Sample Chapter - Blight: Better Off Dead

Better Off Dead

a short story of the Blight

The blood was almost dry, though the light still glinted off of it and made it look wet. A coppery scent stained the air, pluming strongly above the ravaged corpse. I fought the urge to vomit, retching involuntarily, but there was nothing but acidy bile burning my throat.

I looked back at Jimmy. How he was able to sleep mystified me. But there he was sleepy like a baby, his hands tucked under his head for a makeshift pillow and the dirty ratty blanket covered him to the waist.. He had his back against the wall farthest away from the door.

He never loved me. I knew that now. It wasn’t like there were many other choices left for us. After The Blight, we found each other. Truth be told when we first encountered him, I was sorely tempted to behead the fucker just to be safe. But he had food, and a big sword he called Swinging Dick, which he swung with great bravado, and a smiling charm that won my sister over almost immediately.

As if he felt me looking at him, Jimmy stirred. I saw the pink bandanna wrapped around his wrist. It was Ashley’s.

After a month of close calls and deadly encounters his heroics were too much for Ash to ignore. Jimmy was her knight in shining armor. One day she was watching him, the next she was walking side by side with him, bumping casually against him. Then she was holding his hands. The first time I saw them kissing; secretly, in an orange grove, under a thick canopy, with so many oranges dotting the ground around them, I knew I had fallen for him too.

Ash was dead now and all we had, Jimmy and I, was each other.

The breaking glass brought me out of my reverie. I turned quickly peering past the shadows that striped the floor inside burned out house with stripes of bright moonlight. I nearly screamed when Jimmy came up behind me. Heat flowed from his body and enveloped me and I could smell him. He was dirty, we were both dirty, filthy wouldn’t be an exaggeration, but the scent of him, his earthy musk calmed me instantly.

“Good morning.” His breath tickled my neck and I fought from shivering. I imagined his lips on me, an easy enough thing to imagine. After Ash he turned to me.

He had done everything he could to keep her safe, everything except save her. He killed four of them. They came ambling out of the night. The fire drew them. I had warned them, but Ash wanted a romantic fire and fresh cooked rabbit.

For my part, I left them alone. That was something I carried with me. Leaving them alone, to their groping and kissing, turning a deaf ear to their panting and moaning. I’d heard far too much of it. The first time, I pleasure myself to the sounds of it, imagining myself in her place, feeling his hands on me, his tongue, the weight of his body atop me. It left me feeling torn and hollow.

Ash, for her part, knew of my predicament.

We were only two years into The Blight. We’d be seniors now, she and I, or just graduated. It was late summer I think. Technology was non-existent, well, it existed but without electricity, what good was it? We had stumbled upon a cache of batteries at an abandoned Walmart, apparently overlooked by the looters and the scavengers after them. Even better, was the case of wireless portable chargers. After two years of silence, without radio or television or iPhone, I listened to my playlist in wonder, reliving those first times in an almost euphoric high.

We should have thrown them out, the chargers. On more than one occasion they’d been more trouble that they were worth. We fought over them, using them too much, rationing how long we used them, what we used them for.

We had procured a wireless world band radio to listen for survivors. Every day starting at 2:00 and then in two-hour increments until 10:00, we’d turn on the radio on and listen for 10 minutes. An occasional burst of static, an automated emergency signal and once a man whose ravings frightened us more than anything else was all we heard. We’d gone through 20 of the 24 chargers. Sixteen wasted on the radio, the other four charged a wistful musical melancholy that lay on us like clouds as we listened to a Billboards top 100 from 2014.

Jimmy blamed me for Ash’s death. He was with her, which was why I took a charger and my iPhone and climbed one of the grander trees that towered into the night sky. I climbed high enough, the canopy hiding all but a few glimmers of amber light from the fire they had built. I stared up at the sky, the stars almost seemed to glisten in concert with the music, a melancholy light show with Great Big World and Christina tearing at my soul.

I glanced down once and they were in each other’s embrace.

I had climbed high enough to be away, but not high enough where I couldn’t see them. The firelight glowed off of his back; I could just make out the exquisite musculature, his arms taut as he held himself up off of her. I could see Ash’s head thrown back, her mouth open in a climactic O, her nails digging into his flesh.

They came, ambling but fast.

The Blight was something almost out of a Stephen King novel. Not a government mistake bringing the world to the brink of complete destruction, but a terrorist attack. The virus itself was manufactured in a sterile lab somewhere buried deep in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan. The attack was a vial smashed on the floor of Grand Central Station. Within a month, 80% of the world’s population, over 5 billion people, was dead.

I looked back at Jimmy. The kiss on my neck caught me by surprise, then he pulled me back into the shadows as he took Swinging Dick and stood sentry. “Go to sleep. I’ll wake you when it’s time to go.”

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