Pandemic
by Richard Ong
Dusk.
As I witnessed the last rays of the sun disappearing over the horizon, a slight breeze swirled the red dust around my boots. It was the beginning of another long night. The siege against my fortress had come much earlier than I expected. I sat on the steps and carefully opened the small metallic box I was carrying. It contained a syringe and a vial full of blue liquid.
Out of the corner of my eye I detected a movement. I stood up, turned my head around and saw nothing but the slow rocking of the wicker chair on the front porch.
I cocked my head to listen and swiftly turned. I winced at the strain brought on by the sudden movement. The screech was probably that of an owl in search of smaller prey, not one as big as a man, I tried to convince myself.
I shoved my hand into the back of my pants and pulled out a crumpled pack of smokes. I took the last piece of cancer-causing stick and lit it. The coiling heat and vapors that teased the lines of my throat down into my lungs were like the caress of a deadly friend giving false comfort. With my courage bolstered by the smoking magic wand, I sat down on the wicker chair and closed my eyes to the rest of the world.
The siege against my fortress intensified. The magic wand, my first line of defense against this inscrutable evil, seemed to have failed.
From out of the shadows I saw something leap into the open and back to the inky darkness of the abyss. In the briefest of instants I caught a glimpse of its tail and the scales on its back. I flinched as. on my right, another small reptilian man-creature caught my eye. He turned to look at me through narrow slits of red and whispered, “Your will is mine. Your freedom is mine.”
“No!” I jumped out of the chair and rubbed my eyes. The creature had already disappeared back into the darkness.
I suddenly found myself staring at the startled face of my neighbour, Joanne Summers and her seven-year old son, Timmy. The Summers had moved into the two-storey semi-detached home across the street six months ago. When her husband, Mitch, passed away, Joanne needed to find an emotional anchor to keep them both from drifting into total despair. That’s where I came in, and over the last few months Joanne and I had become close.
Timmy was another matter. He looked with wide-open eyes in what could be described as sheer terror and hid behind his mother’s skirt.
“Timmy! What’s the matter with you? Don’t you recognize Mr. Bowers?” Joanne said to her son. “Forgive me, Jim, and please excuse my son. I don’t know what’s the matter with him lately. And you did startle us by getting up from your chair with that terrible look in your eyes just now.” Her gaze drifted towards the cigarette stuck between my lips. I pulled it out and turned my head to exhale.
She took a step back and I caught her hand before she could take another. “Please, Joanne. I’m sorry if I scared you. I didn’t... know you were coming. I was... busy keeping them away, if you get my meaning.” I threw down the magic wand on the porch step and ground it under my shoe.
“They?” Joanne softly asked. She cautiously leaned forward until I could smell the sweet scent of her perfume and I struggled against the familiar sensation in my loins. “Who are they, Jim?”
I nervously looked from side to side for fear of being overheard. The evening was upon us. I could hear the tiny mocking laughter of the crickets. I leaned closer and whispered back into her ear, hoping to drown my fears in her fragrance.
“The monsters.”
Joanne stepped back and stared at me without saying a word for some time. She took one step forward and sniffed the air around me.
“Well, Mr. Bowers, other than the odorous presence of that filthy smoke on your breath, you don’t seem to be drunk.”
She touched my forehead and frowned. “You don’t have any fever either. Are you taking any medications by any chance?” She smiled as she said this and that’s when I noticed the two tiny protrusions growing out of her forehead.
The lizard men were back, flicking in and out of the corner of my eye, and I squeezed my eyes shut in an effort to ignore them. I stumbled back onto the wicker chair and overturned it. My legs got tangled on the furniture and I fell face first on the porch deck.
I also dropped the box of syringe and vial before I could apply the vaccination on myself.
Timmy slowly stepped out of hiding from behind Mommy’s skirt and gave me a toothy smile. His brows furrowed together and a vein pulsed in his temple. No longer a frightened boy of seven, he appeared much older than his mother.
My eyes darted towards where the syringe and the vial rolled out of the box and onto the floorboards, too far for me to reach on time before they got me. I had waited too long and lost the advantage. My last line of defense for the night was lying two feet away behind my adversaries.
Timmy bent down and picked up the vial. He stared at the blue liquid inside the hermetically sealed glass container. Then with a bestial snarl he hurled the vaccine over my head, smashing the vial against the screen door.
Joanne looked down and smiled lovingly at her son as if he had done a good deed for the night. She ruffled his hair with her hand, her long talons shone in the moonlight. She tilted her head slightly towards me.
“Now, isn’t he the sweetest thing, Jim? And here I thought that he was just being a silly little boy. But then...”
She looked hard at me. “He was only trying to protect his own mother.”
She took one step back and crushed the cylindrical body of the syringe under her foot. She was no longer standing, but half-crouched as something grew and forced its way out of her back. The new protrusions between her shoulder blades expanded upwards and out until the moonlit sky was completely covered from behind.
Suddenly she turned and grabbed hold of her son’s arm and flew out into the night, beating down a small windstorm beneath her leathery wings.
She and her son were almost out of sight when I heard her screech: “We’ll come and visit you again tomorrow, Mr. Bowers. And you’d better not be smoking next time!”
I opened my other hand and stared at the empty crumpled pack of smokes. They were my last ones for a very long time, until the next shipment arrived. Who would have thought that the very thing that was killing me with lung cancer had an adverse effect on the nocturnal hallucinogenic virus indigenous to this planet?
I slowly got up on my feet, feeling the sprain on my right ankle. It was going to swell for a week but the pain might actually help me withstand the neurological assault without the vaccine for the rest of the night. The little lizard men continued to flitter to and fro at the edge of my vision. I forced myself to ignore them as best I could.
I reached over on one foot and straightened the overturned wicker chair. I sat down with a sigh and dusted the infectious red dust off my clothes. Over the last few hours of nightfall, I watched the twin moons chase each other across the sky to sink towards the western horizon.
By morning, the blazing red sun rose from the north and quickly chased the shadows away from me. The little lizard men winked out of existence and the wooden planks of the bungalow erupted into a billion splinters revealing the smooth steel of the landing ship under the fading mirage of what used to be a quiet middle-American suburb. The musty pine steps and floorboards had been replaced by the cold aluminum ladder and grill of the spacecraft.
Where the Summers’ home once stood across the “street” were rows upon rows of makeshift crosses stuck on individual mounds of red earth. Joanne and Timmy had died from their own nightmares about a week ago, and it was left up to me to bury their bodies under this alien star. Perhaps this was the reason why a part of me still longed to see their faces night after night.
I looked up to momentarily bask under the glory of the rising sun in this strange, alien world before turning around to enter the airlock and grab a well-earned sleep for the day. Beautiful “Joanne” and her brood “Timmy” would not be back until nightfall, plenty of time for me to brew a fresh batch of vaccine against the pernicious red dust of this planet.
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Ong
