I reached up to wipe away the tear that rolled down his cheek. It was all that I could do to ignore the way tears fogged up my own vision.
He took hold of my hand and gently kissed the inside of my wrist. His breath warmed my skin, leaving behind the barest hint of moisture.
“I don’t want to leave you here,” he said. “I can’t let you be alone. It’s my job to protect you, to keep you safe.”
His fingers caressed my skin and fluttered across the edge of the splint.
“It’s going to be okay,” I lied. “You’re going to be okay.”
He shook his head. “One of them scratched me. I’m-I’m not going to turn into one of them; I can’t let that happen. But I can’t leave you.”
His eyes suddenly focused on the counter behind me, and he snatched an object from atop it. It wasn’t until his fingers wrapped around my Glock that the realization of what was about to happen dawned on me.
“This is how it has to be,” he said.
I lunged for the gun. My fingers wrapped around the muzzle and forced it away from my chest. I’d caught Flynn by surprise, so he let me push the gun away without offering much resistance at first. But then the full force of a six-foot, two-hundred-pound man turned on me and proceeded to wrench the gun out of my grasp. The muzzle moved back toward my chest in slow motion as his finger darted behind the trigger guard and onto the trigger.
I screamed.
Flynn hesitated for a fraction of a second, which was long enough for me to dart forward again. I wrestled and scratched and banged my knee into his groin and rammed my forehead into his chin. His grip never loosened, but he wasn’t able to force the muzzle against my chest again.
The gun went off.
All the fight drained out of Flynn in an instant, and I found myself sitting atop his prone form while blood cascaded from matching holes beneath his jaw and at the crown of his head. Bits of brain and skull lay scattered across the hardwood floor.
I scrambled backward until there was nowhere else to go, and even as I sat frozen and pressed against the wall, my eyes never left Flynn. As if he would sit up at any minute and come after me. As if I would wake up in the king-sized bed with Flynn snoring beside me.
But as hard as I willed those realities to be true, nothing changed. Flynn still lay dead on the kitchen floor with blood now trickling from the wounds where the bullet entered and where it exited.
The wind howled on the other side of the cabin walls in competition with the fresh wave of explosions close enough to shake the cabin. My water bottle toppled off the counter and bounced off Flynn’s foot before coming to rest against the leg of the bar stool. I stared at it for a long time.
Then I got to my feet.
I pulled a weathered hiking backpack from the closet in the hallway and darted around the house as I packed it. Clothes, matches and lighters, an assortment of screwdrivers, boxes of ammunition, granola and energy bars; all of it went into the bag. I shoved the entirety of our medical kit into the front and side pockets.
The last item I picked up was my Glock. It lay beneath the coffee table in the living room. I checked the magazine; three bullets left. I tucked it into the holster that I’d threaded onto my belt before slinging the bag and both rifles on the hall tree over my shoulder.
When I left, I closed the front door softly even as the wind tried to rip the handle from my hands.
Freshmint
M.B. Vujacic
“This can’t go on,” Weasel said.
He stood on tiptoe, his belly to the wall, looking through the musty glass at the street outside. The Arabian Nights hookah lounge lay in the basement of an old apartment building, its windows offering an unprecedented view of any passerby’s ankles. Or they would have, had there been any pedestrians left. Nowadays it was just an empty sidewalk lined with abandoned cars, the asphalt shimmering in the oppressive heat.
“This can’t go on,” he said again, and began pacing around the room, staring at the same couches and ornate cushions and dead TV screen he had been staring at for the past two weeks. Painted on the walls, a desert strewn with pyramids and mosques and distant oases. Empty hookahs rose from the tables like glass-and-steel minarets.
“I raise one,” Gabe said, and added a cigarette to the half-dozen already on the table. He sprawled on a couch, naked but for his boxer shorts. He had removed those, too, at one point, and had only put them back on after numerous complaints from Weasel and Pauline. When this all began, his head had been freshly shaven and his goatee thick and trimmed. Now his hair had grown to a dark crew cut and his beard approached that shipwreck-survivor look.
“Sure,” Pauline said, and rolled another cigarette to the pile. She sat across the table from him, also clad only in her panties. She had worn a shirt for nearly a week after they had holed up in here, but the rising temperatures forced her to abandon her modesty. Weasel and Gabe hardly noticed her breasts anymore. The heat left everyone semi-comatose.
“Let’s see them,” Gabe said, and dropped his cards on the table. Pauline obliged. They stared at the two hands in solemn contemplation. “Damn,” he said as she scooped up the cigarettes. Three days in, he had called her into the back room and tried to hook up with her. He had come out shaking his head, saying, “She’s into chicks. Hell, man, when it rains it pours.”
“What I wouldn’t give for some rain,” Weasel muttered.
Gabe looked at him. “Huh?”
“Freshmint. I miss freshmint. With saloom.”
Gabe sighed. “I feel you, bro.”
They had run out of hookah tobacco four days ago. A huge problem, as aside from playing cards and getting inebriated, smoking was their premier pastime. More importantly, it calmed the nerves. Kept hands occupied and masked the stench of stale perspiration. Restless, they turned to the cigarette rack above the bar. Pauline was a weekend smoker so she had already consumed some of those. Gabe hadn’t bought a pack in years, but he started again out of boredom. Even Weasel, whose only encounter with tobacco was the weekly hookah with Gabe, had a few. And he hated them. Couldn’t understand how anyone could enjoy such flavorless smoke.
Not that he understood much of anything anymore. The world had officially gone to hell fourteen days ago, though the signs of the coming calamity had been there for a bit longer. A month or so. First, the nights had changed. Became warmer. Brighter. After a week, you could no longer tell night from day. Then the new light appeared in the sky. Everybody assumed it was a comet, what with it having a tail and all, but then all the big shot astrophysicists came on TV to explain that it was in fact a star. A red giant that somehow shot through space like the galaxy’s largest, meanest rocket.
The astrophysicists claimed that Mira II—that was the star’s official moniker, though people soon dubbed it Wormwood—would come no closer to Earth than two hundred million miles. A hair’s breadth in space terms, but still too far to affect us much. Two days later, earthquakes. Chasms opening everywhere. Streets caving in and buildings toppling. Villages buried under avalanches. Volcanoes erupting to spew searing death over the countryside. Tsunamis galore.
Gabe and Weasel were at the Arabian Nights when it began. The owner, Adnan, cranked up the TV volume and then everyone in the lounge stared at the destruction on display, hookah pipes hovering before slack mouths. Then the tremors began. Deep in the earth, like an electrical current prickling the soles of their feet. Hookahs fell from tables, spilling coals over the linoleum. The building groaned. The screen went black. The lights flickered and died. Patrons screamed in the gloom. Adnan grabbed his head and fell on his knees and wailed like a man doomed.