunkers in a cave until Heather found a supply closet, and she bade Ash to stop and open the door. The closet was well stocked, but the supplies were dwindling, perhaps half full.

“I guess I’m no longer the only one who knows about this place,” said Heather.

Heather took out some morphine and injected it into the boy, and he stopped quivering. Ash knew she wouldn’t euthanize him, because she could never do that even if it was the right thing to do. The boy sighed again, and Heather brought the gurney back to another room and they sat, neither one of them wanting to ask
what now?

This flare’s given us questions without answers,
thought Ash.
We might have to begin avoiding situations like this, because we can’t have too many more of these dilemmas in our lives. We may have to turn a deaf ear the next time we hear a scream during the day, even if it means letting a kid die.

Ash knew he might not be able to do that, and he knew that Heather would
never
be able to do that, so he chose not to think about the future now.

“What do we do?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but there’s a woman here,” said Heather. “We should find her.”

/***/

They found the woman ten minutes later by listening for the trudge of her feet. Heather called for her by name, and she was a hefty young nurse with long-evacuated eyes and hair that smelled of rotting ham. She held her own flashlight and was pushing a gurney with a blanket-wrapped body up a ramp to the first floor of the hospital. She instructed them to place the child on a shelf downstairs and Heather did so, promising the boy that he was not alone, and that they were only going upstairs for a bit. They followed the thick nurse upstairs and saw her taking the body from the gurney and putting it outside on the ground next to three other wrapped bodies. The three bodies were laid neatly in a row but were an island of order against the cacophony of the rest of the lawn, which had the dead strewn about like wreckage after a hurricane. When the nurse took the body from the gurney and placed it on the ground it shook twice, still alive. Ash looked closely and saw that the three wrapped bodies next to it quivered too.

/***/

The woman’s name was Elsa, and she had been a nurse under Heather before the flare, though she had really been more of a friend. But now she was no longer under Heather, and whatever had bound them as friends was so far gone that it may as well have never existed.

Elsa explained that she had stayed in the hospital because no one else would help the people here, those that the flare had injured but not killed. She explained that she couldn’t let them die alone, but Ash felt that her empathy was now at its breaking point, like someone forced to take care of a distant relative who was now a bedridden invalid. Elsa had been a saint, but now that there was no one left to thank her she had taken on the mien of someone left holding the bag.

She can still leave,
thought Ash.
But where would she go?

“I take care of them down here,” said Elsa. “I do what I can to make them comfortable, but sooner or later they all ask to die.”

“How do you know?” asked Ash. “They can’t talk.”

“They can talk,” said Elsa. “You just have to listen closely, because they wheeze it out. They let you know when they’re ready to go.”

Though it was dark and lit only by Elsa’s flashlight and the moon outside, Ash looked up the stairs and imagined the last journey that these patients would have. He shuddered when he thought that it would most likely be the boy’s last journey as well.

“How long does it take?” asked Ash. “To kill them. Or us, if we were up there?”

“For you or me, two and a half minutes,” said Elsa. “Screams start, then fade, and then there’s one more cry at the end, maybe. These guys don’t have their skin, so it only takes them a minute. They writhe around, but they go quickly. I would fill them full of morphine and just end them that way, but I can’t do that. It’s murder that way, and that’s not something I can do.”

I can’t blame her for her actions, whatever they may be, because she’s inherited a task that no one else wants,
thought Ash.
Part of me wants Elsa to bring everyone up.

Elsa took them back down to the basement and showed them the wounded in a room lit by the moon. It was in a basement half buried underneath the earth, and there were curtains on the windows, the same thick lead curtains that Heather had used to board up their house. The protective drapes had been drawn back and the moon lit up the basement well, though it was a harsh sight. There were twenty-two beds taken, twenty-three if you counted the boy, and though the air close to the patients smelled of human waste, by and large the room smelled of bleach. Ash saw a mop against the wall next to three jugs of sanitizing liquid, and there was a shelf of cleaning chemicals behind that. He took his flashlight and walked towards the wall and peeked in the closet behind, finding it filled with more supplies, enough for a year.
Elsa picked a hard place to be a saint,
thought Ash,
because there are so many provisions here that she might never be forced to abandon it.

“You can leave the child with me if you want,” said Elsa. “I’ll take care of him.”

Before Heather could respond, Elsa had already walked to the shelf where the boy was laying, and then picked him up and put him on another gurney. She wheeled it back to the group and he became the twenty-third resident of this floor, which once held a hundred more and would soon hold much less.

“Elsa, what are you going to do?”

“I’ll take care of him,” said Elsa. “You go.”

Heather looked at Ash, and he nodded that it might be a good idea, or at least an acceptable one. They had picked up the kid on the way here, and this resolution was better than anything he could have envisioned. It wasn’t pretty, but it was an end and they had to take it. Besides, Ash knew that they couldn’t be indecisive because the sun was going to come up soon. He had no idea what time it was, but the sun was coming.

Heather took his cue and nodded as well before walking over to the boy and hugging him, whispering words into his ear quietly and then hugging him again. She then went over to the supply closet and came back with a bottle of pills.