Immunity: Apocalypse Weird Read online

  A gust of air shoved sand in David’s face. He covered his eyes and cussed.

  “Let the sand in, not out,” Nawat called after him. “Give in. No point in fighting it.”

  Easier said than done.

  David rubbed his eyes so hard tears rolled down his face again. He blinked blood-shot eyes at the horses and he was ready to swear the horses were laughing at him. He shook his head and scuttled off toward the no longer existing church.

  The well was made of terracotta wall, and lifting the pail from its bottom turned out to be a much harder endeavor than many western movies had made it look like when he was a child. He was so thirsty though that once he was able to finally lift the pail, he lapped at it like a dog, oblivious of the water’s rusty aftertaste. He filled his bottle, then scrambled back to the fire.

  Nawat had lined three bowls on a row of bricks that once had been one side of the house and was now mixing whatever was brewing in the pot with a long wooden spoon.

  The fact that there were three bowls and not two made David wonder. “Do you have family? Friends?” he asked. He sat on the ground, his stomach rumbling at the aroma wafting from the pot. Sweet potatoes and onions, he guessed. Whatever it was, his watering mouth was already appreciating.

  “They all left,” Nawat said. He filled the first bowl and handed it to him.

  “Thank you,” David said softly, even though he knew there really weren’t enough words to thank this stranger. The soup was dense and warm, with chunks of unidentified vegetables that melted in his palate and comforted his ravening hunger.

  “Thank you,” he said again, with his mouth full this time.

  Nawat nodded and filled the other two bowls.

  “Why did you not leave with them?” David asked.

  Nawat pointed his chin toward the pick-up truck and said nothing.

  He picked up one of the remaining bowls, stood up, and walked to the pick-up truck. David slurped down another spoonful of soup and watched Nawat climb on the pick-up bed and gently tug at the heap of blanket. The heap stirred, a face emerged. Nawat slid an arm underneath and helped the face up—a woman, his wife, David guessed, old and parched and yet ready to smile as soon as Nawat brought the bowl to her lips.

  David’s heart sank.

  These two have nothing and yet they shared their water and food with me.

  He finished his soup then waited patiently until Nawat came back and loudly slurped his bowl clean.

  “Has she been sick for long?” David asked, swatting away the crawling thought that the woman could possibly be sick with the horrid zombie flu that had been decimating the country for the past nine months.

  I’ll take the flu over starvation.

  Nawat brought the bowl to his mouth and drank the last of his soup. “About six months,” he said. “We blessed her burial ground last month. This is where she will reunite with our fathers. No other place will do.”

  And with that, Nawat put the lid back on the pot, putting an end to David’s hopes that there would be a second serving.

  * * *

  The wind howled, a pail clonked, dust pelted at the windshield. Cuddled up inside the jeep, David drifted in and out of sleep, the image of Nawat nursing his wife haunting him through the night.

  The man didn’t leave.

  The man stayed behind with his sick wife.

  He thought of all the loved ones he’d left behind instead. His dog Max, faithful companion of the past five years; his mom, leading an oblivious life at an old, yet expensive nursing home; his neighbors and friends.

  Just go, Dave, you’re needed over there. We’ll take care of everything, don’t worry, his best friend Alex had told him over the phone, while hauling Max and his own family onto his pick-up truck.

  How could I do that to him? The guy’s got a family and kiddos and I just thought of myself. Grabbed everything and left.

  You’re a selfish asshole, Dave.

  You deserve to die out here. By yourself.

  Now that his hunger had been satiated, the random thought that Nawat and his wife could’ve been carriers of the nasty flu kept crossing his mind. No, the bug wasn’t deadly. It was what it did to people’s brains that was deadly: it turned ordinary folks into delusional murderers.

  David cringed at the thought.

  Figure that. Coming out to the desert to help scientists fight the zombie bug and then killing them off because I contracted the very same bug I was supposed to help find a cure for.

  Half asleep, he chortled to himself. How ironic.

  Then exhaustion took over once more.

  There ain’t no bugs in the desert, Dave.

  There ain’t no bugs.

  He drifted back to sleep, random images careening before his eyes: his computer lab back at home; fridges stocked up with biologicals; a panicky news anchor shouting at the camera that the world was about to end; the mushroom cloud, red, humongous, rising above the ocean, just like he’d seen it in those stupid movies he’d watched as a teenager, where the rising cloud always marked the end of the world, the rock bottom, the place of no return.

  And now it’s happened. For real.

  The images played over and over again in his dream: the blast, muted at first, the thunderous roar delayed a few seconds, his feet itching to run and yet his eyes glued to the thing sprouting out of the ocean like an awakened beast.

  Forty-foot waves followed, crashing on the land like ravenous monsters. They swept away cars, trees, houses. They swept away lives, memories, stories. Within seconds it was all gone.

  And then the scream.

  He hadn’t screamed at the time, when the nuke had gone off the coast and the sky over the Bay had turned a psychedelic purple. But in his recurrent dream he kept screaming his lungs off. In his dream, it all turned white, the cloud, the sky, the Bay, everything, as though blanched from too much light. And then the mushroom cloud collapsed like a card castle. The winds swept it away and all there was left was sand.

  Fine, red, sand.

  Dawn snuck up on him like a mugger. He staggered out of the jeep, his head light and drenched in some kind of stupor. A loud buzz droned across the sky, making him jump. Through the sandy mist he spotted the white wake of a plane. A military plane, for sure. All others had been grounded since the nuclear explosion.

  Nawat was crouched by the fire, exactly where David had left him the night before. He wondered if the man had even gone to sleep or had simply spent the night by the fire. A strange smell made its way to David’s nostrils, and it took him a moment before realizing it was the aroma of coffee. Or some close approximation of it. Hell, right now, any approximation of coffee was close enough for him.

  Without offering a word, Nawat emptied a scoop of black liquid from the pot into a metal cup, its enamel chipped and the brim dented, and handed it to David.

  “Drink,” he said.

  David was in no mood to object. The coffee approximation was dense and murky and it completely knocked out all his taste buds. Man, he loved it.

  “What the hell did you put in this?” he asked, sitting on the brick wall.

  Nawat smiled for the first time, small yellow teeth flashing through thin, dark lips. “Secret recipe,” he said. “Wakes up the dead.”

  David gulped down another mouthful and smacked his tongue in appreciation. “You know, that joke’s no longer funny in Southern California.”

  “Why not?”

  “You haven’t heard? Zombies everywhere. ‘Xcept they ain’t zombies, they’re real people gone cuckoo.” He brought a finger to his temple and twirled.

  He grinned, but Nawat didn’t seem to catch up on the dark joke. David downed the last of his coffee and switched subject. “How’s your wife doing?”

  Nawat shrugged. “Same as yesterday. And the day before.”

  David wasn’t sure what to say. “I’ve got some painkillers in the car. And some antibiotics…”

  “No.” Nawat stomped his foot. He took a stick and waved it in the ai
r. “No. Poison. It’s all poison. The stuff they threw in the air—poison. They want to kill us all with their poison.”

  Nawat shook his head. He took the now empty pot from the fire and wobbled away, toward the well. The temperature was mellow for a desert morning. Filtered by the sand, sunrise painted the boulders with strokes of gold and pink.

  David peeled off his shirt, tossed it in the trunk of his car, retrieved a clean one from his duffel bag, brought it to his face and inhaled. It no longer smelled fresh, but at least it was clean last week, when he packed. He hooked it across his shoulder and jogged to the well.

  Nawat was rinsing the pot and mugs.

  “I’m sorry your wife is still sick,” David said, grabbing the rope and pulling up a fresh pail of water.

  Nawat scowled. “What are you doing?”

  “What? Nothing. I’m washing up.”

  Nawat slapped his hands. David let go of the rope and the pail clonked back down the well. “Dust washes you! Water is for drinking!”

  David flew his hands up in the air. “Ok, brother. Ok. It’s all good. All good.”

  He dusted himself off with the clean shirt and then pulled it on, thinking, The sooner I’m outta here, the better. “So. Is the Lab far away from here?”

  Nawat shot one brow up to his hairline. “The Labs?”

  “The Lab. There’s only one. You happen to know the shortest way?”

  Nawat shook his head, his long braid swaying behind his back, and strode back to the fireplace. He climbed over the pick-up truck to help his wife drink. He told her something in his own language, Navajo, maybe, mixed with some random Spanish words. The wife answered in grunts and monosyllables.

  David popped the trunk of his jeep and took out two empty water bottles. He can’t deny me if it’s for drinking. He checked the tank—he still had a little under to three gallons. But how far could he get with that little gas and nowhere to refill? No directions, no cell reception, and not even a home to go back to.

  He sighed and closed the trunk.

  Nawat came back to the fireplace, his face impassive. He looked just like David had found him yesterday.

  David showed the empty water bottles. “One last gift before I leave? Please?”

  “I don’t need your empty bottles,” Nawat replied, and then grinned, waving him to the well.

  What do you know, the man can crack a joke.

  When David came back from refilling his water bottles, Nawat was saddling the horses. The animals were stomping their hooves and bobbing their heads. Whether they were nervous or excited, David couldn’t tell. Nawat seemed so focused on his task that David decided to finish packing away his things before asking him again about directions to the Lab. He pushed away the comforter and smelled his armpits. Bah. Either he was getting used to his own stink or the body had a way to cleanse itself after so many days without a shower.

  Or maybe he’s right. Maybe it is the dust.

  He wiped his hands off his jeans and walked toward the old man. “All right, brother. I’ve got a couple of gallons of gas left, give or take a few ounces. Any chance I can get to the Lab with that kind of fuel?”

  Nawat walked the horses around the pick up truck. “You ride?” he asked.

  David bulged his eyes. “Hell, no. They don’t even offer it in grad school.”

  “They should,” Nawat replied. He squatted by the side of one of the horses and laced his hands together. “Come on, cowboy. Climb up.”

  David blinked, then shook a hand, laughing. “Ha. I see. Very kind, Nawat, but really, I must get going. They’re waiting for me over there. I’m already three days late. In fact, if you could kindly point the way to the—”

  “To the Labs. That’s right. You think you can climb up there with that ragged thing and two gallons of gas?”

  David opened his mouth and then closed it again.

  “That’s what I thought,” Nawat replied. “Save the gas for when you need to go back home. Let’s go, now. Can’t leave my wife alone for too long.”

  A gust of wind blew right then and shoved fresh sand onto the jeep.

  Hell is hell, no matter which way you look at it.

  * * *

  Traveling by jeep had been a pain. Windows shut tight not to let the sand in and AC off to save gas. But he had heavy metal on and no fucking dust blowing in his eyes. Now, wobbling up the incline on a horse, covered from head to toes in red sand, he cussed every step of the way.

  “How much farther, Nawat?” he called.

  “We’d be there already, if you weren’t such a wimpy rider.”

  Thank you.

  They were traveling up a steep and narrow road that ran alongside vertical rocks that looked like they wanted to tumble down any minute now. Every time the horses beat their hooves a bit harder, David hugged his backpack and duffel bag and cringed. The wind blew against the wall of rock and swirled, blowing sand everywhere. The farther up the climbed, the worse it got. The visibility was close to nil. He couldn’t even keep his eyes open, so thick with dust the air was.

  Quit being a baby and give in.

  He clenched his teeth, squeezed the reins and kept his eyes shut, trying to give in to the rocking of the horse. It would’ve been easier if the rocking had been happening a little closer to ground level.

  “Open your eyes,” Nawat called.

  “Are we there yet?”

  “No, but you can look now.”

  David opened his eyes. They had finally come out of the cloud of dust, and the view that opened up before his eyes was majestic. The wavy profile of the mountains ringed the horizon from west to east, steep rocks and flat planes carved out of deep shadows by a harsh sun. The mesa sprawled at their feet, a slab of red rock mottled with junipers and ponderosa pines. It rose above the rolling clouds of dust that had settled over the canyon around it, creating a surreal ocean of red, broken by the tips of the rocks and boulders David had noticed while driving at the bottom.

  “How do you like the view?” Nawat asked.

  “I liked it better when I couldn’t see it,” David replied.

  Nawat laughed.

  The trail they’d been following climbed up the edge of the cliff, and now that the view had cleared, the steep plunge into the canyon looked unnerving, especially when precariously wobbling on the back of a 5-foot tall horse.

  “The Labs are at the top of the mesa,” Nawat explained.

  David didn’t want to look and yet he couldn’t help it. Filled with rolling clouds of red sand, the canyon looked like a boiling cauldron. Farther away emerged the higher portions of the turf, like little islands lost at sea. This high in altitude, the air was rare, yet finally free of sand. David rubbed his eyes and inhaled, his mouth free of the taste of dust for the first time in days.

  Now that the wind was no longer howling, David noticed how silent everything was. No birds chirping, no cars driving by, no—

  A loud buzz interrupted his thoughts—same as this morning, only louder and closer, much closer. The horses got nervous and started trotting faster, making David fret and pull the reins harder. He watched the plane sweep by, an unmanned MQ-1 like the ones he’d seen take over the skies over the Bay hours after the nuclear explosion.

  “Damn!” David shouted, over the fading roar of the engines. “Why did it fly so close to the ground?”

  Nawat squinted his eyes as the plane shrunk to a dot over the horizon. “They saw us. Soon, they’ll come to pay their respects.” He stopped the horses, dismounted, and walked over to David’s mount. “Time for me to turn around.”

  David gripped the reins. “Wait, what? We’re not there yet. You can’t leave me out here.”

  Nawat took the reins from David’s hands and patted the horse, calming her down. “Oh, you’re basically there, squirmy boy. Now get down. I know you loved my Betta, but I need to take her back home.”

  “What?” David protested. “Am I supposed to just walk there?”

  “They’ll be here shortly.”


  “They? Who’re they?”

  Without offering any other explanation, Nawat helped David down and untied his duffel bag from the back of the saddle. “Just stay on the road and don’t do anything stupid. There’s enough paranoia as it is, no need to play it up.”

  “Nawat, listen—”

  But Nawat was no longer listening. “So long, cowboy,” he said. Holding the reins of both horses, he straddled the first one and pulled along the second one. He clicked his tongue and turned around while whistling softly to himself, the two horses happily trotting side by side.

  David watched them vanish behind the first bend in the road, then strayed his eyes back to the wide expanse of the canyon, the red clouds moving and breathing as if they had a life of their own.

  “Wow, that was—lovely.” He sighed, donned his backpack, picked up his duffel bag, and started up the road.

  The town sprawled at the top of the mesa. It looked clean and orderly and perfectly deserted. No cars parked in the street or people strolling along the sidewalks. What was left, instead, were glimpses of ordinary life forever frozen in time: a stroller left abandoned by the playground; a hat forgotten on a bench; a ball at the bottom of a dried up pond. And a mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle blocking the intersection at the end of the road, the barrel of the machine gun installed on the turret scarily pointed at him.

  Wheezing from the oxygen-deprived air, David wondered if the MRAP, too, had been part of the town’s ordinary landscape, or if it had only been added after the nuke explosion had sent the whole country into a pre-war frenzy.

  Especially in a town like this built around the government laboratory.

  David never considered himself the heroic, die-hard kind, and as he stood in front of the 15-ton beast, decided to play it safe. Slowly, he set down his duffel bag and just as slowly he raised his hands. Past the vehicle, cement barricades, CC cameras, and all sorts of warning signs blocked the road. David craned his head and took a quick glimpse of the place he’d come to work at for the next few months. He’d imagined a futuristic, state of the art structure, with tall, sleek towers and mind-blowing technology. Instead, he found himself staring at an ugly assembly of gray, boxy buildings surrounded by cinderblock walls and barbed wire.