Flare (7 page)

/***/

He died four hours later, taking his last gasp, giving one more shake and then stopping. Heather gave a whimper, put her hand on his chest and cried once more. Ash let her have her space; he had always given her space whenever she was upset, and she hated it.
It’s like you’re fleeing from me,
she would say, and then he would remain with her, though awkwardly.

The truth was that Ash really did want to flee from her whenever she got upset, and he wanted to flee now. He could deal with the end of the world, but he couldn’t deal with his sister’s tears. He’d shed too many of his own when he was growing up, and though Heather had dried every last one of them, he couldn’t handle any more emotions now. Dr. Shaw and the burnt child were too much for one day. He didn’t mind staying in a closet, but he wanted to go to another one where he could sleep by himself until the crying was over.

But there is no other closet.
You’re here and she needs you.

Ash put his arm tentatively around his sister, and she buried herself in his shoulder. She let more tears out than Ash thought would be in her, more tears than he thought could be in anyone.

She cried for five more minutes, and then it was just the two of them and a dead man, trapped in a closet and waiting for nightfall.

/***/

The cracks around the wall dimmed completely and they felt it was safe to open the closet door. Ash peeked out slowly, first by looking under the lead curtains and then by opening the door a crack. He opened it further to reveal another brilliant night shining through the basement window, with the hues of green, blue and orange morphed into a silken yellow.

He smiled at Heather, and though she had reason to mourn, she couldn’t help smiling back. The night had come, and they had survived.

Ash immediately ran upstairs to relieve himself and saw that Heather was going to do the same. They had maintained their dignity for the most part in the closet, peeing in a jar she kept in the corner, but the day had lasted a long time and they both needed some distance now. Even in the direst of times, there were certain things you’d prefer not to do in front of another human being.

He searched outside for an area with privacy, but Heather didn’t live near a hill and there were no bushes remaining, so he walked far from the house. Heather had a dirt backyard with no fence, and it extended indefinitely.
It extends even further now that everything is gone,
thought Ash.

Heather had disappeared without hesitation, so Ash took the cue and walked his own path into the darkness.

He walked until the house was small enough to hide behind the palm of his outstretched hand, squatted down, and did what he had to do. It didn’t feel undignified though, not after spending the night with a seizing Dr. Shaw. It just felt like one of the unsavory but necessary parts of life, like sweating in one’s clothes on a hot day. While he was squatting he looked up and saw that the silken yellow of the sky had hardened into an opaque ribbon. He then looked down, and saw three bodies.

He ended his business, covered it with dirt and went to inspect the corpses. They were all dried up like every other body he’d seen, with indistinguishable faces and clothes bleached by the sun. He didn’t want to rummage through these people’s belongings, but knew he’d have to develop that instinct sooner or later. They had lived on a razor’s edge in the closet the night before, and he couldn’t take any more chances. He didn’t know what these dried-up husks could have on them, but he felt obligated to search them. If they had a lighter or a gun, he’d have to take it.

He frisked the first corpse thoroughly, and though he found nothing he discovered that the process of searching a body wasn’t that hard. He didn’t feel that he was violating their dignity. He was doing what he had to do, and nothing more.

He found one of Raj’s equation sheets in the second one’s pocket, crumpled up and covered with dirt. It was a long riddle written entirely in French. Ash could only understand a quarter of the words from his high school classes, but he gathered it was some sort of problem of logic because he recognized phrases that mirrored exams he took to get into graduate school.

Si Jean porte seulement les vêtements rouge, et ce chapeau est petit seulement si le chapeau de Marie est rond …

It was a puzzle, Ash could tell that much. He wouldn’t be able to solve it, not without a French dictionary, but it was a puzzle. He searched the second body further, then the third body, and found that they had nothing else on them. Ash pocketed the piece of paper with the French riddle and took one more look at the bodies. He couldn’t figure out what these people had been doing here, or how they had come to this place, or what their plan was. They were hundreds of yards from Heather’s house and they had nothing on them to suggest that this group would have made it much farther. Perhaps they had a local destination, or perhaps they had something to block the sun, something that was either stolen or looted after they had died. There was no way to tell, and Ash didn’t have the energy to figure out their story. He had their French puzzle sheet, and that was all he was going to get.

Heather’s voice broke the silence. She had run up behind him, not frantic or out of breath, but concerned.

“I found those guys that robbed us,” she said. “They didn’t quite make it past the last sunrise. Two of them are dead, and one’s still alive.”

/***/

The two dead ones were burnt beyond recognition, and the third was still breathing, but just barely. He was under a pile of the lead curtains, and when they pulled the curtains off he was in worse shape than Dr. Shaw. A small fraction of his body had been burnt to cinders, but the rest of his body was relatively untouched. He was breathing but wasn’t conscious, and a small sliver of his head looked like it had melted off and turned to wax, along with part of his leg and some of his midsection. It was as if the sun deadened everything it touched, and left everything else alone.

Ash looked at Heather and saw that once again, she was at a loss as to what to do or how to feel. No one deserved this, not even someone who had left them to die.

“Can you give this guy … some pills?” asked Ash.

Heather nodded and then took a bottle from her pocket. She counted out fifteen tablets, three times the dose she had given Dr. Shaw. She thought for a moment and then walked into the house, returning with a glass of water. She crushed the pills and put them in the water, stirring it with her finger until was cloudy. She knelt down and whispered into the man’s ear. Ash guessed that of the three, this had been the short, flat-headed one.

“This won’t kill you, but it will take away your pain,” said Heather. “You will sleep through the night, and when the sunrise comes you won’t awake. Do you understand?”

The man didn’t understand, but opened his mouth and drank when Heather poured the drugged water into it.

They weren’t yet killers, and it didn’t feel to Ash as if they were committing murder. He reasoned that Heather didn’t think of it as murder either, because she took the protective drapes off the man and walked away without a second thought.

/***/

They couldn’t find the group’s pistol but they took the entire set of curtains in two trips, boarded up the house again, and then buried Dr. Shaw. Heather cried once more, and Ash stood with her as she did so.
It’s right that she cries now.
When someone dies, the living should cry.

They sat above the mound outside and Ash forced himself to put his arm around his sister. She cried, and together they watched the sky fade from a hard yellow to a clear violet, barely visible against the black of the night sky.

Ten minutes later, Heather’s heavy tears faded to a faint sniffle.

“It’s more difficult to do this than I thought it would be,” said Heather. “I’ve seen a lot of death in my day, and I see a lot of now. But in work it was just part of the job, and the deaths I’ve seen since the flare hit … they’re not quite real. The bodies I see are strangers, and they’re burnt. They’re just bodies. And though all our friends are most likely dead, we haven’t seen them, and they could be alive. But burying someone … that’s real.”

Ash nodded. The flare’s force was so strong that it paradoxically left little
tragedy
in its wake. It didn’t leave enough people alive to mourn the dead, and its strength left the survivors’ nights filled with worry instead of sadness.

Heather stopped sniffling and spoke no more. Ash supposed he could say something about the deceased, but he had no words either. Dr. Shaw had a life and a history, but Ash had entered the man’s life at the messy end, with an illicit affair and a fate that would leave him a quivering mess. Ash had never been particularly good at public speaking and wasn’t now, so he just nodded his head. Heather walked away, and that was the end of the funeral.

Once inside the house she was okay. Ash was sure that she still had complicated feelings for the man, but he didn’t want to talk about Dr. Shaw anymore, and neither did she. It was over.

“We need a weapon, ideally two,” said Heather, and Ash knew that she was right.

/***/

They didn’t really want to leave the house again. Heather had an assortment of cutlery, but they needed a gun. Neither of them had fired one before, but they needed something if others came back and tried to steal their curtains—if not to shoot, then at least to brandish.

They first biked back to the hospital, and it seemed like there were more dead bodies than yesterday as they approached the lawn. Heather knew where the security guard’s office was, and they decided to visit that place first. Hospital security guards didn’t carry guns, but this one might have something, and they had to look.

They reached the office, which was near the back entrance, and found nothing there but broken monitors and a swivel chair flipped on its edge. They scoured the premises for one of the guards, hoping to get baton at least, but couldn’t find anything. Ash found a corpse that he thought might have been a guard, but even if he had been, his body had nothing to give them now.

“We should ask Elsa,” said Heather, and Ash agreed.

/***/

Elsa’s basement was quiet, and when Heather shone her flashlight, she found that it was empty too. There were no more patients, and the curtains on the windows had all been stripped away. Ash knew that these patients couldn’t just walk out overnight, so he pulled Heather aside and gave her a look that said something was afoot and that they should be careful.

“What do you think happened?” asked Ash. “Do you think Elsa—”

“I think they’re upstairs,” said Heather.

/***/

Heather was right. All of the patients downstairs were now on the lawn, dead and dried, and loosely arranged like sticks of jerky. They were all in various states of shock, with arms askew and backs contorted to the sky, but they were all dead. They searched for Elsa amongst the bodies and couldn’t find her, and then searched for the boy they had saved and did find him, dead and withered almost beyond recognition. Heather recognized him by his shirt, and she knelt down and put her hand on his chest. She was somber but had run out of tears, and simply lingered by him for a moment in silence.

Ash wondered if Elsa had snapped, or perhaps she just needed to leave. Whatever the case, he reasoned that it was probably for the best. It was better to let all these people die quickly than to let them wither away in the basement downstairs, slowly dying of thirst, starvation or infection. All that these unfortunate people really wanted was an end, and Elsa had delivered it to them.

“Let’s take some more supplies and get home,” said Heather.

She wasn’t interested in solving the mystery of what happened or in finding Elsa, and neither was Ash. They just wanted to go.

/***/

Heather picked up some more medicine in the supply closet, and Ash assumed it to be the medicine that replaced what she had given to Dr. Shaw, but he didn’t ask. They also found another flashlight. Ash assumed it had belonged to Elsa.

Heather took the flashlight and led him three stories above ground. They passed by more bodies, but Heather looked like she knew where she was going and Ash followed without questioning her. The smell of decomposition became rank as they walked up the steps. The sun couldn’t preserve the bodies in the darkened stairwell, so those that ended up there rotted, and Ash didn’t let his flashlight linger too long because he didn’t want to see any decayed faces.

Heather ended up on the third floor, went into a room and found two corpses by a burnt-out machine the size of a garden shed. The door was open and the bodies didn’t smell, so Ash assumed the light had penetrated into the room and killed everyone inside.

Heather went straight to the back of the room and opened a supply closet. She rifled through it and then came back to Ash with two more leaded curtains.

“This is all they have left,” said Heather. “No more of these things anywhere here. We’ll have to hide these somewhere in our house, just in case we need a backup again.”

Ash agreed and wondered where the rest of the hospital’s curtains had gone. He hoped if someone had taken them that it was Elsa and she was still alive.

/***/

They biked to Raj’s store, because he had a gun. Perhaps he had another one, perhaps he could join them, or perhaps he could give them advice. They had nowhere else to go and what was more, Ash was hungry and wouldn’t mind picking up a box of Donettes on the way home.