Eyes to the East

"Eyes to the East" has just been printed in the freshly minted Aims Review. This comes from last semester's creative writing class. Hope you like it.  Feel free to leave any comments that come to mind!  

Eyes to the East

By Brion J. Humphrey

He placed the water bag lightly in the satchel and kicked dust into the fire, trying not to rouse the boy.  Setting the satchel to his left, he rose from the dry and shattered riverbed and peered eastward, cracking open the old shotgun to check the barrels just one more time. The sun was an orb spider, hanging in its web in the late afternoon sky, and its searing rays crawled into the deep crevices of his furrowed brow and sat there.  Something was troubling him.  Something was heading their way.

He snapped the shotgun back into itself, and began to clean the dried blood from the heavy resin stock with an old rag he’d pulled from his back pocket.  He remembered a tale his mother had told him about an Indian boy who’d killed a coyote.  The boy’s father had told him to always keep his knife clean, or the coyote’s soul would return and eat him.  The man chuffed.  Given the present situation, there was little use in cleaning the shotgun.  They came back anyway. 

But habit was a difficult thing to deny, and he had dispensed with all forms of denial long ago.  He turned and glanced at the boy who was sleeping peacefully under the stars.  It didn’t seem to have gotten to the boy.  At least, not yet.  The man thought then, only for a moment, that if he could give his life to ensure, absolutely ensure, that the boy would not fall... But that was wishful thinking.  He looked up at the stars then.  The stars, he thought.  They don’t grant wishes anymore.

It had started slowly, the way it always did in the old movies.  God!  The movies.  It had been a long time. 

First in Europe.  Then New York.  Then everywhere.  Nobody knew why or what to call it.  The experts had been raising hell about the possibility, shit, the likelihood actually, of a pandemic.  They said it was way overdue.  Everyone wanted to panic, in their deepest heart of hearts, but no one was willing to admit what it could be.  No.  What it was!

But someone knew.  Someone high up, and that’s when the bombs started falling.  The big neutron bombs, what they were calling the humane bombs.  The ones that kill everything but the buildings, mostly.  They hit all the major cities, whole countries evaporated leaving silent statues with windows blown to hell and beach front property vacated by force and force again.

There were very few people left.  Even fewer intact families.  And everything was gone.  Farms, cattle, everything.  Most people died of starvation; some went crazy.  Others turned to cannibalism.  The man had his own first taste of another man’s flesh three days after the raid on Denver.

But before that, before the bombs that were meant to contain death and isolate it, before the decay, and before the panic, came the disease.

He had taken his son camping in the Rainbow Lakes area before the world ended.  Cozy under the shadow of the Indian Peaks glacier, he had caught a fishing hook in his thumb.  His son had caught a newt.  He remembered the wind sweeping over them like the breath of God tipping their little canoe.  He’d leapt into the water after his son, swimming in the shallow water to retrieve the boy in the muck and oil-slick lake water.

The boy was only six, crying, soaked and embarrassed.  It was time to leave.  As they drove out of the campsite, the man noticed for the first time that they were virtually alone.  Nearly all of the sites in the secluded camp had been deserted, some abandoned.  He drove on, saying nothing to his son who, wrapped in a warm flannel sheet, bobbed along in the seat beside him. 

They arrived at the cabin at two thirty, parked the car and unloaded the gear into the garage.  The boy ran into the front room, completely distracted from his earlier episode, and dropped with great ceremony into the plush cushions of the couch.  He pounced on the remote and began to channel surf.  The man strode up behind the couch and tousled  his son’s hair.  Then he turned toward the bedroom, the low tones of the scratchy television emanating throughout the little cabin. 

She was still asleep.  Her skin was tight and cool to the touch, almost clammy.  She had beaten the fever, for now.  He sat beside her and she smiled up at him with gray eyes.  The whites around her irises had darkened and the pupils themselves had bee reduced to pinpricks. 

“How are you feeling?”

“Been better.”  Her throat felt as though she had swallowed shards of glass.  She thought she could even feel the blood trickle down into her stomach from over-stretched vocal folds.

“I’ll make you some soup.” He squeezed her hand and she didn’t squeeze back.  She just stared at him, smiling. 

The man rose and moved out of the room and into the kitchen.  Clouds were forming overhead, great rain clouds that usually brought the crashing pins of Rip Van Winkle thundering through the canyons.  He leaned on the sink in the failing afternoon light, head heavy and shoulders burdened.  He was shaking, and of all the prayers he had said in the last five days, the only prayer he gave now was for his son not to see him break. 

The man turned on the cold water and splashed the icy, liquid slap across his face.  Then he turned and clicked on the stove, opened another can of soup and turned his efforts to cooking, and away from keeping his head up.  In the other room his son laughed.  The man let himself break.

The boy was watching cartoons.  They had been playing on a loop for the better part of a month, but somehow, for the boy, they never got old.  A wavy bar of static floated up the screen, and suddenly the Road Runner’s head was at the bottom of the screen and his feet were at the top.  Then a crack of thunder shook the cabin like the jealous bolt of Zeus, and the television righted itself.  Road Runner was whole again. 

The smell of chicken broth saturated the front room and the boy sat up and peered into the dining room and saw the shadow of his father moving about in the kitchen, stirring, chopping, and moving from fridge to countertop, countertop to stove.  There was something comforting to the boy to see his father at work, making dinner.  Routine and normalcy, in the absence of his mother’s smiling face. 

Another wavy line crept across the screen and stopped midway splitting Wile E. Coyote the same way it had bisected Road Runner.  It lingered and flowed like a wave of sheer electricity, a static arc of disruption, and then the crack of thunder, the flash of lightening.  And there she was.  Her face, smiling down at her son in the reflected black of the television as the lights and the power in the little cabin surged and died. 

“Mom?”

He watched her in the reflection.  She just stood behind him, smiling at him.  She didn’t blink her wide staring eyes, and the blackness in the center of them was lost in the dead TV screen. 

The man came around of the corner of the kitchen, “Say something, champ?”

He dropped the rag he was drying his hands with.  “Molly?”

She didn’t turn, she just stood in place, her white arms and thin fingers grasping at the worn flannel nightgown, her dry, cracked lips turned up in a frozen, gruesome smile.  Her hair was ratted and bunched at the back from days of resting in the same position, and her feet had gone black. 

The boy didn’t move.  He just watched his mother sway behind him, grinning down at him, moving nearly imperceptibly from side to side like a human metronome. 

The man took a step forward, and the woman started keening, moaning a high pitched wail from deep in her throat.  She began to bounce on her feet, the rest of her body limp, her seemingly lifeless arms flapping against her sides and hips, and her smiling mouth dropped open and black drool spilled from her mouth. 

The boy went cold, watching the reflection of his mother in the blank screen of the television.  “Dad?”  The child’s pitch was strained. 

The man ran to his wife and took her in his arms, she fell against him, tears falling into his elbow, black discharge thick and gooey forming at the corners of her eyes and mouth.  “Molly, Jesus!  What’s happening to you?”

Her lips quivered, and then curled back from her teeth and she lunged forward. 

He didn’t mean to, but her body was so light and her bones so frail, he thrust his arms out and she flew back into the hall table, crashing through wood and glass.  The boy leapt from the sofa and ran into the kitchen, peering around the corner.  The man stayed where he stood, watching the broken form of his wife lay lifeless and still on the hallway tile. 

He turned and knelt to his son and pulled him into his arms.  The man rubbed the boy’s back reassuringly and glanced wildly around the kitchen and dining room.  Everything was rushing past him, forcing his thoughts into their deepest recesses and he was in danger of drowning in his own indecision.  The boy laid his head on his father’s shoulder and watched his mother’s body mend itself.  He began to shriek.

Molly had flipped to her stomach like a mutilated flounder and her left arm was horribly inverted.  Her neck had snapped on impact and her head lolled, twisted and grotesque on her broken stem of a spine.  She crawled toward them like a giant crab, thrusting her long bony fingers out before her and dragging herself with amazing speed. 

The boy closed his eyes.  He heard the thundering clang of the pot, crashing down on his mother’s head.  And then exhaustion took him. 

The man set the shotgun on the ground against the satchel checked once over his handguns.  He only had ammunition enough left for three more days, maybe four.  He turned back to look at the sleeping boy, the resilience of a child who had seen his mother’s dead face smiling up at him as they packed up their things and left.  Left Colorado, left their lives. 

He didn’t know how long they could survive out here.  How long he could hold onto the two hollow point bullets he’d siphoned out for the final occasion.  He turned back to the horizon and spit in the dust and hoisted the shotgun back into his arms.  There was a scent on the wind, all right. Something was coming.  And he’d hold out as long as could. For God’s sake.  For the sake of the boy.  It was gonna be a long night.