As the first snowflake settled, it whispered secrets of a winter tale waiting to unfold.
The words of some long-forgotten Christmas story glared at me from the leaflet. I wasn’t paying attention – my mind was consumed by a desperate plea:I wish I had more time. Lying on the frozen ground, I wondered if my wish was too much to ask. Perhaps some god had heard – or a devil. Should I scan the sky for a falling star? A scientist knows the futility of such wishes... but desperate men defy logic. Even their own. My wish was simple: just to live longer. Not with some vain desire for immortality, but because I knew with absolute certainty that today, I would die.
I shifted my gaze from the heavens to Claire beside me, sleeping peacefully, unaware of the day’s terrible significance. My watch ticked – 5:12 am. The air was frigid, the landscape lifeless, her snores a strangely comforting echo. Tears welled as I smiled, imagining the monstrous transformation that awaited me. I’d seen the viral infection ravage others, and there was no escape. I pictured myself inflicting horrors on her, on anyone. Then, I nodded off….
His hands rustling the blanket by my feet jolted me awake. His breath, calm and steady. I sat bolt upright, tearing away the dry, ragged shirt. It must have blown over my face in the wind. I ripped it off, desperate, the fabric scraping my skin, cool air rushing against my cheeks. All I wanted was to see if he was there; he wasn’t.
“Sam, what’s wrong? Another nightmare?” Claire mumbled through her sleep.
I ignored her. My eyes weren’t looking any longer for the stranger that tormented me nightly; instead, they were swallowing whole the white glow that surrounded us — blood dripped from my nose.
“Sam?”
This time she sounded hoarse, which meant she was awake.
“Babe, what’s wrong… is that ash?”
I pulled my face away from her so she couldn’t see my affliction.
“Get up. We need to go.”
The air hung cold and brittle, stinging our lungs with each breath. All around, the landscape stretched out in sickly hues. Bare trees wore shrouds of fine dust, mimicking snow but devoid of any winter sparkle. It was the ash, a white winter smothering the world. We gazed across an endless wasteland buried in ash, stretching to the horizon. Not glittering or gleaming, but strangely luminous, the ash possessed a cold, unsettling glow. Such a sight was unlike anything we’d ever witnessed – truly, no one had.
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Claire said, breaking away from her childish amusement with the ash.
“Yesterday, before we made camp, I noticed a mile marker sign that read: Washington, DC, 10 miles.” I retorted.
“10 miles? That’s a hike in these conditions.”
“It is, but we need to find shelter. I’m not worried about the distance.”
My boots crunched through ash, each step kicking up a choking cloud. D.C. was the only lifeline I could imagine – someone there had to hear my warning. The ash itself, the stuff of old theories, didn’t scare me now. What terrified me was the red tide I knew was coming, a blood-red bloom that would swallow everything that clung to life. Claire, walking beside me, hummed obliviously. She had no way of knowing. Her team wasn’t mine. We weren’t mapping ice formations; we were tracking the touch of death itself. The same touch I’d seen freeze a colleague solid days before Yellowstone blew.
“Can we wait a little longer? I’m still sleepy.”
“You want to wait in this stuff? You don’t know what this is or what it can do to us.”
“Neither do you, silly.”
“Let’s go.”
There was no safe path to travel anywhere we tried, but I kept thinking the safest way to travel was by the highway. It was littered with abandoned cars, making the march difficult, but the road was empty of people. Most had migrated inwardly towards the commercial sections of the cities, looking for food and water or whatever was left of it. We didn’t have to follow the masses because I carried a hiking backpack with all the needed provisions, and Claire had one. We weren’t military, but we had been stationed in Antarctica to conduct research. If we survived there, we could survive anywhere.
“It’s remarkable, Sam. This reminds me of being on the ice.” That was the way we caringly referred to Antarctica.
“It does look like home.”
“How much was it that Erica bet against me when I said the ash would be white and not gray? Remind me.”
I chuckled.
“Wasn’t it like her salary or something like that?” I replied.
“Yeah, I think it was.” She hollered a laugh that ruptured the serene silence.
“Do you have to be so loud?”
“I just knew; I really did. You married a smart cookie.” She kept laughing.
Claire had a way about her, an innocence that I had never seen in another woman. She was kind and intelligent and funny. She was witty and never shy – sometimes. However, she was a great lover, always attentive to me and my needs. She was my companion, my soulmate. I constantly summarized her as my Peggy Olson with a pair of red hot heels that would make Dorothy Gale jealous.
I stopped. Claire bumped into me. I turned around and shhh-ed her.
“Listen,” I whispered.
She looked at me, trying to discern my concerned look; then she heard it. It was a slight cough. Someone was nearby; however, judging by the hack, I could tell the person wasn’t well.
“Sam?” Her eyes opened wide.
“Shhh.”
I dug into the right pocket of my cargo pants and clenched an old pocket knife. I loved collecting knives, and this was my favorite.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
“Stay behind me and cover your mouth and nose.”
I knew whoever was coughing was sick. I recognized the wheezing and the struggle to breathe. Yet, Claire didn’t understand it. Instead, she labored to grasp why I told her to cover her face. I could see the curiosity in her eyes.
“Listen to me, cover your mouth and nose.”
She slowly lifted her scarf, which had a heart design, over her lower face while wrinkling her eyebrows and twitching her mouth.
“Stop doing that,” I said between my teeth.
Beyond the rusted hulk of the car, a cough ripped through the air, ragged and wet. Then, a groan—a rumble from deep within a powerful chest. Not a woman’s voice, for sure. A man’s, and a big one at that. My fingers tightened on the knife hilt, sweat making the grip slick.
I gestured to Claire to duck behind a nearby SUV. I crawled to her. She was still bewildered by my actions as I approached her.
“Sam, what on earth are we doing? And why are we hiding behind this truck thing?”
“Listen to me. You have to be quiet. We don’t know what this man has, and we don’t know if it’s contagious.”
“Contagious,” she bellowed.
“Woman, keep it down.”
“You’re acting paranoid, and I don’t like it. Contagious? What’s the matter with you?”
“Keep it down.”
“Hello?”
The man had heard us. My hand clamped over Claire’s mouth, hard. She shoved me back, a jolt of force that nearly knocked me over. Sweat from my palms caterpillared to my forehead, stinging my eyes until my vision blurred. For a frozen second, she stared at my panicked face, then shook it off, stood, and circled the dusty tan SUV.
“Sir, we mean you no harm. Are you OK? My husband here thinks whatever you have is contagious. Are you contagious, sir?”
The man gargled some words, but they weren’t audible.
I lunged to my feet, but my legs wouldn’t obey, the world tilting sickeningly. All around me, shapes of cars and trucks melted into the pallid landscape, a junkyard graveyard in shades of faded chrome. The sky was a featureless blur, but somewhere in that washed-out expanse, a single harsh dot marked the sun.
“Claire.” I hissed
“Claire.”
She ignored me and kept talking to the man who couldn’t put a string of words together into a logical sentence. I knew what was happening. I could hear it in his effort to talk. He was changing. His body was becoming one with the red tide that lurked inside his bloodstream. Claire had no clue what was happening.
On that ice, we came across something – my team and I stumbled onto something. It was an ancient virus locked away in the frozen soil of Antarctica. It meant to stay there undisturbed for eons to come, but someone disrupted it, and someone dislocated it, and I brought it back to the lab. What did we know? Nothing. Scientists don’t know anything except empirical studies and prodding and keeping a journal full of numbers and figures.
“Claire.” I bemoaned louder.
“CLAIRE.”
“What Sam? What?”
Before my words could form, the man exploded in a scream, raw agony tearing from his throat. It was the sound I knew. The same sound John had made back in the lab. John, with the careful hands, the pricked finger... quarantined, seemingly fine. Then day three: the burning fever, the savage cough. Before any of us could react, he’d launched himself from his bed, teeth sinking into the startled doctor. Bullets, a storm of them, riddling his body. That whole nightmare burned behind my eyes.
Claire was a statue of terror beside me. That shriek, so inhuman, had paralyzed her. She stared at me, silent, then her gaze snapped up, following mine to the rear of the SUV.I fought to follow, my own stomach lurching. There, hunched and dripping blood, the man emerged. Cheeks bloated, eyes weeping crimson, nose a mangled bulge, lips pierced through by his own teeth. He swayed on trembling legs, struggling to stand.
“SAM.”
He pounced, a blur of rage. I staggered back, clutching his collar, desperate to keep him contained. He was a snapping beast, rabid, gnawing at the air as if to tear chunks from my throat. No recognition in those blood-drowned eyes, no shred of man in him. Logic was dead, devoured by something primal and relentless.
“Claire, look away!” I roared.
Claws raked my skin instead of fists, each blow a jolt of white-hot pain. My strength seeped away with every passing second. Failure meant more than my own death–it meant Claire’s. I summoned fury from somewhere deep, legs locking around his thrashing waist. One-handed, I dragged him close, our bodies slamming together. Iron stink of his blood choked the air. My fingers scrabbled, found the knife, fumbled it open.
He jerked as the blade plunged into his jugular. My hand was shoved back, a sickening twist, then the knife sliced across his throat...and into my own shoulder. He crashed against the SUV, blood bubbling from his ruined neck, gulping for air that wouldn’t come. The pain detonated in me, a scream ripping from my throat. But I yanked the knife free and sat up. Stabbed. Again. And again. Until the blade snapped off, and I collapsed backward into a spreading crimson pool.
The pallid Claire stood motionless, gawking at him and me. She had pulled down the scarf from her mouth. Her fingers resembled frail twigs on one of the many barren trees surrounding the highway. I could see her shock releasing her, allowing a torrential downpour of tears that ran past her sunken cheeks all the way to the edge of her sharp chin.
“Baby.” I whimpered.
“Baby, help me.”
Blood was gushing out of my clavicle area 100 miles a second. Don’t touch the blood was all I kept thinking to myself regarding my wife. Claire, don’t touch the blood. I couldn’t utter those words, however. It was hard to say anything as the adrenaline was dying out. I was feeling another dizzy spell.
“Sam?” Claire sighed after wiping her eyes.
She dropped down to her knees. I felt the pavement shake as her weight hit the ground. Then she crawled to me. She cradled me in her arms as she desperately tried to yank the scarf from around her neck.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“You need to stop the bleeding. Pressure – that’s what you need; gauze and pressure.”
I remembered giving her the scarf a few years ago as an anniversary gift. She wasn’t a hard person to please as she always found delight in the most minor things. I remembered once being with her at Midway Airport. We were coming back from a conference on climate control and its effects on Antarctica. While we waited to board the plane, she dashed over to the quaint gift shop nearby. From my seat at the gate, I could see her perusing miscellaneous items at the store; however, she kept coming back to the scarves. So the next time I went to Chicago, I went alone. And at Midway, I stopped at the same store and picked out one of the scarves. It was a coffee-brown color with six inches of black stains at both ends. It had a red heart in the middle with the famous Chicago Skyline on it.
“That’s your favorite scarf,” I uttered through the pain I was feeling.
“But you’re my favorite husband, and I can’t do this without you. Hold still.”
She applied pressure to the wound. I felt my bone on fire. A piece of the scarf was touching the left side of my neck. I could sense it being drenched in blood as I experienced the sensation of wet cloth against my skin. Then I could tell that blood was soaking the fabric to the point of forming droplets that ran down the backside of my neck towards the ground.
“Sam, I don’t know if I can stop it from bleeding. We may have to head into town.”
“No. We can’t. We might come across other sick people like this guy.”
“Sick, Sam? What’s going on? What aren’t you telling me?”
I coughed violently – unexpectedly. I shook and clenched my teeth. Foamy saliva seeped from my mouth. Claire reacted as if I was having an epileptic episode. She grabbed my body as best she could and turned me on my side. The whirlwind of emotions she must’ve been experiencing was unfathomable. Still, she tried her best to be whatever form of a nurse that she could be to me.
“Sam.” She started crying again.
“I’m fine.” I moaned after spitting up some blood.
“You’re not… What is going on?”
“You’re right. We need to head to town. I don’t want to, but we have to. Maybe we can find someone there to help. Help me up. I’m better.”
The entire event was coming into focus once I was on my feet. Silently laid the dead man against the bi-colored SUV that now was tan and red. The other vehicles were still white. Claire had her hair disheveled from yanking the scarf off her head. What little makeup she had, pooled around her jawline. And for whatever reason, we could hear thunder rolling loudly above us.
“We need to get going,” I said.
“You’re still bleeding. I need to secure that scarf around you.”
“In my backpack, I have duct tape. Use it.” I retorted.
Claire retrieved it. She taped me up nicely, and we started to walk. At a short distance, we saw an exit. It had been years since my last visit to D.C. I couldn’t tell which exit we were walking to, but I knew we would find help or a place to get the medical supplies I needed.