Survivors

We sat there in the television room and looked in silence at the static on
the television. Mom, Dad, Becky and me. The newscaster had just told us
that the missiles were flying and that we had a half hour to get to a safe
distance. Then the screen went to static.

We didn’t know what that meant. A half hour distance from New York or a
half hour distance from our small town? Does the static mean that New York
is gone or does the static mean an EMP or something? It’s not like we had a
storm shelter. We had no idea what to do.

It’s now six weeks later. Nothing electronic works. We still have no idea
what happened. Our community is still stunned and follows the rules. The
sheriff didn’t break out the rifles and proclaim martial law or anything
like that that. He just told us to keep conducting our lives like decent
people and to focus more on protecting our town from people that might want
to loot us or do us harm in some sort of lawless chaos.

We’re still waiting. There are no refugees. That is somehow the scariest
thing of all.

We’re not well, either. My teeth feel loose and sometimes after I shower it
looks like there’s more hair than usual in the drain but I can’t be sure.
The doctor here is more of a family doctor who’d refer real sickness to the
big city doctors but he can’t anymore. He’s the worse looking of the lot of
us. He came to this small town to get away from impossible questions and
the pressure of triage but here he is, reading all the time about radiation
sickness and finding out that there are volumes on what the symptoms are but
almost nothing on how to treat it.

We wait. I wish we could communicate with other survivors.


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Sleep Demon

I wake up begging for my life.

My hands are clasped together and drawing blood from each other. My blankets are on the floor at the foot of the bed. I’m curled up and my eyes are shut tight. I can hear my own scream fading out of my wide open dry mouth like a train whistle fading into the distance. My heart is nearly bruising itself in a mad panic to escape and my body is slick and shivering with cooling sweat. Every muscle is pulled tight. I stay like that for a few minutes and feel my pulse and breathing rates slow down. I move slowly at first. I can feel the muscles creak. I unfold like a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis and I feel just as fragile.

My life is coming back into focus now. I have a nearly tidy sparse one bedroom apartment. I am single and I work with computers. I have no pets or girlfriend. My name is Jack. I just had a birthday a few weeks ago. 28th? No, my 29th. Yes, my 29th. I can feel my ragged breathing approaching something that isn’t panic. I climb gingerly out of bed and grab for the robe on the back of the bedroom door.

I look at myself in the mirror that was being covered by the robe. I look awful. I only sleep now when I’m so fatigued that I need to. My hair is wild and my eyes are haunted. If wasn’t for the evidence of the apartment around me, I’d think I was looking at a crazy homeless person.

It’s understood, I think, that whatever is torturing me at night doesn’t let me remember the dreams.

I wonder if it’s a survival tactic. Like kids that have been abused shutting it out and just having a blank space where the abuse happened.

But deep in my heart, I know it’s because of one thing:

The thing that’s torturing me in my dreams likes me fresh. It likes me coming to it not knowing what’s about to happen. Every time I scream under its touch is fresh and new. It can ravage me the same way over and over again or exercise its imagination when it wants to. I get the feeling that it picks people at random and does this to them until they stop showing up. Until they die here in the real world from exhaustion. I don’t get the feeling this thing is human. I get the feeling it’s like a five year old that never gets tired of playing the same game over and over again. It doesn’t get bored and it loves doing this.

I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think I am. I won’t be able to tell anyone about it because they’ll think I’m crazy.


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