Flare (3 page)

The man calmed down, and she gave him soothing words before taking an encased syringe from her pocket, along with a packet that contained an alcohol-soaked swab. She opened the packet and sterilized the man’s inner arm, and opened the plastic casing to take out the injection. She took out a small jar of liquid and filled up the syringe, and then injected the liquid into the man’s inner elbow. Ash noticed that the man’s arm was red, swollen and covered with puncture wounds, just barely healed over.

Still, the injection calmed the man down and he stopped seizing, and then fell asleep. The moment over, she turned her attention to Ash and hugged him.

“I thought I’d lost you,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said, not knowing how to react.

She hugged him once more and then pushed off him, looking into his eyes and laughing to herself.

“You have no idea what happened, do you?” she asked.

“No,” said Ash. “You’ve got to tell me what’s happening.”

“I’ll tell you everything,” said Heather.

/***/

Heather put two different types of salves on Ash’s back, the first one aloe and the second one a synthetic, antibacterial substance. She told him how lucky he had been to escape the sun with minor injuries, and that if he had left his eyes open a moment longer, he would have been blinded forever. If the sun had been at a slightly different angle, it would have been just as bad.

“You survived two points of contact with the flare, three if you count your finger,” said Heather. “It’s like getting shot three times in your chest and having every bullet miss a vital organ. You got lucky, but you won’t find luck the fourth time. Do you understand?”

Ash nodded that he did, and Heather continued.

The man on the floor was Dr. Julius Shaw, a man Ash had come to know very well. Shaw was Heather’s lover, for lack of a better term, because the man had a wife and two children elsewhere. He had been working in the hospital with Heather when the flare had hit, and Ash had been in a coma for a week at that point.

Heather explained that Ash had been in an accident, a car accident that they thought had been a suicide attempt. She asked Ash if it had been.

“I don’t remember it,” said Ash.

Heather nodded.

“I guess it doesn’t really matter now,” she said.

“It does,” said Ash. “It always matters.”

“Then did you?”

“I don’t believe so,” said Ash. “But yeah, I was doing a lot of drinking at the time, and I guess I didn’t care if I died.”

Ash looked up at Heather, her short hair falling gracefully over clear brown eyes, and saw a look of genuine concern.
We’ve played out these roles since we were five
, thought Ash.
The beautiful sister protecting her scarred twin brother from his own shortcomings. But we can’t do this—not now. The times are too dangerous to continue this dance.

“But that was then,” said Ash. “I’m glad to be alive, I really am. Now please tell me what the hell is going on outside.”

/***/

Heather told the rest of the story of the flare from the beginning. Ash’s car crash had left him in a coma, and luckily, his bed was in the basement of the hospital. The underground floors had all been safe when it hit, but the upper floors had been completely devastated. The flare had simply come during the day without warning, and everyone touched by the sun had been gravely hurt. All those outside had been killed, and all those near a window inside had been either maimed or killed.

She explained that the sun had blown out the power supply. There were a few flashlights that still worked, but they hadn’t found them at the time, so they were in complete darkness. They heard screams from the stairs above, which gradually faded.

“It was silent,” said Heather. “But every once in a while, you’d hear one again. Somebody would open a closet door or something. Screams, and then nothing.”

She talked about the first night in great detail, how those in the basement had gradually worked up the courage to step outside.

“The nights are safe?” asked Ash.

“More or less,” said Heather. “But yeah, you can walk around at night.”

She talked about the dead and the maimed and just how many there were of both. It was as if an invisible bomb had gone off on every floor and in every room. There were survivors that had been lucky enough to be in dark places when it hit. Some X-ray technicians and janitors had survived without a scratch, and they joined those in the basement to see who else was left.

She told Ash that there were quite a few people who had been caught in the flare but had crawled to safety, and it wasn’t pretty.

“It melts your outsides, and then incapacitates your nervous system somehow,” said Heather. “You’re a shell of what you once were, you can’t see, and you might not be able to talk. You’re still there though, I know it.”

Heather looked at Dr. Shaw’s melted body with sadness, and Ash felt her suffering. He had known the man and liked him, even though Shaw had kept Ash’s sister,
his twin sister
, as his mistress. This is what Heather had done for the past five years. She didn’t steal men from their families, but rather took them after the marriage had already dissolved, after a hundred bad and irrevocable decisions had already been made. If there was ever a permanent change because of Heather, the man would return to his wife with newfound promises of honesty and therapy.

I told her that she deserved better, and she agreed that she did.
I accepted it, because we never judge one another. But still, she couldn’t pry herself from him, even when she counted herself lucky if he showed up at 11 p.m. on her birthday. It was what it was, and I still liked him, and now he’s here.

“He doesn’t deserve this,” said Ash. “He made some bad decisions, but he doesn’t deserve this. No one deserves this, no matter what they’ve done. I just feel that needs to be said.”

Heather nodded in agreement.

“Yeah,” she said. “I shouldn’t know him that well, but I do, and I know that he’s really good. I’ve adjusted to him like this, and I’m all cried out, but I know that he’s a good man.”

Ash looked at Dr. Shaw, completely unrecognizable, completely different than the man he had been before.
He’s been stripped down to his frame
,
but even his frame is different. He was a big man before, powerful and strong even though he was older. Now he’s just a mess, something that’s fallen on the floor and can’t ever be put back together.

Ash wondered if Shaw would be better off if they left him outside to face a merciful death in the morning. It would be a crude way to go out, to die alone, cooked slowly through your last sunrise, but it would be an end, and perhaps the end that Dr. Shaw needed. His body would be still at least, and there was dignity in that.

But Ash also knew that this wasn’t an option with Heather around. She had a soft spot in her heart for the wounded and the weak, and though she’d do whatever she could to protect them, it wasn’t in her nature to quash a broken life out of existence. She couldn’t do it, even if it was the right thing to do.

“Tell me what happened to him,” said Ash. “Tell me how
this
happened to him.”

Heather explained that Dr. Shaw had been untouched in the hospital and they had stayed with Ash for five days, but then people started leaving.

“The police, the army, they weren’t coming,” said Heather. “Cars didn’t work because their electric circuits were out. No communication either, no phones, television or Internet. A guy came from the city on the fifth day. He said there was no help in there.”

“The cities are bad?”

“Yes. He said the conditions there were dire, really dangerous, so he left,” said Heather. “He traveled slowly, careful to stay in abandoned houses, and came to our hospital.”

Heather said that she and Dr. Shaw planned to come back to her house. She lived close and he lived forty miles away, so he’d come to her home and then plan his trip back to his family from there.

“He arranged your transport first,” said Heather. “He knew what you meant to me, and he liked you too.”

Heather explained that Dr. Shaw went to a storage room in the hospital and procured a box of lead-lined curtains, normally used to protect technicians from X-ray radiation. They came back to Heather’s place and covered the basement windows with those curtains.

“He carried you here,” said Heather. “All the way.”

Heather explained that Dr. Shaw had left the next night, leaving her with Ash. She made trips by herself back to the hospital until Ash had all the equipment that he needed, and then she gathered more lead curtains until she had sealed the whole house.

“We don’t have power or cars,” said Heather. “But the water still works, and we’ve got iodine tablets from the hospital, chlorine too. We’ve got a lot of supplies.”

“They’ll be running out,” said Ash.

“Not soon though,” said Heather. “There’s not a real sense of competition for resources now, at least not the kind I would have thought. No fighting over food or anything like that. Maybe in the city, but not here. Here, it’s like there’s no one left.”

Ash wondered how many people this flare had killed. He did a quick calculation in his head of how many people must have been outdoors or near a window at the time the sun had done what it had done. He thought about the other side of the earth too, and what had happened to them. Were they forewarned? Did some take caution and hide, or had they all been killed in their sleep as soon as the sun had risen?

There are pockets of survivors
, he thought.
Perhaps they’re living at one of the poles, stranded in the darkness. Perhaps they’re in every city, living in the sewers and in basements just like this. Regardless, there are survivors, there must be. They just might not live near us.

Heather said she had found Dr. Shaw a week ago on her porch. The flare had caught him enough to leave him incapacitated, but it hadn’t killed him. He had left no explanation, and she didn’t know if he had reached his family or not. He’d just arrived on her porch with melted skin, and she had cared for him ever since.

“I feel bad, I do,” said Heather. “But what’s done has been done, I’ve shed all the tears that I have, and now I don’t know what to do with him. I help him all that I can, but he suffers. I know he suffers.”

“He saved my life,” said Ash. “I liked him anyway, but he saved my life. I’m fortunate he was there.”

“You were.”

“I guess I did get lucky the fourth time,” said Ash. “In a sense, that’s four points of contact with the flare.”

“You did get lucky,” said Heather, “but you won’t survive a fifth encounter, I know this. There were whispers of this being part of a divine plan or a conspiracy, or some things to that effect, but so many people died that those whispers stopped. I don’t know what it is, or why it’s here. The only thing I know is that the sun is a killer right now, end of story. If you stay out one minute too late or you leave one window uncovered, you get hurt and you die. There’s nothing magic about it. One mistake and you and I will both end up like Julius.”

Heather picked out a bandage from a box of five hundred and taped it onto Ash’s back. He looked over and saw Dr. Shaw breathing under his tent, and the man’s burnt hands were folded across his chest. Ash saw the man’s wedding ring had survived the sun, and it lay on his finger gleaming and unsullied.

We’re back to normal.
Heather’s taking care of me and I’m not thinking about her imperfections, no matter how ambiguous and evident they currently are.

/***/

Heather had gone to sleep, and Ash tried to do the same. He heard a high-pitched squeal from outside, and woke Heather so she could hear it too. They both crept towards the curtain and listened. The sound was faint, but he listened closely and it sounded like someone screaming.

“Is that …?” he asked.

Heather nodded
yes
. The screaming continued, then faded, and then stopped.

“Someone gets trapped outside, or they get pushed,” said Heather. “They get blinded immediately, and then they get disoriented and die. First few days I heard it a lot, but I haven’t heard it too much lately.”

The voice outside let out one last torrent of screams, yelling muffled cries for help. There was one more high-pitched squeal, and then nothing. Ash felt a chill go up his back.

“I should thank you,” said Ash. “You’ve saved me in the past, but this is different. This time ...”

Heather nodded and went over to tend to Dr. Shaw, who had begun seizing again.

/***/

After the night fell they went back to the hospital to get medicine for Dr. Shaw. It was a hopeless endeavor, attempting to heal him, but it gave them comfort to have a task. They exited the house with a pair of flashlights that still worked and went to Heather’s shed to get two bikes. She and Dr. Shaw had been avid cyclists, or at least had tried to be when the time was available.

The bicycles had held up well through the flare and operated smoothly, and Ash and his sister snuck through the night like two kids out past their curfew.

The evening sky was beautiful, with a moon as strong as a floodlight and the rest of the sky speckled with muted streaks of green, blue and orange. Ash had seen the aurora borealis once during graduate school, and this held ten times its power. Heather ignored it and continued her pace, but eventually Ash’s awe gave her impetus to stop beside him and admire the view.