The Calm Before The Swarm

DISEASEATER

An Exclusive Short Story

"Cash up front," Anders said as soon as the door swung inward.

"We only have three thousand," the old man who answered said. He stood at the edge of the light from the hallway and the darkness from within, trapped in that transition zone of shadows. The wrinkles on his face were exaggerated by the contrast, his liver spots like amoebae on a lab slide.

"Then I suggest you use it to buy a casket," Anders said, turning away from the door and starting back down the dim corridor toward the stairs.

"Wait!" the old man called after him. Then more softly, "Please."

Anders stopped, but didn't turn around.

"The fee is five thousand. Not a penny less."

"Times are hard. The recession is---"

"Surely of no consequence compared to the value of your wife's life."

The old man was silent.

"Call me when you have the rest of the money," Anders said, again starting forward.

There were mumbled words from behind him.

Anders stopped and turned around. "Did you say something, Mr. Proctor?"

"I said I have the rest of the money. I have your five grand."

Anders turned and stared down the ratty hallway at the old man, past yellowed walls and broken light fixtures, past abused doors missing most of the trim, and shook his head in sorrow. Even now, it seemed, the value of life was negotiable. They were all the same, trying to haggle down a price he hadn't set because he needed the money, but because he wanted his clients to have to sacrifice to know the value of what they had. He walked back down the threadbare hallway and stopped in front of the door.

"I'm sorry," Proctor said, his eyes falling to the ground, tears streaming through his canyon-like wrinkles. He pulled a wad of bills, folded in half and rubber-banded, from his right front pocket, and another from beneath his waistband.

Anders took the money and shoved it into the interior pocket of his weathered trench coat. His wet bangs hung in front of his blue eyes, sapped with melting snow; three days worth of brown scruff on his cheeks at odds with his pale skin. Crossing the threshold into the dark apartment, he waited for the old man to guide him. The entire place reeked of sepsis---a smell with which he was becoming far too intimate---like feces mixed with vomit and heated to a burbling sludge. Beneath, the smells of antiseptics and burnt toast lingered.

"I didn't mean to..." Proctor said. "I mean...we can't even afford to pay our rent---"

"Where is she?" Anders interrupted.

The old man opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but then turned and headed past the kitchen into the living room. A faint glow emanated from the television in the corner of the room on stacked concrete blocks, playing nothing but static.

"We can't afford cable," the man said. "She finds this comforting though."

Anders nodded and advanced into the dark room. There was a coffee table in front of a long couch, covered with scattered magazines and a bowl crusted with vomit.

"What's her name?" he asked, stopping beside the couch and staring down at the emaciated figure piled beneath tattered blankets that had definitely seen better days.

"Margaret," Proctor whispered from directly behind him.

Anders knelt beside the woman and pulled the blankets off of her torso and draped them over her legs. The body beneath was little more than a living skeleton, tight manila skin stretched over protruding bones, save for the abdomen, which looked bloated and malnourished. What little remained of her gray hair was streaked back over her scalp with her beaded sweat and littered the pillow beneath her. He couldn't tell if she was conscious or simply unable to close her eyes all the way, but sickly yellow crescents stared out at him from sunken and bruised sockets. Her thin lips were stretched back from her bare brown teeth as though she was in tremendous pain.

"Hi, Margaret," Anders whispered, reaching for the top button on her bile-stained blouse.

"Don't---" Proctor said, but Anders cut him off with a sharp look and continued unbuttoning her top until he could lay it to either side. Her ribs poked out like a starved dog's, her breasts wrinkled into leathery folds of dried skin.

"What's her diagnosis?" Anders asked, pulling back the sleeves of his jacket and reaching into one of the outer pockets of his coat, producing a small wooden case, barely larger than a deck of cards.

"Hepatocarcinoma secondary to lung cancer," Proctor said as he watched Anders set the case on his wife's sternum.

"Liver cancer?"

"It's everywhere..."

Anders unlatched the small clasp and opened the lid. Inside were half a dozen sugar cubes and two thin steel cylinders about the width of a pencil, one of them capped with a surgical blade.

"You don't have to watch this," Anders said, removing the two pieces of metal and screwing them together to form a scalpel.

"I've been watching her die for so long now...I can't imagine anything worse."

"Suit yourself."

Anders removed three sugar cubes from the case and set them beside the woman on the couch. He leaned forward and raised the fold of flesh that was her left breast with his left hand and brought the tip of the knife to her skin.

"What are you---?"

"Shh!" He pushed down the scalpel until blood swelled up around it, a single drop racing away down her ribs. With a practiced hand, he carved a small square and placed the first sugar cube right in the middle, carefully lowering her breast back down to hold it in place. He did the same thing on the right, wiping his bloody fingertips across her stomach. Using both hands, he felt along the lower border of her ribs on her right, pushing firmly beneath until he isolated her liver. Marking the spot with his left hand, he carved another square where his middle finger had been and placed the remaining cube in the center.

He positioned his hands precisely between the three points and closed his eyes. His lips moved over soundless words, spoken in his mind where only he could hear them. After an eternal moment...he opened his eyes. The white cubes began to slowly darken from the bottom up, filling with a greenish-brown fluid that amplified the horrendous stench in the room.

"What do you do with it...you know, when you get it all out?" Proctor asked.

"Your wife will be well. What more do you need to know?"

"I mean...do you just throw it away?"

Anders allowed himself a meek smile. "If only it were that easy."

The cubes were now so full that fluid began to puddle atop them.

He took a deep breath and blew it all the way out, taking his time doing so. Closing his eyes again, he pried the first cube from under her breast and threw it into his mouth. He gagged and retched, heaving, but swallowed it down. He tried to focus his mind on something else---anything else---but there was no chance of ignoring the awful taste of the sugar as it slid down into his stomach. He grabbed the second and tossed it back, already palming the third as he tried to swallow. It felt like everything in his stomach was already rising in revolt.

"Not yet," he whispered, shoveling the third into his mouth and swallowing as forcefully as he could.

The scar tissue had already filled in the squares on the woman's skin, leaving tender pink bubbles that would stay with Margaret through the remainder of a life that had just become much longer.

Anders leapt to his feet, knocking the coffee table onto its side. He swayed there momentarily to regain his equilibrium and slapped his hand over his mouth. He bent back over and snatched his case and scalpel and jammed them into his pocket.

His cheeks bulged outward with the force of the fluids exploding from his guts.

"Thank you," Proctor said, trying to take Anders's right hand to shake it, but the younger man just lowered his shoulder and plowed right through him, sending him careening to the floor.

Anders staggered through the darkness, finally finding the door to the hallway and yanking it open. He was barely a couple of steps into the hallway when he sprayed a flume of vomit through his fanned fingers, shaking it to fling the remainder onto the dirty carpet. It felt as though his insides were being liquefied, the acids in his stomach churning ferociously. He needed to get the disease back out before it started to take root.

A "Closed for Repairs" sign hung on the elevator, but it wasn't fooling anyone. It was the same all across town. With the escalating cost of electricity, elevators were a luxury only the elite could afford.

Shouldering through the door next to it, he stumbled down the stairs with the smell of urine all around him. He held tightly to the railing as his weak knees repeatedly gave out, forcing him to catch himself before tumbling down to the next landing. Time lost all meaning in the grip of such phenomenal pain. He wasn't sure how many floors he had passed or how many he had left until he reached the bottom and there were no more stairs to descend. He thrust his hip against the release bar and nearly knocked the rust-spotted metal door off its hinges.

"Oh God," he moaned, collapsing to all fours in the snow on the sidewalk and heaving a steamy mess of bile onto the accumulation. Grabbing a handful of snow, he shoved it in his mouth to try to chase the taste of feces from his tongue.

A streetlamp towered over him, beside it an overflowing trash can. The wind chased newspaper pages and plastic bags down the center of the snow-covered street, marred only by the sparse tracks of the few cars still left on the roads with gas prices as they were. Anders crawled until he could reach the wire-mesh receptacle and used it to drag himself to his feet. He vomited into the trash can and forced himself to continue down the street.

He had to move faster. This was an aggressive disease that waged an internal war on his body's defenses, which it was already winning handily.

Faceless people shuffled past him down the street, bundled in rotting clothing and fraying scarves, walking not because they had somewhere to be, but simply for the warmth that moving provided. Not so long ago, the apartments rising into the sky to either side of the road had been filled to capacity with waiting lists as long as his arm. Now, only the penthouse suites were formally occupied, while the street trash did everything they possibly could to crawl through broken windows and pry away the graffiti-laden plywood, if only to bed down inside for a single night.

Anders turned down the alley to his right. It was covered since it once served as the valet entrance to an upscale hotel. Where once uniformed bellhops stood sentry with gold-gilded dollies and valets in burgundy vests waited behind velvet ropes there were now heaps of humanity huddled together for warmth, buried in newspapers, towels, and blankets to the point that they looked like piles of refuse themselves. The front doors to the hotel were hidden behind sloppily-mortared walls of cinder blocks. The empty building ratted inside while the people shivering against the storm outside did the same.

Eyes opened and peered out from beneath trash covers, leering up from beneath wool caps pulled down nearly to the bridges of their noses, at the sound of the limping footsteps crossing from the snow onto the merely iced cement. Those who recognized Anders, those who weren't so stoned they couldn't move, arose from the ground and scattered like roaches into the shadows, willing to brave nature's wrath rather than be tempted by Anders's proposition. They all knew him... what he did.

"I have..." Anders said, doubling over and grabbing his stomach. He felt something warm drain into his shorts and down his leg. "I have three thousand dollars."

More faces appeared from where they were hidden in plain view, newspapers and blankets shuffling and sloughing off to confirm that he had their undivided attention. Usually, this was the point where one of the hardly-conscious zombies would trade his life for the cash to buy enough smack to overdose on anyway.

Anders fell to his knees and tried to puke, though this time the dry heaves brought only a strand of mucus and saliva to slap the ground.

"Will it be quick?" a woman's voice called from somewhere against the wall behind the others.

"Mommy, no," a smaller voice whispered.

"Shh!"

Anders crawled forward and groaned as he rolled over onto his rear end, his head lolling back against his shoulders. He tried to remain focused and conscious.

"No," he said plainly.

There was a moment of silence in which Anders feared he would need to crawl through the bodies until he found a junkie on his last legs to put out of his misery. He abhorred the prospect of giving such a terrible gift, but his was a power that brought life and hope to the desperate. That was enough to outweigh the fact that for each life he saved, another must be taken. Every disease he removed from the dying needed to be transferred into another body before it consumed his own. Hope was a dangerous thing, but it was infectious. And right now, as the world came down around their ears, it was the most valuable of all commodities.

"How long...?" the woman called. "How long will it take?"

"Hours... days...weeks...There's no way of knowing for sure."

"Does it...hurt?" she asked, rising to her feet. A small child grabbed her hand, gloved in a dirty sweat sock, and fought in vain to pull her mother back down out of sight.

Anders locked eyes with the woman across the shadowy alley.

"Yes."

"Please, mommy."

"It's okay, sweetheart," she said unconsciously. She focused on Anders. "Can you help my child find a better place to live? A better life?"

"Mommy!" the child screamed, but her mother's ears were deafened to her plight.

The woman stepped forward, her daughter wailing and pawing at her the whole while. Her straw-colored hair poked out from beneath her ski cap, crisp with frost. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were bright red, her eyes sunken into pits of despair. She wore a wool overcoat that appeared to be of little warmth as she visibly shivered.

"Can I trust you to see that my child is safe?" she asked, her brittle lips cracked and bleeding.

Anders could only nod.

The woman searched his eyes for sincerity. Walking over bodies able to sleep through the bitter cold thanks to enough heroin to fell a horse, she strode up to Anders and stood before him.

"How does this work?" she whispered.

When he looked up into her eyes, tears streamed down her cheeks.

The little girl ran to her mother's side and wrapped her arms around the woman's leg.

"Perhaps you...would like to rethink your...decision," Anders rasped. He knew that if she didn't decide immediately he would have to crawl over and take one of the zombie junkies to rid himself of the disease.

"No," the woman said firmly, though her jaw quivered and her lips pursed. She slipped both hands beneath her child's chest and pried her away. "Someone...please..."

An older man, gray and haggard like a Viking, stepped out of the darkness and walked over to her side without looking directly at either of them.

"C'mon, honey," he said, wrapping his arm around the small girl's chest and lifting her from the ground. Though she swung her arms, kicked her legs, and screamed loud enough to rip the sky, the man managed to keep both arms around her so he could carry her down to the end of the alley.

"Do you swear you will make sure my daughter finds a better life?"

Anders broke eye contact and nodded.

"Swear it to me."

"Your child...will no longer know suffering."

"Will you take her tonight?"

"Tonight?"

"Please...I can't stand the thought of her watching me die. She's been through more than enough in her short life."

Anders stared at her again, his eyes lingering within hers, and finally nodded.

The woman fell to her knees before him, wiping the tears from her cheeks.

"Make sure she knows how much I love her." She had to stifle a sob.

"Come closer," Anders whispered.

The woman leaned over his legs until their face were a scant foot apart.

"Just do it," she said. "Please."

"Closer."

She leaned even farther across him until he was able to raise a trembling hand to her chin. He turned it gently to the side and whispered into her ear.

"Thank you."

"For what?" she asked.

"For restoring my faith. For giving me...hope."

She turned and looked him in the eyes, confused.

"Reach into the left...left inside pocket of my...my jacket."

She slid her hand between the flaps of the trench coat and felt around with a shaking hand until she found the pocket and reached inside.

When she recognized what her hand was wrapped around, she drew in a sharp breath.

"Show no one," he whispered. "Take...take your daughter and go."

"Why---?"

"Go."

She pulled the money out and stuffed it into her pocket, rising quickly to her feet.

"Thank you," she whispered, and turned away. Her pace hastened with every step, and with one final glance back over her shoulder, she snatched her child from the large man's arms and disappeared around the corner onto the street.

Anders rolled over onto his stomach and tried to push himself to all fours, but with as badly as his arms were shaking, he could barely lift his head from the ground. Reaching forward with clawed fingers, he tried to grip the icy cement, tearing the skin from his fingertips and prying his fingernails from the cuticles. He left bloody smears as he dragged himself toward the unconscious addicts abusing the valuable space beneath the overhang. They had one foot in the grave already. All he had to do was pass the disease into one of them and...

He awoke on his belly, a pool of blood expanding around his mouth. Be it from the cold or the rapidly metastasizing tumors that riddled his body, he could barely feel his arms and his legs could only flop uselessly on the ice. He had waited too long...too long...

They would find his corpse in the alley with all of the others and would bury him beneath an unmarked placard. He would no longer be able to take the sickness from the dying. His message would die with him.

No.

The woman and her child. They would continue to pass along the only thing he found worthwhile in this dying land, the one thing the world needed more than anything else...

Hope.

Anders closed his eyes.

"Thank you, sir," a tiny voice said.

He barely had the strength to open them back up.

The little girl stood by his side. She couldn't have been more than seven or eight, yet her eyes were hardened well beyond her years.

He tried to forge a smile. His trembling hand reached for the hip pocket of his coat.

The girl knelt and removed his wooden case from his pocket for him, holding it tightly in both hands.

"How does it work?" she asked.

"Directions..." he whispered. "Inside..."

He closed his eyes and drifted into the afterlife while the child opened up the wooden case. At first she saw nothing, but she turned it over and over in her hands until she managed to decipher a faded inscription. Bringing it close to her face so she could read it, she crinkled her brow.

Hope demands sacrifice.

Closing it back up, she stuffed the box into her pocket and knelt beside the man. She leaned over and placed a gentle kiss on the side of his bloody face.

"I understand," she whispered.

A tear fell from her chin onto his cheek as she rose and ran back down the alley to where her mother waited for her on the street.